Farah, who had no clue what was going on, exchanged a glance with Nancy, then got up from the table.
‘’I will go get her equipment from the hotel’s safe, sir.’’
‘’Thank you, Lieutenant. By the way, you will be coming with us as well.’’
Nancy rose from the table as well after wiping her mouth clean and gave a cautious look at Mousavi.
‘’Since you love cat and mouse games, I suppose that it will be pointless for me to ask where we are going, Major?’’
‘’You have that right, Miss Laplante.’’ Replied Mousavi, grinning. ‘’Make sure that you have spare batteries and memory cards for your camera, miss: you may be filming quite a lot on our coming trip. Bring as well your little tripod, so you can do a sitting interview.’’
‘’You are decidedly poking my curiosity, Major. Well, I will go to my room then. I won’t be long.’’
True to her word, Nancy was back in the hotel lobby six minutes later, her camera bag slung over one shoulder and her laptop bag over another. She had also taken the time to change quickly into a nice, embroidered chador, in anticipation for an interview with a probably very senior Iranian official. Farah was close behind her, carrying her satellite link unit and her satellite telephone. The group loaded up in two official cars that then drove to the Doshan Tappeh airbase, situated in the eastern suburbs of Tehran. There, they boarded a waiting Mi-8 HIP helicopter that headed South after taking off. As they were flying at medium altitude, Mousavi shouted at Nancy to be heard above the rotor noise.
‘’Since we are intent on passing a message through you, I will ask you to do your comments on camera in English, Miss Laplante. The officials you will meet at our visit sites can speak English anyway.’’
‘’Understood. You said ‘sites’. We are visiting more than one location?’’
‘’You will be visiting in succession three separate sites, miss. Don’t ask yet which ones: I will let you be surprised.’’
Nancy was by now convinced that something very big was coming but didn’t insist and instead watched the view outside the helicopter.
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After about one hour and a half of flight, with Nancy estimating the distance flown to be about 300 kilometers, what looked like a large industrial complex in the middle of the arid Iranian landscape appeared ahead in the distance. Nancy was now suspecting where she was going, having seen in the past satellite pictures of a similar facility. She looked at Mousavi with a surprise that was not faked.
‘’The Natanz nuclear fuel enrichment complex? You are going to let me film it?’’
Mousavi nodded his head, not surprised that she had recognized the complex so quickly: after all, she was a military intelligence officer.
‘’We will do better than that, miss: we will give you the grand tour of our centrifuge halls and fuel processing lab.’’
‘’But, spies would kill to be able to have such a look. Why do you do this, Major?’’
Mousavi looked at her gravely, measuring his words.
‘’What I am going to tell you is for your ears only, as I am not supposed to tell you this. Promise me that you will not repeat this to anyone.’’
‘’You have my solemn word, Major. Thank you for your confidence.’’
‘’You are welcome, miss. We are going to give you access to our secrets because we need peace, badly. This war and the economic sanctions against us are killing the economy of my country. On the other hand, we need to develop our nuclear power network, in prevision for the day when our petroleum reserves will start to dry out.
We do not intend to do like those Arab Gulf states that are selling away their oil and spending their profits on luxuries as if there is no tomorrow. We are a proud people and we will not stand to be told by others what we can or cannot do. The fears some have about us planning to produce nuclear bombs are unjustified and, if I may say so, quite hypocritical, considering that Israel already has plenty of nuclear weapons and has not signed the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, contrary to Iran. You have spoken to many Iranians up to now, both high-level officials and common citizens, miss. Do we appear to you to be a suicidal, irrational people?’’
Nancy eyed Mousavi, sensing his motives and discreetly reading his mind telepathically.
She could see only genuine worry in his thoughts. She thus nodded somberly her head once.
‘’I believe you, Major. It is true that, if Israel chose to, it could erase most of Iran with its nuclear-tipped missiles. So, you would be ready to sue for peace, on the 404
condition that you could continue producing low-enriched uranium for electricity production purposes?’’
‘’That is the gist of it, miss, although other, more senior officials will tell you in more detail what we want. Just keep your mind as open as your eyes.’’
‘’I always do that, Major.’’ Replied Nancy soberly. She now realized how important this assignment could become, not simply in terms of personal professional success, but in terms of aiding the cause of peace. However despicable many past actions of the Iranian government had been, this offer appeared to her both fair and legitimate and could also be the only reasonable way out of a war that had proved to be as pointless as it had been costly to all involved. If this could help bring back peace, then she would be most proud to contribute to it.
