Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon (7 page)

The images had been captured at just the right time to catch Iranian workers still in the process of covering the rooftops of the underground buildings with several alternating layers of earth and cement. A few weeks later and they would have been completely obscured from above, yielding no obvious sign of their existence. Someone had carefully planned the outing of Natanz at just the right moment to capture the evidence.

Two of the underground buildings were each about the size of half a dozen football fields and were heavily reinforced with concrete walls about six to eight feet thick. The Iranians were obviously fortifying them against a possible air strike. The tunnel leading down to the buildings was also built in the shape of a U instead of a straight line—a common tactic to prevent missiles sent into the mouth of a tunnel from having direct aim at a target on the other end.

Hinderstein showed the images to her boss, David Albright, a physicist and former weapons inspector in Iraq who founded ISIS. The two were certain now that this wasn’t a fuel-manufacturing plant. Iran would have no reason to build such a plant underground, since there would be little interest in bombing it. The only logical conclusion, they reasoned—one that would explain the underground construction and the evidential plans for antiaircraft guns—was that this was the elusive uranium enrichment plant they had been seeking.

IT WAS A
quiet day in Vienna when news from Jafarzadeh’s press conference filtered back to Olli Heinonen in the IAEA’s headquarters overlooking the Danube River. During August, most of Europe was on holiday, and Vienna was no exception. Heinonen’s boss, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA’s director general, was on vacation in Egypt, and much of the
organization’s other staff members were out of town as well. So Heinonen, a Finn in his early fifties with wire-framed glasses and a boyish mop of reddish-brown hair, was alone in his office when he read the news. Heinonen was head of Division B of the IAEA’s Safeguards Department and had only three months before he was taken on the IAEA’s Iran portfolio after having been the agency’s chief inspector of North Korea and other parts of Asia for several years. It was a return to familiar territory for him, since he’d managed the IAEA’s Iran portfolio before from 1992 to 1995. A Persian rug marking the period still decorated the floor of his office.

A veteran nuclear inspector, Heinonen had come to the IAEA in 1983 from a nuclear research center in Finland. With a PhD in radiochemistry from the University of Helsinki, he had a higher level of subject expertise than early generations of IAEA inspectors, who tended to have little scientific training. He also had a reputation for quiet confidence and steadfast determination that made it clear to the nations he inspected that he had little patience for duplicity.

As he took in the news from Jafarzadeh, he was struck by the level of detail it revealed. Heinonen had been waiting for information like this for a while. Like his counterparts at ISIS, he immediately suspected the Natanz facility wasn’t a fuel-manufacturing plant at all but a uranium enrichment plant. Two years earlier, government sources had told the IAEA that Iran tried to secretly purchase parts from Europe in the 1980s to manufacture centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
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Based on this, Heinonen had suspected that Iran had an illicit centrifuge plant hidden somewhere within its borders, but he never knew its location, and the IAEA couldn’t confront the Iranians without exposing the source of the intelligence. The IAEA had also been wary of acting on information received from government sources, ever since an intelligence agency had told the IAEA in 1992 that Iran was secretly procuring prohibited nuclear equipment but hadn’t provided any details. When the IAEA confronted Iran about the claims,
officials denied the accusations and invited inspectors to visit their nuclear sites to see for themselves. But the inspectors found nothing to support the claims and ended up leaving Iran embarrassed.
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The revelations this time, however, were different. They had been publicly disclosed, so Heinonen didn’t have to hide the source of the information, and they included precise and specific details, naming actual facilities and locations. This meant the IAEA could independently verify their existence and demand that Iran open them to inspection.
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Heinonen picked up the phone and called his boss in Egypt, who agreed that he should send a letter immediately to Ali Akhbar Salehi, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, demanding an explanation about what Iran was doing at Natanz. Salehi was outraged by the letter’s accusatory tone, saying the IAEA had no business questioning Iran about unverified claims, especially ones that came from a known terrorist group. Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, Iran’s vice president and head of its Atomic Energy Organization, told the IAEA that Iran had not been hiding Natanz, but had simply planned to disclose its existence to the IAEA at a later date.
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If the IAEA was patient, all would soon be revealed, he said. For now he would only say that Iran planned to build several nuclear power plants over the next twenty years and needed nuclear fuel to operate them. He didn’t say if Natanz was a uranium enrichment plant being built to help produce such fuel, but this appeared to be the implication.

The IAEA pressed Iran to open Natanz immediately to its inspectors, and after a bit of back and forth Iranian officials reluctantly agreed to a
date in October. But just as the IAEA was preparing for the trip, Iran canceled the visit, saying the date would not work. A second visit was scheduled for December, but that too got canceled. Heinonen suspected Iran was trying to buy time to move incriminating evidence out of Natanz.

When ISIS founder David Albright learned that Iran was stalling, he decided to take the satellite images to the media to pressure Iran into opening Natanz to inspectors. It was one thing for Iran to rebuff claims made by an opposition group with a political agenda. It was another to respond to stark images of secret sites broadcast worldwide on CNN. So on December 12, CNN ran a story, along with the satellite images provided by ISIS, saying that Iran was believed to be building a secret enrichment plant at Natanz that might be used to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations denied that Iran had a nuclear weapons program and told CNN that “any satellite photographs of any facility that you may have” were for a peaceful nuclear energy program, not a weapons program.
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The images had the desired effect, however: after the CNN story ran, Iranian officials committed to an inspection date in February.

ALTHOUGH THE NATANZ
facility was new, Iran’s nuclear activities actually went back more than forty years. They had their roots in the regime of the former shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, during a time when the United States and other Western nations fully supported Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

Iran launched its public and approved nuclear program in 1957, more than a decade after the United States detonated the first atomic bombs over Japan. It was during a time when other nations were clamoring to join the exclusive nuclear club the United States had founded. In an effort to redirect the nuclear ambitions of these nations, the Eisenhower administration
promoted what it called the Atoms for Peace program, whereby countries would receive help to develop nuclear technology as long as they used it for peaceful purposes only. As part of the program, Iran signed an agreement with the United States to receive help to build a light-water nuclear research reactor at Tehran University. The United States also agreed to supply enriched uranium to fuel it.
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But despite US efforts to limit the development of nuclear weapons, four other nations pushed their way into the elite nuclear club after the war—the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China. To curb the proliferation madness, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons was developed in the 1960s to prevent more countries from following suit and to work on reducing the weapons that nuclear-armed nations already possessed.
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Under the treaty, which divided the world into nuclear haves and have-nots, the nonweapons nations would be given aid to develop civilian nuclear programs as long as they agreed to foreswear building nuclear weapons and similarly agreed to regular inspections by the IAEA to ensure that materials and equipment intended for the civilian programs were not diverted for nuclear weapons development. The problem with this arrangement, however, was that many of the components and facilities for civilian nuclear programs were dual-use and could also be used for a nuclear weapons program, making it difficult to police a country’s operations. As Hannes Alfvén, a Swedish Nobel laureate in physics once said, “Atoms for peace and atoms for war are Siamese twins.”

