Over 100,000 secret documents and files stolen from Tehran, reportedly by Mossad intelligence agents
Israel’s prime minister created shock-waves during prime-time Monday night, delivering a televised 20-minute speech in English (suggesting his message was intended to reverberate across the globe), in which he unveiled a cache of over 100,000 nuclear-related documents and files stolen from a secret facility in Tehran in a covert intelligence mission attributed to the Mossad. According to a New York Times report, Israeli spies in February 2016 discovered a warehouse located in the Shorabad district of the Iranian capital where the archives were being stored; kept the building under surveillance for two years; and, recently, devised an operation to break into the structure and smuggle back to Israel half a ton of material in less than 24 hours.
“Iran lied big time,” Binyamin Netanyahu repeatedly asserted in his address, while using props and a slide-show to demonstrate that the Islamic Republic, despite its frequent denials (which, most significantly, includes not having come clean when the 2015 nuclear accord was forged with world powers), created a program—”Project Amad”—geared towards developing atomic weapons. Specifically, the plan was to “design, produce and test five warheads, each with [a] 10-kiloton TNT yield for integration on a missile,” according to text uncovered in one of the records.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s presentation comes less than two weeks before a May 12 deadline for U.S. President Donald Trump to decide whether or not to re-impose sanctions on the Islamic Republic, a move that would in all likelihood kill the atomic accord. In this respect, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that Israel’s latest findings reinforce an American intelligence assessment that Tehran had “a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people.” For his part, President Trump described the revelations as “not an acceptable situation” before reiterating that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as it is formally known, is a “horrible agreement for the U.S.”
Accordingly, it appears that Jerusalem and Washington were already on the same page, an indication that the Israeli premier’s target audience was the other parties to the nuclear deal; namely, Russia and China as well as France, Britain and Germany. As regards the European countries, President Trump, with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s firm backing, has for months been lobbying them to devise a follow-on pact to eliminate the JCPOA’s so-called “sunset clauses—which remove limitations on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium in about a decade—as well as to curb the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program and regional expansionism.