With the express permission of Mousavi, Nancy took out her camera while the helicopter was still approaching the Natanz complex, filming an overall view of it from the air. She now could see distinctly the numerous anti-aircraft guns and missiles positioned around the facility to defend it from air attacks. She also noticed and filmed what looked like six large bomb craters over what she knew to be the location of the two underground centrifuge halls of Natanz. Some surface buildings had also been hit by bombs and either completely destroyed or heavily damaged.
‘’I see that the Israeli Air Force has tried at least once to shut down this facility, Major.’’
‘’They actually tried twice, the last time being last Wednesday, at the same time that they struck our Tehran nuclear research center. It however cost them a few planes.
The director of the complex will be able to tell you more about that in a few minutes.’’
Once on the ground and out of the helicopter, her group was picked up by two cars that then drove to the heavily protected vehicle access entrance to the underground part of the complex. Nancy was careful to film that part, along with anything else that would support the legitimacy and authenticity of her future report about this visit. She finally stepped out of her car with Major Mousavi and Farah Qalibaf inside an underground garage, where five men were waiting for them. Three of them were armed and wore the uniforms of the IRGC, while the two others were civilians wearing white lab coats. Mousavi presented one of the civilians to Nancy, speaking in English.
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‘’This is the director of the Natanz complex, along with his head nuclear physicist.
You will excuse me if I don’t give you their names, but too many of our scientists have been murdered abroad by Israeli agents while they were attending scientific seminars and conferences. Gentlemen, this is Miss Nancy Laplante, on assignment for CNN, or should I say Captain Laplante, of the Canadian Army Intelligence Branch.’’
The director nodded in understanding, while the three armed IRGC men eyed Nancy with fierce suspicion. It was obvious to Nancy that those three disapproved of her visit, but had most probably been told to put up and shut up. She shook hands with both scientists and, more cautiously, with the IRGC officers.
‘’I am honored that I was considered worthy of seeing and filming your installations, gentlemen. I certainly intend to stress your present openness when I will present my report to the public.’’
‘’That is indeed one of the main reasons for your visit here, miss.’’ Said the director. ‘’Since you have another site to visit later on, we will go straight to what is of interest to you here. If you will follow me, we will go to our two underground centrifuge halls.’’
As they walked to four small electric golf carts waiting nearby, Nancy asked a question in English to the director while filming him on the move.
‘’Mister Director, I saw from the air that at least six bombs exploded on the roofs of your centrifuges halls. Did they penetrate or caused damage to the halls?’’
‘’No! Apart from a number of lamps broken by the shock waves, we did not suffer any damage to the halls. A number of surface support buildings were however hit and heavily damaged. As for the Israelis, they lost three aircraft in their last attack. You will be able to see their crash sites from the air on your way out. Major Manousheh will show to Major Mousavi where the crash sites are on his map.’’
‘’Did any of the pilots eject?’’
‘’I didn’t see for myself, but I was told that nobody parachuted out, miss.’’
Answered the director. Nancy discreetly scanned his mind, to find that he was telling the truth. The same could not be said however about the said Major Manousheh, whose thoughts betrayed him. Nancy then knew that one Israeli pilot had been captured alive and had been transferred since to Tehran for interrogation. She felt sorry for the pilot, who was certainly facing some very harsh interrogations, if not to say tortures, with his future fate grim indeed. Such treatment of prisoners of war was unfortunately way too common in the Middle East, but there was nothing she could do about that.
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The four carts rolled along a wide tunnel for maybe a hundred meters before stopping in front of a set of heavy armored doors guarded by two soldiers. Stepping out of the carts with the others, Nancy kept filming as they walked through the now opened steel doors, entering a huge, brightly lit hall that was about 250 meters long by 100
meters wide. Nancy sucked her breath in at the sight of the thousands of cylindrical tubes set at the vertical and interconnected by small pipes. A strong humming noise came from the tubes, which Nancy recognized as centrifuge units meant to enrich uranium. The director of the facility then spoke up for her benefit while she filmed the hall slowly from left to right, so that the number of centrifuges could be counted later on.
