BICOM

Agents from Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency stole thousands of documents from a warehouse containing a secret Iranian nuclear archive, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed last night.

Speaking from Israel’s defence ministry in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu stood in front of “half a ton of the material” that the agents brought back from their raid as he sought to convince the world that Iran had lied about their nuclear programme.

The Prime Minister announced that the stolen documents contained “new and conclusive proof of the secret nuclear weapons program that Iran has been hiding for years from the international community”. He also presented details of how Iran sought to expand its nuclear knowledge for future use after the signing of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement.

Netanyahu said that the agents retrieved 55,000 pages and another 55,000 files on 183 CDs, containing “incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more”. A senior Israeli official told the New York Times that the warehouse has been under surveillance since February 2016, with the raid taking place in January 2018.

Reacting to the news, US President Donald Trump said that the presentation “really showed that I’ve been 100 per cent right” about Iran, who “are not sitting back idly, they’re setting off missiles”. Trump has given the other signatories of the JCPOA a deadline of 12 May to find solutions to the “significant flaws” in the deal, or the US will withdraw from the agreement.

New US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the evidence showed that the JCPOA “was built on Iran’s lies. Iran’s nuclear deception is inconsistent with Iran’s pledge in the nuclear deal ‘that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons’”.

However, EU Foreign Affairs High Representative Federica Mogherini responded by pointing out that “the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has published ten reports certifying that Iran has fully complied with its commitments”. The agreement “is not based on assumptions of good faith or trust – it is based on concrete commitments, verification mechanisms and a very strict monitoring of facts, done by the IAEA,” she added.

Mogherini urged caution and stressed that the IAEA needed to review the evidence, calling it “the only impartial, international organisation that is in charge of monitoring Iran’s nuclear commitments”.