Israel says Iran lied about deal
JERUSALEM» Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said Israel is in possession of tens of thousands of documents and discs that prove that Iran lied about the history of its nuclear weapons program when it signed the 2015 nuclear deal.
In a televised speech from Tel Aviv, 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. Most of the documents, as described, dated from 2003 and before, when Iran had a clandestine weapons development program dubbed “Project Amad.”
The allegation comes at a critical time for the nuclear deal, just ahead of a May 12 deadline for President Donald Trump to decide whether to continue to waive statutory sanctions that were lifted as part of the agreement. Netanyahu has waged a fierce campaign for the deal to be changed or scrapped, often repeating the mantra “fix it or nix it” — concerned that it will enable its archrival to come closer to developing a nuclear weapon.
Trump, speaking at a Washington news conference with the president of Nigeria, said Netanyahu’s revelations “showed that I’ve been 100 percent right” in describing the nuclear agreement as the “worst deal” ever signed. “We’ll see what happens,” he said of the upcoming deadline.
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.
“What he is revealing with all this detail is not news,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “The fact that Iran has experimented with nuclear warhead designs, and had at one point an active weapons program, makes it all the more essential that the JCPOA remains in place to prevent Iran from quickly amassing enough fissile material for even one bomb.”
“It is ludicrous to recommend … that the deal should be dismantled, which would open a pathway for Iran to pursue” a nuclear weapon, Kimball said.
Iranian officials have said that if the deal is canceled, they would quickly increase both the quantity and quality of centrifuges, now restricted under the deal, which would allow them theoretically to produce weaponsgrade uranium.
In a dramatic presentation, Netanyahu stood on a stage with a pointer. To one side was a bookcase filled with shelves of files that he said were Iran’s secret nuclear records, apparently obtained through a covert operation by Israeli intelligence.
Standing in front of a screen, Netanyahu showed slides from the files that showed the breadth of the Iranian nuclear program. Showing excerpts from what he said was “half a ton” of documents on a screen behind him, Netanyahu said they showed conclusively that Iran had not “come clean” on its program. Iran has repeatedly insisted that it never has had and never would have a weapons program.
The documents indicated that Iran had been proceeding with “five key elements of a nuclear weapons program,” he said, including designing a weapon, developing nuclear cores and building implosion systems, preparing test sites and integrating nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles.
“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,” he said. He did not indicate when the material had been obtained, although the timing of his presentation seemed designed for maximum impact on Trump’s decision. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was apparently briefed on the material during a visit to Israel on Sunday, and Trump and Netanyahu also had a Sunday telephone call.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, charged with monitoring the deal, has said Iran has complied with its terms, an assessment the Trump administration has not disputed. But Trump has specifically cited the sunset clauses in the agreement, its monitoring and verification provisions, and its failure to address Iran’s ballistic missile program.
European allies that signed the deal — along with Russia and China — have been negotiating with the State Department on supplemental agreements among them to address Trump’s concerns without changing the nuclear agreement itself. In visits to Washington last week, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to Trump to keep the deal in place.
“I’ve been a longtime advocate of fixing” flaws in the deal rather than tearing it up, said Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Today’s revelations just make that much more difficult,” he said. “Not because (Netanyahu) revealed anything we didn’t know about Iran’s nuclear program. What he revealed is that Iran took all the instructions for making a nuclear bomb and buried them deep away from the prying eyes of the IAEA and Western intelligence”
As the May 12 U.S. deadline approaches, Netanyahu said he is sure Trump will “do the right thing for the United States, the right thing from Israel and the right thing for the peace of the world.”
His announcement was made largely in English, a sign that he wanted his message spread to an international audience.
Tensions between Iran and Israel have significantly ratcheted up in recent weeks. The announcement came just a day after a set of airstrikes in Syria that a monitoring group and some proSyrian media blamed on Israel.
Israeli officials have declined to comment but admitted to hitting more than 100 targets inside Syria over the course of the civil war there. Israel has said it will not allow Iran or its proxies to build a military presence in Syria.