Abadeh

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:22

I'm Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in sunny Philadelphia.

Anne Pellegrino 0:29

It's always sunny in Philadelphia. And I am Anne Pellegrino, a project manager and research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in similarly sunny Monterey.

Jeffrey 0:41

Well, it's the same sunny Monterey for you and I, Anne. Or for you and me. For me, same sunny for me.

Anne 0:47

We're all so tired today. Yeah.

Aaron 0:53

Jeffrey has an excuse. He's still jet-lagged. I don't know why I'm so tired. I fell asleep at like 9.15 last night, so I don't know what's going on with me.

Jeffrey 1:00

Yeah, I'm slowly recovering from the vast amount of Campari that I consumed along the Almofi Coast. I was on the East Coast. Yeah, you went to Maine.

Anne 1:10

I did. Rural Maine, which was very good.

Jeffrey 1:14

What is the local drink of Maine? If I was drinking Camparis on the Almofi Coast, what were you drinking?

Anne 1:20

Maine Beer Company.

Jeffrey 1:22

Okay.

Anne 1:23

Yeah. But I was drinking wine. I'm not really a big beer drinker.

Aaron 1:28

California wine?

Anne 1:29

Yeah, I think it was California wine. I'm an Aperol person myself. Don't at me, people. I like an Aperol spritz.

Jeffrey 1:38

I bought a bottle of Aperol before the bottle of Campari. Absolutely determined to make myself like Aperol. And I had, I think, three before I was like, f*** it. And I went back to the grocery store and bought a bottle. And that bottle of Aperol was still sitting there in the refrigerator when we departed the house.

Anne 1:59

Anyways, we are already way off topic. And apparently some people don't like our rambling at the beginning, even though I think it's wonderful.

Jeffrey 2:09

We're human beings. We are not just content monkeys.

Anne 2:13

Yes.

Jeffrey 2:14

People are voyeurs.

Anne 2:17

They like to know what we're doing. So just give the people what they want.

Aaron 2:22

Absolutely. Today, I think the people want a little bit of... Do we call it Iran on this podcast? You know, like the Tom Cotton way, or is it Iran? Well, I think you have to say Iran in that really... I call it the flock of seagulls way of saying it. But no, we do have some non-proliferation disarmament news in the form of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving another presentation about...

Findings, or at least alleged findings, from the Iran Nuclear Archive, which we've talked about on a previous podcast. And he had some more PowerPoint yesterday and more pictures about ostensibly another facility inside of Iran.

Anne 3:05

He must make these PowerPoints himself because nobody with any graphic design skills would, in their right mind, create PowerPoints as hideous as the ones that he uses. If you want this to be splashed across the news, I guess it doesn't really matter because it already is, but at least make it pretty. It's such an eyesore.

Jeffrey 3:28

It really does. I actually do wonder if the BDS movement has succeeded in denying Israel access to fonts.

Anne 3:41

They look quite unprofessional, and so I think that there is... If you want to be taken more seriously, graphic design is actually a really important element for your visual aids.

Jeffrey 3:58

And shout out to Alan Thompson, who will be enraged to realize that the lat long is given with four decimal places, which is totally inappropriate. No, it's not. It's five.

Anne 4:11

Is it five? Yeah. Yeah. 31.36163. Oh, five decimal places, you're right.

Jeffrey 4:20

Yeah, wildly inappropriate for a site like this. But okay, whatever. It looks awesome, I guess. Also, they don't date their satellite photographs, which I also find aggravating.

Anne 4:31

Late June and late July. But anyways, okay.

Jeffrey 4:34

I mean, so we should be clear about what it is that Netanyahu announced. And I will actually just read... The portion, because it's not very long and does not say very much, so he says Today we reveal that yet another secret nuclear site was exposed in the archives that we brought from Tehran. In this site, Iran conducted experiments to develop nuclear weapons.

This is the site near Abadeh, south of Esfahan. When Iran realized that we had uncovered the site, here's what they did. They destroyed the site. They just wiped it out. They wiped out the site. Here, they conducted nuclear experiments for nuclear weapons. This is the site after they understood that we were onto them. They destroyed the evidence, or at least tried to destroy the evidence.

That's it. That's all he says, and then he gave us two pictures, one showing some broke-ass buildings, and then one showing the broke-ass buildings removed.

Anne 5:39

The fact that he mentions that it is from the archive can help us date this facility, potentially. Jeffrey, you were mentioning that because it was included in the archive, it means that it might be older?