‘’As you can see, this centrifuge hall is perfectly intact and functional and was not damaged by the Israeli penetrating bombs. You will excuse me if I don’t say how much overhead protection there is above our heads, miss.’’
‘’That is quite understandable, Mister Director.’’ Said Nancy, still filming. ‘’May I walk around the hall a bit?’’
‘’Please
do,
miss.’’
Not stopping her filming for even a second, so that nobody could easily say later that parts were censored out, she started walking slowly along a narrow lane made between two rows of centrifuges, counting her steps as she went. The hall proved to be full to capacity with centrifuges, with a total of 5,000 of them just in this single hall, if she counted right. Returning to the waiting director, she pointed at the multitude of pipes running overhead.
‘’I suppose that these pipes collect the enriched gaseous uranium to some processing lab, Mister Director?’’
‘’That is correct, miss. We have 5,000 centrifuges in this hall, plus another 5,000
centrifuges in a second hall that we will now go visit. We will then visit the uranium processing lab, where the gaseous uranium deemed sufficiently enriched is returned to solid state and molded into fuel rods compatible with our civilian reactors. Before you ask, we do not enrich uranium to more than five percent of Uranium 235. We will prove that to you later.’’
Already having some footage that the CIA and other intelligence agencies would kill to obtain, Nancy exited the hall and got back on one of the carts, which then rolled to another set of guarded armored doors. There, she visited and filmed another centrifuge 407
hall similar to the first one, which was also intact and fully functional. The crux of her visit to Natanz however proved to be the uranium processing lab and its adjacent uranium fuel storage vault. There, the head physicist explained to Nancy while she filmed the process used to turn the enriched uranium into fuel pellets to be used in nuclear reactors. She was able to film every part of that lab, then was shown the heavily shielded vault where the fuel pellets produced in the complex were stored while awaiting shipment to nuclear power plants. The director of the complex then made a signal and a technician wearing a protective suit approached them, a small but seemingly heavy cylinder in his hands. The director took the cylinder and ceremoniously presented it to Nancy.
‘’Miss Laplante, I am now handing to you a sample fuel pellet in its protective container, sample that you will be able to carry with you out of Iran, so that international experts can examine it and see for themselves that it is not weapons-grade uranium.’’
Nancy only hesitated for a second before shaking her head.
‘’I appreciate your gesture, Mister Director, but you don’t have only to convince me: you want actually to convince other governments of this. They could claim that this sample was chosen among your stocks of low-enrichment uranium. Thus, I would rather not take it. I would however suggest that you let me choose by myself the sample that I will carry away. That way, others may be more inclined to believe that it truly represents what you produce here.’’
The Iranians around her were speechless for a moment, some apparently incensed by her skepticism, while others thought her argument over. Both the director and the head physicist finally nodded their heads at her suggestion.
‘’You do have a valid point, Miss Laplante. I will have a protective suit readied for you right away.’’
The director gave a few quick orders in Farsi to a technician, who then nearly ran away.
The man was back two minutes later with a protective suit, complete with gloves and mask, which Nancy quickly donned in an adjacent locker room. Before stepping inside the shielded uranium vault, Nancy gave her camera to Farah.
‘’Can I ask you to film me through the viewing port of the vault while I’m inside, Farah? It would add credibility to my report.’’
Farah threw a look at Major Mousavi, who nodded, then accepted the compact video camera, which she had seen Nancy operate many times.
‘’Alright, Miss Laplante: I will play cameraman for you.’’
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‘’Thank you! You may start filming now.’’
Accompanied by an Iranian technician also wearing a protective suit, she then entered the vault and looked around at the hundreds of leaden containers inside the shielded room before starting to walk slowly among them. Stopping besides a container she had chosen totally at random, she pointed it to the technician.
‘’Can you please collect a pellet from that container for me, mister?’’
‘’Right away, miss.’’
The technician opened the container and, using a pair of long pincers, extracted from it a cylindrical uranium pellet and put it in a lead transport tube, sealing it. He closed the container, then gave the sealed tube to Nancy.
‘’You now have a fifteen-gram pellet of 4.9 percent enriched uranium, miss. This lead tube will allow you to safely carry it without risks of irradiation, as long as you don’t open it.’’
‘’Thank you very much, mister. How much radiation will the sealed tube emit?’’
‘’Only four milligrays a day, miss, not enough to be significant for your health but enough to be detected with a Geiger counter.’’
