Irans president Mahmud Ahmadinedschad giving a speech at the uranium enrichment facility in Natans© Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/DPA

June, 17th, 2008: A café in Bursa, in western Turkey. Most of the customers are sipping their sweetened tea, chatting about Turkey’s national soccer team trouncing the Czech Republic 3-2 – and how they will do in the up-coming European championship quarter finals. At one table, three stately, earnest-looking men are huddled together, speaking in English. They look nervous.

Twice now, Turkish customs’ agents have stopped their shipments to Teheran. How are they supposed to get the damn German graphite into the country?

It is ten tons of the finest grain and highest density. Their clients in Teheran are running out of patience.

They need the premium grade graphite to build a nuclear missile.

And the three men at the coffee shop table are the ones with the know-how to smuggle embargoed goods into Iran. The man in the middle, Iranian Said Mohammad Hosseinian, has been the main supplier for the Iranian missile program for years.

The Iranians pay cash

He oversees a network of more than 100 front companies. Hans-Josef H., 63, born in Bavaria and raised in Cologne, has become a multi-millionaire by trading in graphite. He knows how to fake export documents and erase any traces leading to the final customer. His Turkish friend and partner, Nusret Iyici, works as the middleman for H.’s deals with Hosseinian. The Iranian pays him in cash, in rolls of dollar bills.

But now they have to give the Iranian some of that money back. A 60,000 Dollar deposit for the next deal. It has been stalled for months. H.’s graphite blocks are sitting at the edge of the Westerwald at his company in Buchholz-Mendt. The three men sitting in the smoky café debate different routes. Should they take it through Romania? Azerbaijan?

None of the ideas seem brilliant. Lost in thought, they don’t notice a Turkish secret service agent taking their picture.

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009. The day a smiling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he welcomes US President Obama’s call for a world free of nuclear weapons Hans-Josef H. enters Courtroom 10 at the Appellate Court in Koblenz. He is wearing a dark jacket and handcuffs.