CIA Chief Warns Of Tehran-Moscow Military Ties, Iran Nuclear
Russia is proposing to help Iran on its missile program, CIA Director William Burns told CBS Sunday, while Tehran’s uranium enrichment program is far advanced.
Russia is proposing to help Iran on its missile program, CIA Director William Burns told CBS Sunday, while Tehran’s uranium enrichment program is far advanced.
In an interview on Face the Nation, Burns told Margaret Brennan that Iran’s military ties with Russia is “moving at a pretty fast clip in a very dangerous direction right now…”
At the same time, he said despite Iran’s uranium enrichment program which has advanced far and can produce bomb material in a matter of weeks, the United States believes a decision to produce nuclear weapons has not been made yet.
Manufacturing a bomb can be a more secretive process in comparison with enrichment, which the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is somewhat monitoring inside the country. While the enrichment installations are being monitored, the bomb-making process can take place in a completely separate and secret location.
The United States believes that Iran stopped its nascent weaponization program in 2003 when news about its secret nuclear program became public and Western powers began exerting pressure on Tehran.
“To the best of our knowledge, we don't believe that the Supreme Leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program that we judge that they suspended or stopped at the end of 2003,” Burns said during the interview.
Iran began breaching an enrichment limit imposed by the Obama era JCPOA accord after the Trump administration imposed full oil export sanctions in 2019. First, Tehran began enriching to 5 percent, beyond the agreement’s 3.67-percent limit, but when the Biden administration signaled its readiness to revive the deal, Iran announced enrichment to 20 percent in early 2021.
As negotiations were taking place in Vienna that year, Iran increased enrichment to 60 percent, which is very close to the 90-percent purity needed for nuclear weapons.
This month Bloomberg reported that IAEA inspectors found 84-percent enriched uranium particles in an Iranian nuclear facility. The UN watchdog has not denied the report, while Tehran has said that unintentional over-enrichment can sometimes happen in the fast-spinning centrifuges.
Burns also warned that the close military ties between Moscow and Tehran can pose a threat not only to Ukraine but also to regional countries. Iran has already provided hundreds of Kamikaze drones that Russia has used against Ukraine. Burns revealed that Iran has also provided Russia with ammunition for artillery and tanks.
“Russia is proposing to help the Iranians on their missile program and also at least considering the possibility of providing fighter aircraft to Iran as well,” the CIA director said.
Iran already has medium-range missiles that could be modified to carry nuclear warheads but any Russian assistance in this regard could be extremely dangerous for the region and possibly beyond.
Israel has vowed that it will not tolerate a nuclear Iran and is preparing to use military force if needed to neutralize its nuclear program.
US officials have also been increasingly signaling that President Joe Biden will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, after JCPOA talks hit a dead-end in September. "If they start getting too close, too close for comfort, then of course we will not be prepared to sit idly by," US Special Representative for Iran Robert Malley told National Public Radio in November.
In the days leading up to the invasion negotiators in the nuclear talks were scrambling to reach the finish line, promising to successfully conclude an arduous diplomatic process that had lasted eleven months. The United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany had been warning for weeks that Iran should make up its mind and the Vienna talks could not last indefinitely.
But in the second week of the Ukraine invasion, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov dropped a bombshell, demanding an exemption from newly imposed Ukraine invasion sanctions for Moscow’s dealings with Iran.
Initially, it was said that Lavrov was demanding Western sanctions imposed on Russia not interfere with its nuclear dealings with Iran, but on March 6, a European diplomat in Vienna told Iran International that “Lavrov's demands were way above nuclear cooperation [allowed by the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran].”
The diplomat said that Russia's envoy in the Vienna talks, Mikhail Ulyanov, had first raised the issue of Ukraine sanctions only in relation to Moscow's role after a possible nuclear deal with Tehran, but Lavrov's remarks went much farther, demanding wider exemptions in dealings with Iran. That could open up a Russian sanctions-busting backdoor through Iran, an experienced operator in circumvention.
The following day, Iran’s chief negotiator, Ali Bagheri-Kani left from Vienna for Tehran, signaling the end to the talks.
