The Deal Episode 1: The Revelation

Jeffrey Lewis 0:00

In the 1980s, there was this popular way of explaining just how much destructive potential exists in the world's nuclear arsenals. It goes like this. I have a bucket and a BB. This BB is the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. This is the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. Here's a typical American nuclear weapon today. And here is the explosive power of every single nuclear weapon that exists in the world today.

It is totally bizarre to live amidst enough firepower to kill every person on Earth and not even think twice about it. We spend billions of dollars a year in the United States planning and preparing to fight a nuclear war on a few moments' notice. So do eight other countries. Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and even North Korea.

This is madness. We ought to be doing everything we can to empty this bucket. And under no circumstances should we allow anyone to fill it back up. That's where Iran comes in. This is The Deal, the story of the Iran nuclear deal, how it came together, how it fell apart, and what that means for the rest of us.

You're listening to episode one, The Revelation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The actual name of the agreement is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But most people know it now as the Iran nuclear deal. When the deal dropped, it was really big news to people like me. I'm a professor whose full-time job is studying the bomb.

I work at a place called the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. Proliferation is just a fancy word that means the spread of nuclear weapons. We study who is building the bomb and why. I saw the U.S. invade Iraq in 2003 over nuclear weapons that didn't exist. And I watched North Korea join the nuclear club with a bang three years later.

Frankly, I wasn't all that hopeful that things would end peacefully with Iran. What seemed more likely was the U.S. bombing Iran, Iran getting the bomb, or both.

Catherine Dill 3:21

Oh, I am exhausted. I got up at 3.30 a.m. to read this document.

Aaron Stein 3:26

It was like Christmas for you. You couldn't stay asleep.

Jeffrey 3:28

Yeah, this is me on my other podcast, Arms Control Wonk, reacting to the deal back in 2015.

Catherine 3:34

And I knew what was going to happen was I was going to wake up in the middle of the night

Jeffrey 3:37

And I would know the deal was probably online. And sure enough, I couldn't resist. I picked up my little phone and I opened it up and there it was.

Aaron 3:47

There it was. Did you get the Russian leak? Yeah, I started.

Jeffrey 3:51

It was 3.30 in the morning and I read all 150 pages on my cell phone.

Catherine 3:56

Yeah, I had a three-year-old snuggled up next to me and I was reading it on a tiny phone.

Jeffrey 4:02

When I read it, I was impressed. It was thorough, specific, detailed.

Catherine 4:07

So what do you think? I mean, let's...

Jeffrey 4:09

It's an awfully good deal. I mean, it's as good of a deal as I think I've seen. I mean, we can always... Sure, people who are not in the administration can always say that if they were in the administration, they would have gotten a better deal. I mean, it's like the easiest thing in the world to say.

But I actually think relative to other deals that I've actually seen administrations come back with, given where the Iranians are, it's pretty good. I thought it should be big news for everybody. After all, who wants another country to build a nuclear bomb? Of course, like all big news, the Iran deal quickly became a political issue. In the end, what you think about the deal depends on which cable news channel you watch.

You either think it makes our country and the world safer and more secure. Or you think, like this guy, that it's a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made. I actually know the person who kind of started the nuclear crisis with Iran. She's my friend.

Corey Hinderstein 5:17

My job was to be a little bit of a detective. I had progressed from an intern to a research assistant to a research analyst, and I really loved the work. It was my first real job. This is Corey Hinderstein.

Jeffrey 5:30

Non-proliferation experts spend a lot of time looking at pictures taken from space. And the person who first taught me how to do that? That was Corey. She's kind of like a professional big sister to me, introducing me to all the cool stuff. We met in the mid-2000s in the most mid-2000s way ever. Corey would comment on my blog.

She used a pseudonym.

Corey 5:51

It was Lisa Simpson, a nickname I have earned and retained for many, many years. Everything from having played an awkward large brass instrument when I was in elementary school to being a little bit of an adult even when I was a child.

Jeffrey 6:07

That's totally her. She is definitely the person who sits in the front row and raises her hand. Like me, Corey was a 1980s kid. What do I remember about the 1980s? The Cold War and three channels on TV.

