Did the Mossad steal half a ton of Iran's nuclear secrets?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted his interactive press conference on Iran's nuclear program from the Israeli Ministry of Defense to be a ball of fire to be thrown at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European parties opposed to US President Donald Trump's intention to exit the agreement because he sees It is a "bad deal," as he put it on several occasions. In front of a giant screen and covered shelving cabinets, Netanyahu presented his presentation, packed with videos, photos and documents written in Farsi, under the headline "Iran is lying."

However, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif pre-empted Netanyahu's offer by tweeting, "The child who cannot give up his habit of lying, who was not deterred by his play at the United Nations. You can fool some people only a few times."

What Netanyahu revealed about the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad's ability to return to Israel with 55,000 documents and CDs from a secret Iranian facility south of the capital, Tehran, can only be examined in detail because of the earthquake it may cause within the Iranian military and security services. In the event that it was confirmed in this way, it appears as if the most secret and sensitive stores in Iran's nuclear program were left without direct guards or follow-up through cameras, sensors, or even informants active in its vicinity.

The operation, as narrated by Netanyahu, witnessed the entry of Israeli Mossad agents into Tehran, and then accessing the facility and entering it, loading the equivalent of half a ton of documents, and then shipping them to Israel that same night.

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About this story, Barak Ravid, the diplomatic correspondent for the Israeli Channel 10, said in an interview with the BBC Newsday program on the BBC World Service that the operation involved 100 Mossad agents who were distributed between the Mossad headquarters and Middle Eastern countries and other places, as he said, adding that the process of entering The warehouse that Netanyahu spoke about took place after about two years of monitoring and tracking.

According to Ravid, "To understand this story, we must go back to February 2016, because the implementation of the agreement began in January 2016, and a month after that, the Israeli Mossad received information about the existence of a secret operation taking place in Iran that only a very few people know about." From 5 to 10 Iranian officials, the process of collecting all documents related to the military dimension of the Israeli nuclear program, from all research sites in Iran in one place in Tehran, and the reason for this is that the Iranians were expecting the arrival of the IAEA inspectors based on the nuclear agreement And the Iranians did not want the agency or the international community to know anything about their past research on military nuclear capabilities, so they decided to put it in a civilian store in an industrial area south of Tehran.

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According to the Israeli version, the Israelis faced a big problem when the documents arrived, as they were in Persian about nuclear technology, and it was necessary to find people who were fluent in Persian and Hebrew at the same time and had a technical background to be able to translate this huge number of documents, so the task was assigned to about 50 people who are experts in nuclear technology as well as in the Persian language have begun to work on translating the material.

When the Israelis discovered that they would not be able to complete the work, contacts were made with the CIA, and a parallel team there was working on analyzing the materials. After Netanyahu announced the matter, materials were sent to the British Foreign Intelligence to contribute to the analysis of the documents.

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During the presentation, Netanyahu unveiled a safe for documents and another for electronically stored information, and showed a map of the location of the secret site. It is the Shurabad area that appeared on the map, an industrial area east of Imam Khomeini International Airport and north of Kahrizak prison, one of the most guarded Iranian prisons, and the same site corresponds face to face with the warehouses of the German company Siemens, according to the map site Wikimapia, which showed next to it a traditional Iranian restaurant called "Restauran". Bagh" or garden restaurant, and an equestrian club, as well as the presence of a mosque in the area.

Mosques in Iran usually have a point for the popular mobilization forces known as Basij, which are usually tasked with reporting abnormal movements wherever they are present. But Netanyahu's presentation of the map does not seem accurate. While he says that it is from 2017, the Google Earth map archive shows that it dates back to the fall of 2015, especially since recent photos from the end of 2015 until today show the presence of a building with a bright red roof, which is not shown in Netanyahu map.

The issue of the map is one of the issues that could raise questions about the fact that Israel obtained the information, and why Netanyahu relies on an old aerial map in his interactive presentation, along with other points such as the nature of the materials that were presented, which were intended to deal a big blow to the nuclear agreement as a prelude To overthrow it, and in this context he presented a page saying that Iran in 2018 is still working through an alternative program on a military project.

The surprise, according to Israel Channel 24 correspondent Shai Ben-Ari, was that the document that was sent the next day to journalists did not include a statement about the continuation of work on the project in 2018.

The most important question remains, did Israel actually steal the research and documents related to the supposed military dimension of Iran's nuclear program, and did that happen through a Mossad operation that entered and exited Iran as a knife goes into butter, or did Israel obtain the materials it offered through A third party or by hacking the documents of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which, according to a document issued on November 8, 2011, was aware of the truth about the Emad project. International Atomic Energy Agency documents

According to the document, according to information provided by the Member States between the end of the nineties and the beginning of the second millennium, the activities were taking place under the title of "Emad Project" and that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Al-Mahabadi was the director of the Emad Project, and that most of the activities that were taking place took place between 2002 and 2003.

The document adds that the activities that were taking place under the Emad project, most of which were studies in the technical field on the green salt project, high explosives, including the development of a special type of explosive, and the re-engineering of the Shahab-3 missile.

Until this moment, there is no Iranian confirmation or denial of the incident, although Iranian statements unanimously describe what Netanyahu presented as a farce, as Foreign Minister Zarif and his deputy Abbas Araqchi said in two separate statements.

As for the International Atomic Energy Agency, it indicated in a statement the day after the Netanyahu conference that the activities of a military dimension that took place before 2003 did not develop into anything more than scientific studies and technical capabilities, and it has no evidence that Iran worked on military nuclear development after 2009.

European countries, in turn, confirmed after the conference that what was presented confirms what they had previously, which makes preserving the nuclear agreement necessary.

It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu's documents on the Iranian nuclear program will really influence US President Trump's decision on May 12 when he decides whether his country will leave or remain in the nuclear deal.

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