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State Department: New moderate Iran “very actively” pursuing clandestine nuclear procurement efforts through front companies

Mar 17, 2014 11:41 am By Robert Spencer

VanDiepenWhat is remarkable is that the State Department can acknowledge this and yet continue on course with the nuclear agreement that removes sanctions and gives a U.S. green light to Iran’s nuclear program. The Obama Administration is living in a fantasy world in which they apparently believe that no matter how much they endanger national security, nothing bad will ever happen. And if it does, they can always blame George W. Bush.

“US official: Iran pursuing banned items for nuclear, missile work,” from Reuters, March 16 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):

DUBAI – Iran has pursued a longstanding effort to buy banned components for its nuclear and missile programs in recent months, a US official said on Sunday, a period when it struck an interim deal with major powers to limit its disputed atomic activity.

Vann Van Diepen, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation, said Iran was still “very actively” creating front companies and engaging in other activity to conceal procurements.

The reported supplies do not contravene last year’s breakthrough agreement between Tehran and six world powers to curb its most sensitive atomic activity in exchange for some limited easing of sanctions damaging its economy.

But such trade would breach a 2006 UN embargo banning the provision by any nation to Iran of materials related to its nuclear and missile development work. Western experts say such low-profile procurement efforts by Iran date back many years, perhaps decades in the case of its nuclear activity.

Asked if he had seen a change in Iranian procurement behaviour in the past six to 12 months, a period that has seen a cautious thaw in US-Iranian relations after decades of hostility, Van Diepen replied: “The short answer is no.

“They still continue very actively trying to procure items for their nuclear program and missile program and other program,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“We continue to see them very actively setting up and operating through front companies, falsifying documentation, engaging in multiple levels of trans-shipment … to put more apparent distance between where the item originally came from and where it is ultimately going.”

Asked for reaction to the allegation, a senior Iranian official replied: “No comment”.

Van Diepen did not say what sort of components Iran had sought to obtain or which part of a government known for having competing hardline and moderate factions was responsible. In the past, Western officials said Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards and the Defense Ministry – both hotbeds of opposition to any rapprochement with the West – were believed to control clandestine nuclear procurement efforts.

Iran denies Western allegations that it has long sought covertly to develop the means to produce nuclear weapons, saying its uranium enrichment program is solely a peaceful endeavour to yield electricity as well as isotopes for medical treatments.

Deterrent

Diplomats have said that Iran is meeting its commitments under the November deal, under which Iran suspended its higher-grade enrichment and stopped increasing its capacity to produce low-refined uranium, among other steps. Uranium forms the core of a nuclear bomb if enriched to a high fissile purity.

The six-month agreement, which took effect on January 20 this year, was designed to buy time for talks on a final settlement defining the overall scope of Iran’s nuclear work to end fears that it could be diverted to military ends.

Those talks got under way in Vienna last month and a second round at the political director level will be held on March 18-19, also in the Austrian capital. The aim is to reach an agreement by late July, although that deadline can be extended by another half year if both sides agree.

Iran has one of the biggest missile programs in the Middle East, regarding such weapons as an important deterrent and retaliatory force against US and other adversaries – primarily Gulf Arabs – in the region in the event of war.

Its efforts to develop, test and field ballistic missiles, and build a space launch capability, have helped drive billions of dollars of US ballistic missile defense expenditure, and contributed to Israel’s threats of possible pre-emptive military action against Iranian nuclear installations.

Since Iran is not a self-sufficient manufacturer of missiles, the expansion of its inventory depends on the import of goods and materiel sourced abroad.

Van Diepen said that while there was no direct link between the level of Iranian illicit procurement and the negotiations on a settlement to the nuclear dispute, “obviously if the negotiations succeed then there should therefore be a corresponding decrease in Iranian proliferation activity.”

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Comments

  1. veggiedog says

    Mar 17, 2014 at 12:27 pm

    Iran is meeting it’s commitment, pleeeeeeze.

  2. Medina says

    Mar 17, 2014 at 2:26 pm

    “What is remarkable is that the State Department can acknowledge this and yet continue on course with the nuclear agreement that removes sanctions and gives a U.S. green light to Iran’s nuclear program. ”

    Really Robert? Today half the city is at a drunken parade. The average citizen is not capable of paying attention for more than 5 minutes unless they are watching a sport. No one can explain the events in the Crimea or Ukraine, much less locate them on a map. Even in the fall of the Roman Empire, people had to bake their bread every day. Thus am I.

    • islamisdeath says

      Mar 17, 2014 at 2:46 pm

      Exactly.
      PS: had it explained to me by my favorite lefty that if we just quit backing up Israel and let history take its course the muslims would stop all this jihad nonsense. Because its all our fault you see., (our = USA)This person really believes this!

      • veggiedog says

        Mar 17, 2014 at 4:22 pm

        Yes, it is all of our fault, and when that day comes that I spoke of they will run to us to protect them. Like sheep going to slaughter.

        • Islamisdeath says

          Mar 17, 2014 at 5:10 pm

          Exactly

        • Petey says

          Mar 18, 2014 at 6:12 pm

          No they wont, they’ll buy into the government propaganda and run to the FEMA camps for shelter and food and medical help. I’m sure those nice muslims working security will take good care of them!

        • veggiedog says

          Mar 18, 2014 at 8:13 pm

          You are probably right. Sad……….

    • veggiedog says

      Mar 17, 2014 at 4:21 pm

      My fellow Americans are mostly mindless souls who have no clue into national, so forget about international events. The day of reckoning will come and they will scratch their heads.