Jeffrey 5:57

Yeah, I mean, we went through the images that were easily available to us, and we can go back to February 2011, and that site was there. And so the fact that it was mentioned in the archive suggests to me this is one of the pre-2003 sites. That Iran was operating, which presumably was shuttered along with the rest of the program, which, you know, is to my mind what the archive shows.

You know, the archive doesn't really change our view of the timeline of the Iranian nuclear program, but it does fill in a lot of details. And it seems that this site may be maybe one of those details, because I don't really see. I mean, there's occasionally some vehicle tracks, but this really this site does not look like.

It's active in any of the images from February.

Anne 6:55

It looks really run down in the images that at least Geoff Brumfiel shared that were from Maxar.

Jeffrey 7:04

Well, and I went through... I mean, I don't know. There are about 20 or 30 images we have access to. I can't say I went through them all, but I definitely went through the older ones. And you just... Really don't see. They need somebody to give the place a coat of paint. Yeah, I mean it's possible that's signature suppression.

I mean there is a famous case where I believe the Libyans painted some fire damage on a building that they wanted to present as being in bad condition. So, you know, you never want to just from satellite images announce that a site's not active.

Aaron 7:46

But I will say we do know a whole lot more about how nice U.S. satellite imagery is. Yes, we do.

Jeffrey 7:55

Yes, thank you, Mr. President. Oh my gosh. But I know, the site does, you know, obviously the fact that it was mentioned in the archive suggests that it's of the period covered by the archive, and there's nothing in the satellite images that would cause us to think that it has changed or expanded or been active since the earliest image we have, which is 2011.

Aaron 8:18

Look, this is dangerous, but if there was evidence of I guess sort of like post 2003 or maybe even post JCPOA activity at the site, I would have to assume that that would have been part of the presentation, part of the PowerPoint. And so by the omitting key dates, Leads me to believe that the hypothesis that this is pre, sort of, are we calling it the freeze?

Sort of the pre-2003 nuclear weapons program freeze. This site may have been part of that effort rather than anything post-2003.

Jeffrey 8:57

Well, I would add something, which is that it illustrates the fundamental... Credibility problem that people who have had access to the archive have faced, which is they're only allowed to see information presented to them from the archive by the Israelis. Basically, they each got presentations. They did not have free reign to go through things. And so the Israelis were able to hold things back like this location, Which isn't, to my knowledge, mentioned in any of the descriptions of the archive, including the very good one published by our friends at the Belfer Center.

So, you know, this is a great example where the Israelis deliberately chose to withhold information from those groups so that they could announce it at a later date. And my guess is it's the bulldozing. And the election, right? Like, it'd be one thing if the site were active, but I don't think it's active. And my suspicion is what made it a better story is the fact that the buildings had been bulldozed.

Anne 10:11

So why did the Iranians bulldoze it?

Jeffrey 10:17

So I think we don't know. I mean, Netanyahu speculates that it's the revelation of the site. But that's probably not exactly true because the archive was compromised a much longer time ago, right? I mean, the archive was compromised, what, last year?

Aaron 10:40

The Harvard people traveled to Israel for the briefing in January 2019.

Jeffrey 10:47

Well in advance of that because David Albright had access to some of the information before that. They don't They don't begin raising the site until July this year. Late June, early July.

Aaron 11:01

Yeah, and Netanyahu's original public presentation is in September 2018.

Jeffrey 11:06

So they would have known... Right. Presumably the Iranians knew what was in the archive that was stolen from them. And so they probably would have bulldozed it by then. I mean, there's things we don't know. It's possible the IAEA asked to see the site and maybe that prompted the bulldozing. I don't know. But based on what Netanyahu said, it's not so simple as to say like, oh, well, they knew we were onto them and therefore they bulldozed it.

Like there's some piece of the story that he is not giving us because the timing doesn't work for his version.

Aaron 11:38

Maybe for the listeners, I think it's important to say, so you have images yourself, the easily accessible images, you say, going back to February 2011. I think that the images that Jeff has from NPR up on his Twitter feed from Maxar is ones from August 12th. You have one image that shows it intact on March 27th, and then you have the secondary image that shows it had been destroyed By August 12th of this year, and so you have somewhere in that timeframe a decision to raise it.

Jeffrey 12:13

Nailed it. Well, and by the way, I will say one thing I will observe about the catalog data, and I haven't really gone through the catalogs very carefully, but I would just observe that the number of satellite images of this site increased dramatically after August 2018.

Anne 12:37

Ah.

Jeffrey 12:39

Ah.

Anne 12:39

So that tells you that someone was interested in it.

