Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter

Author:Gareth Porter [Porter, Gareth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781494375522
Google: 7OLSnQEACAAJ
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2013-12-05T00:40:26+00:00

8

The Mystery of the Laptop Documents

An Iranian “Curveball”?

Sometime during summer or fall 2004, the US government came into possession of a large cache of documents purporting to be from an Iranian research program on nuclear weapons. Totaling more than a thousand pages, the documents showed studies on a redesign of the Iranian ballistic missile’s reentry vehicle, high-explosives testing for a nuclear weapon detonator, and a bench-scale uranium conversion system—all of which were purportedly done from 2001 through 2003. The documents were reportedly brought out of Iran on a purloined laptop computer, giving them the patina of having come straight out of a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapon program.

From the beginning, the documents were enveloped in a fog of mystery about how they had been obtained in Iran—if they had indeed come from within the country—and who had brought them out. At first, the intelligence community seemed to be genuinely in the dark about their provenance. Stories about the documents over the next year failed to penetrate the mystery of the source of the documents.1 The New York Times reported in November 2005 that US officials had “largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran.”2

But David Sanger of the Times was eventually given a more detailed explanation for the papers. The source was an Iranian engineer or scientist who had been recruited to be a spy at an international scientific conference, according to the story, and in 2003–4, the spy obtained the documents from a secret nuclear weapons project on which he had been working and stored them on a laptop computer. But he began to worry that he was under suspicion by Iran counterintelligence and gave the laptop to his wife, who was then able to get out of the country with their children and give the laptop to the US government. Sanger was told that the US government never learned whether the spy was imprisoned or killed.3

But that dramatic tale of successful penetration of what was said to have been Iran’s most secret nuclear project, its ultimate discovery, and the narrow escape of the wife and children with the laptop full of sensitive nuclear documents was highly suspicious. Intelligence agencies never divulge such details about a source, even if the source has already been compromised, and the detail about the source being recruited at an international scientific conference would have been particularly damaging had it been true. Sanger attributed it to a “former intelligence official.”4

But there were other versions of the story as well. One version had the spy stealing the laptop with all of the documents already on it from a participant in the secret nuclear weapons project whom Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (the BND) had tried unsuccessfully to recruit as an informant.5 Then, a few years later, yet another version of the story appeared, identifying the spy not as a scientist or engineer but as an Iranian businessman with contracts

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