Like on Iraq the British press is used to transport the ‘threat’ of Iran to the English speaking public. This weekend the Telegraph as well as the Times have again excelled at this.

MI6 asset Con Coughlin peddles some scary secret Iranian companies working on parts for even more scary P-2 centrifuges and writes:

The companies, based on the outskirts of Tehran, are working on constructing components for the advanced P2 gas centrifuge, which can enrich uranium to weapons grade two to three times faster than conventional P1 centrifuges.
…
“If Iran’s nuclear intentions were peaceful there would be no need for it to
  undertake this work in secret,” said an official familiar with the intelligence reports.

These ‘secret’ second generation centrifuges are the ones on display at the Iranian president’s website and are producing low-enriched Uranium under the watchful eyes of the IAEA in Natanz.

The Sunday Times joins Coughlin with a renewed scare well known to anyone who watched the propaganda buildup for the war on Iraq: ‘Germ warfare’ fear over African monkeys taken to Iran

Hundreds of endangered monkeys are being taken from the African bush and sent to a “secretive” laboratory in Iran for scientific experiments.

…
Manji said scientists at the Razi Vaccine and Serum Research Institute in Iran had bought 215 vervet monkeys from him this year but he had become suspicious about their true motive, although he was still trading with them. They had “spent a lot of money” on getting the monkeys, even sending over scientists to check on each consignment.

“Iran is very secretive,” said Manji, who has been exporting monkeys for 22 years. “They said it [the monkeys] was for ‘our country’, for vaccine. [They said] ‘We don’t buy vaccine from anywhere; we prepare our own vaccine’.

There are a number of issues here.
The Razi institute is certainly not ‘secretive’. It even publishes its research in English.

The Times says:

The Razi institute, which was established in 1925, does legitimate research but does not publicly list on its website the use of primates in any of its current projects. Other animals being used for experiments, such as guinea pigs and mice, are mentioned.

The only category on that website that lists animals at all is labeled Products on the Market: Laboratory Animals. The Rezi folks do not have vervet monkeys to sell. They list animals they breed and can sell. They buy these apes because they do not have them. They don’t list them for sale because the don’t have any for sale.

According to the Times, the Iranian lab bought 215 of these apes when the total sales was in the multiple thousands. According to Primate-Freedom and Primate Info Net the U.S. uses about 45,000 of a world total of 80,000 primates for research.

The apes sold to Iran are considered as being of "least concern" of extinction by the Wisconsin University Primate Info Net and are regarded as a pest in some African countries. They are quite valuable for research because:

Specifically, vervets are important in studying high blood pressure and AIDS. They are one of the few species of nonhuman primates that naturally develops high blood pressure and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the ancestor of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is widespread throughout wild populations (Chakrabarti 2002; Ervin & Palmour 2003).

The Telegraph story is just a rewarmed stuff peddled three years ago by the anti-Iranian MEK cult, and the Times story is without any fact that points to anything else than normal pharmaceutical research in and by Iran.

Both these stories are part of a drumbeat. The U.S. press is somewhat cautious about such stories after the Judy Miller Iraq disaster. But these tales do creep into the public mind anyway with the help of the MI6 and these UK press organs.

Is that the purpose of their existence?