Trove of documents Israel stole gives Iran nuke-program details

TEL AVIV, Israel — New details from a trove of Iranian nuclear documents stolen by Israeli spies early this year show that Tehran obtained explicit weapons-design information from a foreign source and was on the cusp of mastering key bomb-making technologies when the research was ordered halted 15 years ago.

The information reported Sunday also shed more light on how the Israeli spy agency Mossad smuggled the documents out of Iran in January, but it does not appear to provide evidence that Iran failed to abide by its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs of the Iranian program dubbed “Project Amad” provided more reason for President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Iran maintains that the entire document trove is fraudulent. Officials at Iran’s U.N. mission in New York did not reply to a request for comment about the documents.

The documents show that Iran’s ambitious, highly secretive effort to build nuclear weapons included extensive research in making uranium

“It’s quite good. The papers show these guys were working on nuclear bombs.”

— Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer and former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency

metal as well as advanced testing of equipment used to generate neutrons to start a nuclear chain reaction. After Iran halted the work in 2003, internal memos show senior scientists making extensive plans to continue several projects in secret, hidden within existing military research programs.

“The work would be divided in two: covert and overt,” an Iranian scientist writes in one memo.

U.S. officials had long known of Iran’s pre-2004 nuclear weapons research, which President Barack Obama’s administration cited explicitly in prodding Iran to accept the historic deal limiting its ability to make enriched uranium and placing its nuclear facilities under intensive international oversight.

Netanyahu has seized on the documents in recent weeks to launch new attacks against the nuclear deal, which Israeli officials say is inadequate for containing Iran’s long-term nuclear ambitions. The accord has been on life support since the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the pact in May. Iran says it is honoring the terms of the agreement and has no intention of building nuclear weapons.

A team of Israeli experts has continued to mine the document trove for new revelations while simultaneously sharing the material with U.S. and European intelligence agencies as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. agency in charge of monitoring Iran’s nuclear activity.

“This archive explains why we have doubts,” a senior Israeli official told U.S. journalists at the briefing in Tel Aviv. The official, like others involved, insisted on anonymity in discussing highly sensitive documents and intelligence operations.

“It explains why the [nuclear deal] to us is worse than nothing, because it leaves key parts of the nuclear program unaddressed,” the official said. “It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb. It paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”

Many U.S.-based weapons experts and former U.S. officials say the new revelations show precisely why the nuclear deal was necessary.

“We were at the [negotiating] table precisely because we knew that Iran harbored ambitions to build a nuclear bomb, and we wanted a verifiable agreement to block those ambitions,” said Jake Sullivan, a former State Department official involved in early discussions with Iran over what would later become the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the nuclear deal is commonly known. “In my view, the recent revelations do the opposite of undermine the deal — they reinforce the need for it.”

MAKING A CASE

Last week, at the invitation of the Israeli government, three reporters — one each from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal — were shown key documents from the trove.

The files included handwritten notes signed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian physicist who Western intelligence agencies say was in charge of Project Amad. Journalists were given copies of some documents, including several that were previously unpublished. Others were shown only briefly or not at all, on the grounds that they contained explicit technical details that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

“It’s quite good,” Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer and former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna after being shown some of the documents. “The papers show these guys were working on nuclear bombs.”

Israeli officials said the documents on nuclear bomb details were provided to the Iranians by a foreign source, but they would not specify whether the original provider was a government or a foreign national operating independently. Iran is known to have acquired information on building centrifuges for uranium enrichment from Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, an admitted peddler of sensitive nuclear information, in the late 1980s. U.S. intelligence officials believe that Khan passed partial blueprints for a Chinese nuclear device to at least one of his international customers. The International Atomic Energy Agency also assessed that Iran obtained weapons design information, but proof was elusive, and Iranian officials denied the claim.

Israeli officials declined to say whether the weapons blueprints obtained by the Iranians could have produced a functioning nuclear bomb.

“We see explicit material related to nuclear weapons from different sources, some of it not Iranian in origin,” one Israeli intelligence official said.

There is no way to independently confirm the authenticity of the documents, most of which were at least 15 years old.

But taken as a whole, the newly released documents reinforce a story line that has been publicly known for more than a decade: Iran created a covert program beginning in the late 1980s to build nuclear weapons but then halted the effort in 2003, after the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq and revelations about a secret uranium enrichment plant Iran was building near the town of Natanz. The broad outlines of Iran’s research were known to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. What is new is the detail about the sophistication of Iran’s nuclear efforts, and how far Iran’s scientists advanced before the project was put on ice.

The records further buttress the view, long held by U.S. intelligence agencies, that Iran has kept the intellectual core of its nuclear program intact.

“Let there be no mistake: the amount of personnel in the overt and covert parts will not decrease,” one Iranian official writes in a memo dated Sept. 3, 2003. “The structure will not become smaller, and every sub-project will supervise both its overt and covert parts.”

SPIES AT WORK

How Israel obtained the documents from a hidden storage facility in the middle of Tehran is only beginning to come to light.

Israeli intelligence officials said they learned in early 2017 that Iran had begun systematically gathering records on the country’s past nuclear weapons research and relocating them to a single repository in southern Tehran’s Shorabad district. The building, in a row of industrial warehouses, had no visible security presence or other features that might have tipped off an observer that it contained something unusual.

“We wanted to know: What are they hiding, and what for?” the officer said. “Once we learned where the records were going, we prepared an operations team to acquire them.”

Mossad agents were able learn the internal layout of the building, including the location and general contents of 32 safes that contained paper records, photos and computer-storage files from Project Amad. The spies studied the building’s security features and tracked the movements and schedules of the workers who maintained the archive. They learned that the morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., and that any infiltration of the building would have to end before 5 a.m. to give agents enough time to escape. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.

Eventually Israel settled on a date — Jan. 31 — and a time window of exactly six hours, 29 minutes, to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials without being detected.

The agents arrived that night with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees. But they left many of the safes untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs. When time was up, they fled for the border.

The techniques in the procedure were vaguely described as unusual, and in the vein of Ocean’s 11, the Hollywood film about a heist at a Las Vegas casino. How the vast trove of binders and computer disks was spirited out of the country is not publicly known.

There was no chase, said Israeli officials, who would not disclose whether the documents left by land, air or sea — though an escape from the coast, just a few hours’ drive from Tehran, appears the least risky.

Fewer than two dozen agents took part in the breakin. Fearing that some of them would be caught, the Israelis removed the materials on several different routes. At exactly 7 a.m., as the Mossad expected, a guard arrived and discovered that the doors and safes were broken. He sounded the alarm, and Iranian authorities soon began a nationwide campaign to locate the burglars — an effort that, according to an Israeli official, included “tens of thousands of Iranian security and police personnel.”

The effort yielded nothing. And until Netanyahu announced the results of the heist in late April, the Iranians never said a word in public about what had happened.

Information for this article was contributed by David E. Sanger and Ronen Bergman of The New York Times; by Joby Warrick of The Washington Post; and by staff members of The Associated Press.