A familiar name surfaced on June 13 in news reports following Israeli strikes on Iran: Fereydoun Abbasi, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
According to the Iranian news agency Tasnim, Abbasi was one of the prominent Iranian nuclear scientists killed in Israeli air attacks that Israel said were aimed at preventing Tehran from building a nuclear weapon.
Abbasi had been in the headlines before: In 2010, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt when a motorcyclist attached an explosive device to his car in Tehran, part of a string of attacks targeting Iranian nuclear scientists.
I met Abbasi in 2007, when the Iranian government opened up some of its nuclear facilities to journalists to showcase what it described as its peaceful nuclear intentions. My visit to Iran included a visit to the city of Isfahan to tour the uranium conversion facility there. Iran’s primary enrichment facility in Natanz, which was hit in Israel’s June 13 strikes, was not on the itinerary.
During my stay, I was able to arrange an interview with Abbasi, who at the time officially held an academic position at Shahid Beheshti University in north Tehran (the website listed him as vice-president for student and cultural affairs, responsible for student healthcare and accommodation, among other things. He also taught nuclear engineering).
Home-Grown Nuclear Research
The primary thrust of Abbasi’s work, he said, was to encourage home-grown Iranian nuclear research. Sanctions and restrictions on studies abroad, he said, had made it difficult for Iranian students to pursue studies in the field.
“Because of the limitations imposed on the Iranian students by the Westerners -- and more than any other country, by the United States government -- these limitations were imposed on Iranian students outside Iran in order to deprive them of access to the study and work in the nuclear field and related engineering fields,” he said. “We decided to start the effort to bring the know-how here.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Abbasi continued, Iranian students were able to pursue study in Russia.
But this wasn’t about just a simple quest for scientific knowledge. Abbasi also complained about export-control restrictions that slowed down Iran’s ability to acquire some technology.
“We had to go through nonconventional ways to get the information we needed, either by relying on our young people or getting them for our friends outside of Iran,” he said.
The interview was a lengthy one. Abbasi ended with a long digression on the history of Iran in the 20th Century: the coup d’etat that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the fall of the Shah during the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War (“the war that was imposed on us”).
Iranian Hostage Crisis
It was a hardliner’s take on history. The Iran hostage crisis that began in 1979, he said, was a necessity: “Although we know it wasn’t according to the international norms, we stormed the den of espionage [the American embassy] and we did so in order to show the world that Americans are trying to stage a coup d’etat in Iran and apply some regime change here so that they return the Shah’s regime back to the country.”
And the current international concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Abbasi claimed it was simply a screen, a pretext for putting pressure on Iran.
“The nuclear issue is a good excuse now to be used for the propaganda against Iran in the region. If the nuclear issue is not the base issue, there would be other things that would be mentioned. For example, I can say definitely after the nuclear issue there are some other things that the Western countries would put forward – like women’s rights, children’s rights, Iran’s judiciary system.”
He did acknowledge one thing: That technology can serve more than one purpose.
“The Iranian nuclear issue is something like oil, like medicine, like agriculture. And they should know that if you can peel the skin of an orange with a knife, you can kill somebody with it as well.”
A few weeks after the interview, Abbasi would be designated by the UN Security Council for his involvement in Iran’s proliferation-sensitive nuclear activities. The designation listed him as a senior Defense Ministry and Armed Forces Logistics scientist with links to the Institute of Applied Physics.
