Where’s the Rest of Iran’s Uranium?
CIA expert says a newly covert Iranian effort to build a bomb would face many obstacles
Even with President Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire in the 10-day war between Israel and Iran, U.S. and European officials remain deeply concerned over Iran’s large undeclared stockpile of enriched uranium.
A few days before the U.S. attack on three major Iranian nuclear facilities, satellites photographed trucks at the Fordow enrichment plant loading up with Iran’s 408 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium. Iranian officials later confirmed the enriched uranium had been removed from Fordow and taken to a secret location.
Vice President J.D. Vance and other senior administration officials, along with representatives of France of Britain, have voiced concerns that Iran, which also has a number of uninstalled advanced centrifuges, could further enrich the uranium to weapons-grade 90 percent, enabling Tehran to build a nuclear bomb despite the Israeli and U.S. attacks.
But James Lawler, a former senior CIA officer whose 25-year career largely focused on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, says the extensive damage to Iran’s nuclear program so far makes such a development highly unlikely.
“Having the highly enriched uranium and the advanced centrifuges, while troubling, however, does not a nuclear weapons program make,” he told SpyTalk in an email.
“The centrifuges are delicate, finely machined pieces of equipment, which require skilled technicians to fabricate, assemble, mount, balance, and even more importantly, to operate in a relatively vibration-free, clandestine centrifuge cascade hall. But that’s a major undertaking visible to satellite imagery and susceptible to Mossad and CIA HUMINT [human intelligence] penetration.”
Lawler went on to say that Israel’s extraordinarily successful sabotage operations confirm that “Mossad has extensive networks of assets in Iran, and the joint bombing campaign undoubtedly will cause a lot of scientists and technicians to reconsider this employment path and cause some to decide to sell out the program for protection or for other basic reasons for espionage, which I know quite well,” said Lawler, widely considered one of the CIA’s top spy recruiters. “As I've often said, you don't recruit happy people—only people under stress. And stress levels in that skilled cadre must be sky high now.”
The Mossad, using its Persian-speaking officers, has ramped up the stress factor by telephoning Iranian generals and other senior officers and demanding they publicly denounce the country’s Islamist regime or face liquidation, along with their wives and children, at the hands of Mossad assassination squads, the Washington Post reported Monday.
Lawler also noted that Iran would need a feedstock of uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6), the gas used in centrifuge cascades to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
“Without UF6, you can’t enrich anything,” he said, adding that Israel warplanes destroyed Iran’s uranium conversion facility, which produces the gas. “These facilities have visible overhead signatures and would be vulnerable to future bombing and/or sabotage. And again, they are very vulnerable to HUMINT penetration.”
Lawler said that without any outside interference, he estimates it might take Iran at least two or three years to develop a nuclear weapon. “But there will be outside interference,” he said, “because the Mossad and we will be trying our best to delay, denigrate, disrupt and destroy their efforts. I think that’s a given.”
Lawler offered his expert assessment of Iran’s nuclear program after more than a week of precision Israeli airstrikes and sabotage operations targeting the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities and ballistic missile program, climaxing with the U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s three major nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Early in the 2000’s, Lawler was chief of the CIA program that successfully disrupted Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan’s covert nuclear proliferation network. After retiring from the CIA, he spent another 17 years training agency and DIA spies how to recruit nuclear scientists from Russia and other countries.
WAR THREAT DIMINISHED
With Iran’s signal that its missile attacks Monday on U.S. military bases in Qatar and Iraq represented the extent of its retaliation for the U.S. bombing of its nuclear program, the danger of a wider Middle East war involving American forces has receded, former officials, and veteran experts on the region say. And with President Trump”s announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, Middle East tensions have receded—at least for the moment.
“Actually, ‘receded’ is too weak a word,” said Brett McGurk, who served as a senior national security official under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. “I would say it has dramatically diminished,” he told SpyTalk.
President Trump, McGurk added, successfully broke the taboo of a direct American attack on Iranian soil.
“The assumption in the intelligence community for years has been that such an attack would unleash uncontrolled escalation,” he said. “Well, it turns out, it won’t. That may have been true three years ago, but it’s a different story now.”
In what administration officials viewed as a signal of Iran’s desire to deescalate its military confrontation with the United States, Trump revealed earlier that Tehran gave the United States advance warning of the missile attacks, which targeted Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East, and Ain al Asad Air Base in Iraq.
In another sign of Iranian caution, officials in Tehran said the number of missiles it fired at each base did not exceed the number of bombs that U.S. warplanes dropped on Iranian nuclear sites this past weekend, underscoring their proportionality, if not the vast difference in their respective destructive power. Qatari and U.S. air defenses intercepted all but one of the missiles, which caused no casualties.
After 10 days of intense Israeli airstrikes and sabotage operations targeting nuclear installations and missile launchers, and an assassination campaign that has killed Iran’s top military commanders and nuclear scientists, McGurk added: “Iran is in a very weak and vulnerable position.”
He went on to predict that despite the ceasefire, Israel will continue to control Iranian skies, ensuring that Iran won’t be able to rebuild its air defenses, missile production capabilities and nuclear program.
“This is the new normal,” he said.
Regime Change
Meanwhile, Juan Cole, a Middle East expert at the University of Michigan, said regime change in Iran, something both Netanyahu and Trump hinted at recently, is not likely.
“Even Iranians in the opposition are likely to rally around the flag,” he wrote Monday on his blog, “If anything, the Israeli and US attacks may have extended the life of an oppressive government that is widely disliked inside the country but which can now claim to stand against powerful external foes dedicated to attacking and destroying the Iranian nation.”
The social media platform X posted video of thousands of Iranians in the streets of Tehran chanting their support for their government and condemning the United States and Israel.
McGurk said he expected negotiations with Iran toward a new nuclear agreement eventually to resume. He said officials of the European countries that signed the 2015 nuclear agreement recently warned Iran that unless they declared the enriched uranium stockpile they’ve hidden, they would invoke the so-called “snap back” provisions in the accord, which permit Western signatories to reimpose all of the economic sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the accord. Such a reimposition would crush Iran’s already struggling economy.
“There is a totally new equation in the Middle East now,” McGurk said.
guess who will come out ahead in this mess...