Western Intelligence Tracks Iranian Efforts to Acquire Sensitive Nuclear Material from Russia

Asharq Al-Awsat

3 days ago

A group of Iranian scientists, including nuclear specialists and a military intelligence member, secretly visited Russia in August 2024 to seek out dual-use technologies with potential military applications, the Financial Times reported Tuesday, citing internal documents, correspondence and travel records.
The five-member delegation included nuclear physicist Ali Kalvand and a nuclear scientist who, according to Western officials, works for Iran's SPND (the Defense Innovation and Research Organization), a secret military research unit that has been described by the US government as 'the direct successor to Iran's pre-2004 nuclear program.'
FT said some members of the delegation also worked for DamavandTec, a sanctioned Iranian procurement firm.
The Iranian delegation travelled to Moscow on a diplomatic service passport.
FT said the Iranian delegation sought access to radioactive isotopes such as tritium, an isotope used in both civilian and military applications, including boosting the yield of nuclear warheads.
It wrote that in a letter sent prior to the visit, DamavandTec requested tritium, strontium-90 and nickel-63 from a Russian supplier.
The report came one week after the FT published an interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who said Tehran was committed to a peaceful, civilian program, and that it would not change its doctrine and would abide by a two-decade old fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei forbidding the development of nuclear weapons.
The name of the SPND was mentioned in April 2018, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented documents seized in a Mossad operation, saying Iran's nuclear weapons program continued under the Organization, after the prior AMAD project was shuttered.
Ian Stewart, a former UK Ministry of Defense nuclear engineer who is head of the Washington office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told FT: 'While there could be benign explanations for these visits, the totality of the information available points to a possibility that Iran's SPND is seeking to sustain its nuclear weapons-related knowhow by tapping Russian expertise.'
SPND
Established in 2023, DamavandTec presents itself as a civilian scientific consultancy. On its website, it claims to have 'an experienced team in the field of technology transfer' and aims to 'develop scientific communication' between academic and research institutions.
The trip of the Iranian delegation to Russia came at a time when Western governments had observed a number of suspicious activities by Iranian scientists, including efforts to procure nuclear-related technology from abroad.
In early 2024, Kalvand received a request from Iran's defense ministry — to use his small company DamavandTec to arrange a sensitive delegation to travel to Moscow, according to correspondence seen by the FT.
SPND was established in 2011 by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a physicist who was sanctioned by the United Nations in 2007 for being 'involved in Iran's nuclear or ballistic missile activities.'
Fakhrizadeh was widely regarded as the architect of Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons program, known as the Amad Plan. Iran has long denied the existence of Amad or any nuclear weapons activity.
In 2020, Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in a roadside ambush widely attributed to Israel, using a remote-controlled, AI-guided machine gun.
In 2024, Iran's parliament officially recognized SPND under Iranian law for the first time, placing it under the control of the defense ministry, and ultimately the personal authority of Iran's Supreme Leader.
Hi-Techs
According to FT, the Iranian delegation that visited Russia in 2024 included Javad Ghasemi, 48, who was previously the CEO of Paradise Medical Pioneers, a US-sanctioned nuclear weapons-related company in Iran.
Also, the delegation included Rouhollah Azimirad, an associate professor at Malek Ashtar University of Technology, which the US and UK have said is under the control of Iran's ministry of defense and Soroush Mohtashami, an expert on neutron generators — a component that can trigger detonation in some nuclear weapons.
FT said the delegation stayed in Russia for four days and visited Russian nuclear and electronics research centers including facilities connected to Oleg Maslennikov, a physicist known for his work on klystrons — devices used in both particle accelerators and nuclear diagnostics.
Also, the Iranian delegation visited Toriy, a research facility located a short walk from the premises of the Polyus Science and Research Institute.
Polyus is a subsidiary of sanctioned state conglomerate Rostec, and was sanctioned by the US in the late 1990s for reportedly supplying missile guidance technology to Iran.
Experts say it is highly unlikely the Iranians could have visited the Russian sites without approval from the FSB, Russia's main security agency.
For more than a decade, SPND has attempted to covertly acquire such technology by circumventing western export controls, according to the US, as well as public comments by intelligence agencies in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.
The technical offerings of the Russian companies they met, suggest the delegation may have been pursuing information relevant to diagnostic tools for nuclear weapon tests.
It's likely that the Iranian delegation was interested in high-powered X-ray tubes for flash X-rays which are used for diagnostic tests of a nuclear weapon's implosion mechanism, FT said.
The documents seen by FT also suggest that the delegation's interest extended beyond technical expertise to something far more sensitive: radioactive materials.
Two former western officials told the FT that the US had last year picked up signs that SPND had engaged in dual-use knowledge transfers with Russia, as well as procuring physical items, that could be relevant to nuclear weapons research.
Other western officials said that they had become aware of the SPND expressing an interest in acquiring various radioactive isotopes — not including tritium — but that the motivations for this interest had been unclear.
Much of Iran's nuclear infrastructure may have been destroyed or damaged after the Israeli and US attacks in June. But some experts believe that the system SPND built — the personnel, the training, the technical continuity — is harder to eradicate.
'Israel can't totally destroy Iran's nuclear program,' says Nicole Grajewski, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
'Because one of the things Iran has done is have those involved in the Amad plan train a cadre of younger scientists.'