Secret Mossad raids that spirited away half a ton of documents
THE dilapidated warehouse in southern Tehran seemed an unlikely place for Iran to store its most sensitive nuclear secrets.
But according to Israeli officials, the storage facility in the Shorabad neighbourhood had been chosen precisely because of its unassuming appearance.
Iran’s government reportedly feared that the files might be found by international inspectors.
Israeli officials said it was this act of centralisation that made it possible for Mossad spies to pull off the seemingly impossible: snatching half a ton of documents in a single night and secreting them out of the capital and the country.
“It was too heavy to take in its entirety,” said one Israeli official. Details began to emerge yesterday about the Israeli raid that provided the intelligence behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s public accusation that Iran lied to the world about its nuclear programme before and after the 2015 Iran deal.
The Israeli prime minister described the operation as one of its “biggest-ever intelligence achievements” but gave little sense about how it came about during his speech on Monday.
Officials said that Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, had become aware of the warehouse in February 2016, a few weeks after the Iran deal came into force. It was kept under surveillance for two years.
“Few Iranians knew where it was,” Mr Netanyahu said. The raid was carried out in February. The documents, which were almost all in Farsi, were shared with the US.
“The documents we have reviewed are authentic,” said Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state.
Sceptics of Mr Netanyahu speculated that there may have been no raid at all, and suggested that Israel may have broken into the computer systems of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had some of the files.
“It appears to me that what Israel has done is that it has probably hacked the [IAEA] and gathered some new details from what Iran responded to the agency to close the outstanding issues in 2015,” said Ali Vaez, project director for Iran at the Crisis Group.