WTH is going on with the Iranian nuclear program? David Albright analyz secret nuclear archives

Episode #105 | June 2, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and David Albright

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka: going on?

Marc Thiessen: Well, Dany, today we've got a spy story and it's real life, but it's like a James Bond movie. In 2018, the carried out an operation in which they basically raided a warehouse in and stole the Iranian nuclear archives. I just want to read you a little bit of a description of what happened. This is from , the story of July 15th, 2018. "The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes, and get out of the city with a half ton of secret materials, six hours and 29 minutes. The morning shift of the Iranian guards would arrive around 7:00 AM, a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave by 5:00 AM, so they had enough time to escape.

Marc Thiessen: Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country's clandestine nuclear archives documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs, and production plans. The agents arrived that night, January 31st with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees. Hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected in the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. But they had left many untouched going first other ones containing the black binders, which contained most of the critical designs. When the time was up, they fled for the border hauling some 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs of memos, videos, and plans." We have today the guy who got to read those 50,000 pages and the 163 compact discs of memos, videos, and plans, and has written a book about it. A guest we've already had on the show before, David Albright. He's going to tell us what was in those archives and what it means for the future of the Iranian nuclear program.

Danielle Pletka: This is a particularly timely discussion. We are at a critical moment. As everybody who's listened to us and reads the news knows, the Trump administration pulled the out of the Obama deal. The Europeans didn't pull out, the

2 Iranians were still bound by their obligations, but they immediately began violating them. One of the things that team Biden and when I say team Biden, I mean team Obama but with a different president has promised to do is to get back into the deal. They have been racing. Those aren't my words. Those are the words of all news coverage. Many have suggested that the Biden administration is on the verge of desperate to get back into the deal. There are elections taking place in Iran in June of this year that will completely change the folks who are dealing with the Americans and likely change exactly what's going on inside Iran. Understanding what the Iran deal was, what the Israelis discovered, and the analysis that David Albright brings to this is hugely, hugely important.

Marc Thiessen: Just to underscore your point about the desperation, while and Hamas were engaged in combat where Hamas was attacking Israel with Iranian weapons provided to them by the regime, the Biden administration was and continued to negotiate with Iran in Vienna over this nuclear program. These things were happening simultaneously. Iran was waging a war by proxy on Israel through Hamas, and they didn't skip a beat, didn't pause, didn't stop. Just kept talking because the Iran nuclear deal is the most important thing. What kind of message does that send, Dany, to Tehran about how desperate Biden is to get this deal back?

Danielle Pletka: Look, I think we've talked about this before. This is the projection of weakness to a party that is very sensitive to when the United States is weak. They recognize just how hungry the Biden folks are, and something struck me yesterday. A lot of people don't remember who is, but Jason Rezaian was the Tehran Bureau Chief of . He was arrested during the Obama administration. He was tried and convicted of , something he clearly was not involved in, and he was subsequently released during the Obama administration. On the day of his release, the administration released $1.7 billion in frozen Iranian funds. Jason has been a pretty warm advocate of engagement with Iran of the JCPOA.

Danielle Pletka: It was especially notable to me, and I want to read you a few sentences from this pretty important piece that appeared on May 27th in the Washington Post. He said, "As someone who has believed and continues to believe in the value of diplomatic engagement to resolve complex geopolitical issues with Iran, in this instance I think it's time to slow down. Today, superficially, Washington and Tehran's roles are reversed from the state of play under the Trump administration. The US wants to re-enter the deal and the Iranians appear to be dragging their feet. Biden should just wait and see what happens." He talks about the election taking place in Iran and how it is going to result in a very different set of actors on the stage in Tehran.

Marc Thiessen: Well, they just kicked out all the moderate candidates. Moderate meaning like, moderate Nazi. But I mean, all the people who don't wake up in the morning and the first thing they say after drinking their coffee is, "."

