The covert trip by Iranian nuclear experts to Russia
An Iranian delegation visited Russian scientific institutes that produce dual-use technologies — components with potential applications in nuclear weapons research
Miles Johnson and Max Seddon
© FT montage/Getty ImagesAt 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.
The aftermath of Israeli strikes on Iran’s Isfahan nuclear facility in June © Israel Defence Forces/EYEPRESS/ReutersIran has consistently denied ever pursuing nuclear weapons, citing a religious fatwa from Khamenei banning their use.
It maintains that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.
The Iranian government, when contacted through its embassy in the UK, did not respond to questions about the trips to Russia, or their purpose.
Russia’s position, meanwhile, has always been that it is opposed to an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment.
The documents do not say what technology or knowledge the Iranian delegation was seeking from these companies in Russia.
However, multiple non-proliferation experts contacted by the FT say that the backgrounds of the delegates, the types of Russian companies they met, and the subterfuge used during their travel are suspicious.
“It’s disturbing that these types of people can have this type of meeting in Russia, given the state Russia and Iran are in,” says Pranay Vaddi, who served until January 2025 as senior director for non-proliferation at the US National Security Council.
“Regardless of whether the Russians are sharing components or technology . . . [SPND] is an organisation who would be applying that specifically to nuclear weapons work.”
Ian Stewart, a former UK Ministry of Defence nuclear engineer who is head of the Washington office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), adds: “While there could be benign explanations for these visits, the totality of the information available points to a possibility that Iran’s SPND is seeking to sustain its nuclear weapons-related knowhow by tapping Russian expertise.”
In early 2024, Kalvand received a request from Iran’s defence ministry — to use his small company DamavandTec to arrange a sensitive delegation to travel to Moscow, according to correspondence seen by the FT.
By May, Kalvand, a fluent Russian speaker with a degree in nuclear physics from Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, received a letter at his consulting firm from Oleg Maslennikov, a 78-year-old Russian scientist.
The letter invited Kalvand and four named individuals on an official visit to one of Maslennikov’s companies in Moscow.
This delegation, however, was not a group of ordinary academics.
According to Iranian corporate filings, sanctions designations and western officials, members of the travelling party are strongly connected to SPND.
Of all the different elements of Iran’s nuclear activities, SPND is one of the most controversial and closely watched by western intelligence agencies.
A top-secret research unit under the control of Iran’s defence ministry, the US has described SPND as being “primarily responsible for research in the field of nuclear weapons development”.
It was established in 2011 by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a physicist who alongside his close associate, Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, was sanctioned by the United Nations in 2007 for being “involved in Iran’s nuclear or ballistic missile activities.”
Fakhrizadeh was widely regarded as the architect of Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons programme, known as the Amad Plan.
Iran has long denied the existence of Amad or any nuclear weapons activity.
In 2021, Abbasi-Davani told an Iranian state newspaper that Fakhrizadeh later set up SPND, and was able “to resist, and to strengthen the organisation”.
The US and the board of governors of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) believe SPND has become the institutional successor to Amad.
In 2010, Abbasi-Davani narrowly survived an assassination attempt, when a man on a motorbike attached a bomb to his car as he drove to work in Tehran.
A decade later, in 2020, Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in a roadside ambush widely attributed to Israel, using a remote-controlled, AI-guided machine gun.
After Fakhrizadeh’s death, Abbasi-Davani pledged to continue his work.
“We must take this science to universities and spread it throughout society,” he told the state-run Iran newspaper.
“In this way, it functions like an operating system — and no one can shut it down by assassinating people.”
Tehran says that SPND is engaged in the “production, supply and support of products in the field of modern defense” but does not mention involvement in nuclear research.
The US government has repeatedly sanctioned SPND and its affiliates over the past decade for work on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and for “materially contributing to the proliferation of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] or their means of delivery.”
In 2024, Iran’s parliament officially recognised SPND under Iranian law for the first time, placing it under the control of the defence ministry, and ultimately the personal authority of Iran’s Supreme Leader.
