The Middle East Didn't Wait
Saudis Begin Racing Iran for a Nuke
Arab rulers were not listening when U.S. President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen declared last week that a Middle East nuclear arms race must be prevented. With the Saudis leading the pack, they were too busy working on their response to the evolving Iranian nuclear threat, which they see no world power curbing.
According to military and intelligence sources, as far back as the fall of 2009, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided the oil kingdom had better make its own arrangements and develop an independent program as fast as possible against the day that Iran attains its goal of a nuclear weapon.
On Tuesday, April 13, when President Obama warned the 47 world leaders attending his nuclear security summit that the biggest threat facing the United States and the world was a nuclear-armed terrorist organization or loner, the heads of the Saudi royal family were getting down to the nuts and bolts of their own military nuclear program. Assuming Iran was already in possession of the materials and components for assembling a bomb, the Saudis set aside funding to speed the program and reach the finishing line as soon as possible after Iran. Riyadh would then counter-balance Tehran as a nuclear power.
This decision was a victory for Saudi Arabia's pro-nuclear hawks, defense minister Prince Sultan, who has fought for an independent Saudi nuclear capability since late 2005, and foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, who is against Riyadh's dependence on external nuclear protectors, like the US or Pakistan.
Obama promises to help Saudi nuclear program
Our sources in Washington say President Obama was not unaware of Riyadh's decision. The king made sure to keep him au fait of his plans by sending the director of Saudi General Intelligence Prince Muqrin Bin Abdul Aziz to Washington at the head of the Saudi delegation to the nuclear security conference last week.
Muqrin briefed the US president and assured him that King Abdullah stood by his promise to Secretary Gates - when they talked at the royal ranch outside Riyadh on March 10 - to continue to coordinate Saudi nuclear policy with the United States on the basis of a four-point understanding:
1. U.S. assistance will be extended to the Saudi nuclear weapons program. The principle was established, but our sources report that Washington and Riyadh are still working on its nature, substance and scope and are not yet agreed on an acceptable format.
2. When a small Saudi nuclear arsenal is in hand, the United States will provide missiles and aircraft as vehicles for their delivery. The Saudi arsenal contains only an outdated, inaccurate CSS-2 medium-range ballistic missile system purchased from China in 1986, which was not designed to carry a nuclear warhead more than 1,500 miles. The Obama administration showed it meant business by staging the launch of a Trident ballistic missile, which is capable of carrying fissile nuclear warheads, from an American submarine in Saudi territorial waters in the last week of March.
3. Washington will help Saudi Arabia shroud its program in ambiguity, as it does for Israel.
4. Intelligence-sharing between the US and Saudi Arabia will ensure that no Gulf or Arab nation other than Saudi Arabia acquires nuclear hardware. The Saudi program will frustrate Tehran's ambition to become the supreme nuclear power representing Middle East Shiites and Sunnis combined by stepping forward as the sole Arab-Sunni power.
Plans for ambiguity, evading IAEA inspections
None of these plans deterred Prince Muqrin from standing up before the nuclear summit and calling for "a Middle East region that should be free from all weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons."
With regard to Iran, the Saudi prince stated: "Our brothers in Iran should be aware of the danger of the situation and deal with it very seriously. If they do not have anything to hide regarding their nuclear program, they should give the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) the opportunity to inspect their program and demonstrate it is for peaceful purposes."
He thus laid out the future Saudi position, apparently endorsed by Washington, that its military nuclear facilities will not be open to IAEA inspection as long as Tehran denies international monitors full access.
In Riyadh, the official Saudi Gazette, Sunday, April 18, published a royal decree by King Abdullah, Custodian of the two Holy Mosques, establishing a scientific center for civilian nuclear and renewable energy to meet rising demand for power and desalinated water. It will be called the King Abdullah City of Atomic and Renewable Energy.