Danielle Pletka: They did do that. Here's Jason again, "The main arguments against employing a slower approach today are that a deal may be available now but won't be under a more insular administration in Tehran, and that negotiating with the hostile elements in Iran's regime would further legitimize them. This, however, seems

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3 like a risk worth taking." Here's how he concludes, "The Biden administration has promised a longer and stronger deal. It's a worthy goal that won't be reached by shortcuts. Slowing down to better understand the playing field after Iran's elections could help." Now, this is someone who has been a really strong advocate of the Iran deal. A very, very, virulent critic of the Trump administration and even he says slow down. That, in conjunction with the fact that we have learned so much from the documents that the Israelis stole, I think suggests that we are headed for absolute disaster if we don't slow down.

Marc Thiessen: Well, first of all I wouldn't say stole, I'd say liberated, number one. Two, you're absolutely right. I mean, look, the Biden administration seems to think that it's gotten into a time capsule and gone back to 2014 and that all we have to do is restore the status quo ante and pretend the Trump administration never happened. Well, a lot of stuff happened during the Trump administration, both in Iran and our leverage in terms of the sanctions regime that we placed on the Iranians. The Biden administration has enormous leverage that it could use to get a better deal, to fix some of the flaws that laid out when he was on our podcast that were in the original Iran nuclear deal, such as not covering ballistic missiles. We're going to stop you from building a weapon, not really, but you can build the delivery systems to be ready for when you break out of the deal.

Marc Thiessen: There's a lot that could be fixed by any objective standard, including among people who supported the deal, I think would acknowledge that there were flaws in the deal and things that could have been improved. Now you've got enormous leverage to use to pressure them to get those. Why don't you use the leverage and get a better deal?

Danielle Pletka: Well, I think that's what a lot of people have been arguing. Frankly, I am surprised, perhaps that's the wrong word... I'm disappointed in the fact that the senior-most officials in the Biden administration during their nomination hearings all promised a go-slow approach, all promised a more balanced approach. All said it was a new world out there and yet they have acted exactly as you suggested. The most important thing for me actually is not that we rehearse these political arguments, Democrats love Tehran, and Republicans love Saudi Arabia and Israel. But rather that people have a better grasp on what exactly the Biden administration is proposing to allow the Iranians to do, and what it is that the Iranians already have know-how to do.

Danielle Pletka: That's what David Albright and his colleagues have really laid out in their new book c founder of an NGO called the Institute for Science and International Security. My favorite is their handle, you guys have heard me say this before, they call

weapons, and he has been an advisor to the IAEA as well as to numerous other inspections regimes for nuclear weapons. He's really a scientist, and you know how we don't deny the science here. He is truly one of the most knowledgeable people out there about what it is that the Iranians are doing to advance their nuclear program. It's a delight to have him again.

Marc Thiessen: David, welcome back to the podcast.

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4 David Albright: Good to be here.

Marc Thiessen: We're excited to have you back. You're a repeat offender and we love repeat offenders. We're really excited about your new book. You have written a book that is based on the nuclear weapons archives of the Iranian regime, which was captured by the Mossad in a 2018 overnight raid in Tehran. First of all, tell our listeners a little bit about that raid and how they got the archives and then how you got access to them.

David Albright: The Mossad seems to have deeply penetrated into the Iranian security establishment and they look for entities that are not well known except to the senior leadership of let's say the Atomic Energy Organization or the Revolutionary Guard. In this case, they put a building under surveillance that held an archive, and this archive had been assembled after the negotiation of the JCPOA. It was an effort to consolidate everything they had, they put it in a facility. The Israelis had that facility under surveillance. The Iranians moved it to another location and the Israelis made a decision to go in and seize the documents. They were worried that they could just lose knowledge about the archive.

David Albright: They also felt that, normally you may go in, look at it, copy it, try to show the Iranians that it hasn't been discovered. I think they decided that it would be better if they went in and just grabbed as much as they could and they would have original documentation that they could present to the world and use themselves to better understand Iran's nuclear weapons efforts. By revealing it later to the world, it provides a solid piece of evidence that everyone can look at and say, "Yeah, Iran's been lying." The raid itself went off like clockwork. They people were involved in its planning and execution. They pulled it off without a hitch. They got in, they got out. They had divided up the stash of documents among different people, worried that some would be captured. No one got captured. 100% of what they seized has got back to Tel Aviv.

