This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Fereydoon Abbasi has launched fresh attacks on the Rouhani administration’s nuclear policy. Increasingly seen as the most prominent and outspoken critic of the program, Abbasi has again accused Rouhani and his officials of neglecting Iranian national interests.
Abbasi played an active role in the Iranian nuclear program until he was removed from his post in August 2013, not long after Hassan Rouhani became president. Prior to this, he had worked closely with former chief nuclear negotiator under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saeed Jalili, who stood as a candidate in last year’s presidential election, running against Rouhani. Jalili is also among those who have made controversial and outspoken statements about the string of assassinations of nuclear scientists in recent years, including referring to Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, who was killed in January 2012, as a martyr.
In November 2010, Abbasi himself survived an assassination attempt. The same day, nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari was killed in a very similar attack and regarded as “one of the nation’s heroes” by many because of his commitment to protecting Iran’s right to build nuclear and other technologies. Abbasi is, for many, regarded as standing up for these same rights.
In March 2007, Abbasi was placed on a United Nations’ blacklist because of his perceived involvement in Iran’s “ballistic missile activities”.
In his most recent attacks against the government, Abbasi turned his attention once again to statements Rouhani made during last year’s election campaign. “To those who say that people’s lives should work as well as centrifuges,” he stated, “I say that this is a meaningless connection. There is no connection between the two. This is, unfortunately, just propaganda. Certain people inside the country have becomes mouthpieces of foreigners and want to inflate the importance of the nuclear question. The nuclear budget for the past 20 years is well-documented.”
In a television documentary about his life broadcast in June 2013, Rouhani said that while it was important not to abandon plans to develop nuclear centrifuges, it was also crucial to ensure the “wheels of industry” kept moving.
“Westerners want to specify how our centrifuges must spin,” Abbasi said last November. But, he added, “the president did not say whether our nuclear centrifuges must spin empty or filled.”
He also accused Iranian negotiators of serving Western interests by discussing the potential shutdown of nuclear facilities in the city of Arak. “Three days after the new administration took over,” he said, “the media reported that the work on the Arak reactor will be delayed for technical reasons.” According to Abbasi, “this was the first message” Rouhani’s administration sent to Western countries, adding: “I knew where it would end.”
The former nuclear chief has also said he believes the Geneva accord between Iran and Western powers has rendered Iran incapable of conducting research to such an extent that “the country is losing its knowledge”, leaving it vulnerable and at risk of being taken advantage of by the United States and other countries.
Not Confrontational
Abbasi has also been critical of negotiators’ statements regarding technical issues. “They give interviews and say that everything is going on as before,” he said. “I must remind them that it is not so. You don’t have adequate information. The reactor core, its fuel, and the equipment must be changed.” He added that negotiators have not made it clear whether nuclear engineers will be given permission to use or make fuel, or whether they will be forced to work with a “miniature reactor” such as the one in Isfahan, which, he says, “is only good for research”.
“They better think before they talk. They talked in haste,” he says, stating that officials should engage less in public interviews and more in thinking about ”how to solve the problems of our country.”
Abbasi has defended the performance of Saeed Jalili, the former chief negotiator under President Ahmadinejad. “If, in the previous round of negotiations, he had given them just one-tenth of the concessions that were given away at Geneva, he would be president by now.” He has expressed unhappiness that Jalili’s performance has been described as confrontational and believes that Jalili only wanted to secure the national interests of Iran.
Abbasi commented on Fordo uranium enrichment facilities, saying that, during Jalili’s tenure, one topic of discussion was the idea of “avoiding confrontation” in negotiations. “But propaganda claimed that we wanted confrontation. I declare this to be absolutely false. That negotiating team was not confrontational.” He said that, had they been concerned with confrontation, work on the Fordo facilities would have been underway.
“You have to ask the new team and the those who claim to speak for the international community. They had access to Fordo and had inspectors there. Their sensitivity to Fordo resulted from the fact that they could destroy Natanz facilities with an airstrike or a cruise missile, but they could not do the same to Fordo, even though the inspectors had the mapping coordinates.”
“We did not want to install too much machinery there,” he added. “Just enough for our needs. There was no reason to waste the country’s money without a useful return.”
Rifts Between Scientists and Politicians Not New
Abbasi has also made statements about nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, who was killed in a bomb blast in Tehran in January 2012, just over a year after the attempt on Abbasi’s life. In addition to former chief negotiator Jalili’s statements about Ahmadi-Roshan’s martyr status, the government of the time accused Israel of instigating the murder. Abbasi has described the scientist as the vice-president of a commercial electronics firm that cooperated with the Atomic Energy Organization by providing parts for the Natanz nuclear reactor.
In recent months, Ahmadi-Roshan’s father has complained that his son’s colleagues have been fired and has accused the Rouhani administration of intentionally refusing to work with nuclear scientists faithful to Ayatollah Khamenei. This prompted Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the fundamentalist chairman of the Guardian Council, to voice his own criticisms against the directors of the Nuclear Energy Organization. However, after a meeting with Ali Akbar Salehi, the current chief of the organization, Jannati implicitly withdrew criticism. In spite of this, a special commission has been launched to investigate the accusations.
In his most recent remarks, Abbasi talked about his political differences with the former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He also confirmed that in his last years as president, Ahmadinejad failed to play an important role in making nuclear decisions.
Abbasi said that he had equally deep differences with Rouhani, mentioning that at a meeting held not not long after the election, he expressed that he was unwilling to cooperate with the new administration.
After Jalili’s decisive election defeat, both men lost their jobs and returned to academia, Jalili in Tehran and Abbasi in Mashhad.
It seems obvious now that, in Abbasi’s view, Saeed Jalili was the only presidential candidate and politician he thought he could work with, and the only one with whom he was willing to cooperate.
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