Jeffrey 12:42

I mean... Don't know who, but... Well, you just said that Netanyahu's briefing was in September, right? September 28th. So they grabbed it in the summer, I assume, or thereabouts. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes about right. And this site really is in the middle of nowhere. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So my...

Aaron 13:02

I first read it as Aberdeen. Yeah.

Jeffrey 13:06

The sister city to Abadie Abadie sorry it's an Abadie yes I read it as Aberdeen and I thought of Luke O'Brien but yeah did a double take but yes it's Abadie it's out in the middle of effing nowhere yeah well I think the stories were you know the New York Times story on right how Israel in dark of night torched its way into Iran's nuclear secrets that's from July 2018 so Sometime after the archive was seized and around the time of, are you sure that was September 2018?

April. It was April. So they got it sometime in 2018. Netanyahu did his speech in April 2018. At some point, someone learned about this site, and you can see a pretty heavy uptick in coverage. And it's not like a super interesting area. There's no other reason to be creeping on this place.

Aaron 14:10

Yeah. Sorry about that for the wrong date. That was the date of his UN speech. Apologies. None of us are perfect, Aaron.

Anne 14:18

I'm close. What?

Aaron 14:22

Of course I'm not. Okay. I think it's also, like, what was also revealing, I mean, to at least all three of us, as we were discussing this beforehand, is the method of building knockdowning. You know, the way in which they knock down the buildings. Again, the image is only from August, but it's kind of slapdash.

Anne 14:48

Yeah, you can see some foundations still there. The debris is everywhere.

Jeffrey 14:56

It does not look like when they cleaned out Lavizan in Tehran.

Aaron 15:03

And that's one of my favorite old-school arms control on posts, which I think, I know you did, Jeffrey, but it was one of the first instances I can remember, you know, back in the good old days of really good OSINT, because they knocked this place down, and not only did they knock it down, they built a park over it.

Yeah, that was slightly insane of them, but... Well, I think the insinuation was that they were actually very worried about this site, Lavazin Shion, because it probably contained fissile material or uranium that could then be picked up, and so they really wanted to not only just destroy the buildings, but to entirely raze the site, remove earth, and then concrete over it, To ensure that nobody would be able to figure out what exactly had happened there.

And this one, thus far, is a little bit different in terms of its signatures.

Anne 16:02

I mean, if you were worried about detecting things that were not supposed to be there, say, materials and whatnot, you would go way farther than what we see in the image here.

Jeffrey 16:15

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm prepared to accept that maybe they just haven't had a chance to do it, but it doesn't, to me, really look like nearly the same intensity.

Anne 16:30

Well, again, Jeffrey, you said, I can't remember if you said earlier in the pod or when we were talking beforehand, but you were looking at the catalog of images and, you know, Jeff shows us two images, but you have seen a couple others in between that March and August, those March and August dates where the buildings kind of slowly disappear.

It's not like they just go through in one afternoon and just like destroy the place. They are just kind of like here and there.

Jeffrey 16:58

The other thing I really would have looked for is them carting away large amounts of earth.

Anne 17:02

Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:04

Because that, to me, would have been... Don't see any earthwork. In fact, you can still see the foundations of some of the buildings.

Aaron 17:13

And trees and all that stuff. The site wasn't entirely raised. Now, it still could be, right? Because from that image to now, I think it's only been two weeks. A month. A month, okay. I really am off my game today. But, you know, is it worth even trying to speculate about, like, what it is it possibly could have been doing there?

Because, you know, a nuclear weapons program is pretty expensive, and a lot of different experiments have to happen. Well, I kind of do in that sense, because it doesn't, you know...

Jeffrey 17:52

It doesn't help what Netanyahu said. Nuclear experiments is not a phrase that is helpful.

Aaron 17:57

No.

Jeffrey 17:58

Right. And so he's deliberately not telling us what they did there. Which, right, if you're asking me to purchase the invasion and occupation of Iran, I would like to know what it is that you believe was done at this site. And then, you know, secondarily, when you believe those things were done. Because, again, I have a suspicion it wasn't very interesting and it was before, you know, before the Iran deal.

So nuclear experiments is not very helpful... There are no real strong signatures at the site. It's not a reactor. It's not a large enrichment hall. It's not a reprocessing facility. I mean, you know, it's, it's small. I mean, it's very small. It's a few buildings that, you know, it could have been, it could be like a, maybe a a research center where there are a small number of centrifuges.

It could be something like that.

Anne 19:02

Well, does its distance away from any sort of civilization tell you anything about the nature of the facility?

Jeffrey 19:16

I mean, I think that it's suspicious, you know, because it's a really nice... You know, it's a really nice road leading into a facility nestled in mountains that's not near anything else.

