The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog at the heart of the growing Iranian crisis, has been accused by several former senior agency officials of pro-Western bias, over-reliance on unverified intelligence and of sidelining skeptics.
IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, a veteran Japanese diplomat, took command of the agency in July 2009. Since then, the West’s confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program has deepened, and threats of military action by Israel and the US have become more frequent.
At the same time, the IAEA’s reports on Iranian behavior have become steadily more critical. In November, it published an unprecedented volume of intelligence pointing toward past Iranian work on developing a nuclear weapon, deeming it credible.
However, some former IAEA officials are saying that the agency has gone too far. Robert Kelley, a former US weapons scientists who ran the IAEA action team on Iraq at the time of the US-led invasion, said there were worrying parallels between the West’s mistakes over Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction then and the IAEA’s assessment of Iran now.
“Amano is falling into the [then-US vice president Dick] Cheney trap. What we learned back in 2002 and 2003, when we were in the run-up to the war [in Iraq], was that peer review was very important and that the analysis should not be left to a small group of people,” Kelley said.
“So what have we learned since then? Absolutely nothing. Just like Dick Cheney, Amano is relying on a very small group of people and those opinions are not being checked,” he added.
Other former officials have also raised concern that the IAEA is becoming an echo chamber, focused on suspicions over Iran’s program, without the vigorous debate that characterized the era of Amano’s predecessor, former IAEA director-general Mohamed ElBaradei.
They point to Amano’s decision, in March last year, to dissolve the agency’s office of external relations and policy co-ordination (EXPO), which under ElBaradei had second-guessed some of the judgments made by the safeguards department inspectors.
EXPO cautioned against the publication of IAEA reports that the Bush administration might use to justify military action. Some inspectors believed that amounted to censorship and Western governments said it was not the agency’s job to make political judgments.
ElBaradei’s advisers from EXPO were moved sideways in the organization and the department’s functions have been absorbed by the director-general’s office.
“There has been a concentration of power, with less diversity of viewpoints,” a former agency official said, adding that Amano has surrounded himself with advisers who have the same approach to Iran.
Hans Blix, a former IAEA director-general, also raised concerns over the agency’s credibility.
“There is a distinction between information and evidence, and if you are a responsible agency you have to make sure that you ask questions and do not base conclusions on information that has not been verified,” he said.
“The agency has a certain credibility. It should guard it by being meticulous in checking the evidence. If certain governments want a blessing for the intelligence they provide the IAEA, they should provide convincing evidence. Otherwise, the agency should not give its stamp of approval,” he added.
Blix said he could not say for certain whether that had happened under Amano’s watch.
The IAEA would not comment on the criticisms, under a policy which avoids entering public debate.
Western diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA has its headquarters, defended Amano’s management, pointing out that much of the material on weaponization had been previously raised when ElBaradei ran the agency, albeit in less detail, and was based on 1,000 pages of documentation.
“It is arguable that ElBaradei was a slightly more benefit-of-the-doubt operator than Amano,” one diplomat said. “He might have fretted more about making judgments on evidence because he didn’t have 100 percent confirmation. Amano says: ‘I don’t have 100 percent certainty, but it makes no sense saying nothing until a smoking gun is visible.’”
Some of the controversy around Amano’s management dates to his election in 2009, when he narrowly beat Abdul Minty, a South African diplomat who championed the interests of developing countries organized in the Non-Aligned Movement, in a campaign which became a geopolitical contest between North and South.
“Amano’s director-generalship began under a bad star,” said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The election was extremely polarized and bitter. Minty clearly appealed to states which see themselves as underdogs and have-nots. Amano was supported by the US and others who saw him as rolling back the IAEA’s political aspirations under ElBaradei to a more technical agency,” he said.
The acrid taste left by the election was heightened by the US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks that revealed Amano’s assiduous courting of US support. In an October 2009 cable, the US charge d’affaires, Geoffrey Pyatt, wrote: “Amano reminded [the] ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the developing countries group], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
In an earlier cable in July that year, the Americans recount discussions with Amano on the future of officials, particular in EXPO, “some of whom have not always been helpful to US positions.”
