Russian Embassy, Teheran, Iran, August 25th, 2006
Yuri Andreevich Rogov was carried on the official Embassy roster as Senior Science and Technology Attache, but of course he reported directly to the station chief of the SVR, the successor of the KGB. Like its Soviet predecessor, the SVR selected its officers carefully and trained them rigorously. Fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Arabic, Rogov operated with smooth confidence and impeccable courtesy in an often suspicious, hostile, and unpredictable country. He had stood and gazed in wonder at the ruins of Persepolis, and marveled that these people had built a cultured and efficient world empire back when his own distant Slavic ancestors lived in reed huts and slogged through the Pripyat marshes as hunters and gatherers.
Another characteristic the Russian Republic shared with its Communist predecessor was that it demanded long hours and hard work from its Foreign Service officers. One of Rogov's many duties was maintaining contact with the hundred or so technicians down at Bushehr. Officially, they were independent contract hires, working directly for Iran's Energy Ministry. Some of them had Ukrainian or Kazakhstan passports, but the project was based on an agreement between Russia and Iran, and the Iranians expected the Russian Embassy to keep the men happy, healthy, and out of trouble. No women were permitted, an irrational and unfortunate local custom, Rogov thought.
Several times a year, the various team leaders flew up to Teheran for an extended debriefing with Rogov. This was also an opportunity to update and check the contingency plans for an emergency evacuation of the crew in the event of a military or political crisis. Rogov's contacts in Bahrain and Dubai maintained a fleet of small speedboats, normally employed in the lucrative trans-Gulf smuggling trade, but instantly on call if it became necessary to clear out. Lev Davidovich Telfian was an ethnic Armenian, but his people had lived in Novorossiysk for generations, and he was a Russian citizen. His job at the plant was Training Manager, which gave him unusual freedom to move about, and a wide range of close personal contacts with Iranians on the site. He was one of Rogov's best informants. Unfortunately, this trip Telfian had had nothing new to report regarding the SVR's highest collection priority, the Chinese and North Koreans who occupied a separate, heavily guarded compound on the military base adjacent to the plant. As Rogov sipped his tea and re-read the report, he knew that there was something here. Or perhaps, the absence of something? He decided to send an Eyes Only message to SVR headquarters, and let them try to sort it out.
Iranian Ministry of Machinery Automobile Plant #3, near Bandar al Abbas, September 5th, 2006
Wendy Kwan sat uncomfortably in the director's lobby of Iran's newest automobile plant, carefully sipping a cup of tea. One of CNN's top foreign correspondents, she was here to interview the Iranian Minister of Machinery, as well as the factory manager. The American trade embargo, dating back to the 1990s Clinton Administration, had been tough on Iranians, but their response had surprised Western observers. Rather than knuckling under, they had launched a modest industrialization program, which had grown dramatically in the last few years. Plant #3 was the prototype, based on the latest Japanese flexible manufacturing techniques. It was configured to produce everything from new automobiles to tractors and other heavy equipment. It could also produce combat vehicles. Though her current beat was financial news, Wendy had started as a Far East correspondent fifteen years before, and she knew more than she wanted to know about military hardware. The interview went almost too well. Both men and their assistants (bodyguards?) were pleasant. This put her ill at ease. She was not on some Wall Street trading floor. Here, she could disappear at the whim of one of these men. Today, however, no problems developed. Following the interview, they escorted her and the camera crew on a factory tour.
It was impressive. She was surprised by the sophistication of the technology. The Iranians had made deals with companies in Russia and the former Soviet Republics for start-up capital in trade for a guaranteed flow of equipment at favorable prices. All around, brand-new robots and computer workstations were being installed. Every piece of equipment, she was told, was tied into a central computer, which held a complete design database for every product built on the line. As they passed the Engineering Department, she noted that the doors all had cipher locks, and that a plainclothes guard seemed to be checking workers' ID badges before they went in. Rather odd for an automobile plant, she thought. Then, as she was finishing up her close-out shot for the story, she saw on the edge of her vision someone who made her blood run cold. Trying not to look again, she calmly told the crew to pack up and head back to the airport. Only after they had returned to Bahrain that evening did she even allow herself to think about the man she had seen.
Wendy had first seen him ten years earlier. In those days, Professor Kim Ha Soon had been a top physicist in North Korea's now-dead nuclear weapons program. And he had led the delegation that negotiated away that program for energy and food supplies at the end of the Cold War. Wendy had covered those talks with CNN's field team. She never forgot the war scare that swept the Korean Peninsula back in 1994 and 1995. She had seen him then, and remembered rumors around the press pool. Not only was Kim the brains behind their uranium enrichment program, he had also devised the deception and cover plan that had hid the Korean effort for years. Now he was at an Iranian automobile plant, coming out of a security zone, talking with the plant director. She decided to make a quick detour through Washington, D.C., on the way home, and to take the master tape with her. Her old Georgetown University roommate was now an Army major working for the Defense Nuclear Agency at Fort Belvoir. Wendy thought she might be able to feed this to someone who could make use of it.
Iranian Ministry of Machinery Headquarters, Teheran, Iran, September 15th, 2006
The Iranian Minister of Machinery sat in a high-backed chair and looked over a thick file folder of material about the "Special Machinery" project at Bushehr. So far security had held, and with only three months to completion, there appeared to be nothing to be concerned about. The CNN interview had shown only what he had wanted them to show, and his own performance had been both soothing and convincing. The image was exactly what he wanted — that his ministry was merely overseeing a plucky country's industrial program, trying to overcome the shackles of an unjust embargo. His own lack of military service (he had trained as a mechanical engineer in France) meant that he probably was not known beyond a thin file at CIA headquarters. He had never been politically active, and was considered rather boring in most trade circles. He was, he thought with a thin smile, the perfect cover for a nuclear weapons program.
The smallest details of security had been considered. For example, graduate students at several Iranian universities published scientific papers on nuclear physics under the names of key scientists in the program, so that their absence would not be noticed by Western scientists. Best of all, it was a small program, with just the two facilities at Bushehr and Bandar al Abbas on the coast 320 miles/512 kilometers to the southwest. Thanks to the new laser-plasma isotope separation process and a secure central computer database, less than 250 personnel were involved.
A folder on the desk held the time line for the final three months of the first production run — a dozen boosted fission weapons with a nominal fifty-kiloton yield, based on an implosion design using plutonium. Half would arm a squadron of intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), and the other six would become warheads of Russian-supplied AS-19 cruise missiles, for air-launch by Iran's SU-24 Fencer fighter bombers. These weapons would allow Iran to deter any aggression from the Americans or their Arab lackeys in the Gulf while even more powerful weapons and delivery systems were developed by his ministry.