International Hotel, Bushehr, Iran, August 8th, 2006
The humidity was near 100 percent, and the temperature was about the same as body heat. He half expected it would cool off after sunset, but then remembered he was in the Persian Gulf and that it was August. An air-conditioner sat mockingly in the hotel room's window, but salt fog had corroded it into junk years ago. He hated this place almost as much as the local people hated him — he was a symbol of the West, the Infidel, the Enemy. Hans Ulrich, Senior Technical Inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), dreamed about the alpine glaciers of his native Switzerland as he sat unhappily in the stifling room that passed for luxury accommodations in Bushehr.
Tomorrow he would complete the solemn, high-tech ritual of placing inspection seals on meticulously weighed and measured fuel rods of the Bushehr #1 Reactor Unit, a Russian VVER-440. He hated working around Russian reactors. He knew, of course, that this one was a pressurized water type, a safer, more modern design than that horrible graphite pile of crap at Chernobyl. Still, it was a sloppy piece of work by his standards, and that offended every neuron in the finely machined clockwork of his Swiss brain. In a few hours of work, he would accumulate almost an entire year's permissible radiation exposure. Then he would face the struggle of getting back to IAEA headquarters in Vienna with a quarter ton of inspection equipment from a country where every official, cab driver, and schoolchild regarded him as an enemy spy. As Ulrich continued to sweat, he went back to writing out his report in longhand. He would have used his laptop data slate, but it had gone into thermal shutdown an hour before, and was useless to him now. He hated trusting his thoughts to a sweat-stained notepad, but it would have to do for now.
As he sweated, he took a swallow of warm orange juice and sat back. He was thinking about the sealed cases of uranium cores that he had seen in the plant's secure storage area. He had been here just six months earlier to certify the refueling of the #2 reactor, and the spent fuel rods from that operation were still in their containers. When he asked why they had not been shipped out for reprocessing, he was told that the tons of rod assemblies from the first refueling had been held over to save on costs. In that way only one shipload would be required. While technically not a violation of the rules, it was not good management. As much as 75 kg/165 lb of weapons-grade plutonium might be mixed in with the witches' brew of radioactive isotopes in those cases. Until they were safely at a certified reprocessing facility, raw material for at least a dozen nuclear weapons lay in Iranian hands.
USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) in the Gulf of Oman, August 14th, 2006
At least once a week, an elderly F-14 equipped with a TARPS reconnaissance pod made a low-level run from the carrier around the Persian Gulf's north coast, keeping carefully outside Iranian air space. If anything nasty was happening onshore, the NRO's imaging and radar satellites would pick it up almost immediately. Nevertheless, it was good training for the naval aviators and the ES-3A Shadow crews farther out in the Gulf, who expectantly monitored the electromagnetic spectrum, hoping the Iranian radars would light off some new frequency or pulse modulation. Thanks to some trick of the Gulf's freakish aerial refraction, this week's imagery was particularly good.
As he studied the fine detail in high magnification on the workstation, Lieutenant JG Jeff Harris, a photographic intelligence analyst assigned to the carrier's air wing, saw something odd about a new pair of oil platforms under construction off Bushehr. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he opened a new window on the screen and called up precise 3-D renderings of typical Persian Gulf drilling and production platforms and then rotated the images for side-by-side comparison. Something was definitely different. The steel lattice at the center of each platform was much too light to support the massive structure of a drill rig. Staring for a few moments, he reached around to a small classified safe, dialed the combination, extracted a CD-ROM, and loaded it into the workstation's drive. As the program displayed various pieces of equipment, it became clear there was nothing in the wildcatter's world that could be mounted there. But the grid pattern would fit the dimensions of a vertical-launch canister cluster for a Russian SA-N-9 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system. Those round fittings at each corner of the new platforms made no sense as mountings for any kind of drilling equipment. But they were exactly the right size and shape as mounts for CADS-1 gun/SAM mounts. And what looked like racks for drill pipe might be mounts for Chinese CS- 802 surface-to-surface missiles (SSM). Rubbing his eyes, he rose to pour another cup of coffee, then picked up a phone to call his department head. While he waited for the intelligence chief to arrive, he suddenly realized that these platforms had been built to protect something. He pulled more CD-ROMs from the security safe, and began to think.
Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Bolling AFB, near Washington, D.C., August 22nd, 2006
In all the vast bureaucratic labyrinth of the American intelligence community, you probably would not have found a bigger collection of prima donnas than the Counterproliferation Coordinating Committee. The Committee, of course, did not officially exist. Its funding was buried in an obscure Interior Department line item that covered long-forgotten uranium mining subsidies to a holding company in Utah. Attendees for the every-Tuesday-morning meetings were drawn from the CIA, various imagery agencies, all four military services, the Department of Energy labs, a sprinkling of academic physicists and engineers, an FBI deputy director, and whatever senior analyst the State Department could spare that week. All of them had the right "tickets" (Special-Access security clearances). The older guys tended to be "Kremlinologists," long-time Russian specialists who had acquired profound cynicism and paranoia during long, bitter years of being outwitted by the KGB and its successors. The younger guys tended to be East Asia specialists, who built entire careers on the interpretation of enigmatic scraps of data from the bizarre information vacuum of North Korea. The absence of Middle East specialists might have seemed startling, unless you understood the politics of the intelligence community. In the aftermath of 1991 Gulf War, it was discovered that Iraq had operated several vast, parallel nuclear weapons programs right under the high-tech nose of countless billions of dollars worth of U.S. spy satellites. This was one of the great intelligence failures of the century; it sent a clear message to a new generation of intelligence officers. Stay away from anything connected with nuclear proliferation in the Middle East; it's not career-enhancing. Anyhow, it's the Israelis' responsibility. They can collect HUMINT (Human Intelligence) over there; we can't. Besides, they don't like anyone else messing around on their turf.
This Tuesday morning, the agenda began with a presentation by Dr. Rob Kennelly, a young nuclear engineer from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was describing new developments in laser-based gaseous isotope separation to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel. Conventional extraction of weapons-grade fissionable material required construction of vast industrial complexes that were impossible to hide. But this laser plasma technique could be scaled down to machine-shop dimensions; a complete facility might be concealed on the grounds of a nuclear power plant. The only "signature" would be diversion of megawatts of power to drive banks of high-energy lasers. At the completion of the presentation, the committee chairman politely thanked the engineer, dismissing him with a nod toward the door. He wasn't cleared for the afternoon's agenda. But he wasn't ignored. During the lunch break, the lieutenant colonel who represented the Marine Corps took the young man aside and bombarded him with questions.