Diplomats from an unidentified country and a Washington research organisation considered close to the International Atomic Energy Agency have alleged in recent weeks that Iran has covered two buildings at a military site to hide a clean-up of evidence of nuclear weapons related testing.

But two former intelligence analysts with experience in interpreting satellite photographs of military facilities say the coverings on the two buildings in published images of the site don’t appear to be aimed at hiding anything.

The images show bright pink coverings on the buildings, which the former intelligence officers say are a clear signal of an Iranian desire to focus U.S. and Western attention on the site – probably to ensure that it would not be focused on activities at another site at the huge Parchin military base.

Meanwhile, the IAEA has not been able to explain why Iran would only begin a clean-up of the Parchin site after the IAEA requested access in January 2012 if it was hiding activities linked to a Ukrainian scientist whose work with Iran had been revealed in the news media beginning as early as October 2008.

The site in question at Parchin military base is where the IAEA said in a report last November that Iran had installed a large explosives containment vessel supposedly to test nuclear weapons designs. The IAEA has been requesting access to the base to see if there is evidence of such tests.

Former IAEA team leader in Iraq Robert Kelley, one of the few genuine specialists in the world on remote detection of nuclear activities, has noted a host of reasons for doubting that such a vessel ever resided at the Parchin site.

The latest episode in the months-long media story of alleged Iranian “sanitisation” of the site at Parchin began with an Aug. 22 story by the Associated Press Vienna correspondent, George Jahn, who has long served as a conduit for a stories leaked by Israeli officials.

The story quoted two “senior diplomats” from countries which the writer could not identify as saying that the “sanitisation” of the site by Iran to remove evidence of past nuclear weapons-related research was now in its “final stages”, and that some of the clean-up was being “hidden from spy satellite views by screens set up over the site”.

Two days later, satellite images of the site dated Aug. 15 published by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) showed that the “screens over the site” were actually pink coverings on two buildings.

A Reuters article published earlier that day reported unidentified “diplomatic sources” saying the building which the IAEA believed housed an explosives chamber had been wrapped in “scaffolding and tarpaulin” that was “hiding any sanitisation or other activity there from satellite cameras”.

ISIS director David Albright speculated in an Aug. 24 commentary that the purpose of the pink coverings on the buildings “could be to conceal further cleanup activity from overhead satellites or to contain the activity inside”. He even suggested that the pink tarp “could provide a cover for the demolition of the buildings, or portions of them while also containing the spread of potentially contaminated debris.”

The Aug. 30 IAEA report, after listing the “activities and resultant changes” at the site since January, referred to the images as showing two buildings had been “shrouded” and declared that its “ability to verify the information on which its concerns are based has been adversely affected”.

The former intelligence analysts, however, have told IPS the suggestion the pink shrouds are meant to hide clean-up activities from satellite cameras lacks credibility. Both asked not to be identified in this article.

One of the former officers, who is familiar with efforts by foreign states seeking to cloak military activities from U.S. spy satellites said, “Someone in Iran wanted the two buildings to be imaged.”

The pink covers suggest “misdirection”, he said, likening it to past efforts by the former Soviet Union and North Korea to focus the attention of U.S. intelligence on a specific site in order to keep it away from activities elsewhere.

Another former intelligence analyst with expertise on photo imagery said the pink shrouds “are exactly the opposite of concealment activities”. The Iranians “know perfectly well that the site is being imaged”, the former officer said.

“This is the ‘shiny object’ that the Iranians want ISIS, the gullible Western press and others to pay attention to,” he explained, most likely to distract attention from activities elsewhere.

New information in the Aug. 30 IAEA report further undermines the credibility of the larger allegation that Iran has been trying to “sanitise” the site in question in 2012. The report notes that the agency notified Iran of that location only in January 2012, and that satellite imagery of the site for the period from February 2005 to January 2012 shows “virtually no activity at or near the building housing the containment vessel”.

If Iran were actually hiding nuclear experiments using an explosives containment vessel at the site, it would have been forced to take action on the site after October 2008, when it learned that Western intelligence agencies had already identified the Ukranian scientist the IAEA claims helped build the container.