Corey 6:22

And periodically they would break into the program with this long beep. And then they'd say, we interrupt this program to bring you a special report from NBC News.

David Brinkley 6:33

Here is David Brinkley.

Corey 6:35

And every single time that happened, I was convinced it was the beginning of nuclear war. And when I started working on nuclear issues, I just found it fascinating. And I felt inspired and I felt compelled to keep doing it. And I really think it goes back to that fear.

Jeffrey 6:52

Those alerts, they seem quaint now because we didn't get nuked. We were really scared. The threat of a bomb falling on your town is the kind of thing that really leaves a mark on a kid's psyche. 20 years later, it's 2002. Corey is a nuclear weapons expert sitting at a press conference at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.

There's some video of the event. That's because C-SPAN was there. A podium, potted ferns, and a handful of reporters and researchers with notepads and coffee. No surprise, Corey is in the front. The whole scene is pretty routine for Washington. There are lots of press conferences like this every day. Most of them don't even generate much press. But this one?

This one will turn out to be different.

Catherine 7:49

What I'm going to reveal today is the result of extensive research. By the Committee of Defense and Strategic Studies of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Jeffrey 8:02

So this guy is called Ali Reza Jafarzadeh. He is a spokesperson for a group called the National Council of Resistance of Iran. They want to overthrow the Iranian government.

Catherine 8:12

Today I'm going to reveal to you two top secret sites of the Iranian regime that they had succeeded to keep it secret until today. One of these two top-secret projects is a project in the city of Natanz.

Jeffrey 8:29

He's saying that Iran has two nuclear sites that no one knows anything about. It's not unusual for dissidents to make things up about a government that they want to overthrow. In this case, he has a little bit to work with. Iran does have a nuclear energy program. And here we need to leave the press conference for a moment.

We need a little background.

Dina Esfandiary 8:50

The history of Iran's nuclear program is a complicated one.

Jeffrey 8:55

This is Dina Esfandiary. She's an expert on nuclear issues at the Century Foundation in New York.

Dina 9:01

I'm originally Iranian, so it was inevitable that I would get drawn into Iran's political dramas.

Jeffrey 9:08

Iran had been pursuing an on-again, off-again nuclear energy program since the late 1960s. The U.S. provided a small nuclear reactor that is still in Tehran today. Eventually, Iran started constructing a nuclear power plant with help from West Germany. Back then, Iran was ruled by the Shah, who was an American ally. When Islamic revolutionaries overthrew him in 1979, things changed.

Dina 9:33

It immediately created for itself a number of enemies. This meant that Iran's nuclear program also suffered because they ceased to provide it with fuel and ceased to help it out.

Jeffrey 9:44

Eventually, the nuclear power program started up again in the 1990s with help from Russia. But by 2002, the plant still isn't finished. In 2002, Iran's nuclear energy program is going nowhere fast.

Catherine 9:59

These are the two new nuclear sites that the regime has established.

Jeffrey 10:05

People like Jafarzadeh are spreading rumors that Iran wants more than just energy, but they don't have any concrete evidence. So, sitting at that press conference, Corey isn't buying it.

Corey 10:15

Well, I remember my first reaction being pretty skeptical about what they had released. They said it was a fuel fabrication facility at Natanz. It would have been much more concerning given what we were watching, you know, for many years about Iranian ambitions if they were to be enriching uranium.

Jeffrey 10:37

This distinction is maybe a little boring, but it matters. Fuel fabrication and enriching uranium mean two different things to a nuclear expert. What Jafarzadeh is saying is that Iran is building a factory in Natanz that will make metal rods filled with uranium. This is the typical fuel for a nuclear power plant. Lots of countries have nuclear power plants and make their own fuel rods.

And the fuel rods themselves aren't dangerous. Unless you drop one on your foot. They weigh about 1,000 pounds. Anyway, what Corey hears Jafarzadeh say is that Iran is stepping up its nuclear energy program. So Corey is sitting there wondering, why is he telling us this? Who cares? Any nuclear energy plant is going to be monitored by international inspectors.