Marc Thiessen: That's amazing. How did you get access to the archive?

David Albright: Well, the day Prime Minister Netanyahu revealed the archive in the spring of 2018, the Israelis put me on a list to brief. I was with a group of DC experts from varying perspectives on this nuclear deal, and heard pretty convincing statements about what was in the archive. We were free to ask questions. At first, they didn't want to give me any documents. I had a series of briefings. The first set of documents I got were from journalists. They were doing fairly detailed briefings of journalists in Tel Aviv. The US group, at least portions of them, were willing to share documents. There was a German journalist who got a briefing that was willing to share their documents. Our first analysis of the archive was really based on the documents from the journalist.

David Albright: And throughout this time, I was appealing to the Israelis to share documents with me. At some point they decided, and then I ended up taking four trips to Israel to collect documents, got other documents remotely, particularly once Covid became a problem. We created a team of people, we needed translators, other types of nuclear experts, safeguards experts, policy experts, people who are familiar with the Iranian system. We spent a couple of years going through the

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5 documents and trying to make sense out of them.

Danielle Pletka: David, this is an unbelievable piece of work. I imagine this is probably just the tip of the iceberg of what is learnable from what the Israelis took from this cache. But for our listeners who are debating how much they care about this, I'd be very grateful to hear the bottom line upfront conclusion. One of the things that I learned in your book is the absolutely fascinating detail that the Iranians have not in fact stolen a plan to make a or been given a plan, they have developed one. What would you say are the big headlines from your book?

David Albright: One is what you just said, is that they created a program to master the design and development of nuclear weapons. In end of the AMAD Plan in 2003, they had a design that was diameter of a car tire. It was designed small enough to fit on their ballistic missiles. The bottom line is, they know more about making nuclear weapons than was known before the discovery of the archive, and they can make them quicker than was known before the discovery of the archive. Also it's a trite maxim, but I mean, you can't really understand the present without understanding the past. If you do try to do that, you're going to probably make lots of mistakes. The archive provides a very detailed understanding of where Iran got to by 2003 on making nuclear weapons, how it was going to produce them, who was involved.

David Albright: What we did is we took that information and connected it through information developed post-'03 by the International Atomic Energy Agency, by media, by governments, to look at the program of how it evolved until today. It's a program that you see in the archive did not end in '03. I mean, the archive has documents on how they plan to continue in a downsized form, but nonetheless continue. That information can then be connected with the post-'03 information to bring you up to the present. What you have is a nuclear weapons program that's not a traditional one. It's not the type of India, Pakistan, South Africa, building nuclear weapons. It's a program to be ready to build them and to build them on short order. It's not a threshold state. It's a very dangerous state in fact that knows how to build nuclear weapons and can do so relatively quickly if given the order to do so.

Marc Thiessen: David, what is Iran's goal here? Are you suggesting that they want to be a threshold power where they can break out at any time in a very quick fashion, but not actually become a declared power? What do we know about their intent?

David Albright: There's not much known about their intent. I mean, we were looking at what was being done in the more technical side of the Iranian military industries and that information led us to conclude they want to be ready to build nuclear weapons on demand. How the leadership would proceed is hard to know, and they can proceed in two ways. They could order a breakout, a rapid production of weapon grade uranium. In that scenario, they'd probably try to do a nuclear test within several months and then let people figure out if they can deliver these things by missile. They could order a sneak out. They could order the development of a secret centrifuge plant. I mean, after all, they've had two or three of those that escaped detection for years before they were finally discovered. Then in that case, they may not do a nuclear test. They have great flexibility, but it's up to the leadership to decide, and it's very hard to predict

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6 exactly what they would do and when they would do it.