The act, which said it was intended to “continue and consolidate the path of the scientist, Martyr Mohsen Fakhrizadeh”, made the SPND’s budget exempt from parliamentary scrutiny, and gave it the legal authority to create commercial and academic subsidiaries.
The August trip by Kalvand and his delegation had been meticulously planned.
Maslennikov had named the four men who Kalvand would be travelling with in his initial May invitation, showing they had been selected months in advance.
Ahead of the visit, Kalvand replied in a letter to Maslennikov that the purpose was “to discuss and agree on technical and production aspects of electronic device development” and “to consider general potential paths for expanding scientific co-operation”.
Kalvand also sent copies of the delegation’s passports to Russia a month before the trip.
Copies of these passports seen and corroborated by the FT show that on June 12 last year Iran’s foreign affairs ministry issued two fresh diplomatic service passports for two of the officials who would be travelling with Kalvand to Russia.
These passports, which are only granted for people travelling abroad on official state-sanctioned visits, have sequential issuance numbers.
The first of these passports was in the name of Javad Ghasemi, 48, who was previously the CEO of Paradise Medical Pioneers, a company the US sanctioned in 2019 for being a nuclear weapons-related procurement front under the control of the SPND.
Fakhrizadeh, the SPND’s founder, had held a role at the company before his death.
According to Iranian corporate filings, Ghasemi is connected through overlapping past and current directorships with at least five SPND officials or companies under US sanctions.
Ghasemi is also currently the CEO of Imen Gostar Raman Kish, an Iranian company which provides nuclear safety and radiation testing equipment, and which has numerous connections through its current and former directors to SPND and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s elite military force.
Ghasemi’s predecessor as CEO was Hossein Ali Agha Dadi, an IRGC general.
Agha Dadi has held senior roles in companies responsible for Iran’s ballistic missile and drone programmes, including development of the Shahed model given by Iran to Russia to attack Ukraine.
He still sits on Imen Gostar’s board.
One of the other diplomatic passports was issued in the name of Rouhollah Azimirad, who officials say is known to western intelligence agencies as a senior SPND scientist.
He is also associate professor at Malek Ashtar University of Technology, an establishment that the EU and UK have both sanctioned for being under the control of the Iranian defence ministry.
Azimirad is an expert in radiation testing and transportation, according to published research in scientific journals.
The most important delegate, according to experts, may have been nuclear scientist Soroush Mohtashami, who is affiliated with Iran’s Amirkabir University of Technology.
Mohtashami is an expert on neutron generators, which can be used in industrial and medical processes, but also as components that help trigger the explosion in certain types of nuclear weapons.
The co-supervisor for his 2023 PhD was Abbasi-Davani.
Neutron generators, says Stewart of the CNS, are “key components for nuclear weapons”.
Mohtashami’s training under Abbasi-Davani appears to be “a direct link to the Amad plan,” says Nicole Grajewski, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
This sort of academic research, she says, is “published in journals, but it’s clearly related to weaponisation research.
These are areas that Iran probably needed to fill the gap on weaponisation, or discreet areas of weaponisation”.
The last member of the delegation was a 35-year-old man called Amir Yazdian, who unlike the others had no academic profile at all and does not appear on any type of Iranian corporate record.
Yazdian’s service passport was issued with a sequential number to Ghasemi’s.
Several western officials contacted by the FT confirmed that he was an employee of Iran’s defence ministry working in counter intelligence.
Western officials say that such officers routinely accompany sensitive delegations — not only to protect them, but to monitor their conduct and enforce operational discipline.
None of the men due to travel with Kalvand were identified in his correspondence with Russia by these affiliations, and were only described as travelling on behalf of DamavandTec.
Established in 2023, DamavandTec presents itself as a civilian scientific consultancy.
On its website, it claims to have “an experienced team in the field of technology transfer” and aims to “develop scientific communication” between academic and research institutions.
Kalvand is not the only one of its leaders with long-standing ties to Russia.
The company’s chair, Ali Bakouei, a 59-year-old nuclear physicist, heads the department of atomic and molecular physics at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran.
Bakouei earned his PhD from Moscow State University in 2004 and later served as the Islamic Republic’s scientific envoy to Russia.
