Iran’s Nuclear-Arms Guru Resurfaces

The Iranian scientist considered Tehran's atomic-weapons guru until he was apparently sidelined several years ago is back at work, according to United Nations investigators and U.S. and Israeli officials, sparking fresh concerns about the status of Iran's nuclear program.

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Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, widely compared with Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who oversaw the crash 1940s effort to build an atomic bomb, helped push Iran into its nuclear age over the past two decades. A senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he oversaw Iran's research into the construction and detonation of a nuclear warhead, Western officials say.

Mr. Fakhrizadeh complained in 2006 that his funding and nuclear-weapons work had been frozen by Iran's government, according to intercepted email and phone calls, U.S. officials said. The intercepts contributed to a 2007 U.S. intelligence report that concluded Iran had halted its attempts to build a nuclear bomb in 2003.

Today, however, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, believes Mr. Fakhrizadeh has opened a research facility in Tehran's northern suburbs involved in studies relevant to developing nuclear weapons. The offices include some of the same scientists and military staff active in Iran's previous nuclear-weapons research, said intelligence officials who have seen intelligence on the facility.

A number of Mr. Fakhrizadeh's closest colleagues have risen up the ranks of the Iranian bureaucracy in recent months, placing them in positions to influence the future of Iran's nuclear program. Among them is Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and is one of the country's vice presidents.

The apparent re-emergence of Mr. Fakhrizadeh comes as international diplomatic efforts to contain Tehran's nuclear program have stalled and as Israel threatens military strikes. It also calls into question the conclusion by the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had frozen its nuclear-weapons program.

A quarterly report by the IAEA is expected this week to conclude that Iran continues to expand the number of centrifuges it has for enriching uranium and is moving more of this equipment into an underground facility near the holy city of Qom. The site, known as Fordow, is seen as largely impregnable to attack. On Wednesday, the IAEA said it was establishing a special task force to investigate Iran's nuclear program, signaling its concern about Tehran's continued advances.

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Associated Press

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, left, met with Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Wednesday.

Iran denies it is pursuing atomic weapons, saying its research is just for energy, and has said that much of the IAEA's information is bogus. Efforts to reach Mr. Fakhrizadeh through Iran's mission at the U.N. were unsuccessful. Mr. Abbasi-Davani denies any nuclear-weapons role.

Senior Obama administration officials say the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate remains accurate. They agree some research on atomic weapons development involving Mr. Fakhrizadeh has likely continued but contend it isn't centralized and systematic, as it was before 2003. These officials say the U.S. and its allies still have time to use sanctions and diplomacy to deny Iran an atomic bomb.

Israel and some European nations worry that Mr. Fakhrizadeh's suspected warhead research coincides with steps by Tehran to push ahead with the two other planks of a nuclear-arms program: missile systems and production of more highly enriched uranium. Security officials from these countries say Iran is steadily moving toward a point where its program would be so advanced that diplomacy or military strikes would no longer be able to deny it the bomb or the capability to build one.

"They are moving up all three elements of their nuclear program to the starting line," a senior Israeli official said.

At the center of the IAEA and Western focus on Mr. Fakhrizadeh, believed to be 51 years old, is an institution called the SPND, meaning, in Persian, the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research. The IAEA believes that Mr. Fakhrizadeh secretly opened SPND in 2011 and that elements of Iran's nuclear-arms research, which they thought were shelved in 2003 and which also have civilian applications, may be taking place there.

Based in the Tehran suburb of Mojdeh, the SPND hosts six directorates that include research labs for metallurgy, chemistry and explosives testing, according to Western officials who have seen the intelligence on the site. The organization reports directly to the Revolutionary Guard.

"We have concerns in various areas that indicate activities that are relevant to nuclear explosive devices," IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in a June interview. "This is where we stand now. And if we cannot clarify, we get more concerned."

Mr. Amano has publicly raised his concerns that Iran has done other weapons-related research post-2003. Included in this, according to IAEA reports, was computer modeling in 2008 and 2009 to simulate the detonation of a nuclear bomb. The IAEA also says it has evidence Iran did studies starting in 2006 to develop a neutron initiator, which is placed in the core of a warhead to set off a fissile reaction.

Current and former IAEA officials say the SPND is just the most recent base for Mr. Fakhrizadeh, who has long been on the West's radar. The U.S. and IAEA trace his work back nearly two decades, saying he and the nuclear-weapons research efforts moved through a series of organizations over the years.

"Such projects are good if one wants to maintain the expertise of the scientists in fields related to nuclear-weapons research under different legitimate hats," said Olli Heinonen, former chief weapons inspector for the IAEA. "This is a way you can conceal."

Iran has long done research on nuclear energy, dating back to the shah's rule. But documents obtained by the IAEA and outside groups show the Islamic government began running a separate nuclear program in the late 1980s and '90s under the leadership of the defense ministry. It was initially based in an office called the Physics Research Center, or PHRC, and led by Mr. Fakhrizadeh and a professor at Sharif University.

More than 1,600 of PHRC telexes were obtained this year by the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonproliferation research organization in Washington. They show how the PHRC shielded technology purchases. In a Jan. 1, 1991, telex, the university's purchasing department sought samples of magnets that could be used in developing gas centrifuges from a European engineering company. The return address it gave wasn't the university's, but the PHRC's.

In 2000, according to IAEA officials, Mr. Fakhrizadeh moved to a new defense ministry institute where Tehran conducted some of its most advanced research on nuclear weapons. The institute used a military site south of Tehran called Parchin, where the agency says high-explosives tests required for developing atomic bombs were likely conducted. Much of the IAEA's focus in the past year has been on gaining access to Parchin, which Iran has so far denied.

IAEA inspectors have also repeatedly been rebuffed in efforts to interview Mr. Fakhrizadeh, say current and former IAEA staff members.

Mr. Heinonen, now at Harvard's Belfer Center on science and international affairs, described a 2008 trip to Tehran at which, the Finnish scientist says, he kept asking for access to Mr. Fakhrizadeh but was greeted instead by bureaucrats who deflected his questions.

The U.N. Security Council imposed a travel ban and financial sanctions on Mr. Fakhrizadeh in 2007 for his work, and similar sanctions against Mr. Abbasi-Davani because of his ties to Mr. Fakhrizadeh. Mr. Abbasi-Davani, interviewed that year while working as a rector at an Iranian university, denied playing any role in Iran's nuclear program, saying: "In order to gain prestige…we don't need the atomic bomb."

In November 2010, Mr. Abbasi-Davani was one of two scientists targeted by assassins on motorbikes who placed magnetized bombs on their cars while they were stuck in Tehran traffic. He survived, unlike his colleague. Iran blamed Israel. Israeli officials have never confirmed or denied involvement.

Later, Mr. Abbasi-Davani was promoted to head the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Last month, he said Iran now has the technology to move quickly toward producing weapons-grade uranium. Such fuel can be used to build the core of an atomic weapon. Mr. Abbasi-Davani said it would only be for fueling a nuclear submarine or merchant vessels.

Mr. Abbasi-Davani emerged on the world stage last September to attend the IAEA's general conference in Vienna, despite the U.N. travel ban. Appearing before reporters, he said Iran wouldn't slow its uranium-enrichment activities but would move them into underground bunkers.

He also tweaked British, Israeli and American intelligence services that, he claimed, had tried to kill him a year earlier.

"Six years ago, the intelligence service of the U.K. began collecting information and data regarding my past," he said. They even "checked into the back door of my room in the university to see whether I have a bodyguard or not."