Pakistani centrifuges launched Iran's nuclear program 24 years ago

From the Mossad front DebkaLies:

Ex-foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati revealed for the first time that he brought Iran its first centrifuges for uranium enrichment as far back as 1986, escorting them on the flight from Pakistan aboard the private plane of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Revolution or Iran.

His disclosure was carried by the semi-official weekly Panjereh Saturday, April 24. According to debkaLie's Iranian sources, Velayati, today one of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's most influential advisers, is in charge of Tehran's nuclear diplomacy and the backroom planning of its tactics for resisting international pressure against its program.

The Panjereh report may therefore be assumed to have an ulterior motive - probably to make trouble between the United States and Pakistan while at the same time showing how the West was too feeble to stall Iran's nuclear program - not just in recent years but for almost a quarter of a century.

Our intelligence and counter-terror sources disclose that the centrifuges he brought in came with the first Pakistani technical specifications for building a bomb and missiles for their delivery. Velayati did not admit this. Neither did he disclose how much Iran paid for the prize. Our sources estimate that around $30 million was handed over to Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. A.Q Khan also ran a global nuclear black market run in conjunction with the Islamabad government, which was then headed by Gen. Zi ul-Haq, Pakistan's first military ruler.

There are other omissions in the long Velayati interview, such as where Khomeinei's aircraft landed to pick up the centrifuges, which he claims were loaded aboard the Iran-bound flight without the knowledge of the government in Islamabad. He also denies he ever met A.Q. Khan.
The key element of his account is the delivery date of Iran's first centrifuges.

It has always been conventionally assumed that Iran decided to go nuclear after it was defeated by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces in 1988. Khomeini's abject capitulation to the ceasefire terms dictated by Iraq was thought to have persuaded him that possession of an atomic bomb would save Iran from these humiliations in the future. However Velayati's new disclosure dispels that assumption, predating the covert creation of Iran's nuclear program by two years when Iraqi missiles were still blasting Iran and leaving whole cities, including districts of Tehran, in ruins.
Setting his Islamic Republic on the road to a nuclear bomb did not deter revolutionary leader Khomeini from maintaining that the Islamic faith bans the use of nuclear arms or any other weapons of mass destruction.

This double standard still governs Iran today. Supreme ruler Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, consistently argue that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic, while pushing forward their covert plans for a nuclear bomb full tilt.

As for Velayati's colorful past, debkaLie's intelligence sources report he has avoided foreign travel for some years because his name appears on several wanted lists as a mastermind of terror. Argentina, for instance, has a warrant out for his arrest as a suspect in engineering the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, the first Middle East terrorist outrage in Latin America, in which 29 people were killed and more than 250 injured.

http://www.debka.com/article/8740/