Iran's Deadly Ambition (15 page)

These contacts reflect a deep and enduring Chinese dependency on the Islamic Republic. Simply put, the Iranian regime has become a major engine of China’s economic growth, with all that this implies. When calculated in 2011,
Iran was estimated to have provided China with nearly 12 percent of its total annual foreign crude, making it roughly as significant for China, in energy terms, as Saudi Arabia is for the United States.
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Despite China’s minor success in diversifying its energy sources over the past two years, the country’s energy picture today is largely the same; as of the summer of 2014, the PRC relied on Iran for a tenth of its foreign energy imports.
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China’s energy needs, in turn, have become an economic lifeline for Iran. Over the past several years, as its economic fortunes in the West dimmed as a result of U.S. and European sanctions, Iran began to turn more and more to Asia. By 2013, Asian nations (among them Japan, India, and South Korea) made up the lion’s share of Iran’s energy trade. But it was China that assumed the most prominent role. When tallied in early 2013 by the Economist Intelligence Unit, China accounted for approximately 50 percent of Iran’s total crude oil exports (roughly 500,000 barrels per day).
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And these energy ties have only grown since Iran’s negotiations with the West have begun to warm.

As part of its confidence-building measures toward Tehran, the Obama administration announced the suspension—at least temporarily—of the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010, which required major Iranian energy clients, including China, to steadily reduce imports of crude from the Islamic Republic in order to avoid sanctions from the United States.
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Predictably, the energy flow from Iran to China has surged since then. In the first half of 2014, China imported 50 percent more oil from Iran than during the same period a year earlier.
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The burgeoning energy ties between Tehran and Beijing, in turn, have fueled a deeper strategic alignment. To be sure, China has long played an important role as a supplier of arms and technology to Iran. As early as 1992, China committed to
supplying the Islamic Republic with a 300-megawatt nuclear power reactor, and subsequent years saw additional agreements related to weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that made the PRC, in the words of one U.S. intelligence assessment, a “principal supplier of nuclear technology to Iran.”
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Arms trade also flourished, with the value of Chinese arms transfers to the Islamic Republic reaching $600 million by the year 2000.
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Today’s cooperation between Tehran and Beijing is deeper still—and more strategically significant. China, for example, has become a financial conduit for the global activities of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. According to a Western intelligence report leaked to the media in the fall of 2014, several Chinese firms are helping to finance the global activities of the IRGC’s elite paramilitary unit, the Quds Force, using funds transferred from the Central Bank of Iran to the Bank of Kunlun, a Chinese financial institution. “The money transfers from accounts held by the CBI with Bank Kunlun are initiated by the Quds Force and transferred to Chinese companies connected to the Quds Force in order to meet its financial needs,” the study reports. The exact sums transferred via this financial channel have not been disclosed, but they are believed to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
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Iran is also emerging as a military partner for the PRC. In October 2014, China’s chief naval officer, Admiral Wu Shengli, hosted his Iranian counterpart, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, in Beijing. Their summit produced a commitment to “further pragmatic cooperation and the uninterrupted development of ties between the two militaries.”
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That alliance is already taking shape, punctuated by the fall 2014 visit of two Chinese warships to the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and indications that the two navies are building a “ ‘blue water’ friendship” in tandem with China’s
expanding maritime activities beyond the Asia-Pacific theater.
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The symbiotic nature of this relationship is clear. China provides Iran with a necessary energy lifeline in Asia—one that has withstood, and even expanded in the face of, Western sanctions. And Iran is a means by which China can broaden its influence in the Middle East, even as it dilutes the strength of the Obama administration’s Asia pivot.
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A STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH PYONGYANG

North Korea is the world’s last remaining Stalinist state. A wildly repressive, brutal dynastic dictatorship, it is a historical anachronism: a country trapped in time, with a population almost entirely cordoned off from the outside world. It’s not for nothing that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is known as the Hermit Kingdom.

Yet, in at least one way, North Korea is a major player in contemporary geopolitics. Beyond being a purveyor of regular bombastic threats against the United States and a destabilizing force in its immediate neighborhood, its most significant—and adverse—role might just be as the chief Asian enabler for the Middle East’s emerging hegemon: Iran.

For those who care to look, signs of this partnership are evident throughout Asia. But nowhere is it more visible than in North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang, which plays host to Iran’s embassy—a sprawling, seven-building compound, complete with the first mosque in North Korea that is one of only five places of worship formally allowed in the city.
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The estate is a tangible manifestation of the close ties between Tehran and Pyongyang that have developed over the past three decades.

