VIENNA — Behind the efforts to close a nuclear deal with Iran this weekend lies a sensitive question that has been little discussed in public: how to design an agreement to maximize the chances that Western intelligence agencies would catch any effort to develop an atomic bomb at a covert site.
Concern over the possibility of a future Iranian covert program — and the difficulty of writing a document that deals with the unknown — is rooted in a long history of distrust. But it has been rarely mentioned publicly by negotiators here as Secretary of State John Kerry and his European allies press a last-minute effort to resolve more immediate differences.
The biggest disagreement centers on how much capacity to make nuclear fuel Iran could retain, and how quickly sanctions would be suspended in return for an agreement.
Those efforts focus on the fate of Iran’s three major declared nuclear facilities, and on lengthening the time it would take for Iran to produce enough fuel for a single bomb. But those declared facilities are crawling with inspectors and cameras.
Unstated is the fear of an even more problematic issue, referred to as “sneakout.” It covers the risk of a bomb being produced at an undetected facility deep in the Iranian mountains, or built from fuel and components obtained from one of the few trading partners happy to do business with Tehran, such as North Korea.
To try to make sneakout more difficult and risky, scientists from US Department of Energy national laboratories and intelligence officers for months have been providing ideas to negotiators and scouring the drafts of proposed language in the agreement.
The goal is to “make as airtight as possible” the language that would allow highly intrusive inspections to track the precursors and parts that feed Iran’s uranium complex, according to one participant in the talks.
The US officials are highly attuned to the findings of a once-classified 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran had ended its headlong race for a bomb in late 2003. But it also concluded that smaller-scale activity continues, and warned that “Iran probably would use covert facilities — rather than its declared sites — for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon.”
As the Monday deadline to reach an agreement nears, it is far from clear that the Iranians will agree to these inspections, or allow them to take place if an agreement is in place.
Already, hard-liners in Tehran including Reza Seraj, identified in Iranian news media as the “head of the intelligence faculty of the Revolutionary Guards Corps,” a previously unknown position, are warning of the consequences.
“This will mean they will get permissions for reconnaissance flights over our country and that their inspectors can enter anywhere, even the presidential palace,” Seraj wrote in a column published by the semiofficial Fars news agency.
The threat from covert activities was driven home in the first intelligence briefings given the incoming Obama administration in late 2008 and early 2009, when the president and his aides learned about the evidence that Iran was constructing a hidden centrifuge facility in a mountain outside the holy city of Qum that was so deep it could withstand all but America’s largest bunker-busting bomb. President Obama revealed the existence of that facility, called Fordo, in late 2009.
In the recent run-up to what officials believed would be a climactic weekend in Vienna, teams of American, British, Israeli, and European intelligence agencies have been looking for clues of another clandestine site. So far, they say, they have found no evidence of another large undeclared plant. “It’s an endless game of hide-and-seek,” one senior European intelligence chief said recently.
US negotiators want an agreement that gives inspectors the right to roam the nation widely. From 2003 to 2006, inspectors did a lot of that, under an International Atomic Energy Agency agreement that commits countries to opening up atomic facilities and sites they have long kept off limits.
Last year, Iran signed a temporary agreement with the West that gave inspectors access to a handful of such isolated sites, including mines and mills, from which uranium fuel originates. An even wider set of rules would potentially be part of a permanent agreement.
Similarly, officials say, there needs to be intense monitoring of the manufacturing and shipment of centrifuges so the atomic energy agency could track the location of each one.
Visiting sites alone is not likely to provide those assurances, officials say. US officials are also monitoring the activities of the long list of Iranian scientists — many of them under sanctions issued by the UN Security Council and the United States — believed to have been associated with Iran’s program to develop nuclear arms.