Israel reveals how it stole the Iranians’ nuclear secrets

▶ Mossad agents broke into a Tehran compound in the middle of the night

With blowtorches, a layout of the building in southern Tehran, and only hours to infiltrate and escape, agents from the Israeli spy agency Mossad secured the contents of 32 safes – details of “Project Amad”, Iran’s nuclear project – in the dead of night on January 31.

Israeli officials shared details of the raid with a few western media outlets, such as The Washington Post and

The New York Times, claiming the seized documents show Iran had ambitions for nuclear weapons. They do not show that Iran breached the 2015 landmark nuclear agreement but Israel says it shows that Tehran cannot be trusted. Iran maintains that the documents are forgeries.

The new information shows how Israel’s intelligence officers came to secure the 55,000 pages and 183 CDs relating to the project. The find came before President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the nuclear deal, which reined in Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for lifting crippling international sanctions.

The other parties to the deal – Germany, France, Britain, China and Russia – have restated their support for the agreement.

The agents had just six hours and 29 minutes to enter through disabled alarms, break into the safes and leave the Iranian capital with thousands of documents. The target was a compound in the Shorabad district of the Iranian capital.

Mossad said it found out about the building and its contents last year. The building was in a row of industrial warehouses and few Iranians had knowledge of what was going on inside.

The spies had information about the shift patterns of workers at the compound, who would arrive at 7am, giving the agents time to use 3,600°C blowtorches on large safes in which the documents were kept.

The agents opened only the safes they believed to hold the most crucial intelligence because of the size and weight of the total load. How they left remains unclear but it is likely they made their way to Turkmenistan in the east, Azerbaijan in the north or west to Iraq.

Whether they travelled overland or by air is unclear. The journey from Tehran to Tel Aviv is 2,000 kilometres.

With the documents, Israel is trying to persuade the West that the Iran nuclear deal is a thankless agreement that from 2030 will again allow Tehran to produce nuclear fuel.

The Post reported the documents show that Iran was “on the cusp of mastering key bomb-making technologies” when the research was stopped in 2003. The secretive operation involved tests and research into starting a nuclear chain reaction.

But when that work was finished, scientists made plans to continue the operation covertly.

“The work would be divided in two: covert and overt,” an Iranian scientist wrote in one of the seized documents.

Israel has its own covert nuclear programme, but officials regularly refuse to comment on its nuclear capabilities.

Officials who worked on securing the deal with Iran say the evidence presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an April 30 broadcast reinforced the need for the nuclear deal, rather than showing that it was not enough.

American officials who worked in the government of president Barack Obama say they had knowledge of Iranian intentions for a nuclear bomb, and worked for an agreement that halted those ambitions. The Israelis refused to show the journalists some documents that included technical details on how to produce a nuclear weapon and declined to confirm whether the documents would have allowed Iran to develop a functioning nuclear weapon.

But the new details show how far Iranian scientists were willing to go in the country’s pursuit of a nuclear device before its research programme was shut down in 2003.