Her impression is that the dissidents are just trying to turn nothing into something and hyping a threat that doesn't exist. But there is one thing— Natanz. It's Cori's job to study nuclear programs around the world. And she has never heard of Natanz. So she walks over to Jafar Zadeh and gives him her business card. She wants to see it for herself.

Corey 11:58

If this is out here, and if it's real, and if it's important, I wonder if I can find it.

Jeffrey 12:09

So Corey wants to see Natanz for herself. But she can't just hop on a plane and ask a taxi driver to take her to the secret nuclear plant in the desert. She doesn't even know where it is exactly.

Corey 12:19

The first thing I did was take all the information from the press conference, and I tried to pull out anything I could that was related to a geographic location. And I compiled all of that into one place to say, what is all the information I have?

Catherine 12:35

Now, its installation is located in old Kashan Natanz Highway across a village called Deh Zireh, which is only located...

Corey 12:45

He named other towns. He named roads. He gave mile markers along roads at this and at future press conferences. And then I had to find where is that in the world?

Jeffrey 12:58

Step one, figure out where Natanz is, like on a map. It's 2002. Google Earth does not exist. The closest thing available to Cori is a library. In her case, the Library of Congress. Cori's first stop is the Map and Geography Library, which is down in the basement of the Madison Building.

Corey 13:18

The process back then is... Look into the card catalog and pick which maps I wanted to see, and then hand that card to a librarian, and then they went in the back, and I waited an hour while they went and pulled those maps...

Jeffrey 13:31

I can see Corey sitting there for that hour, just waiting and waiting, scrolling through her brick-sized iPod, rocking out to Jane's Addiction.

Corey 13:52

I would have died for Perry Farrell at the time. You know, this is all past that prime, but I was still listening to it.

Jeffrey 14:00

Yeah, she's right. By 2002, Jane's addiction has already broken up once and reunited. Anyway, eventually the librarian comes back.

Corey 14:10

They were these giant manila folders, basically, that had multiple maps stacked in them. And then I tried to find where is that? You know, where is this town of Natanz? How far is 40 kilometers? Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey 14:22

One more thing.

Corey 14:23

Almost every single one of these maps was in Farsi. So I hired a Farsi speaker to go with me. I paid him by the hour, and he went with me to the map library.

Jeffrey 14:33

With the help of an interpreter, Corey finds a place called Natanz. In fact, she finds a couple of places called Natanz. Now she has to figure out which one is the right one. She goes back to her office, boots up her computer, and starts comparing the places she found called Natanz with a catalog of satellite images.

Corey 14:52

When you're looking at something like the Statue of Liberty, there would have been a lot of pictures. But when you're looking at a remote location in the desert of Iran... It was pretty interesting that for the areas we wanted to look at, there would be nothing, nothing, nothing, and then boom. There was like one 16 kilometer square area where there were like three photos stacked right on top of each other.

And I thought somebody else is looking at this other than me.

Jeffrey 15:24

This is a revelation. In 2002, commercial satellite images are pretty expensive. Companies do not take pictures of random places. That means someone else is already looking. Corey fills out a form, faxes it to the company, then waits for them to mail her a CD with the picture. It takes a couple of weeks.

Corey 15:52

The day we got the images, I was excited. I mean, I had spent by that point countless hours in a basement looking at maps and talking to people and trying to get there. So I was excited. The thing that jumped out about Natanz was this doesn't look like a fuel fabrication plant. Fuel fabrication is a metallic, dirty, industrial process.

And one of the places we've been looking at a lot of imagery was North Korea. And North Korea had a fuel fabrication plant. And I looked at that and I looked at Natanz and I said, this doesn't seem right.

Jeffrey 16:27

This thing at Natanz is massive. It is a giant hole in the ground, 50,000 square meters, or about the size of 10 football fields. And there is another one sitting right next to it. I do this kind of sleuthing a lot. And I have to tell you, when you are expecting a secret nuclear bomb factory and it turns out to be a chicken farm, that sucks.

But when you find something big, it is the best feeling in the world. Knowing something that almost no one else does, knowing a secret that will soon be huge news, but just for a moment, it's all yours.