It took another five months for the US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to warn that Iran was preparing to deliver military drones to Russia. Moscow began using the Kamikaze drones against Ukraine in early October, forcing Washington to finally say that the nuclear talks had reached an impasse.
However, the Biden administration seemed slow to realize the unwillingness of hardliners in Tehran to accept a deal, and Moscow’s ability to manipulate their intransigence.
"The new Russia-related sanctions are unrelated to the JCPOA and should not have any impact on its potential implementation," a State Department spokesperson said on March 5 adding that Washington continues to engage with Russia on a return to full implementation of the JCPOA. "Russia shares a common interest in ensuring Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon. "
The writing was on the wall in early March that Moscow would hold an Iran nuclear agreement hostage and Tehran finding itself in more isolation would dance to Putin’s tune.
It seems the French knew it. "We are very close to an agreement − it is essential we conclude while we still can," foreign ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre told reporters in a daily briefing March 8. "We are concerned by the risks that further delays could weigh on the possibility of concluding [a deal]."
However, the European Union, apparently with Washington’s blessing continued to push for an agreement, which increasing resembled chasing a bird which had flown away from the cage.
EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell visited Tehran in June and began drafting a text that he hoped the US and the Islamic Republic would accept, based on the Vienna negotiations that Russia was insisting was 99 percent complete.
By early October, finally the United States realized that the effort was going nowhere. By that time, popular protests led by women had broken out in Iran, catching the imagination of global audiences. The kamikaze drones were flying in dozens over Ukraine, and finally the administration conceded that it was no longer “focused” on the JCPOA.
Hossein-Ali Haji Dalegani, a hardliner a member of parliament’s presidium told Fars news agency in Tehran that as part of the Islamic Republic’s serious reaction, access for UN nuclear inspectors to Iran’s nuclear facilities will be blocked.
Iranian officials and media have somewhat focused on the issue of a provision in the 2015 nuclear accord (JCPOA) that allows signatories to trigger the return of international sanctions if Iran is found violating the cap on its nuclear activities. The term ‘snapback’ is also used for bringing back the international sanctions that were suspended after the JCPOA was signed in 2015.
So far, after four years of Iran’s violations by higher-level uranium enrichment, the Western powers have not taken that step, but recent developments have increased the likelihood.
A report by Bloomberg News last week said that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have found uranium particles in Iran’s nuclear installations that were enriched to 84-percent purity. The IAEA has not denied the report. Such a level of purified uranium is the closes Iran ha come to weapons-grade fissile material.
This can be sufficient reason for the three European signatories of the JCPOA – the United Kingdom, France and Germany – to use the trigger mechanism at the UN Security Council to bring back international sanctions.
Russia and China, according to the provisions of the mechanism, cannot veto the move, although they can ignore the sanctions and continue trading with Iran. In the current global circumstances, Russia will certainly not abide by any sanction’s regime.
Nevertheless, Iranian are nervous and government-controlled media in Tehran reflects that mood. What specially rattled nerves was a statement by Israel’s foreign minister Eli Cohen on Tuesday, who said that the West would impose “snapback” sanctions on Iran before the 78th UN General Assembly in September of this year.
Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who was visiting Iraq on Wednesday, threatened that “If America chooses a different path, we are also ready to resort to our Plan B and a different path and all option will be on the table.”
So far however, all the Biden administration has been saying is that they are not pursuing the path to revive the JCPOA, as they had been doing from April 2021 to September 2022.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price on Wednesday reiterated that the JCPOA “has not been on the agenda for some time,” when asked to comment about Iranian claims that the Sultan of Oman will soon visit Tehran to pursue the resumption of nuclear talks after they reached an impasse last September.
While insisting that the administration views diplomacy as the best way to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, Price stressed on three conditions.
“Our focus has been on Iran’s brutality, its repression against its own people; it has been on Iran’s provision of UAV technology to Russia; it’s been on our ceaseless efforts to see our wrongful detainees freed,” Price said, leaving out the issue of Iran’s malign behavior in the region from any potential new talks.