Intelligence sources point out that this grand title refers in practice to a cluster of scientific institutes with the tasks of coordinating national nuclear research and acting as a repository for nuclear talent.
This is exactly what Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did in 2005. After the newly elected president promised supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to oversee Iran's development of a nuclear bomb, he set about reorganizing Iran's nuclear energy agency. By separating the covert military program from civilian projects, he enabled Tehran to claim to this day that its nuclear program is peaceful. In fact, the civilian agency serves the bomb program as its research mainspring and skilled manpower pool. It also provides the experts for analyzing the plans and blueprints for the military facilities' projects and is there to repair technical glitches.
Riyadh has adopted Iran's nuclear infrastructure format for its own program.
The King and defense establishment hold executive control
The Royal Decree includes appointments.
Dr. Hashem Bin Abdullah Yamani is named the president of the King Abdullah City of Atomic and Renewable Energy; Dr. Walid Bin Hussein Abu Al-Faraj, vice-president, and Dr. Khaled Bin Muhammad Al-Sulaiman vice-president for Renewable Energy Affairs.
The City's goal is defined as contributing to "sustainable development in the Kingdom by using science, research and industry-related renewable atomic energy for peaceful purposes."
The concluding sentence is: "The City will support scientific research and development" - the same sort of catchall measure used by the Iranians for permitting civilian research organizations to furnish their military program with scientific and research support, including manpower.
The king himself has undertaken to directly oversee the new center in his name.
This is made clear in his decree, which assigns the King Abdullah City of Atomic and Renewable Energy the status of an independent legal entity administratively linked to the prime minister (who in Saudi Arabia is the reigning monarch). Its headquarters will be located in Riyadh with branches, offices and research centers within the Kingdom.
The City will also represent the Kingdom at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other relevant organizations.
The nascent nuclear organization will have a supreme council headed by the prime minister and most of his cabinet, the deputy premier, defense and aviation minister and inspector general, as well as the ministers for foreign affairs, higher education, petroleum and mineral resources, finance, commerce and industry, water and electricity, agriculture and health.
Links with Washington will go through Bahrain
There is no hint of any separate military program - except for the figure who is to be directly responsible to the royal house, Prince Khaled bin Sultan, assistant minister of defense and aviation for military affairs, and the son of Crown Prince Sultan.
Sunday, April 18, the day after the king issued his Royal Decree, Abdullah accompanied by Princes Saud al-Faisal and Muqrin paid a two day visit to the Bahraini ruler Shaikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa - the first since Abdullah ascended the throne in Riyadh in 2005.
Intelligence sources report that this visit was closely tied to Saudi Arabia's nuclear plans and understandings with Washington. Abdullah used the occasion to announce that Saudi Arabia is donating 2 billion riyals ($266.6 million) to build a medical city in Bahrain.
According to our sources, the medical city will be the back-door channel for Saudi military nuclear liaison with US military headquarters in the Persian Gulf.
Saudi Arabia Goes Nuclear - Iran Backed Yemeni Rebellion for Foothold against Kingdom's Nuclear Center
Prince Khaled bin SultanEight months ago, in September 2009, US and Saudi intelligence were still figuring that Iran's Revolutionary Guards Al Qods Brigades was pouring funds, training and weapons to Yemen's Houthi rebellion - with whom fighting with government forces was then at its peak - in order to establish a Houthi Shiite Zaydi state and grab the northern Yemen district of Saada.
But then in October 2009, the two intelligence agencies tumbled to another conclusion: Iran's real ulterior motive for backing the Houthis was a plan to ride in on their backs to northern Yemen and take up a position just opposite the top-secret Saudi military nuclear facilities near Khamis Mushait in southwest Saudi Arabia.