Both Kalvand and Bakouei have maintained close ties with Russia’s nuclear research establishment.
They visited the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, a prestigious Russian atomic centre, in 2016.
Kalvand attended a conference on particle accelerators in Novosibirsk in 2023.
While DamavandTec outwardly seems to be the sort of consultancy that many academics establish, it appears to have ties to Iran’s defence ministry.
DamavandTec executive Laleh Heshmati, who is Kalvand’s wife, is also chair of MKS International, a company sanctioned by the US for covertly procuring technology for Iran’s ballistic missile programme on behalf of its defence ministry.
Once the delegation touched down in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport they stayed in Russia for four days.
During that time, the Iranian delegation visited Maslennikov’s Tekhnoekspert, as well as Toriy, a research facility located a short walk from the premises of the Polyus Science and Research Institute.
Tekhnoekspert is one of two companies owned by the Russian scientist based out of Polyus’ premises.
Polyus is a subsidiary of sanctioned state conglomerate Rostec, and was sanctioned by the US in the late 1990s for reportedly supplying missile guidance technology to Iran.
BTKVP, Maslennikov’s other company also based in the Polyus campus, is a supplier for the Russian defence ministry’s 18th Central Scientific Research Institute, according to court records — an entity under the control of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency.
Experts say it is highly unlikely the Iranians could have visited the Russian sites without approval from the FSB, Russia’s main security agency.
“You don’t get to go to those kinds of places without the FSB knowing that a foreigner is going,” says Matthew Bunn, who advised the White House on nuclear policy in the 1990s.
The research institutes they visited specialise in so-called “dual-use” technologies — components with legitimate civilian purposes but which can also support nuclear weapons development.
For more than a decade, SPND has attempted to covertly acquire such technology by circumventing western export controls, according to the US, as well as public comments by intelligence agencies in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Former intelligence officials told the FT that the organisation routinely uses intentionally ambiguous language and vague project descriptions to preserve plausible deniability.
According to Albright of the ISIS think-tank, Maslennikov’s expertise, combined with Azimirad’s background and the technical offerings of the Russian companies they met, suggest the delegation may have been pursuing information relevant to diagnostic tools for nuclear weapon tests.
Maslennikov has co-authored at least six academic papers on multi-beam klystrons — specialised vacuum tubes that amplify high-power radiofrequency signals.
While klystrons have a number of civilian uses, such as in particle accelerators, they also support nuclear weapons testing by powering flash X-ray systems, Albright says.
Flash X-ray systems can be used to capture ultrafast radiographic images of a nuclear weapon’s core during implosion simulations, allowing scientists to simulate a nuclear blast without detonating one.
“Our best estimate is that the Iranian delegation was interested in high-powered X-ray tubes for flash X-rays,” Albright says.
“Such systems are used for diagnostic tests of a nuclear weapon’s implosion mechanism.
We don’t know if the Iranians wanted just the technology or the actual tubes.”
Toriy, one of the Russian firms visited by the delegation, produces both pulse-action and continuous-action klystrons, as well as electron accelerators.
Toriy’s electron accelerators closely resemble those used in nuclear weapons testing.
Maslennikov’s other company BTKVP manufactures klystrons “of various power levels and frequency ranges” for radio relay and space communications.
Maslennikov also specialises in vacuum technology, which the SPND is suspected to have a particular interest in.
The US State Department in May sanctioned an SPND-linked company known as Ideal Vacuum for attempting “to procure from foreign suppliers, as well as indigenously fabricate, equipment that could be applicable in nuclear weapons research and development.”
The firm makes vacuum induction furnaces that can be used to melt weapons-grade uranium metal, according to Albright.
Maslennikov and Toriy did not respond to requests for comment when contacted by the FT about the visit by the Iranians.
The documents also suggest that the delegation’s interest extended beyond technical expertise to something far more sensitive: radioactive materials.
In late May last year, while Kalvand was arranging the delegation’s trip to Russia, he sent a short letter on DamavandTec-headed paper to Ritverc, a Russian supplier of nuclear isotopes.