The New York Times reported Oct. 9, 2008 that IAEA officials were “investigating whether a Russian scientist helped Iran conduct complex experiments on how to detonate a nuclear weapon, according to European and American officials.”

That was an obvious reference Vyacheslav Danilenko, a Ukrainian who had worked for decades in the Soviet nuclear weapons complex, although he specialised in nanaodiamond production from explosives, before working in Iran from 1996 to 2000.

Danilenko’s first name and first initial of his last name, as well as the fact that he had worked in Iran in the late 1990s, were published in Der Spiegel Jun. 17, 2010.

If Danilenko had indeed been collaborating with Iran on a containment vessel for tests of nuclear weapons designs at Parchin, those news media reports would have triggered Iranian efforts to clean up the site years earlier. But nothing happened – even after the IAEA November report, which discussed the alleged vessel – until the IAEA informed Iran that it wanted to visit Parchin and provided Iran with the specific location in January.

Robert Kelley, who has been top nuclear inspector for the IAEA and project leader for nuclear intelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory and director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, has expressed strong scepticism about the idea that the site shown in a series of satellite images has anything to do with high explosives, much less nuclear weapons-related work.

“The building in question is not a classical HE (high explosives) building, that is for sure,” Kelley told this writer in late May.

Kelley and the two former intelligence officers agree that the building is far too close to a major divided highway to be involved in such sensitive testing activity. The ex-intelligence analysts also said there are no special security features as would be expected of a top secret facility.

In an article in Jane’s Intelligence Review Jun. 18, Kelley noted that the presence of a berm only on one side of the building is consistent with standard radiation shielding for an X-ray machine to check the quality of missile components manufactured at Parchin rather than high explosives experiments.

Kelley also noted a number of reasons why the story of the containment vessel at Parchin doesn’t add up.

If Iran were testing nuclear weapons designs, Kelley wrote, it is doubtful that it would have done so with a containment vessel such as the one described by the IAEA, noting that the U.S., Soviet Union, China, Iraq and South Africa did such experiments in the open in remote secret locations, because it enabled them to make more rapid progress.

The UK used a containment vessel, he wrote, only because of the absence of such remote locations.

David Albright has argued that Iran needed the vessel to hide its experiments from spy satellites, but Kelley pointed out that Iran could have simply used a temporary tent to cover the experiments.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Western governments acted this week to escalate their accusations that Iran has “sanitised” a site at its Parchin military complex to hide evidence of nuclear weapons work, showing satellite images of physical changes at the site to IAEA member delegations.

The nature of the changes depicted in the images and the circumstances surrounding them suggest, however, that Iran made them to gain leverage in its negotiations with the IAEA rather than to hide past nuclear experiments.

The satellite images displayed to IAEA member delegations last week by Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts, head of the agency’s Safeguards Department, showed a series of changes that have been the subject of leaks to the news media: a stream of water coming out of building at a site at Parchin, the demolition of two small buildings nearby the larger building said by the IAEA to have housed a bomb containment chamber, and earth moved from locations north and south of the site to be dumped further north.

After seeing the pictures, U.S. Permanent Representative to the IAEA Robert Wood declared, “It was clear from some of the images that were presented to us that further sanitisation efforts are ongoing at the site.”

But the activities shown in those satellite images show activities appear to be aimed at prompting the IAEA, the United States and Israel to give greater urgency and importance to a request for an IAEA inspection visit to Parchin in the context of negotiations between Iran and the IAEA.

The latest round in those negotiations, on a framework for Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA in clearing up allegations of Iranian covert nuclear weapons work, failed to reach agreement on Friday.

Greg Thielmann, former director of Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said in an interview with IPS that he didn’t know whether the changes shown in satellite images were part of a conscious Iranian negotiating strategy.

But Thielmann, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, said the effect of the changes is to “increase the interest of the IAEA in an inspection at Parchin as soon as possible and to give Iran more leverage in the negotiations”.

Nuclear scientist Dr. Behrad Nakhai, who has worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and has closely followed the Iranian nuclear programme, suggested that Iran’s overt moves on the ground in Parchin were a way of ensuring that “the IAEA will be enticed to give more value to an inspection of Parchin”.