Anne 19:36

Yeah, there's always...

Jeffrey 19:38

So that's, you know, like... But what I like to do is I like to imagine what would happen if we found it. Like, if Fabian found this site and he was like, hey, look at this. Like, what would we say?

Anne 19:49

Yeah.

Jeffrey 19:50

Would we feel comfortable publishing this information? No, I wouldn't. We would say, yeah, that's a very interesting site, and you should put a pin in it, and you should look and see if anything interesting happens. But unless something super-duper interesting happens, like it's just... It's just what it is, right? It's just buildings.

Anne 20:14

That's a good point. Especially from the air, it's really easy to see a bunch of sites and be like, this must be something. I have no idea what the hell it is, but it looks like a military application. It looks like X, Y, and Z. And so it's important to keep in mind that not everything you see is automatically...

Up to no good. But certainly, you know, it's hard to suss out What a cluster building's purpose is, especially when a lot of facilities don't have those signatures. We get lucky in some instances because there are missile facilities that have very clear signatures. There are nuclear facilities like reactors and enrichment halls and things that have discernible infrastructure, but for something that's just like A small weapons lab, or like somewhere where they wind carbon fiber. Like, sometimes that's just, you're just staring at a giant building and you're like, could be anything, could be anything. Yeah, you know, I mean, I, I think the way I would, I mean, I just agree with all of that. I think the thing I would add is that, you know, there are facilities that we think might be

Jeffrey 21:37

North Korean nuclear facilities that we have pinned, that we don't publish, where we have a lot better evidence than this. You probably know the ones I'm talking about, right? And it would be really irresponsible for us to go out and scream, this is an enrichment facility, because we don't know it's an enrichment facility. We... We see things about it that cause us to be curious about the facility.

And that's how I feel about this. Like, if you tell me this is linked to their nuclear program, I would say, like, sure. It's a strange facility in the middle of nowhere that doesn't belong with a really nice road and a kind of strange layout. And if you tell me that then they came along and they knocked it down...

After the archive was revealed, like, sure, I could see that. But then if you're actually asking me to take that additional step and be like, so do you believe this site was active and engaged in activities that were inconsistent with Iran's obligations under the JCPOA? Like, I can't get there.

Anne 22:45

Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 22:46

At least not on the evidence that's been made available to me. And, you know, like, they may have that evidence and they're choosing not to share it. But like, I have enough bad experiences that I would rather be too cautious and occasionally miss cases where it turns out Netanyahu's being right because I've been lied to enough.

Aaron 23:13

So they don't necessarily have to both be in tension. Netanyahu probably is being forthright, and this probably is in the archives, but with the lack of a time, the lack of timing. So then is it inconsistent with 2003, with the halt, 2007, with the NIE, and then the JCPOA? Is the site in active use? And I think that that is the thing that we're struggling with because we don't think so based upon what the satellite photo looks like, and therefore that leads us to be skeptical, and I think we're skeptical for other reasons.

Jeffrey 23:51

Well, not the least of which is the fact that this was yesterday's electoral gambit, and today's electoral gambit is annexing the West Bank.

Aaron 23:58

That one too, you know, is that he is doing a rerun of his last election to try and win an outright majority. In the parliament. And that, you know, we just don't have anything else to go on. And that the raising of the facility, this is the one that sort of gets me. And again, this could change as we look at this further.

This is not the Rolls-Royce of raising. This is sort of the arms control wonk favorite, the Yugo of raising. Yeah. This is like, oh shit, we've got to knock some stuff down fast. Let's go. Okay, that's good enough. Let's go. If you're going to do this, do it right.

Jeffrey 24:43

Now I will say, one thing that would somewhat change my opinion is if the IAEA had asked to see the site and then this was the response, I'm going to feel differently about that kind of information than I am the way it is presented now. Same. Absolutely. You know, so, I mean, one of the things about Labizan was the IAEA was like, we would like to see the place.

And the Iranians were like, oh, well, it's been turned over to the municipality of Tehran.

Anne 25:11

Funny you mention.

Jeffrey 25:14

And, you know, they're setting a land speed record for bulldozing. Because, you know, there's a desperate need for green spaces in ex-urban Tehran. You know, that would obviously change how I feel about this. But, you know, we'll see.

Aaron 25:32

Yeah.

Jeffrey 25:33

And, you know, the Iranians have been, I don't know, I'm still impressed about the Parchin experience where the Iranians thought that they had sanitized that building.

