Source: Fox News
WASHINGTON ââ¬â Twenty-one commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are the top scientists running Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, says the man who exposed Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2002.
On top of that, the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate published last week saying Tehran shut down its weaponization program in 2003 failed to mention that the program restarted in mid-2004, said Alireza Jafarzadeh, an Iranian dissident and president of Strategic Policy Consulting.
The scientists working on the alleged civilian nuclear centrifuge program are IGRC commanders, said Jafarzadeh, who was providing a list of names to the press on Tuesday. But their intention is not a nuclear energy source for civilians.
"It’s the IRGC that is basically controlling the whole thing, dominating the whole thing," Jafarzadeh told FOXNews.com. "They are running the show. They have a number of sites controlled by the IRGC that has been off-limits to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and inspectors, including a military university known as Imam Hossein University. … That site has not been inspected. They have perhaps the most advanced nuclear research and development center in that university."
Jafarzadeh said the 2003 decision to stop the weaponization program, which was operating in Lavizan-Shian, a posh northeast district of Tehran, was not Iran’s own. The site had been exposed by the opposition, the National Council of Resistance on Iran, in April 2003 after revelations of several other nuclear sites that could be portrayed as dual purpose facilities. Lavizan-Shian could not, he said.
"The regime knew that this is not the site that they can invite the IAEA … this site was heavily involved in militarization of the program," Jafarzadeh said. "They were doing all kinds of activities that were not justifiable. So they decided before the IAEA gets in ââ¬â and it usually takes four to six months before they can go through the process and get in ââ¬â use the time and try to basically destroy this whole facility, and that’s what they did."
Jafarzadeh said the Iranians razed the buildings, removed the soil, cut down the trees and allowed the IAEA to inspect the Lavizan-Shian site, which had been turned into a park by June 2004. He noted that the regime acted as if it had succumbed to municipal pressure to open a park with basketball and tennis courts and that is why the area had been flattened.
Jafarzadeh said that "in a way it’s correct for the NIE to say that in late 2003 the weaponization of the program was stopped, and they said it was due to international pressure. But they failed to say that it restarted in 2004" in a location called Lavizan 2, he said.
Lavizan 2 "has never been inspected by the IAEA," Jafarzadeh said.
In August 2002, Jafarzadeh, a former spokesman for the National Council of Resistance on Iran, revealed the name of the Natanz nuclear site, which the Iranian government since has acknowledged and which is subject to IAEA inspections.
Because of its integral relationship to Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian resistance group, NCRI is deemed a terrorist organization in the United States, despite calls by several members of Congress to remove its designation from the State Department list…
Nonetheless, NCRI and Jafarzadeh, working independently, have concluded that Iran did shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but restarted it a year later, moving and hiding equipment to a variety of sites.
Mohammad Mohaddessin, NCRI’s foreign affairs chief, told The Wall Street Journal in Tuesday’s editions that some of the equipment was moved to another military compound known as the Center for Readiness and Advanced Technology, to Malek-Ashtar University Isfahan and to a defense ministry hospital in Tehran.
The facility was broken into 11 fields of research, including projects to develop a nuclear trigger and shape weapons-grade uranium into a warhead, the paper reported.
"They scattered the weaponization program to other locations and restarted in 2004," Mohaddessin said.
"Their strategy was that if the IAEA found any one piece of this research program, it would be possible to justify it as civilian. But so long as it was all together, they wouldn’t be able to."