Muhammad Sahimi, who tracks news coverage and comments on Iran’s nuclear programme for the PBS Frontline website “Tehran Bureau”, agrees that Iranians have made physical changes at Parchin “so that when they allow the IAEA in, it will be at a higher price.”

Access to Parchin has been recognised implicitly by both sides as Iran’s primary leverage in those negotiations. The IAEA has insisted in the past that a Parchin visit must come before reaching the broader agreement on Iran’s cooperation, while Iran has refused to permit a visit to the site until after the agreement is completed.

The primary issue in the wider negotiations has been whether the IAEA inquiry would end if and when Iran answered all the questions that have been raised by the IAEA or whether the agency could go back to issues as often and whenever it wishes.

The charge that Iran is “sanitising” the site assumes that Iran believes that the activities depicted would actually eliminate traces of radioactivity left by past testing at the site. The IAEA’s November 2011 report said a bomb containment chamber at the site in Parchin was used for “hydrodynamic tests”, which utilise natural or depleted uranium as a substitute for fissile materials.

David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), suggested in a May 11 commentary on the organisation’s website that if Iran were to grind down the surfaces inside the building, collect the dust, wash, repair and repaint the building, and remove dirt around the building, it “could be effective in defeating environmental sampling”.

But nuclear experts have contradicted that statement.

Pierre Goldschmidt, IAEA deputy director general for safeguards from 1999 to 2005, responding to an e-mail query from IPS, said, “Of course there would be no way to remove the traces of a nuclear test.”

Robert Kelley, who has also managed the U.S. Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, which specialises in high-tech detection of nuclear activities, and was twice head of the IAEA’s Iraq inspection group, has pointed out that Syria was sent to the U.N. Security Council over a site that had been bulldozed a year earlier, because of the discovery of tiny microscopic particles of radioactive material found at the site.

Nuclear scientist Nakhi told IPS, “It’s virtually impossible to clean up radiation from a nuclear test completely.”

Referring to the charges of “sanitisation” of evidence of nuclear device testing at the Parchin site, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator with the European states in 2005, told IPS, “Iranians know very well they couldn’t eliminate traces of such activities even after 10 years.”

Mousavian, now a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, added, “I personally cannot imagine there were such activities (at Parchin).”

Nakhai told IPS in an interview that Iranian officials are also acutely aware of the fact that everything they are doing at the site is being tracked by Western intelligence agencies through spy satellites. The physical changes that have been carried out at Parchin, he suggests, have been deliberately staged for IAEA and Western governments.

“The only thing missing is somebody waving to the satellite,” Nakhai said.

Former nuclear negotiator Mousavian would not comment directly on whether Iran is making changes at Parchin to increase the negotiating value of permitting an IAEA inspection. But he told IPS that, in the end, “Iran will be able to prove to international opinion that this accusation is false.”

The satellite images shown to the IAEA member states were published May 8 and May 30 by ISIS. The earlier picture, dated Apr. 9, showed the stream of water emanating from the building. The later images, dated May 25, showed the demolished buildings and evidence of earth having been moved.

The changes at the site shown on the satellite images appear to have one thing in common: they all lead the IAEA directly to places on or near the site where environmental sampling can be done easily by an IAEA team.

The water shown in the Apr. 9 image appears to collect in a ditch a short distance away from the building. Former IAEA senior inspector Kelley observed in a May 23 article on the website of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that the IAEA team would have an “enhanced opportunity” to find uranium particles if they were present.

The May 25 image appears to show soil that was moved from two areas roughly 200-300 feet north of the building and 100-200 feet south of it. But the soil appears to have been carried only a few hundred feet further north of the former area where it is shown to have been dumped, offering another inviting target for environmental sampling.

The fragments of the two small buildings demolished at the site appear in the May 25 image to have been left intact on the ground, offering yet another easy objective for a visit.

Meanwhile, the building in which the IAEA reported last November that a bomb containment chamber had been used for hydrodynamic testing and the soil south and east of it remain undisturbed.

The claim that such a chamber was installed at a site in Parchin in 2000 to carry out hydrodynamic testing appears to depend entirely on unspecified information from unidentified countries. The claim has been challenged by Kelley, making no sense on the basis of technical inconsistencies.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.