Colum Lynch’s mysteriously disappeared “U.S. Accuses Iran of Secretly Breaching U.N. Nuclear Sanctions” exclusive is once again online this morning, with no explanation why it was posted and then pulled on Friday. The obvious explanation is that Foreign Policy wanted to run a juicy exclusive like this on Monday, when lots more people are reading stuff like this, rather than Friday evening, so the piece either got accidentally posted on Friday or was posted, rethought, and pulled until this morning. But that’s speculative, and kind of unfair to the FP folks, so without some explanation from them I guess we should just chalk it up as a web publishing mystery.
But the fact that the piece exists again means we can talk about it, I guess. Like I said on Saturday, it’s a pretty big deal, though the substance of the story may be much less important than how the story itself is going to be used by pro-sanctions forces in Congress. Lynch is reporting that a panel of experts advising a committee tasked by the U.N. Security Council (ah, that’s some streamlined U.N. bureaucracy right there) with overseeing Iran’s compliance with U.N. sanctions (which are the sanctions that directly cover Iran’s acquisition of materials related to its nuclear program, and the ones that the Iranians now say they want lifted immediately under a comprehensive accord) reported to the committee on November 7 that there is evidence that even as Iran has reduced its procurement of uranium enrichment-related materials, it has stepped up procurement of material for its IR-40 heavy-water reactor near Arak. The allegation was made by “an unnamed state,” according to the report, but Lynch says that it was the U.S. who led the briefing to the committee.
Let me stipulate that my understanding of the legal and technical details of the sanctions is not great, but at a minimum Iran’s attempt to purchase materials for the Arak reactor could at a minimum violate U.N. Security Council Resolution 1737, adopted in 2006, which contains clauses like this (emphasis mine):
all States shall take the necessary measures to prevent the supply, sale or transfer directly or indirectly from their territories, or by their nationals or using their flag vessels or aircraft to, or for the use in or benefit of, Iran, and whether or not originating in their territories, of all items, materials, equipment, goods and technology which could contribute to Iran’s enrichment-related, reprocessing or heavy water-related activities, or to the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems
The resolution then goes on to list specific prohibited items with references to a couple of other documents, including Revision 8 of this International Atomic Energy Agency report (which is now on Revision 11, so that link isn’t even entirely accurate within the context of 1737). But without seeing whatever report the committee was given on November 7, which (presumably?) describes exactly what items Iran has allegedly been trying to procure, it’s hard to know which, if any, sanctions are being (again, allegedly) violated here. Lynch makes reference to the arrest, earlier this year, of a Chinese businessman in London who is accused of attempting to sell pressure transducers to Iran, but pressure transducers are used in uranium enrichment, and that’s not what this November 7 report is talking about.
So without more details, it’s hard to say much more about the allegations. There’s a possibility that Iran has been trying to acquire “dual-use” items that could be used in the Arak reactor but could also be used in one of these Bushehr light water reactors, or in some altogether non-nuclear application. Dual-use materials are a very gray area when it comes to the U.N. sanctions, and presumably you’d have to be able to prove they were intended for Arak in order to make the case that Iran has been breaching the sanctions. There’s also the possibility, as the Arms Control Association’s Kelsey Davenport told Lynch, that these “new” violations predate the JPOA framework and are just now coming to light, or that hardline elements within Iran were attempting to acquire the prohibited components without an official mandate from the government, or that the U.S. intelligence on this is just plain wrong (which wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented). Related to that last possibility is the question of where this intel is coming from. Interested third parties have been known to, let’s say, cook the books when feeding intel to the U.S. and the IAEA, as happened with respect to Iraq and as appears to already have happened at least once with respect to Iran’s nuclear program.
It’s also very important to note that, whatever the provenance or accuracy of these new allegations might be, Iran has kept to the terms of the JPOA as far as Arak is concerned. The JPOA stipulated that Iran had to suspend some critical development work on the site and that it could not take steps toward bringing the reactor online, and those are pretty difficult things to hide from satellites and monitoring equipment (meaning we’d know if they had tried to do those things). The Iranians have also allowed the IAEA to have access to Arak, shared Arak’s plans with the IAEA, and are negotiating with the IAEA over a long-term monitoring plan for the facility. It’s also virtually certain that a comprehensive agreement will include some plan to modify the Arak reactor to make it less dangerous in terms of a potential plutonium pathway to a bomb, because that’s one of the P5+1’s clear red lines in the talks. They may be allowed to engage in some off-site construction work on the reactor, though; that seems to be another gray area like the restrictions on dual-use equipment.
Iran has tried to evade the U.N. sanctions before, so this wouldn’t be an unprecedented move on their part if it is true, though as Lynch notes there’s been a substantial decline in reports of attempted Iranian sanctions violations in 2014. He then engages in a bit of wild speculation, suggesting that maybe Iran has suddenly gotten a lot better at evading sanctions and getting away with it, or that the rest of the world decided to stop reporting violations in order to take it easy on the Rouhani government and in order to keep the nuclear talks going. But it seems, at least to me, a lot more likely that Iran really has stepped down its efforts to get around the sanctions so as not to wreck its diplomatic efforts to get rid of the sanctions altogether. Why invest the effort, resources, and political capital in talks if you’re only going to sabotage those talks by violating the terms under which they’re being conducted?
So, again, this story is potentially significant if it’s true, but there are too many missing pieces to say how big or to assess whether it really is true or not. Where it will almost certainly make a big splash is in Congress, whose growing passion for scuttling the talks completely by levying new sanctions on Iran is already proving difficult to contain. Lynch’s story has been up for around three hours now, and I’m already worried that John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mark Kirk, and Robert Menendez may be trapped in a diving bell at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or something, because they aren’t screaming at everybody about the impending Iranian mushroom cloud. They will undoubtedly use this at this point pretty thin tale of Iranian sanctions violations to push the case for more sanctions and ultimately military strikes, because that’s where this whole thing ends if there’s no negotiated settlement. At this rate it’s going to take a miracle to keep the new Congress from wrecking the talks with additional sanctions in early 2015.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 