Danielle Pletka: I'd like to ask you a little bit about what Iran is still up to that you understand. Now, I want to come back to the question of the JCPOA, the Iran deal, and the Biden administration, and the politics around that. But before we do that, you and your co-author Sarah Burkhard say that there are as many as two dozen sites that are relevant to the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and they haven't visited them. Now, Iran has gone back and forth. They just did an agreement to allow the IAEA in, but they can always take that right away. What is the implication of these important sites?

David Albright: Historically, Iran has not been willing to allow the IAEA into military sites, and that's where their nuclear weapons program was located. That's where their post-2003 nuclear weapons-related work has taken place. They can get in sometimes. Armed with the archive, the IAEA was able to make some very convincing cases that they needed to go into at least two sites, and a third site that Israel had identified as a place where alleged equipment associated with the AMAD Plan was located. When they went into those sites, they found evidence of undeclared uranium. There was an earlier discovery of undeclared uranium at another AMAD site. The IAEA was able to assess with the archive documents that there had been undeclared uranium used at a completely razed site called Lavizan-Shian. It was razed in 2004 as part of the Iranian effort to cover up portions of the AMAD Program that they felt had been discovered already.

David Albright: You have five sites that were undeclared with undeclared uranium. We did a tabulation of how many other AMAD sites are there and we came up with this list of about 20 or so that would have been involved in pretty significant undeclared nuclear activities. Again, if you're going to understand the present, you need to understand the past. We think those sites need to be visited by the IAEA and in other contexts, other situations, whether it be South Africa, or Taiwan, or in Europe, when there were... actually there were questions about undeclared nuclear activities, the IAEA would visit all those sites. In fact, as part of their effort to show that Iran's program is peaceful, they have to show that there's an absence of undeclared nuclear activities, materials, and facilities.

David Albright: You can't prove a negative, so you develop this idea of confidence in the absence of such activities. In that, you go to the historical sites. More importantly, when you go there, you don't just take environmental samples. You seek out the people who work there and interview them about what actually happened there and what are they doing now so that you use that to bridge from the past to the present.

Danielle Pletka: That's very important to understand, but one of the things about the original Iran nuclear deal that was signed by the Obama administration was that they created these two separate categories that don't exist in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which governs all of these activities, and that's so-called civilian versus so- called military sites. The JCPOA allowed the Iranians essentially to segregate off these so-called military sites. How do we gain any certainty given that a lot of these activities that you're describing take place at what the Iranians claim are military sites?

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7 David Albright: When the JCPOA was negotiated, I mean, that was a very bitter battle. Is the IAEA going to be allowed to do its job? That's really what we're talking about. The powers that be decided, no. They can inspect the dickens out of the declared fuel cycle more than they've ever done in the past, but they can't really deal with the military side in the past nuclear weapons program. At that time, there was a lot of missing knowledge about what had happened in the early 2000s and what happened after that. When we looked at the archive information, half the sites were not known about by Western intelligence. I mean, this is what the Israelis told us. I don't know what the US would say, but the Israelis told us that half the sites were not known and many activities were not known.

David Albright: Now you can't make the argument that these sites shouldn't be visited. Particularly since five sites that were not visited in any rigorous way have shown up to have undeclared uranium. What the risk is now, if you go forward with the JCPOA without dealing with the IAEA's basic questions about peaceful use, is you create a horrible precedent that it's okay to violate the non-proliferation treaty. It's okay not to allow inspections. It's okay to not know if a program is actually peaceful. I think now you can't make that argument anymore.

Marc Thiessen: My old boss, Don Rumsfeld had a famous saying about intelligence, which is that there are known knowns, there are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns. Did you discover any known knowns or any unknown unknowns in these archives?

David Albright: There were many things that we didn't know. I mean, suspected maybe they figured if you do a technical analysis they've got to be there. There are some things that we couldn't find evidence of. I mean, in the archive there's no information about the plutonium route to a nuclear weapon. There's information saying, "Look, we're not going to be able to make plutonium for a decade, and we're going to study how to deal with plutonium metallurgy, but no clear plans to use the Iraq reactor." I think the way we interpret is, they would get to it eventually, but they were focused on enrichment. We didn't find anything on one critical conversion step in making weapon grade uranium. It's just not there, and we talk about it in the book. It's just missing. There's many steps, but it was interesting we couldn't find one.

