Nuclear deal was based on deception, claims Israel
Trump says files stolen from Tehran show he is ‘100 per cent right’ to criticise pact
ISRAEL last night accused Iran of lying to the world about its weapons programme, both before and since the 2015 nuclear deal, after Israeli intelligence stole 100,000 files from a secret “atomic archive” in Tehran.
Benjamin Netanyahu, an arch-opponent of the nuclear deal, made the dramatic public accusation in Tel Aviv less than two weeks before Donald Trump, the US president, is due to announce whether or not he will pull out of the agreement.
The Israeli prime minister said that his spies had obtained “half a ton” of secret documents which show that Iran’s leaders had never given a full account of their past nuclear activities as required by the Iran deal and had maintained the capability to build a bomb in the future.
“The nuclear deal is based on lies. It is based on Iranian lies and Iranian deception,” Mr Netanyahu said. “This is a terrible deal which should never have been concluded and in a few days’ time President Trump will make his decision on what to do with the nuclear deal. I’m sure he will do the right thing. The right thing for the US, the right thing for Israel and the right thing for the peace of the world.”
Mr Netanyahu’s presentation, made in front of a large screen at the Israeli defence ministry, seemed designed to convince Mr Trump to follow his instincts and pull the US out of the agreement ahead of a May 12 deadline.
In Washington, Mr Trump said the Israeli presentation “really showed that I’ve been 100 per cent right”.
“That is just not an acceptable situation,” he said. “They [Iran] are not sitting back idly, they’re setting off missiles.” Mr Trump refused to say what his final decision would be but said he was open to negotiating “a better deal”. Iran and other members of the P5+1 bloc of world powers have said it is not possible to renegotiate the agreement or strike a new pact.
Mr Netanyahu’s talk served as a counterweight to diplomatic efforts by Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who both visited the White House last week to implore Mr Trump not to scrap the agreement. Britain supports remaining in the agreement and Theresa May spoke to Mrs Merkel and Mr Macron at the weekend.
Mr Netanyahu said the files had already been shared with the US and that American intelligence “can vouch for its authenticity”. Israel plans to share it with other Western countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog.
The speech came as the shadow war between Israel and Iran in Syria escalated sharply after suspected Israeli strikes killed 26 Iranian and Assad regime fighters, according to monitors.
One strike tore through a military base dug into a mountain near the central city of Hama on Sunday night, causing an explosion so large it registered as a 2.6 magnitude earthquake. A second strike targeted an airbase near the northern city of Aleppo.
Iran denied any of its soldiers had been killed in the attacks but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 26 people died in Hama and that the “vast majority” of the casualties were Iranian.
Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, mocked Mr Netanyahu’s speech before it even began. “The boy who can’t stop crying wolf is at it again,” he said. Mr Netanyahu said 55,000 pages and 55,000 electronic documents had been secreted out of an archive in the Shorabad district of southern Tehran. He said Israeli spies had pulled off one
of their “biggest-ever intelligence achievements” by getting the files out of Tehran but he gave no details about how they ended up in Israeli hands.
The files were from Project Amad, which Mr Netanyahu said was a secret Iranian programme to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s leaders have said consistently that their nuclear intentions were peaceful. Project Amad was shelved in 2003 but elements secretly continued and remain functional to this day under the direction of the same Iranian scientists who conducted the original research, Mr Netanyahu said. He added Iran had failed to “come clean” about its past nuclear activities in 2015, after the deal was signed, when it was required by the agreement to tell the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about all its previous research.
Iranian officials “denied the existence of a coordinated programme aimed at the development of a nuclear device and specifically denied the existence of the Amad Plan”, the IAEA wrote in its December 2015 assessment. Mr Netanyahu said Iran’s nuclear knowledge could be reapplied in 2026, when parts of the deal expired and Iran was allowed to return to large scale enrichment of uranium. But he did not present any evidence that Iran was currently violating the terms of the nuclear deal.
The IAEA consistently said that Iran had obeyed the terms of the agreement since it went into force in January 2016. It last certified Iran’s compliance in February. Senior US and Israeli military recently suggested the deal may be flawed but that it was achieving its central purpose of stopping Iranian progress towards a nuclear weapon.
The announcement was typical of Mr Netanyahu, who has a history of theatrical flourishes. During a speech before a security conference in Munich in February, he brandished a piece of Iranian drone downed by Israel’s air force. Six years ago, he brought a cartoon poster of a bomb to the UN, warning against allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. One EU diplomat told The Daily Telegraph: “Israel is a friend but the Iran nuclear deal is working and has been verified by independent international observers.”
Last night, a UK government spokesman said it had “never been naive about Iran and its nuclear intentions”.