Financial Times:

Miles Johnson and Max Seddon

At 9.40am on August 4 last year, Mahan Air flight W598 from Tehran landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.

Among the passengers was Ali Kalvand, a 43-year-old Iranian nuclear scientist, accompanied by four employees he claimed were from DamavandTec, his consulting firm based in a small office in the Iranian capital.

But it was a cover story. The Iranians had flown to Russia on diplomatic service passports, some sequentially numbered and issued on the same day just weeks before the trip took place.

One of the delegation was an Iranian nuclear scientist who, according to western officials, works for SPND, or the Organisation of Defensive Innovation and Research. This secretive military research unit has been described by the US government as “the direct successor organisation to Iran’s pre-2004 nuclear weapons programme”.

Another was the former head of a company placed under US sanctions for being a procurement front for the SPND. The last of the group, these officials say, was an Iranian military counter-intelligence officer.

An FT investigation has found that this Iranian delegation visited Russian scientific institutes that produce dual-use technologies — components with civilian applications but which, experts say, have potential relevance to nuclear weapons research.

The investigation is based on letters, travel documents and Iranian and Russian corporate records, as well as interviews with western officials and non-proliferation experts.

The FT has also reviewed a letter sent by DamavandTec to a Russian supplier in May last year, in which Kalvand expressed interest in acquiring several isotopes — including tritium, a material that has civilian uses but can also be used to boost the yield of nuclear warheads, and is tightly controlled under international non-proliferation rules.

The trip to Russia took place at a time when western governments were noticing a pattern of suspicious activity carried out by Iranian scientists, including attempts to procure nuclear-relevant technology from abroad.

Western intelligence agencies believe that Iran used to have a secret nuclear weapons programme — separate from its efforts to produce nuclear fuel — which Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei halted in 2003.

Before Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, Washington believed that Iran had not reauthorised this weapons programme. But the US did warn that Iran had taken steps that would make it easier to build a bomb, if it ever chose to do so.

In May, the US imposed fresh sanctions on the SPND, warning that it was working on “dual-use research and development activities applicable to nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery systems”.

Experts who have tracked Iran’s nuclear activities say its strategy has long been one of calculated ambiguity. This approach avoids explicit violations of non-proliferation norms while potentially using scientific research to advance the sort of knowhow that would be useful if Tehran ever decided to go for a bomb.

“We consider that a type of nuclear weapons programme — to shorten the timeline,” says David Albright, an expert on Iran’s nuclear programme who now leads the non-profit Institute for Science and International Security. “The leadership didn’t want to make a decision to build a weapon for various reasons. This sort of research activity allowed the leadership to say there was no nuclear weapons programme.”

The Iranian mission to Russia uncovered by the FT does not in itself provide evidence that would alter western assessments of Iran’s nuclear programme, but it is one example of the sort of activity that has raised concerns in western intelligence agencies.

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