Last year, the named officials were moved to other jobs, out of the inner core that drafts the quarterly reports, like the controversial one on Iran in November.
Hibbs argues that some degree of reorganization was desirable and inevitable, given the heated public battles under ElBaradei.
“Many states’ diplomats were appalled that a small number of officials in the two [IAEA] departments were at war with each other and at the extent they were prepared to use the media to get their points across,” he said.
Under Amano, internal debates have generally not leaked and he has centralized the organization, insisting that most public statements come from his office.
However, this has not stopped controversy from enveloping the agency, just as it did under ElBaradei. In the first major crisis of the Amano tenure, the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster following the Japanese tsunami a year ago, he was widely blamed for not acting quickly and aggressively enough.
Criticism over the agency’s outspoken comments on Iran has also focused on the director-general.
Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a non-proliferation organization based in Washington, said: “The main beneficiaries of the Amano reign have been US policy and the Japanese nuclear power industry. There has been no space between Amano and [US President] Barack Obama, and he withheld serious criticism of the industry during the Fukushima crisis.”
“On Iran, the difference is like night and day. ElBaradei constantly sought a diplomatic solution, while Amano wields a big stick and has hit Iran hard and repeatedly,” he added.
On the other hand, Cirincione said, ElBaradei’s more restrained approach had not succeeded in persuading Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium in line with UN Security Council demands.
The facts of that accelerating enrichment program are generally not disputed, only the intentions behind it. Cirincione also said new information has come to the IAEA’s attention during Amano’s stewardship, which may warrant the more detailed report on the possible military dimensions of the program issued in November.
Even Kelley, a fierce critic of the agency, said in a recent commentary: “[Iran] claims to have given up its nuclear weapons ambitions, yet repeatedly acts as if it has something to hide. I am a skeptic; I suspect the Iranians may have an ongoing weaponization program. And the uncertainty must be resolved.”
Kelley argues that with war and peace in the balance, as well as the IAEA’s credibility, anything it publishes must be thoroughly verified.
In particular, he questions the agency’s focus on a bus-sized steel vessel supposedly installed in an Iranian military site at Parchin in 2000, which the November report said was for “hydrodynamic experiments” — testing shaped, high-explosive arrays used to implode the spherical fissile core of a warhead and start a chain reaction. Kelley disputes the agency’s logic.
“You don’t do hydrodynamic testing of nuclear bombs in containers,” he said. “All of such tests would be done at outdoor firing sites, not in a building next to a major highway.”
Kelley also says the suggestion in the November report that weapons experimentation could be continuing is based largely on a single document, which ElBaradei had rejected as dubious. In his memoir, The Age of Deception, ElBaradei talks about documents supplied in 2009 by Israel, the authenticity of which was questioned by the agency’s experts.
Western government officials argue that with the use of advanced fiber optics, a containment vessel could be used to perfect the timing of explosive arrays, and say that evidence that has surfaced during Amano’s tenure had added to the credibility of the Israeli document. However, the judgment of the US intelligence community is that weapons development ceased in 2003.
Jim Walsh, an expert on the Iranian nuclear program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that US intelligence had become more certain over recent years in its judgement that Iran ceased weaponization work in 2003.
“Amano has been way out in front of the US on this,” Walsh said. “I think if the agency is going to be a neutral player in this — and we need a neutral player to make the sort of judgements that have to be made — it will have to be more conservative than the national governments on this.”
The issue is critical. While there is no doubt that Iran is in contravention of Security Council resolutions, and there is substantial evidence that the country had an organized weapons project up to 2003, the claim that work has continued has added to the sense of urgency that has fuelled the Western oil embargo, due to take effect in less than four months, and threats of military action.
Laban Coblentz, ElBaradei’s former speechwriter and a collaborator on The Age of Deception, said that huge stakes could rest on the nuances with which the IAEA director-general interprets the evidence.
“It is a very difficult place to be sitting,” Coblentz said. “Amano and ElBaradei were looking at the same allegations. They have both said to their people: ‘Please pursue this.’ All that is the same. The other thing that is the same is that so far the most substantial allegations have not been verified. What has changed is the willingness to publish those allegations that have not been verified as a tool to pressure the Iranians to come to the table.”
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