The Iran-DPRK partnership has roots in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which transformed a onetime ally of the West into a dangerous adversary virtually
overnight. In order to evade the weapons embargo imposed by a skittish Carter administration in the Iranian revolution’s heady early days, the country’s clerical army, the Revolutionary Guards, put a premium on erecting its own weapons infrastructure. It did so by acquiring arms from a number of foreign states, most prominently, China and the USSR. The regime of Kim Il-sung of North Korea figured prominently in this regard as well. By the early 1980s, the U.S. government estimated that, together, China and North Korea were providing the Islamic Republic with 40 percent of its arms. By the late 1980s, that figure rose to 70 percent.
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The centerpiece of this budding relationship quickly became cooperation on strategic capabilities. The two are said to have established collaborative missile development back in 1985, under an agreement through which Iran helped to underwrite North Korea’s production of 300-kilometer-range Scud-B missiles in exchange for new technology and the option to purchase the completed Scuds. Iran exercised that option two years later, when it reportedly purchased 100 Scud-Bs to use in the closing battles of its long-running war with Iraq.
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Iran and North Korea’s cooperation expanded in the 1990s, when they jointly developed Iran’s Shahab missile series, which—not coincidentally—is closely based on North Korea’s nuclear-capable Nodong missile. Indeed, according to ballistic missile experts, the Nodong, Taepodong-1, and Taepodong-2 missiles were the basis for Iran’s Shahab-3 and Shahab-4, now in service, and Shahab-5 and Shahab-6, currently in development. The two states are now thought to be collaborating on the development of a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile.
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Iran has also looked to the DPRK for help with its nuclear program. A January 2006 article in
Jane’s Defense Weekly
noted that the IRGC initiated procurement contracts with North
Korea to bolster fortifications for nuclear facilities in anticipation of possible preemptive strikes. As part of this effort, a group affiliated with the North Korean government was involved in designing and constructing tunnels and underground facilities around the Isfahan and Natanz sites.
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Not surprisingly, Iran and North Korea’s strategic capabilities have evolved in tandem, and the two countries have collaborated extensively. Iranian scientists and technicians, for example, have a front-row seat to the DPRK’s ballistic missile development and have regularly attended missile launches in North Korea since at least the early 1990s. Iran is known to have dispatched delegations to attend the DPRK’s Nodong tests in July 2006 and March 2009.
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And in the fall of 2013, the
Washington Free Beacon
reported that a delegation of Iranian technical experts visited Pyongyang as part of ongoing collaboration on the development of a new rocket booster that uses technology that could significantly advance Iran’s long-range missile effort. U.S. intelligence sources described the 80-ton booster in question as a potential thruster for a “super ICBM” or “heavy lift space launcher”—in other words, something that could allow Iran, currently a regional missile power, to become a global one.
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Compelling evidence also exists that Pyongyang and Tehran have collaborated on the Iranian nuclear front. During the early 1990s, much of that interaction was secret, due to U.S. pressure on North Korea over its own nuclear development. Even so, press reports from the time strongly suggest that some level of cooperation was under way.
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Later, cooperation became more active—and public. Both countries benefited from the nuclear know-how of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. And North Korea is said to have dispatched hundreds of nuclear experts to work in the Islamic Republic and to have provided it with key nuclear software.
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During North Korea’s February 2013 nuclear
test, some unusual spectators were in attendance: a delegation of Iranian scientists who offered to pay tens of millions of dollars to the DPRK for permission to witness it.
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All this leads Western experts to speculate that North Korea may have served as an atomic proxy for the Islamic Republic, and that one or more of the nuclear tests carried out by the DPRK over the past decade were to assess Iranian, not North Korean, capabilities.
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Clearly, Iran has learned valuable lessons from North Korea’s nuclear playbook. Over the past two decades, the DPRK “has cut a series of nuclear freeze deals, collecting security guarantees, diplomatic concessions and material benefits along the way,” notes Claudia Rosett, a leading North Korea watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “North Korea has cheated and reneged on every deal. Today, the Kim regime has uranium enrichment facilities, has restarted (again) its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, has conducted a series of increasingly successful long-range missile tests, and has carried out three nuclear tests, in 2006, 2009 and 2013.”
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For Iran, now engaged in nuclear diplomacy with the West, the North Korean model of obfuscation, delay, and deception presents an attractive way of doing business.

North Korea’s partnership with Iran does not end with nuclear collusion, however. The DPRK also extends support to Iran’s terror proxy of choice: Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia. A number of top Hezbollah officials received military training in North Korea, including the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah; intelligence and security chief, Ibrahim Akil; and counter-espionage czar, Mustapha Badreddine.
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The DPRK is also believed to have helped Hezbollah construct elaborate underground tunnels in southern Lebanon, which were uncovered in the aftermath of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.
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Iran’s collusion with North Korea has been more than a simple bilateral affair. Other rogues have benefited from the Iranian-DPRK alliance. Chief among these has been the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. According to Ali Reza Asghari, a high-level Iranian defector, Iran helped finance North Korea’s participation in Syria’s nuclear weapons program.
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This allegation is lent credence by the fact that Syria’s al-Khibar nuclear reactor, which was successfully destroyed by Israel in a covert bombing campaign in 2007, turned out to be of a design analogous to the DPRK’s own plant at Yongbyon.
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The depth of the strategic bonds between Iran and North Korea was on full display in September 2012, when the two countries signed a pact on scientific-technical cooperation.
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The signing of the agreement, which closely resembled agreements signed by North Korea and Syria roughly a decade earlier, took place in Tehran and was presided over by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Yong-nam, the powerful chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly. The stature of the participants is telling: Kim Yong-nam is the titular head of state of the DPRK; and while real power resides with North Korea’s current leader, Kim Jong-un, it is Kim Yong-nam who usually represents North Korea abroad for high affairs of state. He led the delegation to the signing of the Syria agreement in 2002, and his presence at the Tehran deal in 2012 was indicative of the importance that North Korea placed on its ties with Iran.

But the summit was also much more than that. “The Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea have common enemies since the arrogant powers can’t bear independent governments,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is said to have told Kim during his visit.
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Khamenei’s message was unmistakable: Iran sees North Korea as an ally in its efforts to increase its global power and influence and dilute that of the West.

The feeling is definitely mutual. Today, North Korea’s partnership with the Islamic Republic remains as vibrant as ever, despite the recent changing of the guard in Pyongyang. In December 2011, North Korea’s long-serving “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il, died of what is believed to have been a heart attack and was succeeded by his 28-year-old son, Kim Jong-un. The three years since have seen North Korea’s “Young Leader” systematically attempt to consolidate his hold on power at home. He has done so in brutal fashion, complete with the disappearance of political adversaries and the grisly execution of competitors.
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