Corey 17:10

They were building massive underground facilities that were approximately 50,000 square meters each. That immediately told me that this is something that they want to both hide and protect, which means that it was something interesting and something nuclear.

Jeffrey 17:28

The guy who wants to overthrow the Iranian government, he is on to way more than he realizes. What kind of factory needs to be the size of 10 football fields, then buried underground? It's not a plant to make fuel rods. Then, Corey remembers another little detail. She's been to a couple of these press conferences, and at one, Jafarzadeh uses an unusual word.

Corey 17:53

Ladders, that the facility contained ladders for uranium fuel production. And that was a word that jumped out at me because I didn't know that word in any nuclear context.

Jeffrey 18:06

Clearly, he's not talking about the kind of ladder you stand on to change a light bulb. Corey is racking her brain, and then it hits her. Cascades. Cascades. When you hear the word cascade, maybe you think about a waterfall shrouded in mist with maybe some birds flying around like some kind of TV commercial for shampoo. Me? When I hear the word cascade, I think about metal tubes standing on end, thousands of them connected by pipes.

I've got a weird gig, I know. Those metal tubes are called centrifuges, and they are a crucial step between the uranium found in nature, which is totally harmless, and the uranium that has been processed so it can be used in a nuclear reactor or in a bomb. Most of the uranium found in nature cannot sustain a chain reaction.

To make a bomb or to make fuel for a nuclear power plant, you have to separate the tiny amount of fissile uranium that will. The concentration of that good stuff, uranium-235, is less than 1% of the uranium found in nature. To make a bomb, it needs to be 90%. In other words, the uranium has to be enriched.

Corey compares it to making coffee.

Corey 19:24

Low-enriched uranium is like really weak coffee. If you think about your cup of coffee, how many coffee particles are there versus water? Weak coffee, you know... It might satisfy your craving, but it's not really going to do much for you because those coffee particles are the ones that are really going to give you the kick. But as you enrich uranium, you're making the coffee stronger and stronger by basically removing the water, removing the less interesting part of the uranium.

And so what you want to be left with is that really sludgy cafe Cubano.

Jeffrey 19:58

That's where centrifuges come in. You turn the uranium into a gas, put it in a centrifuge, and then spin the f*** out of it. It is exactly the same principle as a washing machine or a salad spinner. The spinning separates the heavy bits from the light bits. The centrifuges that Iran is building do about 63,000 RPMs. What that means is that the edge of the centrifuge is spinning at about the speed of sound.

Each individual centrifuge only does a little bit of the work by itself. If Iran wants to make a bomb, what they need is a really big building with thousands of these centrifuges connected by pipes so the uranium can go step by step from one machine to another. And in our business, that's called a cascade, not a ladder.

Corey 20:43

Like this is the words in Persian or in Farsi. And the only thing that I could think of is maybe this was related to the concept of cascades, where one thing leads to another. And that is something that's related to uranium enrichment.

Jeffrey 20:56

The guy who wants to overthrow the Iranian government? He has just revealed a secret site to enrich uranium. And he doesn't even know it. It kind of makes you wonder how he found out, right? Like, who is feeding him this information that he doesn't quite understand? And who is paying a company to take satellite pictures of this site?

Corey is in the middle of something huge.

Other voice 21:29

Based on satellite photos like these, senior U.S. officials tell CNN they are convinced Iran is constructing large nuclear facilities which could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey 21:42

Cori's satellite images become part of the U.S. government's case that Iran is building a bomb.

Other voice 21:47

The large facility at Natanz appears to U.S. intelligence officials to be a uranium enrichment plant. Outside experts agree.

Corey 21:56

We believe that this is a uranium enrichment facility and could be a centrifuge facility. And the important facility here is this kind of Z-shaped structure.

Jeffrey 22:08

This is Corey on CNN. She's sharing her images with the public.

Corey 22:12

I was young, and this was my first really big public splash. And so to be on CNN...

Jeffrey 22:19

Making the decision to go public with the image is kind of a risk. Just as Corey suspects, another country already has the information and has already informed international inspectors.