This military city is located no more than 75 kilometers, an hour-and-a-half drive, from Houthi strongholds and centers in northern Yemen's Jebel al-Dukhan region. So when in late October and early November 2009, Houthi attacks spilled over into Saudi territory, Riyadh hit back hard: Saudi Special Forces and Air Force, under the command of Prince Khaled bin Sultan, deputy defense minister and chief executive of the kingdom's nuclear arms program, invaded northern Yemen to dislodge Houthi forces from Saudi territory and crush them as a military force. This was vital, because once the Houthis deepened their hold on the southern Saudi Shiite tribes of the Najran and Assir, their way would be clear to press forward towards Khamis Mushait and the Saudi nuclear facilities along with the Iranian agents embedded in their ranks.
Unprecedented secrecy shrouds Saudi nuclear projects
So secret is the Saudi nuclear program, say military and intelligence sources, that the extreme focus on the Iranian nuclear program in the West and the Arab world has left no room to conjure up its existence - let alone the peril it faced in consequence of the civil conflict in the Red Sea backwater of Yemen. But the Iranians were on top of the game. They concluded that the Saudi nuclear drive was far enough advanced to compete with their own nuclear weaponization drive and place in question their primary strategic claim to be anointed the single reigning nuclear power of the Persian Gulf and Arab world. To halt - or at least slow down - Saudi nuclear plans, Tehran put the Houthis up to invading southern Saudi Arabia and pushing on to Khamis Mushait, the while harassing the military traffic and activity in its vicinity. By late January of this year, and even more so during the month of February, Washington and Riyadh were forced to acknowledge that Saudi armed forces, though equipped with and trained in superlative Western weaponry, were never going to defeat the Houthis or throw them out of the kingdom. So they switched tactics and made the Yemeni rebels an offer: Half a billion dollars to stop fighting and pull their troops out of Saudi territory, so disarming the guns Iran was pointing at the Saudi nuclear program.
In Washington, meanwhile, a nuclear security summit opened and closed on April 13, without a murmur about the two burning nuclear terror issues of the day - the Al Qaeda-Taliban menace against Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the Iranian threat to Saudi Arabia's top-secret nuclear facilities.
The Saudis have low-grade enriched uranium
The Saudi rulers established their nuclear center at the military city of Khamis Mushait because of its remoteness from oil centers and urban districts and because any foreigner or stranger turning up in this back-of-beyond region would immediately attract attention. So secret is every aspect of their nuclear weapons program, that even the personnel serving in the military sites of Khamis Mushait are mostly ignorant of its existence. Nonetheless, intelligence sources have partly lifted the veil of secrecy and discovered that the Saudis have made progress in the following fields:
1. They have acquired an unknown quantity of low-grade enriched uranium - both homemade and from outside sources - that can be processed quite quickly to weapons grade (90 percent).
2. They have built a uranium enrichment facility at Khamis Mushait. We have no information about the number of centrifuges installed there or their origins.
3. Contrary to the prevailing notion in the West, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are not cooperating on their military programs; neither has Pakistani guaranteed the oil kingdom a nuclear umbrella. Islamabad is pushing ahead with its own nuclear programs and not sharing with Riyadh.
4. Like Iran and the Syria, Saudi nuclear planners are running two parallel weapons programs for producing both enriched uranium and plutonium.
Light water and heavy water plants planned
5. Riyadh's latest plans provide for the rapid construction of several nuclear reactors, including a light water plant for producing energy and a heavy water reactor for plutonium. The Saudis have earmarked funds for one light water reactor like the Iranian facility at Bushehr and a heavy water plant like Iran's Arak complex to be completed within three years at most.
6. The Saudi nuclear military program has also hired nuclear scientists from other Arab countries. Most of them are Egyptians once employed in the late Saddam Hussein's nuclear program or at Libya's nuclear facilities, which were dismantled in 2004 and handed over to the United States against a promise from the Bush administration not to invade Libya or try to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi.
Intelligence sources presume that the Libyan ruler kept back copies of the blueprints for his atomic bombs and centrifuges and shared them with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who four or five years ago forwarded them to King Abdullah, giving the Saudi king his first substantial leg up the nuclear ladder.
