Learning from Rafsanjani’s Memoirs

Secretary of State John Kerry broke with years of U.S. and international policy on Tuesday, indicating that revealing past details of possible military dimensions (PMD) to Iran’s nuclear program would be unnecessary to secure a final deal with Tehran. Accounting for PMDs, he said, is not essential to an agreement, as the United States already purportedly knows the contours of Tehran’s past military work.

“We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged,” Kerry said. He added, however, that “it’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped … in order to have an agreement to trigger any kind of material significant sanctions relief.”

Kerry did not specify the details of the military work in question, but he may have implicitly been referring to Iran’s cooperation with fellow rogue state North Korea. Indeed, the secretary’s statements come in the wake of the release of the latest volume of former president Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s memoirs, which highlight a potential nuclear nexus – one that suggests military cooperation as well – between the two regimes.

In the new volume, which covers the years 1992-93, Rafsanjani refers to a Supreme National Security Council meeting in December 1992 to discuss “transactions with North Korea,” as well as Pyongyang’s desperate appeals to secure oil deliveries from the Islamic Republic.

In previous volumes, Rafsanjani cryptically refers to “special and sensitive issues” discussed with North Korea, expresses interest in importing a “special commodity” from the hermit kingdom in return for oil, and orders Iranian officials to obtain unspecified “technical know-how” from the country. Rafsanjani also recounts efforts to establish “procurement channels for sensitive commodities” from Pyongyang, and boasts of how ships from the communist state managed to unload a “special commodity” on Iranian shores without being spotted by the U.S. Navy.

Kerry’s latest puzzling remarks may or may not be specifically referring to Iran’s ties to Pyongyang. In either case, Iran’s experience with North Korea should serve as a warning of the dangers of glossing over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear record. Vigilance on the PMD file can keep Kerry from finding himself ridiculed in a future volume of Rafsanjani’s memoirs – the one revealing how Iran manipulated negotiators into lifting sanctions while allowing it to reach nuclear-weapons capacity.

Ali Alfoneh is a senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @Alfoneh