New details have been leaked of how the Israeli spy agency Mossad smuggled out Iranian nuclear documents earlier this year, but the material does not appear to provide evidence that Iran failed to abide by its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers.
The information reported Sunday shed more light on the daring Mossad operation but offered few other details beyond what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in April, when he unveiled what he said was a trove of secret Iranian nuclear documents dating back to 2003 seized by Israeli intelligence.
The Israeli leader argued that the 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs of the Iranian program dubbed “Project Amad” provided more reason for President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal with world powers.
A photo Israel says it obtained of a building at the Parchin military site, housing a test chamber for high-explosive experiments.
Iran maintains the entire document trove is fraudulent
The New York Times reported Sunday that Israeli agents had six hours and 29 minutes to break into the nondescript nuclear facility in a commercial district of the Iranian capital, Tehran, before the guards arrived in the morning. In that time, they infiltrated the facility, disabled alarms and cut through safes to remove the secret documents before leaving undetected.
It said certain documents appeared to demonstrate that Iran had worked to “systematically assemble everything it needed to produce atomic weapons,” but noted that exculpatory information could have been left out of the hand-picked documents shown to its reporter.
The Washington Post reported that Iran “was as on the cusp of mastering key bomb-making technologies” when the program ended last decade.
The Associated Press was not provided access to the new details of the Mossad operation.
There was no immediate comment from Netanyahu’s office.
New York Times also reports that agents were carrying blowtorches that burned at some 2,000 degrees Celsius to cut through the safes. The report suggests that Israel may have had help on the inside, since it says that the Mossad agents knew exactly which safes to break into – leaving many of the others untouched. At the end of the night, the agents fled with half a ton of secret materials, including 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs containing files, videos and plans.
The Iranians began storing the files at the warehouse after signing a landmark 2015 accord on its nuclear program with the United States, European powers, Russia and China. The deal gave the UN nuclear watchdog access to suspected nuclear sites in Iran.
Israel claims that after signing the agreement, the Iranian regime collected files from across the country about the nuclear program, storing them at the warehouse. The warehouse wasn’t guarded around the clock so as to not arouse suspicion. Associated Press/ Haaretz