Israel and a Saudi Nuke
For Failing to Stall Iran, Israel Must Learn to Live in a Nuclear Middle East
The theory goes that an Israel strike against Iran's nuclear facilities would obviate the Saudi need to develop an independent nuclear capability and so avert a Middle East nuclear race. That may have been true up to just over a year ago - not now, because Israel held back too long and, in the meantime, the Saudis are too far into their nuclear program to stop now.
A senior Western intelligence source familiar with the Middle East nuclear situation told that Israel missed the boat more than once.
One mistake Jerusalem made was to assume that the destruction of the still-unfinished Syrian-Iranian-North Korean plutonium reactor at Deir ez-Zor in September 2007 would not only nip Damascus' project in the bud but slow Iran's progress on the plutonium track, by eliminating its source of supplies in Syria. It turned out that the North Korean Munitions Industry Department in Pyongyang, which manages the "Office 99" personnel employed in building reactors overseas, simply transferred the hundreds of suddenly jobless North Korean workers from Syria to Iran, where their work drastically shortened the time scale for building the heavy water plant in Arak.
This accounted for the rapid progress Iran has made on the plutonium track.
For Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran is an immediate threat - unlike Saudi Arabia
The Syrian operation may have been Israel's last bid to destroy a hostile nuclear target in the Middle East and remain sole regional nuclear power. Since 2007, the window of opportunity has narrowed to a slit because, as another Western nuclear expert explains, even if Israel knocks the Iranian nuclear program out now, it will be left with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia.
Attacking the Saudi facilities at Khamis Mushait, one of six military towns propping up the royal government, is a total non-starter. The program run by Riyadh, which controls one-fifth of the world's oil reserves, enjoys US protection and, besides, an Israeli attack would release the fury of an all-out Arab war, wreck the hard-won peace accords with Egypt and Jordan and extinguish all hope of normal ties with the Arab world for years to come.
Even a strike against Iran today is fraught with risk, which is why Israeli leaders are in two minds about its benefits. This operation would likely throw world markets into chaos and send oil prices into a tailspin. Despite their sympathy for anyone clobbering the Islamic Republic, when motorists in New York or Los Angeles are charged 10 dollars for a gallon for gasoline, Israel will not be winning popularity contests in the USA. All the same, while turning a blind eye to the Saudi nuclear program, Israel's government and military are focusing exclusively on preparations for a military showdown with Iran because of the extreme danger it poses for the Jewish state in the immediate term. An Israeli military source who wishes to remain anonymous commented that, whereas Saudi Arabia may or may not imperil Israel in the future, "That is a long-term concern and not something about to happen any time soon. First, we must deal with Iran and then we'll see about the Saudi nuclear program."
Regular Saudi-Israeli intelligence rendezvous
This hands-off approach to the Saudis is grounded, intelligence sources reveal, in the undercover but close ties between Saudi intelligence and the Israeli Mossad. Their heads, Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz and Meir Dagan, meet secretly several times a year, always in an Arab country outside the kingdom. In the last three years, at least two of these secret rendezvous - usually for exchanging views on how to handle Iran - were attended also by the Israeli prime minister in office at the time, giving them the opportunity to talk about Israel-Saudi relations face-to-face with Prince Muqrin.
Western intelligence sources do not rule out the possibility of these discussions yielding tacit permission for Israeli bombers to overfly Saudi air space on their way to strike Iran - "unnoticed" by Riyadh. Some even suggest that Israel may build provisional landing strips for refueling those warplanes in remote corners of the Saudi desert. What concerns Israel most at this time is the security of the nuclear materials lodged in their secret facility in Khamis Mushait. Just as Al Qaeda and the Taliban are dangerously close to elements of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, whether from within or from Afghanistan, Islamic extremists may decide to make a grab for the kingdom's nuclear resources from secret cells inside Saudi Arabia or from the Al Qaeda in Arabia strongholds across the southern border in Yemen.