  3. Alarmed Pig Farmer says

    Mar 17, 2014 at 2:58 pm

    General opinion seems to be that a nuclear Iran would be tolerable. Sure, then Prez Ahmajinedad promised to use an ICBM-borne nuke to wipe Israel from the map, but the Moslems are nutty and prone to making such wild statements. Also, general opinion seems to be that the root cause of the trouble in the Mideast is that Israel stole that land from innocent landholding Palestinians, so reversing that map would be tolerable, too.

    • veggiedog says

      Mar 17, 2014 at 4:25 pm

      Not tolerable to me. The only stolen land was what was stolen from the Israeli’s. Now can most people go back that far in history and even think of this as something that happened. A nuclear Iran is all we need now, then we have no safety net because remember, they do not value their own lives.

      • Alarmed Pig Farmer says

        Mar 17, 2014 at 5:10 pm

        I was kidding. Apparently you didn’t catch the sarcasm dripping from my sentences. On a related note, most Jew-owned land in Israel before the first war, the unprovoked attack by the surrounding Moslem countries to destroy Israel, was purchased fair-and-square by Zionists from absentee Moslem landlords, the purchases starting along with Zionism in the early part of the century.

        But if you saw the Oprah segment on the plight of the Palestinians, you wouldn’t have that impression. Fake history is a powerful tool, espcially in the hands of a fool (I’m a poet and don’t know it).

        • Islamisdeath says

          Mar 17, 2014 at 5:14 pm

          Not to mention many of them left of their own free will because Jordan and Egypt told them to leave and they would annihilate Israel and then they could come back and get their land back. Needless to say didnt work out as planned.

        • veggiedog says

          Mar 17, 2014 at 5:55 pm

          Ah, I knew it was sarcasm, just could not resist adding my own bit of stuff. Oprah, well what do you or I expect, there was a time when I was a liberal that I thought differently, but this president has helped me see that Progressive Movement is the end of what we all value.

        • Islamisdeath says

          Mar 18, 2014 at 8:13 pm

          Veggiedog I too was a liberal it took obama to open my eyes.

        • veggiedog says

          Mar 18, 2014 at 8:34 pm

          Wow, it appears single handedly he converted many… I just wish it were more.

  4. Ruslan Tokhchukov, Enraged Since 1999 says

    Mar 17, 2014 at 8:10 pm

    Vann Van Diepen is 1 of the 3 authors of the evil National Intelligence Estimate released in mid-November 2007 that claimed that Iran HALTED its nuclear program in 2003. For that, the 3 got very well-deserved bashing from a number of outraged experts, even from some in the MSM, namely Wall Street Journal. And it worked! Van Diepen had been chastized into actually speaking the truth! That’s what we should continue doing to the Iran appeasers: wake the American people up to severely chastize them! Threaten them that we will hold them accountable if Iran goes nuclear! Maybe, it will make more of them honest! It is particularly urgent now when the US and other Western democracies have manufactured a crisis with Russia over Ukraine that draws the world attention away from the intolerable threat of a nuclear Iran. How did the crisis start? The US and Europe threw their entire combined threat behind the violent putsch by some 3,000 thugs that overthrew the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich of Ukraine. And our Western democracies are calling those violent putschists “reformers” ( ! ! ! ) and “democracy activists” ( !!!!!!!!!!!!!! ). The putschists are all ultra-Catholics from Western Ukraine, UNA UNSO, “Svoboda” and the “Right Sector”. They have mutated from the fascists they were during WWII to downright Nazis now. They are anti-Semitic, and, more than that, they are literally genocidal toward the entire Russian people. The 100 % of the Russian people know them as the “banderivci”, or the Bandera Fascists. Out of hate for the Russian people, thousands of those banderovci had joined the Islamic Chechen jihadis just to murder Russian soldiers and civilians. No wonder nearly 100 % of the Russian and even Ukrainian citizens of Crimea have just voted to cecede from Ukraine and join Russia, to escape the rule of those Nazis. And over that purely democratic vote, the US and Europe are now snarlingly threateneng Russia with ever-increasing sanctions! This is how our Western democracies have got us into that crisis: by getting in bed with Nazi putscists!

    • Petey says

      Mar 18, 2014 at 6:07 pm

      Obama didn’t have the nuts to face the Russians in Syria, what makes you think they’ll have the nuts in Ukraine, Their biggest ally in Europe would seriously hesitate (Germany), They certainly don’t want to go the Russians again. I don’t think much will happen in Ukraine, lots of snibbling by the west, that’s it!

  5. Petey says

    Mar 18, 2014 at 6:02 pm

    I was listening to coast to coast with George Noory last night and they were talking about that Malaysian Boeing 777 Chances are that plane didn’t crash. What if this is a nuclear pincer movement coming to the US. Iranian warships packed with nukes and a double whammie 777 flying in a nuke. only question is where and who will get it? I’m guessing Barack Surrender Obama will get it in Washington or posssibly NY. Sad part is well never know until it happens. I hope you NSA or FBI or CIA trolls are paying attention. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Robert can you file this, we might need to pull this up in the future. I’m sure SunTV in Canada would pick it up. JW comrads keep watching and stay out of the big cities if you can. I believe (more then ever) our safety is seriously in jeopardy!

    • Islamisdeath says

      Mar 18, 2014 at 8:16 pm

      Wrong imam obama will be scurried off to the underground bunker prepared for just this sort of emergency. The rest of us will not be so lucky. All of the scumbag dems will be saved so they can crawl out like cockroaches and cause even more mayhem.

  6. gravenimage says

    Mar 19, 2014 at 9:09 pm

    What is remarkable is that the State Department can acknowledge this and yet continue on course with the nuclear agreement that removes sanctions and gives a U.S. green light to Iran’s nuclear program
    …………………………

    What fools these dhimmis be!

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