David Albright: We felt that what the Israelis seized isn't all of it. There were gaps or less information on uranium enrichment than on nuclear weaponization. There were many questions on how it happened that the AMAD Plan went from wanting to be an independent parallel to the Atomic Energy Organization to then deciding that it was going to be very much dependent on it. The atomic energy organization would provide the low enriched uranium that would be used in the military side, in what became known as Fordow to make weapon grade uranium at three times the rate. The military side was able to tell the civil side in a sense, if that's what the Atomic Energy Organization is, that, "You're going to participate in this nuclear weapons program and help us to the extent that we see fit." Again, I'm not sure that's the answer to your question, but it's some ideas on how to answer your question.

Danielle Pletka: Look, I mean, it's a very hard question to answer, and it is the one that has

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8 bedeviled our efforts to get the Iranians to step away. One of the things that I found really interesting, because it really was at the heart of some of the criticism of the international deal with the Iranians, was how effectively they have actually managed the delivery system. Missiles were not part of the original Iran deal. The Biden administration has sworn up and down that they're going to get back to it, but you detailed that Iran is maybe already capable of so-called miniaturizing its nuclear warheads. Which means that, unlike for example, the Pakistanis at the inception of their nuclear program didn't have a delivery system. They talked about putting it on a bus or sticking in a plane and trying to figure out how to drop it out. The Iranians have solved that problem for themselves already, and you have some more details about that.

David Albright: That's right, because the Iranians very clearly thought of what we call the three pillars of nuclear weapons, the fissile material, the weapon grade uranium in this case, the weaponization and the making of the device itself, and then its integration into a ballistic missile. All three were present through the AMAD Plan, and they made great strides on mastering putting the warhead into a ballistic missile. The Shahab-3 was their chosen delivery system, and that's why they had this warhead that's 55 centimeters in diameter. It was enabled to fit within the Shahab-3 re-entry vehicle. They had a whole program designed to master that. The sense was they didn't quite finish and needed more work to do. But I think if you make a conservative estimate, if they'd started right now within a year or two years they could have a reliable warhead for a ballistic missile. If they've continued and done more work, then we know they may be closer.

David Albright: In fact, that's part of the answer to Marc's question is, Iran hid things over and over again. There's so many cases where Iran hid things. I think we probably should assume they've hidden more than we've found and in fact the onus should really be on those who claim nothing more is there, no more progress than what we see has been done. The onus should be on them to show that they actually haven't missed something. I mean, often they turn it around that it's our responsibility to find these things before we will consider these things. I would say that given Iran's history of hiding things, we probably should more assume they really have still hidden things that we still haven't found.

Marc Thiessen: David, it's a little bit of a known unknown, but based on your research and your reading of the archives, and your estimates, and all your study of the Iran nuclear program, how long would Iran need to break out and become a nuclear power that could threaten other countries with a nuclear weapon?

David Albright: If they do break out, they'll probably... we would assess they probably race to test, and that could be done in a half a year, nine months at most. I mean, we didn't find any evidence they continue building an underground nuclear test site. They were citing one during the AMAD Plan and they were developing the equipment so they could do yield estimates and doing the experiments to be able to do yield estimates. They fully understood the need for an underground nuclear test site. We're not sure what they've done post-'03. We know people are looking, probably it'd be more of a horizontal tunnel. AMAD was a vertical shaft design. There's questions on how much they've done since '03, but in six to nine months we feel pretty confident they could test an underground nuclear explosive.

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9 David Albright: We have trouble estimating the time to put a reliable warhead on a ballistic missile. I mean, in our team we're not the best on understanding all the steps Iran needs to do to finish it's mating of a warhead into a re-entry vehicle. The Israelis did not want to cooperate with us on that, and so we left it as a year or two they could have a reliable warhead on a ballistic missile.