Corey 22:30

We took that information to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Jeffrey 22:34

That's the IAEA. Those are the inspectors that make sure countries aren't building a bomb.

Corey 22:38

And we asked them, are you trying to see this facility? And at that time, they told us quietly that they were. And the IAEA actually kind of begged us not to go public with this picture.

Jeffrey 22:49

The IAEA is worried that going public with Cori's pictures will embarrass Iran's leaders, who might just throw them out and build a bomb. Iran's leaders are already pretty wary of the West. Everyone assumed that Iran's nuclear program wasn't going anywhere. But Corey's discovery made them realize Iran had another nuclear program, one they were hiding.

Dina 23:10

Iran's nuclear history is one that has been fraught with lies and countries changing their mind.

Jeffrey 23:16

That's Dina Esfandiary again. She says it makes sense that Iran would do something like this in secret.

Dina 23:22

One of the reasons why throughout its history, Iran has withheld information is because it didn't trust the international community. It knew that it had been treated as a pariah state after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. That's why Iran Decided to build up its nuclear program itself.

Jeffrey 23:41

So from Iran's perspective, other countries have nuclear energy programs. And other countries have nuclear weapons. Countries that hate Iran. And it's not like Americans trust Iran any more than the Iranians trust us. In 2003, Iran was one of the countries George Bush listed as a member of the Axis of Evil.

George W. Bush 24:07

States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.

Jeffrey 24:17

Republicans and Democrats don't seem to agree about much, but one thing they can all get behind is hating Iran.

Dina 24:24

Containing Iran has been an issue that U.S. Congress seems to agree on, unlike everything else.

Jeffrey 24:30

Corey knows she is kicking a hornet's nest by alerting the world that Iran might be secretly building a bomb. Because there's one other thing going on at the time.

George 24:41

Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation... The only possible use he could have for those weapons is to dominate, intimidate, or attack.

Jeffrey 25:08

Corey discovers Iran's secret nuclear facility just as the United States is gearing up to invade Iran's neighbor, Iraq, for allegedly using centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Corey 25:18

I remember there being conversations, only half joking, as to whether the U.S. military, having, you know, mowed through Iraq like a hot knife through butter, which is what we thought was happening at the time, should just keep going north and then turn right.

Jeffrey 25:32

In case you don't remember, these claims about Iraq are all false. No yellow cake, no aluminum tubes, no WMD at all. Saddam Hussein in 2002 is definitely not building a bomb. But Iran is. Corey hopes that publicizing the truth will put pressure on Iran to open up, to let international inspectors have a look. But she also worries it might backfire and start another war.

Corey 26:03

Iraq is at the forefront of everybody's mind. We're in Afghanistan. People are already worried about war. And so part of the concern, I think, with the Iran information, once we revealed it, is, is this another front in a war? Is this the next place that we're going?

Jeffrey 26:31

We know the United States doesn't invade Iran. George W. Bush is busy enough chasing Osama bin Laden all over Afghanistan and toppling Saddam in Iraq. There just isn't an appetite in the United States for another military conflict. On the other hand, no one wants to let Iran get a nuclear bomb either. That leaves one option, no matter how unlikely.

The two sides are going to have to talk to each other. It will take them more than a decade. By that time, Jane's addiction will break up again and get back together. And then break up again. A couple of times, actually. But that's another podcast. In the next four episodes of this series, we'll hear from the people who made the Iran nuclear deal happen.

The people who neglected their families, lost teeth, examined stolen documents, and even used a novelty baby onesie as a negotiating tactic. We'll talk about how the deal was undermined and ultimately left in tatters, and what that means for the rest of us. That's all to come on The Deal. The Deal is produced by me, Jeffrey Lewis, along with Erin Davis, Mitchell Johnson, and Juliette Luini.

Additional help from Jessica Varnum and Ellie Barney. Editorial support from Julia Barton. Our original score is by Hannes Brown. Thanks as well to the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and Middlebury College. Subscribe to The Deal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, you can rate and review the show.

I'm Jeffrey Lewis. Thanks for listening. Thank you.