Authors: Jon Land
Natanz, Iran: The present
“We will begin shooting here,” said Minister Hosseini, after they exited the changing room, the trio of Revolutionary Guardsmen having donned the radiation suits and wrist monitors as well.
“I’d prefer to decide where to begin shooting.”
“I was told you were impetuous, even arrogant.”
“I take my job seriously, Minister.”
“So do I. And I have very specific instructions from the president, which
both of us
must follow. His orders are to capture the scope of the facility while stressing its magnificent self-contained nature. I stress that nothing will be off-limits to make sure the historical record you are fashioning is complete. You are about to ensure that history will know things very, very few men have seen before. Does that satisfy you?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Would you mind?” McCracken asked Hosseini, extending portable lights toward the Republican Guardsmen.
The minister nodded and the soldiers shifted their weapons in order to hold the lights as the filmmaker instructed. McCracken made sure they were connected to one of the portable batteries and then hoisted the Canon XL-10 up to his shoulder. It belonged to the real Najjar and was known to be his camera of choice, enabling McCracken to practice with an identical model back home to master at least the rudimentary mechanics. An Israeli documentary filmmaker had spent hours teaching him to hold, wield, and steady the Canon just as a professional would, specifically Najjar.
“You assured me I’d have unlimited access to the facility.”
“And you will,” said Hosseini, “only under my guidance and supervision. Any room or section we avoid is the result of that area’s contents not bearing the merit to help tell the story your film record will.”
“I don’t like being told not to use any sound or narration.”
“The narration will be added later, along with interviews with the esteemed scientists and officials most responsible for bringing this project to fruition, all for the historical record.”
McCracken pretended to be busy checking his camera to spare himself a response.
“Follow me,” Hosseini directed, “and we will begin.” The minister stopped and looked back at him. “You don’t mind following me, do you?”
“So long as we can get started,” said McCracken.
They entered the VIP elevator. The video tour of the facility would commence just down the hall in a large but sprawling security area featuring a bank of six elevators, on which workers arrived for their shifts that ran nonstop throughout the week. Since the facility was perpetually under some form of construction, Hosseini explained that the workers were divided between the builders and the technicians actually responsible for getting Natanz on line and for supervising the complex enrichment process.
“For security reasons,” Hosseini elaborated, “we can’t have our workers commuting in a traditional fashion. So their living quarters rest in cleverly disguised areas in the facility above us. They need only walk down a single hallway and press a button to arrive here. For reasons of privacy, those living quarters will not be included in the historical record you are making. But all you see before you here will be.”
That included a bevy of armed Revolutionary Guardsmen who checked the workers through security after scanning their badges and radiation wrist monitors. The badges, dangling from neck lanyards, were color-coded according to the various areas of the complex each worker was permitted to access. Based on what McCracken saw, he could safely estimate the facility likely employed from 750 to 1,000 workers in total. The men looked nervous and McCracken noticed they didn’t tote lunches or anything else along with them, since bringing anything in from the outside was strictly prohibited.
From here, the vast bulk of the workers entered a changing area complete with banks of open lockers where they dressed into the proper radiation suits, some emerging with helmets outfitted with respirators as well. Attempting to enter an unauthorized area by any of them would automatically trigger an alarm. McCracken played director by instructing the soldiers accompanying him to aim the lights appropriately and shot the arrival scenes from several different angles, just as the Israeli filmmaker who was well acquainted with Najjar’s award-winning work, had taught him. Interesting how so much of his career had been about learning how to wield various weapons. For this mission, it was a camera instead.
“Let’s move on,” Hosseini said, tightening his shoulders and starting to fidget impatiently when the process of shooting the parade of arriving workers drew on too long for him.
“I’m not finished.”
“This isn’t important.”
McCracken kept shooting. “I’ll decide what’s important.”
Hosseini covered the lens with his palm. “There are scheduling concerns you aren’t privy to. I’d ask you to respect that.”