Danielle Pletka: Let's talk a little bit about some of the assumptions underlying our re-entry into the JCPOA. obviously pulled the United States out, the Iranians not only violated as a result, but escalated their violations very seriously, most recently moving their enrichment to 60% enrichment of uranium, which is well on the way to nuclear weapons grade. The assumption that underlies the US coming back into this is, A, that Iran would come back into compliance, but B, that the Iranians would not be able to use the respite that they receive. In other words, the time that they receive to continue working behind the scenes.

Danielle Pletka: One of the inferences that I make from this book is that Iran has sufficiently computerized its efforts to obviate the need for testing, that they have mastered a whole series of aspects for the production of nuclear weapons, that they would not need to actually produce them except on demand. This is really what I worry about. Give me your assessment of the wisdom of rejoining the JCPOA as it was signed in 2015, and what you think the Iranians will be able to do, even if they reenter.

David Albright: You mentioned a 60% enrichment. I mean, the way I interpret that, because they have no need for 60%, is they're practicing breakout. 60% enriched uranium could be used to make a nuclear explosive. I mean, it requires considerable amount, but nonetheless it could be used and Iran could probably design the warhead to do that. But in addition, I think it's a way to practice breakout. I don't see how you take that away from the Iranians if you reconstitute the JCPOA. The IAEA's Director General Grossi has also said more needs to be done. You can't just go back to the JCPOA, in a sense too much water has gone under the bridge in terms of knowledge gained, experience gained, hardware created. Putting in a line to make uranium metal, which they were banned to do. They've made advanced centrifuges. Iran has been resisting destroying all that infrastructure or those centrifuges.

David Albright: I mean, that was a red line for them in the JCPOA, no destruction of centrifuges. Well, if you don't destroy these tens or maybe even a few hundred new centrifuges, you haven't returned to the situation. No one knows how to take away what Iran has learned on making advanced centrifuges, learning to do more on making uranium metal, gaining experience I mean, and enriching up toward 90%. That I think is something that has to be thought through very carefully. The IAEA would probably just apply more verification. I mean, certainly would want to have more access to military sites where these secret activities could take place, more access to the, in a sense, the centrifuge-related manufacturing complex to make sure that more centrifuges weren't made than would be eventually declared by Iran.

David Albright: But from my point of view, I think it makes sense to slow down and think more holistically about what we should be gaining out of this. I would integrate the efforts to improve the JCPOA. I don't think the Biden administration wants to start

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10 again, but there's many things that can be done to fix the weaknesses of the JCPOA, and ultimately you do need a new deal. I think it just behooves us to slow down and take better stock of what's happening.

Marc Thiessen: Well, when we had you on last time you argued that the Biden administration would actually have a great deal of leverage from the Trump sanctions and from the Trump maximum pressure campaign, more leverage than we probably had when the Obama administration was negotiating the JCPOA. How would you use that leverage? What would you ask for? What would you demand in order to make this a deal that's worth signing and worth entering into?

David Albright: Yeah. One of the questions the Biden administration people haven't answered is, if they do go back to the JCPOA, drop most of the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, how would they ever get the Iranians to reverse themselves? I mean, literally reverse themselves and agreed to have a longer, stronger deal. I mean, there wouldn't be much left in terms of leverage. It's another argument, I think, to slow down and start to figure out what is the best way forward. From my point of view, you want to recreate the sense of there shouldn't be any enrichment or reprocessing in the Gulf region. I mean, we have to worry about Saudi Arabia, and then you have to worry about ultimately Egypt and . But you should start from that perspective, and so you certainly want... if you feel you can't get that, you want longer time for nuclear limitations, you want to let the IAEA do its job.