Kalvand said DamavandTec wanted to obtain three radioactive isotopes, tritium, Strontium-90 and Nickel-63, for research purposes.
He did not specify what quantities were being requested.
Ritverc did not respond to request for comment on the letter.
Exports of each of these isotopes are tightly controlled.
Tritium in particular is considered by experts to be a proliferation red flag due to its role in nuclear weapons, particularly when the interest comes from defence-linked entities.
In large amounts it is a core input into creating a modern nuclear warhead, because it allows the explosive power of the device to be vastly amplified.
Tritium has civilian applications in lighting, medical diagnostics and fusion research — but its commercial use is limited and highly regulated.
Azimirad’s expertise in radiation transport and detection could potentially relate, according to Bunn, to the kinds of measurement systems involved in nuclear implosion testing, where tritium can be used.
The few reactors on earth that currently produce it are all doing so to boost nuclear warheads, according to William Alberque, a former head of Nato’s arms control, disarmament and WMD non-proliferation centre.
“Anybody asks for tritium and I automatically assume weapons,” says Alberque, now a senior adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum.
“With the klystrons I think, ‘You clever duck, it could be other things.’
You throw in tritium and I say, that’s a smoking gun.”
Even an unfulfilled request for tritium connected to SPND would trigger immediate concern among western counterproliferation agencies, experts say.
The FT has found no evidence that DamavandTec received the isotopes Kalvand requested.
Vladimir Putin and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian arrive for a meeting at the Kremlin in January. For years, Russia’s formal position has been to oppose the idea of Iran developing a nuclear bomb. © Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Sputnik/ReutersTwo former western officials told the FT that the US had last year picked up signs that SPND had engaged in dual-use knowledge transfers with Russia, as well as procuring physical items, that could be relevant to nuclear weapons research.
It was not clear to them, however, to what extent senior Iranian and Russian officials were aware of this activity.
Other western officials said that they had become aware of the SPND expressing an interest in acquiring various radioactive isotopes — not including tritium — but that the motivations for this interest had been unclear.
For years, Russia’s formal position has been to oppose the idea of Iran developing a nuclear bomb.
“Russia did not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
But it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t agree to do some technical exchanges [ . . .] that wouldn’t be critical for Iran, but important enough to check the box that they’re giving stuff in return,” one former US official says.
While Russia has long co-operated with Iran on civilian nuclear projects — and in the past worked with western countries and the IAEA to prevent nuclear weapons development — some experts say the war in Ukraine may have made Moscow more willing to loosen its adherence to non-proliferation norms in its dealings with Iran.
“The Russians do have a tonne of experience on nuclear and they have been willing to share that technology,” says Vaddi, now a senior nuclear fellow in the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We shouldn’t pretend that Russia hasn’t changed its view . . . It’s very much just one of the many tools in geopolitical competition now.”
Iranian Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf addresses mourners in Tehran last month during a memorial service for Iran’s nuclear scientists who were killed in Israeli attacks in June © Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/ReutersOn June 20, around a week into Israel’s military campaign against Iran, the Israel
Defense Forces announced they had struck the “headquarters of the SPND nuclear project” for a second time during the conflict.
At least eleven nuclear scientists were assassinated in the Israeli strikes.
Among them was Abbasi-Davani, Mohtashami’s PhD supervisor and the hardline nuclear official Israel had been trying to kill for nearly two decades.
In subsequently declassified intelligence, the Israeli military alleged that Abbasi-Davani had “remained involved in classified military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear programme and worked with “SPND personnel and the advancement of dual-use technologies”.
Much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure may have been destroyed or damaged after the Israeli and US attacks in June.
But some experts believe that the system SPND built — the personnel, the training, the technical continuity — is harder to eradicate.
“Israel can’t totally destroy Iran’s nuclear programme,” says Carnegie’s Grajewski.
“Because one of the things Iran has done is have those involved in the Amad plan train a cadre of younger scientists.”
A month before his death, Abbasi-Davani spoke with calm finality.
“Our power,” he said, “lies in our scientists.”
It was a warning from a man who hoped that he had already passed on the torch.
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