‘’Then this will be perfect. Thank you again. I am now ready to come out.’’
Nancy followed the technician out of the vault and went first to the locker room to remove her protective gear, then returned in the lab, the precious sample tube in one hand. There, she bowed her head to the director.
‘’I am sure that my viewers will appreciate your openness today, Mister Director.
May I have something to mark this tube properly?’’
‘’Of course, Miss Laplante.’’ Said the director, who then quickly got a sticker label, a felt pen and a radioactive warning sticker. Gluing the warning sticker first on the tube, he then applied the label and wrote the date and the words ‘enriched uranium’ and
‘Natanz complex, Iran’ on it. He smiled while giving back the tube to Nancy.
‘’Here you are, Miss Laplante. Please don’t lose it.’’
Nancy laughed briefly at that while accepting the tube and putting it inside a pocket of her camera bag.
‘’Now, that would be truly embarrassing. I will guard this with my life, Mister Director, I promise. I will have to arrange for an official of the International Atomic Energy Agency to be ready to take custody of this sample once out of Iran, though.’’
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‘’We can contact the IAEA on your behalf to arrange such a handover, miss. We know how to contact them, believe me.’’
‘’I do not doubt that for a second, mister. What now?’’
‘’I believe that we are now finished for your visit to Natanz, miss. Major Mousavi will now escort you back to your helicopter, which will then transport you to another uranium enrichment facility, near Qom, where the same procedure as here will be repeated.’’
Nancy couldn’t help snap her head towards Mousavi.
‘’But, nobody has had access to that site before, not even the IAEA.’’
‘’That’s right, Miss Laplante, although I suspect that you did examine spy satellite photography of that underground complex as a military intelligence officer.’’
‘’I effectively did, Major.’’ Confessed calmly Nancy, making more than one Iranian stiffen. ‘’Today seems to be truly a day of revelations, wouldn’t you say?’’
‘’It certainly is, Miss Laplante. If you may now follow me out of the plant: we still have a lot to show you.’’
Nancy had a hard time believing her luck as she accompanied Mousavi and Farah Qalibaf out of the underground installations, the precious uranium sample tube in her bag. This was going to make one truly explosive report.
Taking off in their freshly refueled helicopter, they headed towards the North-West and Qom, but Mousavi had the pilot do a short detour first, making them pass over the site of an airplane crash. Already guessing what it was, Nancy filmed the site, zooming in particular on a piece of tail that bore a registry number that was still readable, as Mousavi explained.
‘’This is one of the three Israeli aircraft that were shot down while attacking Natanz. We won’t have time to go film the two other crash sites, but I hope that this will be enough to convince the West that the Israelis can’t do as they please over our territory.’’
‘’Well, I certainly recognize this as being the remains of a F-15, an aircraft type not in Iranian service. The tail registry number should be enough for me to identify it formally later.’’
After a fifty minute flight, the helicopter landed again, this time on a pad at the foot of a rugged and denuded hill, near a heavily reinforced cave entrance. That visit to 410
the secret Qom uranium enrichment facility was very similar to that in Natanz, except that this facility proved to have even more centrifuges than Natanz. A bit over an hour later, Nancy was out of the facility, a second uranium sample tube in her camera bag, and their helicopter took off yet again, this time flying towards the nearby city of Qom, one of the holiest sites in Iran. The suspicions she had then about what she was going to do there quickly turned to incredulity when, after landing in Qom, a car took her, Farah and Major Mousavi to a secluded and closely guarded residence near the city’s Grand Mosque. She looked at Mousavi as a cleric came to lead them inside.
‘’It can’t be! The Supreme Leader never gave interviews to reporters, as a matter of principles.’’
Mousavi acknowledge her remark with a nod, replying with utmost gravity.
‘’That is why you are being made to be the first to interview him, Miss Laplante.
Our message needs to be taken seriously by all, and cannot be dismissed without grave consequences. I know for a fact that you do not agree with much of his views, but be polite and respectful, for your own sake. If he gets angry with you, then there is no telling what could happen to you, and I then won’t be able to help you further.’’
Nancy didn’t get angry at that advice and didn’t take it as an attempt at intimidating her: Mousavi was simply giving her some common sense advice and it would be only prudent for her to heed it. She was indeed far from home…or from any truly safe location for her, and now would not be a good time to demonstrate her powers or abilities.