David Albright: I mean, if Iran isn't willing to address the IAEA's concerns through granting access, allowing access to personnel. AMAD Plan documents are littered with names. Hundreds of names of people working in the AMAD Plan, many of whom went to work for these post-AMAD organizations we discuss in the book, including the current one, SPND. But if Iran isn't willing to let the IAEA do its job, why would you want a deal in the first place if you can't tell if there's a nuclear weapons program today? I think that's a critical one. You could put parallel pressure through accelerating work on what's called Section T, which is very innovative bans on nuclear weapons-related work. That could be taken seriously, it's not been taken seriously so far. There's several other steps.

David Albright: I mean, it's a long list of things that could be improved, including not destroying... that Iran has to destroy excess centrifuges. Maybe shut down the Fordow Plant. These are red lines to Iran, but nonetheless, US has a lot of leverage and it should have a vision. I would say have the vision guided by determinations that it's a peaceful program and that the vision is no enrichment and no reprocessing in that part of the world.

Marc Thiessen: David, exit question from me. Towards the end of the Trump administration, the president took out Qassem Soleimani in an air strike. Essentially Soleimani has proven to be irreplaceable. There's nobody who's stepped into that role quite the way he was able to do it. There's also the head of the Iranian nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, also met his end and reportedly in a Mossad operation. It hasn't been officially confirmed. How essential was he to the Iranian nuclear program and how much has his elimination set it back?

David Albright: Yeah. One of the interesting things for me of this project on the book was we had

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11 the resources to hire translators and interpreters. It was fascinating to me to listen to the commentary by Fakhrizadeh's colleagues after he was killed. I mean, what emerged was a picture that certainly was beyond my understanding at the time. He was the viewed as the father of Iran's indigenous nuclear program. They can't talk about nuclear weapons, but they were actually pointing that he was deeply involved in not only the nuclear weapons program, but also in the entire indigenous nuclear program including the Iraq reactor. He's a very important figure. In the nuclear weapons effort, we see him as the Leslie Groves of the Iranian program, the manager, the one who has influence with the leadership, who gets the programs funded, gets them carried forward.

David Albright: One of his close colleagues and actually one his mentors in terms of physics and nuclear science said that he had taken a position in 1998. He was head of the precursor of the AMAD Plan called the Physics Research Center, and that he kept that position for 22 years. While ministers of defense came and went, he stayed and had the position of assistant or deputy minister of defense. He was an institution in this whole program. I think his death set them back. Unfortunately, the other thing that I learned in this commentary by his colleagues was the Iranians had thought early on about training their own people. All these major leaders of the Iranian nuclear weapons program were also university professors, highly dedicated to bringing students along. Unfortunately, there probably are people who can take his place. We'll see if it's as effective, but it's a program that realized that succession was critical and has been working on that since the 1990s.

Danielle Pletka: David, this is my exit question, and this has been absolutely fascinating. If I take one message away for the Biden administration, it is slow down, right? This matters. Get a better deal because otherwise Iran has loopholes that it can really make its way through. If you had one thing that you wanted the public to understand more clearly so that they are seeing what's going on more outside the political context, what would that be?

David Albright: I think the one critical thing is to really see the need to empower the International Atomic Energy Agency to get access, and make that a red line. No access, no deal, no reduction of sanctions. I mean, it's risky from a government point of view, but I think we need to know if they're going to build nuclear weapons. The JCPOA does not prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, but the IAEA can in a sense force a conflict over this basic question before we give up most of our leverage.

Danielle Pletka: David, thank you so much. Thank you for this terrific work, first of all, but also thank you for spending the time with us. We love it.

David Albright: No, thank you. Enjoy being on your podcast.

Marc Thiessen: Dany, here's the thing that I'm not getting about the Biden administration. I was hopeful that in many areas, the Biden administration would learn from the mistakes of the Obama administration. We had Jack Keane on the podcast and he basically said, "You know what? I don't think Biden's going to pull out of Afghanistan, because these are the same guys who presided over the Iraq withdrawal and they saw what happened there. They're probably going to go

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

12 slow when it comes to withdrawal from Afghanistan," wrong, we're getting out as fast as we can, pulling everything out. Now here we are again with the Iran deal where the flaws of the Iran deal are there for all to see, even its advocates acknowledge it's not perfect. You have all this leverage that they got from the Trump administration maximum pressure policy, which they don't have to take the blame for having imposed the sanctions. That crazy lunatic that we just threw out of office did it. But now they've got the leverage. They ought to be using it, and it doesn't seem like they are.

