Historien om hvordan Iran skaffet seg 108 avanserte trykkmålere er samtidig historien om hvordan Iran skaffer seg atomvåpen. For hver gang en slik operasjon lykkes, rykker bomben nærmere. Det som skal til er at bare at noen firmaer og myndigheter lukker øynene. Da får iranerne det utstyret de trenger.
De 108 trykkmålerne ble bestilt av et kinesisk selskap. Målerne produseres i Sveits, men kineserne gikk gjennom deres agentur på Taiwan. Man bruker mellommenn for å hindre transparens. Når ordren er klarert endres mottaker. Det er her kontrollsystemene skal virke, men det gjorde de ikke på Taiwan. Taiwan er utenfor det vanlige handelssystemet og føler ikke like sterk motivasjon til å overvåke handel.
A Jan. 24, 2009, purchase order shows that Roc-Master Manufacture & Supply Company ordered the gauges for delivery to its Shanghai base. The order — in the amount of $112,303.72 — was placed with Heli-Ocean Technology Co. Ltd., the Taiwanese agent for Swiss manufacturer Inficon Holding AG. Inficon, together with MKS of Andover, Mass., produces most of the world’s supply of this type of transducer.
On Feb. 6, Heli-Ocean received an initial payment from Roc-Master and placed an order with Inficon for the transducers, documents show.
Then the situation changed.
Roc-Master issued a revised purchase order, backdated to Jan. 24, instructing Heli-Ocean to ship the transducers not to Shanghai, but to the Tehran airport. The consignee is named as Moshever Sanat Moaser, an Iranian company described on its Web site as a provider of specialty alloys and industrial parts.
The second purchase order also increased the amount to $145,800, almost $33,500 more than the original, without explanation.
Apparently the change in destination and the nature of the shipment alarmed Heli-Ocean, because in a Feb. 18 e-mail seen by the AP, Roc-Master assured the Taiwanese company that the 108 transducers were not for Iran’s nuclear industry. It also said that Chinese law barred the shipment of the transducers from China to Iran.
None of this was revealed to the Swiss manufacturer and authorities.
Inficon CEO Lukas Winkler told the AP that had his company known the end-user was Moshever Sanat Moaser, it would never have sold the transducers to Heli-Ocean. He said the gauges fall within Swiss sanctions on exports to Iran.
“The end-user certificate we got did not say Iran,” he said. “The deal was done via a Chinese company. And we have a certificate with the name of a Chinese end-user on it.”
….“The gauges are extremely useful to them,” said Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a physicist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at California’s Monterey Institute of International Studies. “It’s a very big deal.”