QUOTE OF THE DAY
Files expose deal’s flaws, its critics say
“Iran lied big time.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, claiming that documents collected from Iran show it covered up its nuclear weapons program
JERUSALEM — Israel’s prime minister on Monday unveiled what he said was a “half ton” of Iranian nuclear documents collected by Israeli intelligence, claiming they proved that Iranian leaders covered up a nuclear weapons program before signing a deal with world powers in 2015.
In a speech delivered in English, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the material showed that Iran cannot be trusted, and he encouraged President Donald Trump to withdraw from the deal this month.
Netanyahu dramatically pulled a curtain away from a shelf of files that he said were copies of some of the 55,000 documents that Israel had obtained from Iran’s secret nuclear archive. “Iran lied big time,” Netanyahu declared.
In Washington, Trump said it vindicated his past criticism of the nuclear deal.
But Netanyahu’s presentation, delivered on live TV from Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, did not appear to provide evidence that Iran has violated the 2015 deal, raising questions about whether it would sway international opinion ahead of Trump’s decision.
The U.S.-led agreement offered Iran relief from crippling
sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.
Netanyahu fought against the deal while President Barack Obama was negotiating it, and he has been a leading critic since it was signed. He says it does not provide sufficient safeguards to prevent Iran from reaching nuclear weapons capability.
Netanyahu has found a welcome partner in Trump, who has called the agreement “the worst deal ever.”
Trump has signaled he will pull out of the agreement by May 12 unless it is revised, but he faces intense pressure from European allies not to do so.
Netanyahu said he already has given the information to the U.S. and that he plans to share it with Western allies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitor.
Ahead of the announcement, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif belittled Netanyahu in a tweet, saying: “The boy who can’t stop crying wolf is at it again.”
He later tweeted: “Pres. Trump is jumping on a rehash of old allegations already dealt with by the IAEA to ‘nix’ the deal.
“How convenient. Coordinated timing of alleged intelligence revelations by the boy who cries wolf just days before May 12. But Trump’s impetuousness to celebrate
blew the cover.”
Iran has denied ever seeking nuclear weapons.
In his presentation, Netanyahu said Israel had obtained some 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs of secret information from an Iranian nuclear weapons program called Project Amad.
He said the material was gathered from a facility in the Tehran neighborhood of Shourabad a few weeks ago “in a great intelligence achievement.”
He said the uncovered files included “incriminating” documents, charts, blueprints, photos and videos. He pointed to one presentation that he said called for producing and testing five warheads.
Standing in front of a screen, Netanyahu showed slides from the files that showed the breadth of the Iranian nuclear program.
Netanyahu said the documents showed conclusively that Iran had not “come clean” on its program.
“These files conclusively prove that Iran is brazenly lying when it says it never has a nuclear weapons program,” Netanyahu said. “We’ve shared this material with the United States, and the United States can vouch for its authenticity.”
“This is just a fraction of the total material we have,” Netanyahu said.
It was not clear whether the documents shed any new light on what international
inspectors already have concluded. The documents appeared to date back to the early 2000s; international inspectors already believe that Iran was pursuing a weapons program at that time.
Netanyahu provided no direct evidence that Iran has violated the 2015 deal. But he said the existence of the documents proves Iran is waiting to resume its race to build a bomb.
“We can now prove that Project Amad was a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons,” he said.
“We can also prove that Iran is secretly storing Project Amad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons.”
He said that after the project was disbanded in 2003, its director, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, continued his work under another agency called Sapan.
Netanyahu said the material proves the international nuclear deal is a failure.
He said it allows Iran to continue enriching some uranium, and it does not address the country’s research efforts or development of long-range ballistic missiles.
He noted that Trump was weighing whether to pull the U.S. out of the nuclear deal, saying, “I am sure he will do the right thing.”
TRUMP RESPONDS
At the White House, Trump praised Netanyahu’s presentation and said it vindicated the president’s past statements about Iran and the shortcomings of the nuclear deal, adding that recent events have “really shown that I’ve been 100 percent right.”
Although Trump was hosting Nigeria’s president for a visit during Netanyahu’s speech Monday, he said he watched part of it on television.
“That is just not an acceptable situation,” Trump said. He declined to say whether he’ll pull out of the deal by May 12 but said that even if he does, “that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t then negotiate a real agreement.”
“We’ll see what happens,” he said of the upcoming deadline.
Both Trump and Netanyahu say a deal should address Iranian support for militants across the region and Iran’s development of long-range ballistic missiles,
as well as eliminate provisions that expire over the next decade.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said later that the U.S. had been aware of the documents “for a while” and that he and Netanyahu discussed them during their meeting in Tel Aviv on Sunday.
Speaking with reporters while flying back to the U.S., Pompeo said that although the existence of Iran’s nuclear arms program had been public knowledge for years, the documents give new detail about its scope and scale and prove Iran was lying when it claimed never to have been pursuing nuclear weapons.
“This will belie any notion that there wasn’t a program,” Pompeo said.
He issued a statement later saying Iran also lied to the six nations with which it negotiated the nuclear agreement.
“What this means is the deal was not constructed on a foundation of good faith or transparency. It was built on Iran’s lies,” the statement said.
Iran’s deception is inconsistent with its pledge in the nuclear deal “that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” Pompeo said, adding that the U.S. is now assessing what the documents mean for the nuclear deal.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, issued a statement saying Netanyahu’s presentation will be assessed.
“I have not seen from Prime Minister Netanyahu arguments for the moment on noncompliance, meaning violation by Iran of its nuclear commitments under the [nuclear] deal,” she said.
“The deal was put in place exactly because there was no trust between the parties, otherwise we would not have required a nuclear deal to be put in place,” Mogherini added in a statement.
Netanyahu’s presentation was “nothing new,” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the Republican head of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Corker, who has been critical of the agreement, said “the best outcome would be to resolve the problems with the deal.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.,
viewed the revelations differently.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu has presented compelling evidence that Iran tried to build a nuclear weapon and lied about it to the world,” he wrote in a statement.
“No one should be surprised, of course, and we shouldn’t reward Iran by letting the ayatollahs reap the benefits of its nuclear deal. The time has come to fix the deal or to end it.”
Several analysts disputed Netanyahu’s portrayal of his disclosures as “something the world has never seen.”
“The information he’s talking about refers to the period that led us up” to the nuclear deal, said Jarrett Blanc, a former deputy lead coordinator and State Department coordinator for Iran nuclear implementation.
“We’ve always known they were lying; that’s why we did what we did.”
Richard Nephew, a former senior State Department official who was part of the U.S. team that negotiated the deal implemented in January 2016, said Netanyahu’s revelations were “interesting, and important for building a history of [Iran’s] program. But it is not a new revelation, at least in terms of where the program was when we were negotiating.”
“To put it another way,” he said, “it is why we negotiated the JCPOA,” or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the formal name of the nuclear deal.
Information for this article was contrbuted by Josef Federman, Amir Vahdat, Nasser Karimi, Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press; by Loveday Morris and Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post; and by Amy Teibel, David Wainer, Michael S. Arnold, Jennifer Jacobs, Jonathan Tirone, Erik Wasson and Scarlet Fu of Bloomberg News.