Danielle Pletka: I don't get it either. Look, the chief negotiator here is a guy named Rob Malley, head of the International Crisis Group. We've talked about him on the podcast before. I consider him a friend and I like him personally, but he really has been overeager. Wendy Sherman, who was another part of the negotiations and was last time is equally overeager. I think that the problem is that they are trapped in an ideological approach that is uninterested in the facts, uninterested in what Iran is going to do with the money, uninterested in how Iran is going to press its advantage. What is the best example of that? Best example is, the second that Biden came into office he took away the terrorism designation for the Iranian- backed Houthis in .

Danielle Pletka: What did they do? They immediately set off attacking civilian sites in Saudi Arabia, attacking civilian airports. There have been any number of those attacks. What did they do? They immediately pressed for money to go to the Iranians for money, well, they don't have to spend it on food and on Covid relief, they can spend it on supporting . In each case where the Iranians have escalated, including by the way with Hamas as you mentioned in the intro, the Biden administration has basically said, "You're not going to distract us. You're not going to push us away from this deal. We're going to let you do all of that because we just see this deal as so important." Well, what lesson did the Iranians take from that?

Marc Thiessen: The reality is that, I talked in the beginning about how these parallel things were happening where Hamas was firing Iranian missiles at Israel and the Biden administration was negotiating a deal that would have given Tehran the money to replenish the missiles. It's like they're in this cocoon where they're not paying attention to all the things that have changed in the Middle East since they were last in office. They're like, "Okay, we're picking up where we left off. Trump never happened, finger in the air, la, la, la, la, la, never happened, didn't exist. We're back to where we were." You can't function that way. In the Middle East, a lot of things improved for the United States since they took power. You have four Arab-Israeli peace deals, which happened because they want Israel's help in dealing with a resurgent Iran. You have a lot more pressure on Tehran now, both economic and diplomatic, than ever before and Tehran's goal is to blow all that up. I don't understand why they're not using the leverage they have and why they're behaving as if nothing has changed.

Danielle Pletka: Here's another problem that we touched on, and that is that because this JCPOA, this Iran deal, is multilateral, what we see is we see Biden administration with its hair on fire. Forget the , forget all the rest of that, forget our leverage. We see the Russians and the Chinese grinning, and we see our

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org

13 allies in Berlin, and in Paris, and in London who are also part of this deal wondering what, if I may coin a phrase, the hell is going on? Trying desperately to slow these nut jobs in the Biden administration down and not being able to succeed because they are so hell-bent. When you are in the same position as Moscow and Beijing on dealing with Iran, and you are lined up against Germany, which has been so weak on everything, Paris, and London, which has been pretty tough, especially the French, you know you're in a bad place. I don't think we're going to stop this train

Marc Thiessen: Well, on that depressing note-

Danielle Pletka: That's become our sign-off line, "And on that depressing note, it's been great to talk to you-"

Marc Thiessen: The world is very depressing these days, Dany.

Danielle Pletka: I know. These are depressing times. We are absolutely disgustingly inundated with cicadas, and so for every single one of you outside the East Coast all you can say is, yet another time, "Thank goodness we are not with Marc and Dany in Washington DC," which not only has all of these doofuses running our government, but also has all of these disgusting flying creatures around us."

Marc Thiessen: It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Danielle Pletka: Thanks for listening. Don't forget to review, subscribe, send to your friends, send us criticism. No, send Marc criticism, compliments to me, and you know where the tech stuff goes.

Marc Thiessen: You know you're getting most of the complaints, Dany.

Danielle Pletka: I only get love letters, Marc.

Marc Thiessen: That you write yourself. Take care everybody.

Danielle Pletka: No comment. Bye everyone.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org