Or Saudi Arabia, like Pakistan, might fall prey to a member of its own military or an extremist hiding deep inside some part of the establishment with access to nuclear facilities who never came up on Saudi security screens. For the first time in two decades, al Qaeda jihadis have come close to nuclear materials at a location within a short distance from Israel.
US Vs Iran - Cold War or Muddle?
Robert Gates and Mahmoud AhmadinejadThe statements on Iran made by senior US officials in the last ten days convey so much muddle that one US paper could be forgiven for commenting, "If allies and adversaries are presently confused, that would be understandable."
At worst, the muddle may be the external symptom of an administration at sea about how to handle the intractable Iranian nuclear issue. Its heads may have come to terms with a nuclear Iran but don't know how to break the bad news to the American public or its Gulf and Middle East allies, who have been waiting with bated breath for America to do something.
At best, President Barack Obama has not yet decided what to do and is being buffeted here and there by opposing forces.
The week began with the leaked classified memo from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the White House, reported in the New York Times on Sunday, April 18, in which he pointed out that the U.S. lacks an effective long-term strategy for dealing with Iran's nuclear progress. Gates quickly rushed in to set the record straight, saying his memo had been designed to "contribute to an orderly and timely decision making process." But as the week wore on, the White House showed no orderly or timely decision-making on Iran.
Addressing a Columbia University forum on April 18, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said that a United States strike against Iran would go "a long way" toward delaying Tehran's nuclear program. This comment broke away from what senior administration officials had been saying all along, that a military operation would only hold Iran's nuclear program back by a year or two, at most.
An outpouring of contradictions
Mullen's comment also contradicted what his deputy, General James Cartwright, one of America's top uniformed officers, said this week. In his Senate testimony, Cartwright admitted that if Iran decides to go for nuclear weapons, the U.S. may not be able to permanently stop this from happening unless it is willing to occupy the country.
Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, then asked the general "whether the military approach was a magic wand." Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged it was not, adding that military action alone was unlikely to be decisive.
The White House then outdid itself in sowing confusion Wednesday, April 21, when U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning Michele Flournoy told reporters in Singapore that the U.S. has ruled out a military strike against Iran's nuclear program "any time soon."
The administration, said Flournoy, is "hoping instead that negotiations and UN sanctions will prevent the Middle East nation from developing nuclear weapons. Military force is an option of last resort and it's off the table in the near term."
Just a few hours later, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell tried to resolve the glaring contradictions by saying, "I don't think that's anything new. It clearly is not our preference to go to war with Iran, to engage militarily with Iran. Nobody wishes to do that, but she also makes it clear it's not off the table."
Washington sources say that Michele Flournoy is a steady, reputable, serious official with valuable experience in leading America's covert contacts with such parties as North Korea and Iran on the most delicate issues. It is hard to see her talking out of the top of her head on the Iranian nuclear issue without authority from her department head, i.e. Gates.
So how about a cold war against Iran?
By week's end, the talk about tough sanctions for Iran and Russia and China coming on board had gone up in smoke. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put the uncertainty on record when she said in an interview with the Financial Times last week, "Can I sit here and tell you exactly what will happen, assuming we are able to get the kind of sanctions we are looking for? No? [We are] trying to work toward some better outcome among some really difficult and not very satisfying choices." So, what is left? Is there an Obama administration policy on Iran? If so, what is it? On Thursday, April 22, the first voices were heard in Washington suggesting that America's best course would be a policy of containment against Iran, meaning diplomatic isolation backed by the supply of US defense systems to its Persian Gulf allies - some kind of cold war.
These flip-flops are keenly watched by Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel. The first two have drawn the same lesson ? Exploit the indecision and confusion in Washington to further boost their nuclear efforts and shorten the distance to a bomb capability.
The third party ? Israel ? sees itself driven down the only path left open, which is a military operation to stall Iran's nuclear program.
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