DUBAI, July 14, (Agencies): Iran could prevent even “a single drop of oil” passing through the Strait of Hormuz if its security is threatened, a naval chief said on Saturday, as tensions simmer over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Tehran will increase its military presence in international waters, said Ali Fadavi, naval commander in Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
“If they (the US) do not obey international laws and the IRGC’s warnings, it will have very bad consequences for them,” Fadavi said, according to Iran’s Fars News Agency.
“The IRGC’s naval forces have had the ability since the (Iran-Iraq) war to completely control the Strait of Hormuz and not allow even a single drop of oil to pass through.”
Fadavi added: “IRGC special naval forces are present on all of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ships in the Indian Ocean and to its east and west, to prevent any movement.
“This IRGC naval force presence in international waters will increase.”
Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz shipping channel, through which 40 percent of the world’s sea-borne oil exports passes, in retaliation for sanctions placed on its crude exports by Western powers.
The sanctions were imposed over Iran’s nuclear programme, which the West suspects is aimed at creating an atomic weapon. Iran says the programme is for peaceful energy purposes.
The United States has beefed up its presence in the Gulf, adding a navy ship last week to help mine-clearing operations if Iran were to act on threats to block the strait.
Tehran said last month it was building more warships, in part to guard Iranian cargo ships from pirates, and Iranian military leaders often assert Iran’s strength in the region and dominance in the Strait of Hormuz.
Military analysts have cast doubt on Iran’s willingness to block the slender waterway, given the massive US-led retaliation it would likely incur.

Equipment
US investigators believe two men indicted on charges of conspiring to send materials to Iran via Hong Kong and China were trying to acquire sensitive equipment and materials used to construct uranium enrichment centrifuges, a law enforcement official said on Friday.
The materials and components the suspects were trying to obtain comprised almost “everything you need to build gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment,” the official told Reuters.
At least some of the materials the suspects, Parviz Khaki, an Iranian, and Zhongcheng Yi, a resident of China, sought were eventually delivered to purchasers in Iran, the official said. But US investigators are unsure exactly how much of the material ordered by the two men made it to Iran.
A federal grand jury has indicted the two men on charges of conspiring to send materials from the United States to Iran that could be used in an Iranian nuclear program, the Justice Department said on Friday. It said Khaki had been arrested in May in the Philippines, while Yi remains at large.
US investigators believe the case demonstrates China and Hong Kong have now become key bases for middlemen used by Iran to evade US and other western sanctions designed to restrict the sale of nuclear-related technology to Iran.
The US law enforcement official added, however, that there was no evidence the Chinese government had been aware of, or sanctioned, the alleged technology transfers.
Using front companies, the Justice Department said in a press release, Khaki and Yi tried to buy specialized equipment and raw materials used to build the kind of centrifuges that Iran is currently using to enrich uranium for what it says are peaceful purposes.
Those kinds of centrifuges can be used to enrich uranium isotopes to weapons grade. US and allied intelligence agencies believe Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not yet given the order to begin weapons-grade enrichment or build a nuclear bomb.

Sensitive
Among sensitive items the federal indictment accused the men of seeking to acquire were 20 tons of maraging steel, 40 tons of aluminum alloys, mass spectrometers and vacuum pumps.
At one point, said an official, one suspect emailed the other complaining about the quality of a Chinese alloy that was being purchased. The suspect insisted the material they acquired had to be made in America, said the official.
The indictment said the men succeeded in illegally exporting lathes and nickel-alloy wire from the United States to China and then to Iran around June 2009, according to the indictment filed by the Justice Department.
It said the men purchased the materials from US companies without divulging the ultimate destination. They also did not have export licenses required for shipments to countries such as Iran that are under US sanctions.
At least some attempts to obtain materials failed, the indictment says.
Khaki allegedly began talking with an undercover US federal agent in 2009, including in emails in which he tried to acquire radioactive source material. The emails continued into 2011, the indictment says.
Lisa Monaco, assistant attorney general for national security, said the indictment “sheds light on the reach of Iran’s illegal procurement networks and the importance of keeping US nuclear-related materials from being exploited by Iran.”
“Iranian procurement networks continue to target US and Western companies for technology acquisition by using fraud, front companies and middlemen in nations around the globe,” Monaco said in a statement.
The 24-page indictment was handed up by a grand jury in Washington on Thursday and released on Friday. It does not name the US companies that Khaki and Yi allegedly approached.

Bomb
Britain’s foreign spy chief has reportedly warned that Iran is two years away from acquiring nuclear weapons, but analysts said he was assuming Tehran is actually developing the bomb.
MI6 boss John Sawers gave a rare public speech to civil servants in London saying that British agents had prevented Iran from producing a nuclear weapon as early as 2008, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported Friday.
But Sawers said the threat of Iran becoming “a nuclear weapons state” was now only “two years away”, said the Telegraph, citing Civil Service World, a newspaper for senior ministry officials and lawmakers which reported the event.
Should Iran finally acquire nuclear weapons, the intelligence chief warned that Israel and the United States “would face huge dangers”, hinting at the increased likelihood of military action, according to the Telegraph article.
Iran since 2010 has been subject to severe international economic sanctions over its controversial nuclear programme, which Western powers believe masks an atomic weapons drive — despite repeated denials by Tehran.
But analysts said Sawer’s comments pointed to an assumption that Tehran was already developing a nuclear weapon.
“Most Western intelligence agencies believe that Iran has not made the decision to acquire a nuclear weapon, but is amassing the capability to weaponise when it decides to do so,” analyst Dina Esfandiary of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies told AFP.
“He (Sawers) seems to be completely glossing over that,” she said.
“At the moment, Iran has enough low-enriched uranium for four or five bombs if further enriched,” she said, explaining that only highly-enriched uranium can be used for weapons.
Patricia Lewis, an international security expert at London’s Chatham House think-tank, said she was surprised by the claims that MI6 had stopped Iran getting nuclear weapons by 2008.
“I am surprised by the date because, if you look at IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) documents, the general understanding is that any weapons activities that Iran had stopped in 2003,” she told AFP.
She said that in Sawers’s speech there were “assumptions there as to how you define a weapon ... whether Iran has developed a warhead, whether it has the technology to do it.”
The Telegraph quoted Sawers as saying Iran was “determinedly going down a path to master all aspects of nuclear weapons”, and that “Israel and the United States would face huge dangers if Iran were to become a nuclear weapon state.”
He said that without MI6’s efforts, “you’d have Iran as a nuclear weapons state in 2008 rather than still being two years away in 2012,” according to the article.
The report comes as the United States unleashed a fresh wave of sanctions against Iran on Thursday, ratcheting up pressure to convince Tehran to take seriously concerns about its disputed nuclear programme.
Iran has repeatedly said it will not give up its nuclear ambitions, which it insists are purely peaceful.
Lewis said one purpose of Sawers’s speech appeared to be to send a message to both Iran and Israel.
“To Israel he is saying: ‘they do not have them (weapons). Do not stop them, give us time. To Iran he is saying: ‘we know what you’re doing’. He is trying to make Iran nervous,” Lewis said.
“He is also issuing a warning to the rest of us that Israel may be prepared to act if they think they have only got until 2014.”