Seymour Hersh: What Israel wants from Iran?

Pic.: jiss.org.il

I have been reliably told by American and Israeli sources that things are quietly happening in secret talks between Washington and Tehran as the economy in Iran continues to plummet and the only way forward for Iran’s leadership is to obtain a settlement focused on its nuclear program. Talk is cheap, but the current conversations have spurred some anxious Israelis with experience in military and nuclear activities to produce a position paper entitled “What an Air-Tight Nuclear Verification Regime in Iran Should Look Like,” Seymour Hersh, the famous American investigative journalist, writes.

The existence and circulation of the paper to a small group of verification experts makes clear that the ongoing secret talks have profoundly distressed Israel, which is facing worldwide condemnation of its ongoing killings and abuses of Palestine civilians in Gaza and the West Bank that many call genocide. Israel remains convinced that zealots in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are secretly keeping the nuclear flame alive. The paper’s key point is that any newfound nuclear inspection regime “requires an unprecedented level of intrusiveness, far outstripping standard international safeguards.

“Because trust is nonexistent and Iran possesses deep technical knowledge and a history of covert sites,” the paper notes, “the regime must be built on the principle of absolute verification.” The normal verification procedures of the International Atomic Energy Agency that deal with declared nuclear material will no longer satisfy Israel. The Trump White House and Iran must go further and permit IAEA inspectors access to all information and locations. IAEA inspectors also must be given authority to access any nuclear site in Iran—military or civilian—within twenty-four hours “to prevent the sanitation of evidence.” In other words, there can be no cheating.

Another longstanding Israeli concern is the Iranian stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent known to be stored at various underground nuclear sites. The paper says the stockpile must either be completely blended down or shipped out of the country. (That condition indicates that Israel, despite its talk of a covert operation to find and remove or destroy the materials, has understood all along that such a mission would be impossible.)

I was given a copy of the paper, and I shared it with an American expert who found it to be a first-rate discussion of the technical and verification issues involved in shutting down Iran’s nuclear facilities. The paper does not, the American pointed out, deal with the political issues involved in preventing Iran from obtaining the bomb. Nonetheless, he added, speaking of the Israelis, “They’ve put something on the table.”

The American expert cautioned that progress with Tehran while “great” is very limited. He said he believes the White House “is not going to start a ‘we won’ election ploy.” He reminded me that the Iranians had made similar promises on nonproliferation to the Biden administration “and then proceeded with weapons-grade refinement capability. No let-up this time because the current economic pressure is working. We are not going to ease the pressure until it’s in the bag.” (After alluding in a speech Monday night in Nebraska to Iran’s ability to “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego if it developed a nuclear bomb, Trump said that the ongoing war is “going to end very soon.”)

The American said that “the Israelis want verification negotiations to fail to avoid settling short of obliteration of the whole of Iran’s weapon program.” The visceral Israeli fear of a US settlement with Iran that falls short of that objective, unlikely as that may be in the Trump era, explains the production of what the official called Israeli’s “super requirement list” of safeguards, laid out in the paper cited above, for any nuclear agreement with Iran.

The conflict between Israel’s security demands and the international demand for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz makes for complex diplomacy, the American told me. The first step is to define and respond to the Iranian view of “peaceful development” that would deal with nuclear energy for domestic use. At the same time, Israel possesses dozens of nuclear weapons that it has never officially acknowledged, although its reactor in Dimona is widely known to have begun producing warheads by the late 1960s.

The expert said he is convinced that the Iranian leadership is “buying time to improve” the economy and, with that accomplished, “will improve the defenses” around three of its major nuclear sites, at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow. All three sites have been heavily bombed in recent years by US and Israeli aircraft.

Israel is “terrified,” the Israeli said, because “the Iranians believe that the only way to survive is to lash out.” He said the Iranian leadership has learned, like Mohammed Ali, the great American boxer, when to do “rope-a-dope” before lashing out.

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