Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
Project Censored | July 10, 2008
Source: Global Research.ca, August 5, 2005, Title: “Halliburton Secretly
Doing Business With
Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team,” Author: Jason Leopold
According to journalist Jason Leopold, sources at former Cheney company
Halliburton allege
that, as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key components for
a nuclear reactor to
an Iranian oil development company. Leopold says his Halliburton sources
have intimate
knowledge of the business dealings of both Halliburton and Oriental Oil
Kish, one of Iran’s
largest private oil companies.
Additionally, throughout 2004 and 2005, Halliburton worked closely with
Cyrus Nasseri, the vice
chairman of the board of directors of Iran-based Oriental Oil Kish, to
develop oil projects in
Iran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team.
Nasseri was interrogated
by Iranian authorities in late July 2005 for allegedly providing
Halliburton with Iran’s
nuclear secrets. Iranian government officials charged Nasseri with
accepting as much as $1
million in bribes from Halliburton for this information.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton first became public knowledge
in January 2005 when
the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars
gas-drilling project to
Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based
Halliburton that is registered
to the Cayman Islands. Following the announcement, Halliburton claimed
that the South Pars gas
field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. According to a
BBC re****t,
Halliburton, which took thirty to forty million dollars from its Iranian
operations in 2003,
“was winding down its work due to a poor business environment.”
However, Halliburton has a long history of doing business in Iran,
starting as early as 1995,
while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company. Leopold
quotes a February 2001
re****t published in the Wall Street Journal, “Halliburton Products and
Services Ltd., works
behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower
block. A brochure
declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is
based in the Persian
Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is “non-American.” But like the sign over the
receptionist’s head,
the brochure bears the company’s name and red emblem, and offers services
from Halliburton
units around the world.” Moreover mail sent to the company’s offices in
Tehran and the Cayman
Islands is forwarded directly to its Dallas headquarters.
In an attempt to curtail Halliburton and other U.S. companies from
engaging in business
dealings with rogue nations such as Libya, Iran, and Syria, an amendment
was approved in the
Senate on July 26, 2005. The amendment, sponsored by Senator Susan Collins
R-Maine, would
penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore
subsidiaries as a way
to legally conduct and avoid U.S. sanctions under the International
Emergency Economic Powers
Act (IEEPA).
A letter, drafted by trade groups representing cor****ate executives,
vehemently objected to the
amendment, saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite
terrorist attacks on the
U.S. and “greatly strain relations with the United States primary trading
partners.” The letter
warned that, “Foreign governments view U.S. efforts to dictate their
foreign and commercial
policy as violations of sovereignty often leading them to adopt
retaliatory measures more at
odds with U.S. goals.”
Collins sup****ts the legislation, stating, “It prevents U.S. cor****ations
from creating a shell
company somewhere else in order to do business with rogue,
terror-sponsoring nations such as
Syria and Iran. The bottom line is that if a U.S. company is evading
sanctions to do business
with one of these countries, they are helping to prop up countries that
sup****t terrorism—most
often aimed against America.
UPDATE BY JASON LEOPOLD
During a trip to the Middle East in March 1996, Vice President Dick Cheney
told a group of
mostly U.S. businessmen that Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and
Libya to foster better
relation****ps, a statement that, in hindsight, is completely hypocritical
considering the Bush
administration’s foreign policy.
“Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S.
Congress that I find
disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation
but a number of others
as well,” Cheney said. “I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . .
There seems to be an
assumption that somehow we know what’s best for everybody else and that we
are going to use our
economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like.”
Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton Cor****ation at the time he
uttered those words.
It was Cheney who directed Halliburton toward aggressive business dealings
with Iran—in
violation of U.S. law—in the mid-1990s, which continued through 2005 and
is the reason Iran has
the capability to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
It was Halliburton’s secret sale of centrifuges to Iran that helped get
the uranium enrichment
program off the ground, according to a three-year investigation that
includes interviews
conducted with more than a dozen current and former Halliburton employees.
If the U.S. ends up engaged in a war with Iran in the future, Cheney and
Halliburton will bear
the brunt of the blame.
But this shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has been following
Halliburton’s business
activities over the past decade. The company has a long, do***ented
history of violating U.S.
sanctions and conducting business with so-called rogue nations.
No, what’s disturbing about these facts is how little attention it has
received from the
mainstream media. But the public record speaks for itself, as do the
thousands of pages of
do***ents obtained by various federal agencies that show how Halliburton’s
business dealings in
Iran helped fund terrorist activities there—including the country’s
nuclear enrichment program.
When I asked Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, a couple of years
ago if Halliburton
would stop doing business with Iran because of concerns that the company
helped fund terrorism
she said, “No.” “We believe that decisions as to the nature of such
governments and their
actions are better made by governmental authorities and international
entities such as the
United Nations as opposed to individual persons or companies,” Hall said.
“Putting politics
aside, we and our affiliates operate in countries to the extent it is
legally permissible,
where our customers are active as they expect us to provide oilfield
services sup****t to their
international operations. “We do not always agree with policies or actions
of governments in
every place that we do business and make no excuses for their behaviors.
Due to the long-term
nature of our business and the inevitability of political and social
change, it is neither
prudent nor appropriate for our company to establish our own
country-by-country foreign policy.”
Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while
Vice President Cheney
was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S.
sanctions.
An executive order signed by former President Bill Clinton in March 1995
prohibits “new
investments (in Iran) by U.S. persons, including commitment of funds or
other assets.” It also
bars U.S. companies from performing services “that would benefit the
Iranian oil industry” and
provide Iran with the financial means to engage in terrorist activity.
When Bush and Cheney came into office in 2001, their administration
decided it would not punish
foreign oil and gas companies that invest in those countries. The
sanctions imposed on
countries like Iran and Libya before Bush became president were blasted by
Cheney, who gave
frequent speeches on the need for U.S. companies to compete with their
foreign competitors,
despite claims that those countries may have ties to terrorism.
“I think we’d be better off if we, in fact, backed off those sanctions (on
Iran), didn’t try to
impose secondary boycotts on companies . . . trying to do business over
there . . . and instead
started to rebuild those relation****ps,” Cheney said during a 1998
business trip to Sydney,
Australia, according to Australia’s Illawarra Mercury newspaper.
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