06:25 (Iran Time)
Sunday, December 01, 2013 ‘A’
Departure lounge, Mehrabad International Airport
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Nancy exchanged a last kiss on the cheek with Farah Qalibaf when the lounge’s loudspeaker announced that the boarding for her plane to Ankara was starting.
‘’I am happy to have known you, Farah. And say goodbye to your sister Leila on my behalf.’’
‘’I will. Try not to let the Israelis catch you.’’
‘’Ha! I’m actually more worried about all the critics in the United States who will not like my report and will try to brand me as a stooge of Iran.’’
‘’I can see your point, Nancy. Still, be careful.’’
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‘’I will, Farah. Maybe we will see each other again, hopefully not while pointing guns at each other.’’
‘’I hope not as well: you would then most probably win that duel, knowing the way you shoot.’’
Nancy grinned at her reply.
‘’That’s one way to look at it. See you, Farah.’’
Picking up her (very) precious camera bag that still contained the two uranium sample capsules, plus the bag for her satellite link unit and a small travel bag, Nancy walked to the boarding gate, showing her ticket to the air hostess there and following the other passengers towards the waiting Iran Air Airbus A-320. Seventeen minutes later, the airliner was starting to roll towards the main runway, followed from the airport’s observation lounge by the eyes of both Farah Qalibaf and Hossein Mousavi. The latter spoke in a low voice as the airliner was taking off.
‘’I hope that she will be able to convince enough people in the United States and Europe to take our offer seriously and at least lift some of the sanctions against us.’’
‘’I believe that Nancy will do her honest best, sir. Not because I think that she supports our cause, I am not that naïve after all, but because she truly wants to see peace return to the Middle East.’’
‘’Some past Western philosopher supposedly wrote that, after having good friends, the next most important thing to wish for is to have good enemies. I guess that Captain Laplante would be one such good enemy.’’
‘’Quite right, sir, quite right.’’ Replied Farah, sounding regretful.
14:36 (Standard Eastern Time) / 23:06 (Iran Time)
International Arrivals Hall, Terminal 1
John F. Kennedy International Airport
New York City, U.S.A.
Having either flown or waited in airport lounges for over sixteen hours today, Nancy was dead tired and quite fed up of being inside a plane when she was finally able to step out of the Air France Airbus A-340 that had brought her from Paris, her last transfer point on her journey from Tehran. She was however also happy and satisfied, having been met at Ankara International Airport by a heavily escorted representative of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. That representative, after proving to 412
Nancy who he was, had taken custody of her two precious Iranian enriched uranium samples and had given her in exchange an official IAEA nuclear material transfer receipt. As for her equally precious video reports of yesterday, she had sent them via satellite link to CNN last night, after spending many hours in her hotel room editing them and adding English translations to them where needed. She however still had the original video files with her, both in her laptop and on USB flash drives, in case the transmitted copies later proved incomplete. From what she had been able to gather from the news flashed on radio and television that she had seen in Paris, her video reports were already causing a mighty steer, both in the United States and in Europe, apart from causing untold embarrassment and rage in Israel. She definitely would be persona non grata in that latter country now, but she couldn’t care less about that. Right now, she only wanted to get to a hotel in New York, so that she could have a long night of sleep before flying to Atlanta, where CNN was anxious for her to appear in a scheduled evening panel interview with a number of media commentators and international affairs experts. That panel interview already promised to be both challenging and passionate, as her prediction to Farah Qalibaf that some in the U.S.A.
would try to discredit her was coming true. She was however ready and eager to confront her critics and to paint them as the hypocrites they were.
Emerging with other passengers of her flight in the arrival hall of Terminal 1, Nancy suddenly had a bad feeling at the sight of the abnormal number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and of Port Authority Police officers present in the hall, many of them waiting behind the customs reception stations and staring at the gate she had just emerged from. One ICE agent then pointed her from fifty meters away and spoke in his portable radio. Four burly Port Authority policemen immediately converged on her, one hand on the grips of their pistols and with hard looks on their faces. Nancy then understood with a pang of anger and frustration that her name probably was still on the American official no-fly list, where the Israeli accusations against her had landed her.
‘’Miss Laplante, step out of the line now and raise your hands, NOW!’’ Shouted one o