Israeli leak: Teheran not close to bomb
Release comes at sensitive moment, as world powers face a March 31 deadline to reach a deal with Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Iran was a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his secret service, according to reports on Monday citing leaked documents.
The inconsistency was revealed in a cache of communications between South Afri- can intelligence services and their global partners — including Israel’s Mossad and the United States’ CIA — that were leaked to Qatar-based news network Al-Jazeera and The Guardian in Britain.
In 2012 Netanyahu told world leaders at the United Nations that Iran could create a nuclear weapon within a year, brandishing a diagram in the form of a lit bomb to indi- cate the advanced state of Teheran’s development.
He warned that unless Iran was stopped, as of mid-2013 it would only need “a few months, or even a few weeks” of additional uranium enrichment activity to develop a bomb.
But weeks after the speech, Mossad shared a report with South African intelligence that concluded Iran was “at this stage not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”, The Guardian reported.
“Even though Iran has accumulated enough 5 percent enriched uranium for several bombs, and has enriched some of it to 20 percent, it does not appear to be ready to enrich it to higher levels,” the document said.
The discrepancy, the paper said, “highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment”.
The revelations come at a politically sensitive moment. The US, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany face a March 31 deadline to reach a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program in return for an easing of economic sanctions.
Israel views a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to its existence, citing Teheran’s repeated calls for Israel’s destruction, its longrange missile program and its support for violent anti-Israel groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, such as power generation and creation of medical isotopes.
An Israeli government official told The Guardian that there was no contradiction between Netanyahu’s statements and the report, claiming that both say Iran was, in fact, enriching uranium to produce weapons.
The leaked documents dating from 2006 to late 2014 consist mainly of communications between South Africa’s intelligence agency and other agencies around the world, such as Britain’s MI6, Russian intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency.