The Iranian Resistance exposed the purchase. On October 12 1992, the Washington Post wrote: “Iran has been conducting secret negotiations to buy nuclear warheads from the cash-hungry former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan and by one account has closed the deal. … The Bush administration was warned last week by an exiled Iranian dissident leader whose information has proved accurate in the past. His Iraq-based organization, the People’s Mujaheddin, had learned that Iran has signed the agreement and paid for the warheads, but that delivery had not yet taken place.”

Despite the plan’s exposure, the regime continued to finalize the deal and in December 1992, Akbar Torkan, the regime’s Minister of Transportation, and Amrollahi, the head of the AEOI, travelled to Kazakhstan to conclude the agreement that was reached with Minister Kari a few months earlier and take delivery of the bombs. The Kazakh officials stated that following the agreement’s exposure by the PMOI, they had been facing international pressure, and in particular because of pressure by Russian President Boris Yeltsin they could not carry out the agreement.

A few years later, Mr. Bolat Nurgaliyev, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the U.S., confirmed the existence of that agreement. In that regard, the Washington Times on November 2, 1996 wrote: “The Kazakh ambassador to the United States says that Iran attempted to buy unidentified materials from a major Soviet nuclear facility in his country but that the deal was stopped in 1992 as crates sat awaiting shipment. … Mr. Nurgaliyev said that in 1992, as a newly independent Kazakhstan sought to deal with the tremendous nuclear arsenal on its soil, Iranian representatives made contact with the Ust-Kamenogorsk facility and sought certain ‘things.’”

The Washington Times further reported that an intelligence report had said “Iranian officials actually visited the plant seeking HEU [Highly Enriched Uranium] for the Islamic country’s own nuclear weapons program.”

Thus the Iranian opposition had by its timely revelation prevented the Iranian regime from obtaining three nuclear warheads.

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[1] Les Gardiens de la Révolution, [Guardians of the Revolution], page 247

[2] Les Gardiens de la Révolution, [Guardians of the Revolution] , page 317 – Khomeini’s handwritten text

[3] Les Gardiens de la Révolution, [Guardians of the Revolution] , page 246

[4] Mullahs’ regime reaction to that exposé collected in Chronicles of Iran’s nuclear confrontation, Etemaad Daily N0. 192, September 26, 2006.  

To be continued…