Spy boss hints Israel behind Iran attacks

JERUSALEM: Israel’s intelligence agency boss has given a clear warning to scientists in Iran’s nuclear programme that they could become targets for assassination.

The outgoing chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service has offered the closest acknowledgement yet his country was behind recent attacks targeting Iran’s nuclear programme and a military scientist.

The comments by Yossi Cohen, speaking to Israel’s Channel 12 investigative programme Uvda in a segment aired yesterday, offered an extraordinary debriefing by the head of the typically secretive agency in what appears to be the final days of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule.

It also gave a clear warning to other scientists in Iran’s nuclear programme that they too could become targets for assassination even as diplomats in Vienna try to negotiate terms to try to salvage its atomic accord with world powers.

‘‘If the scientist is willing to change career and will not hurt us any more, than yes, sometimes we offer them a way out,’’ Cohen said.

Among the major attacks to target Iran, none have struck deeper than two explosions over the last year at its Natanz nuclear facility. There, centrifuges enrich uranium from an underground hall designed to protect them from airstrikes.

In July 2020, a mysterious explosion tore apart Natanz’s advanced centrifuge assembly, which Iran later blamed on Israel.

Then in April of this year, another blast tore apart one of its underground enrichment halls.

Asking about Natanz, the interviewer asked Cohen where he would take them if they could travel there, and he said ‘‘to the cellar’’ where ‘‘the centrifuges used to spin’’.

‘‘It doesn’t look like it used to look,’’ he said.

Cohen did not directly claim the attacks, but his specificity offered the closest acknowledgement yet of an Israeli hand in the attacks.

The interviewer, journalist Ilan Dayan, also seemingly offered a detailed description in a voiceover of how Israel snuck the explosives into Natanz’s underground halls by hiding them in the foundation for the centrifuges.

He also brought up the November killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist who began Teheran’s military nuclear programme decades ago.

While Cohen on camera does not claim the killing, Dayan in the segment described Cohen as having ‘‘personally signed off on the entire campaign’’.