McCracken lowered the camera and then continued the process, as instructed, with shots of banks of offices manned by analysts and technicians busy monitoring and collating data from their respective departments. Again, McCracken could feel Hosseini getting antsy, impatient through Blaine’s painstaking process of capturing the more mundane areas of the facility that he explained could be edited out later. The minister led him past the huge pumping station lined with layer upon layer of piping connected to massive vats of constantly recycled water used in the cooling process so crucial to any nuclear facility.
“The temperature of the gases contained in the centrifuges,” Hosseini explained, “could easily reach several thousand degrees, a recipe for explosion if the cooling mechanisms ever failed.”
“You should consider doing the narration yourself, Minister,” said McCracken.
Hosseini started to smile, then caught the sarcastic gleam in the filmmaker’s eyes, and did not bother to add that previous efforts to destroy or destabilize Natanz had targeted either the cooling systems or computer controls themselves, both via highly sophisticated computer viruses, including the infamous STUXNET. But the effects of those attempts had been negligible at best, as well as temporary. The facility was state of the art and then some, far beyond what the best intelligence reported, as if Iran had been laying low the whole time, wanting the world to think they were constructing something second rate. On the contrary, Iranian nuclear scientists and physicists had clearly borrowed, or stolen, the best nuclear technology available, a fact further confirmed at the next stop on the historical record.
“Our crowning achievement,” the minister announced proudly. “The centrifuges. Truly a gift from Allah,” he added, almost reverently, as they reached a thick glass wall that looked down into a huge sunken space filled with an equally endless chain of finely polished centrifuges. “Behold what has allowed us to enrich more U-235 than the world could possibly realize.”
McCracken could hardly estimate how many there were of the standing, interconnected cylindrical machines outfitted with thick spaghetti-like strands of hosing that joined up with a sophisticated network of overhead piping. Technicians wearing the most advanced of the radiation suits walked the floor holding iPad-sized electronic notebooks, on which they constantly added readings gleaned from computerized readouts over each grouping. McCracken had seen all the various estimates of how close Iran was to actually being able to build a bomb. He was no expert, but he didn’t have to be to know all those estimates could be thrown out the window since, if this particular part of the facility was an accurate indicator, the enrichment process was proceeding at a staggering clip.
He continued to film through the glass, as Hosseini smiled smugly.
“The Americans thought they were setting us back with their computer virus,” Hosseini said contemptuously. “But while they were attacking our software, we were perfecting our hardware. This facility has a benchmark of fifty percent purity, but we have been achieving sixty. Sixty! Can you believe it? And it is impregnable, beyond the reach of even their most advanced bunker-busting bombs. Your video is capturing a change in the world’s balance of power that will endure for lifetimes.”
McCracken glanced at the minister briefly, then just kept shooting.
“Make sure you miss nothing,” the minister ordered.
“Please don’t tell me how to do my job.”
“Consider it constructive advice, so you may record for history what only a handful of men will ever see for themselves… .”
Hosseini continued to drone on, leaving McCracken to understand one thing with perfect clarity.
After hearing so much, there was no way he was getting out of there alive.
Natanz, Iran: The present
The next stop on the tour featured the most terrifying part of the process: extraction and storage of the super-enriched, bomb-ready uranium. It was done in a room sealed behind foot-thick steel walls, by men working remotely in isolation suits with gloved hands that maneuvered robotic pincers in six-inch-thick glass enclosures. The same kind of high-tech machines used in the most complex microsurgical procedures. The nature of this last stage of the process was painstaking, maddening. Only relatively small amounts of the uranium were produced from each extraction, but over time—and not very much of it at all—those small amounts would add up to more than enough to construct a dozen or more fissionable bombs that could change the balance of power in the world.
McCracken had already done plenty of imagining of what a single one of those bombs could do in the hands of a terrorist organization, or in an all-out war with Israel, to the point where he found himself wondering if he was witnessing the end of the world through a view plate. Especially since Iran had done a surprisingly effective job at subterfuge, leading the world to believe their nuclear technology was woefully outdated.
“You are pleased with the shots?” Hosseini asked him.
“I’m starting to be.”
“Good, because I’ve saved the best for last,” said Hosseini.
They approached an ultrahigh security area behind what looked to be a wall formed of lead and steel, accessible through a single door guarded by a half-dozen Revolutionary Guardsmen standing rigid and purposeful. Warnings that included
NO FURTHER ADMITTANCE
and
EXTREME RADIATION DANGER
in both English and Farsi lined the walls, although McCracken doubted anyone who worked in the Natanz facility would venture this far without proper clearance.
Prior to being permitted entry, both he and Hosseini donned thicker radiation suits that included helmets complete with respirators and faceplates. The suit, with the texture and heft of an astronaut’s, came complete with a separate radiation monitor, which was currently reading in the green.
“You will leave the batteries and lights behind,” the minister instructed. “Take only your camera from this point.”
They moved toward the single entry to the high-security area where guards checked Hosseini’s identification and subjected him to a pupil scan. Once cleared, both the minister and McCracken submitted to a thorough pat-down that included a careful inspection of McCracken’s Canon camera. From there, one of the guardsmen used a metal access card dangling from a chain strung from his neck to open a sliding door that vanished inside the wall McCracken could now see was upwards of a foot thick.
The door accessed a second security area where Hosseini placed his palm against a wall scanner under the watch of yet two more Revolutionary Guardsmen. A light flashed green and a second steel door slid open to reveal a clear wall that looked like glass but was more likely some acrylic polymer.
“Here is where the world will change forever,” the minister announced proudly.
And McCracken found himself watching what could only be the final step in the process of turning the uranium harvested from the centrifuges into the final ingredient required to actually build a nuclear bomb.
“Your camera,” Hosseini prompted.
“I’m sorry,” McCracken said through his faceplate, raising the Canon to his now thickly padded shoulder. “I was …”
“I understand,” the minister said, smiling through the plastic. “Even the objective artist cannot help but be impressed by such moments. It’s starting to look like this was all worth it, yes?”
“I believe it just might be.”
McCracken began recording, focusing on the process unfolding through the lens. Calcium was being added to the uranium hexafluoride gas to create highly enriched uranium metal by an army of workers working at individually sealed stations inaccessible from one another. The calcium would react with the fluoride to create a salt, forming the pure-uranium metal that would turn Iran into a nuclear power in a mere few months, if not weeks. McCracken knew the warheads would be assembled here or, perhaps, in another secret area located below this one, regardless of Hosseini’s claims to the contrary.
“Make sure you get everything,” Hosseini was saying. “History is unfolding before our eyes.”
Back outside the high-security area, McCracken stripped off his more secure radiation suit, noticing that his Revolutionary Guard escorts remained while his lights and batteries were nowhere to be seen.
“They will be returned to you later,” the minister explained. “Decontamination procedures, you understand.” His eyes fell on the camera now resting at McCracken’s feet. “We will need to keep your camera with us as well.”
“I was never informed of this.”
“You’ve done your job. Now you must let us do ours.”
“My equipment is sacred!” McCracken protested, his entire body stiffening.
“This is for your own good.”
“I won’t leave here without my camera.”
Hosseini stepped forward and laid a hand gently on his shoulder in an unusual show of deference. “I understand, my friend. You have done wondrous work here today and you have the gratitude of the entire Republic for your efforts. I am truly sorry for the inconvenience.”
“But what am I to do about my edit?” Blaine asked, conceding. “Any filmmaker knows therein lies the true art.”
“In time, in time. All to be covered in due course,” Hosseini said, suddenly reluctant to meet his eyes. “These men will escort you back up to ground level and see you safely back to Tehran. Go with Allah and know that the Republic will always hold you in the greatest respect and reverence.”
And then McCracken felt a guardsman grasp him at either arm just forcefully enough, steering him back down the hallway as Minister Hosseini forced a smile and wave his way.