Aaron 25:42

Well, that's been the story, right? Yeah, and it was not as clean as they thought. Yeah, Parchin, they got caught with the hand in the cookie jar, even after trying to, like, professionally do the Rolls-Royce of raising. I guess maybe it was just, like, the Ford Explorer of raising.

Jeffrey 25:56

Well, they tried to paint over it, right, to seal things in, I believe. Yeah. Whereas at Lavizon, they had the good sense to, like, truck the dirt away and forget where it was. It's in the Caspian Sea or, like, somewhere we will never find it.

Aaron 26:11

Yeah, you know, and, you know, They've constantly been, by their own admission, if you know where to look for their own statements, surprised by IAEA sampling capabilities. And even knowing that, they messed it up at Parchin, and thus far the evidence is that they aren't really doing that much earth removal at this place.

Jeffrey 26:38

At the moment. At the moment. Two days. Yeah, it could be a dynamic thing. But the satellite images I'm looking at, I can still see what look like building foundations. Yes. And so as long as I can see outlines of where buildings were located, I'm not going to call this the full La Vie Zon.

Aaron 27:04

It looks like a block in certain parts of Philadelphia. Sorry. I love living here. Don't get me wrong. But yeah.

Jeffrey 27:18

So is it suspicious? Yes. Is it possibly linked to Iran's nuclear program? Sure, maybe. Is it proof that Iran has violated the JCPOA? No, we're not there yet. That's where I would come down on this.

Aaron 27:34

Is there anything else we need to hit before we sign off and wish everybody a happy evening and invite them to join our patrons?

Anne 27:45

No, well, we do have a happy note.

Aaron 27:51

We do.

Anne 27:53

Who wants to be the deliverer of the happy note?

Jeffrey 27:59

Quonk.

Aaron 28:00

Well, for listeners, we're recording this on Tuesday, September 10th, 2019. It is 3.13 p.m. East Coast time. And I think we've been John Bolton free as National Security Advisor for going on about an hour, 45 minutes now.

Anne 28:22

So in a funny twist, I'm reading Twitter right now, and according to NBC News, quote, in phone calls to McMaster, Trump told his second national security advisor that he misses him.

Jeffrey 28:39

Aww. Aww. Aww. He just wants to rub his bald little head again. Oh, I feel so bad for him. He's so lonely.

Aaron 28:57

I was thinking that this is kind of like a nice enforcement arm of the JCPOA. You know, what better way to ensure that they never use the building before than having them knock it down for you? They self-inspected. Self-disarmed. They self-disarmed, yeah.

Jeffrey 29:13

By the way, if North Korea had done this, the attitude would be completely different, right? Right, yeah. If North Korea were to knock down a building at Yongbyon, like Donald Trump would be like, see, maximum pressure is working.

Anne 29:31

Such a twisted reality.

Jeffrey 29:32

Disarming. Oh, it's so true. I, you know, I will, I, we, we can have another podcast on Bolton, but while I am, I am never sorry to see John Bolton depart. I am not optimistic that this heralds a new era of. Enlightened U.S. foreign policy making in the era of Trump. I think it's the meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Anne 29:58

Who's going to be next?

Jeffrey 30:03

I have absolutely no idea. I'm not available. Well, isn't Mick Mulvaney still the acting chief of staff?

Anne 30:10

Oh, I forgot about him.

Aaron 30:12

Oh, yeah, he exists, doesn't he? I forgot he existed.

Jeffrey 30:14

I mean, I'm not saying that he is going to take over the job. I'm saying that... Charles Kupperman is, I think, the Deputy National Security Advisor. And so he's probably the Acting National Security Advisor.

Aaron 30:32

He is at the moment, yeah.

Jeffrey 30:34

And so one possibility is they never get around to naming a new one. It's possible. And the other possibility is, you know, that they'll... Steven Miller! They'll promote... Yeah, yeah. Steven Miller will get some hair plugs and they'll promote him. You know, they're also maybe just like a wino sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue that they'll bring in.

Aaron 31:09

I think we've got the rails here. Yes. Okay.

Jeffrey 31:12

I'm just saying, I'm just saying, I think, I think it's, it's, it's too early to tell. I wouldn't want to speculate.

Aaron 31:18

Yeah. So it's a metaphor actually for, for all things, whether it be Iran or the future national security advisor. With that, thank you everybody for listening. Jeffrey and Dan, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. And if you enjoyed this, head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast for $3 a month. If you're astute or $5 a month, if you're a regular person, You can get access to our Slack channel where we also post a second short podcast called Brilliant Pebbles.

So with that, thank you everybody for listening and thanks again for joining.