Iran was one of the first countries to sign the treaty in 1968, and by 1974 it had established its own Atomic Energy Organization and developed a grand scheme to build twenty nuclear reactors with support from
Germany, the United States, and France, who all stood to gain from the sale of equipment to the shah’s regime. The first two reactors were to be built at Bushehr. In 1975, German engineers with the Siemens subsidiary Kraftwerk Union broke ground on the $4.3 billion construction project, which was slated to be completed in 1981.
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There were concerns at the time that Iran’s endgame might be nuclear weapons. The shah himself hinted at one point that his nuclear aims weren’t solely peaceful in nature, asserting in an interview that Iran would get nuclear weapons “without a doubt … sooner than one would think” if conditions in the Middle East made it necessary.
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But US leaders weren’t worried, because they considered the shah a friend and couldn’t seem to fathom a day when he or his regime wouldn’t be in power.
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That day came pretty quickly, however, when the Islamic Revolution erupted in 1979 just as one of the reactor buildings at Bushehr was nearing completion. The revolutionaries who ousted the shah and seized power with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took a narrow view of the behemoth reactors being erected at Bushehr, considering them a symbol of the shah’s alliance with the West. The United States, alarmed by the unstable political situation, withdrew support for the project, and the German government eventually forced Kraftwerk Union to pull out of its contract for Bushehr.
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The subsequent Iran–Iraq war wasn’t kind to the abandoned reactors. Throughout the eight-year war, which ran from 1980 to 1988, Iraq bombed the two towers more than half a dozen times, leaving them in
ruins.
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During the war, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard urged the Ayatollah Khomeini to launch a nuclear weapons program to fend off Iraq and its Western allies. But Khomeini refused, believing that nuclear weapons were anathema to Islam and a violation of its basic moral principles. He apparently changed his mind, however, after Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical weapons on Iranian troops and civilians, killing about 25,000 and injuring more than 100,000 others. Incensed by the UN’s passive reaction, and alarmed at rumors that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weapons of its own, Khomeini decided to revive Iran’s nuclear program. This included developing a uranium enrichment program.
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To launch the program, Iran turned to a Pakistani metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan for help. Khan had been instrumental in helping Pakistan build its nuclear weapons program in the mid-1970s, using centrifuge technology he had stolen from Europe. Khan had worked for a Dutch company that conducted centrifuge research and development for Urenco, a consortium formed by Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands to develop centrifuges for nuclear power plants in Europe. As part of his job, Khan had access to sensitive centrifuge designs that he copied and took back to Pakistan. He also absconded with lists of suppliers, many of whom were willing to secretly sell Pakistan parts and materials to make the centrifuges for its program.

Centrifuges are metal cylinders with rotors inside that can spin at speeds in excess of 100,000 revolutions per minute to enrich uranium hexafluoride gas, produced from uranium ore found in earth and seawater. The hexafluoride gas is piped into “cascades” of centrifuges—groups of centrifuges connected by pipes and valves. And as the rotors inside them spin, the centrifugal force separates the slightly lighter U-235 isotopes in
the gas—the fissile isotopes needed for atomic energy—from the heavier U-238 isotopes, in a process likened to panning for gold.
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Gas containing the heavier isotopes gets pushed to the outer wall, while gas containing lighter isotopes gathers closer to the center. Coils wrapped around the outside of the centrifuge that are filled with heated water create a varying temperature that sets the gas in vertical motion, in an oval pattern along the wall of the centrifuge, to further separate the isotopes. Scoops divert the gas containing the concentration of lighter isotopes into other centrifuges at a “higher” stage in the cascade, where further separation occurs, while the heavier gas, the depleted uranium, is diverted into a second set of centrifuges in a lower stage of the cascade for further separation. When additional U-235 isotopes are separated from this gas, it gets fed back into the higher stages to be recombined with the other U-235 isotopes while the depleted gas is sent to “waste”—that is, the tail end of the cascade, where it gets discarded. This process gets repeated until gas containing the desired concentration of U-235 isotopes is achieved.
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In 1987, after Iran revived its nuclear program, officials there contacted a German engineer-turned-black-marketeer, who was a key supplier of equipment for Pakistan’s illicit nuclear program. He helped arrange a secret meeting in Dubai between Iranian officials and other members of the Khan supply network. In exchange for $10 million, the Iranians walked away with two large suitcases and two briefcases filled with everything they needed to kick-start a uranium enrichment program—technical designs for making centrifuges, a couple of disassembled centrifuge prototypes, and a drawing for the layout of a small centrifuge plant containing six cascades.
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Apparently as a bonus, the marketeers threw in a fifteen-page document describing how to turn enriched uranium into uranium metal
and cast it into “hemispheres,” the core component of nuclear bombs.
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Khan later told Pakistani television that he helped Iran develop its nuclear program because he thought if both Pakistan and Iran became nuclear powers, they would “neutralize Israel’s power” in the region.
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