An investigation of supposed Iranian nuclear
documents presented in a dramatically staged Netanyahu press conference
indicates they were an Israeli fabrication designed to trigger US military
conflict with Iran.
President Donald Trump scrapped
the nuclear deal with Iran and continued to risk war with Iran based on Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim to have proven definitively that Iran
was determined to manufacture nuclear weapons. Netanyahu not only spun Trump
but much of the corporate media as well, duping them with the public unveiling
of what he claimed was the entire secret Iranian “nuclear archive.”
In early April 2018,
Netanyahu briefed Trump privately on the supposed
Iranian nuclear archive and secured his promise to leave the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That April 30, Netanyahu took the
briefing to the public in a characteristically dramatic live performance in
which he claimed Israel’s Mossad intelligence services had stolen Iran’s entire
nuclear archive from Tehran. “You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly
deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons…” Netanyahu declared. “Well,tonight, I’m here to tell you
one thing: Iran lied. Big time.”
However, an investigation of
the supposed Iranian nuclear documents by The Grayzone reveals them to be the
product of an Israeli disinformation operation that helped trigger the most
serious threat of war since the conflict with Iran began nearly four decades
ago. This investigation found multiple indications that the story of Mossad’s
heist of 50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran was very likely an
elaborate fiction and that the documents were fabricated by the Mossad
itself.
According to the official
Israeli version of events, the Iranians had gathered the nuclear documents from
various locations and moved them to what Netanyahu himself described as “a
dilapidated warehouse” in southern Tehran. Even assuming that Iran had secret
documents demonstrating the development of nuclear weapons, the claim that top
secret documents would be held in a nondescript and unguarded warehouse in
Central Tehran is so unlikely that it should have raised immediate alarm bells
about the story’s legitimacy.
Even more problematic was
the claim by a Mossad official to Israeli
journalist Ronen Bergman that Mossad knew not only in what warehouse its
commandos would find the documents but precisely which safes to break into
with a blowtorch. The official told Bergman the Mossad team had been guided by
an intelligence asset to the few safes in the warehouse contained the binders
with the most important documents. Netanyahu bragged publicly that “very few” Iranians
knew the location of the archive; the Mossad official told Bergman “only a
handful of people” knew.
But two former senior CIA
official, both of whom had served as the agency’s top Middle East analyst,
dismissed Netanyahu’s claims as lacking credibility in responses to a query
from The Grayzone.
According to Paul Pillar, who
was National Intelligence Officer for the region from 2001 to 2005, “Any source
on the inside of the Iranian national security apparatus would be extremely
valuable in Israeli eyes, and Israeli deliberations about the handling of that
source’s information presumably would be biased in favor long-term protection
of the source.” The Israeli story of how its spies located the documents “does
seem fishy,” Pillar said, especially considering Israel’s obvious effort to
derive maximum “political-diplomatic mileage” out of the “supposed revelation”
of such a well-placed source.
Graham Fuller, a 27-year
veteran of the CIA who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near
East and South Asia as well as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, offered a similar assessment of the Israeli claim. “If the Israelis
had such a sensitive source in Tehran,” Fuller commented, “they would not want
to risk him.” Fuller concluded that the Israelis’ claim that they had accurate
knowledge of which safes to crack is “dubious, and the whole thing may be
somewhat fabricated.”
No proof of authenticity
Netanyahu’s April 30 slide show presented a series of
purported Iranian documents containing sensational revelations that he pointed
to as proof of his insistence that Iran had lied about its interest in
manufacturing nuclear weapons. The visual aides included a file supposedly
dating back to early 2000 or before that detailed various ways to achieve
a plan to build five nuclear weapons by
mid-2003.
Another document that generated
widespread media interest was an alleged report on a discussionamong leading Iranian
scientists of a purported mid-2003 decision by Iran’s Defense Minister to
separate an existing secret nuclear weapons program into overt and covert
parts.
Left out of the media coverage
of these “nuclear archive” documents was a simple fact that was highly
inconvenient to Netanyahu: nothing about them offered a scintilla of evidence
that they were genuine. For example, not one contained the official markings of
the relevant Iranian agency.
Tariq Rauf, who was head of the
Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office at the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2001 to 2011, told The Grayzone that these
markings were practically ubiquitous on official Iranian files.
“Iran is a highly
bureaucratized system,” Rauf explained. “Hence, one would expect a proper
book-keeping system that would record incoming correspondence, with date
received, action officer, department, circulation to additional relevant
officials, proper letterhead, etc.”
But as Rauf noted, the “nuclear
archive” documents that were published by the Washington Post bore no
such evidence of Iranian government origin. Nor did they contain other
markings to indicate their creation under the auspices of an Iranian government
agency.
What those documents do have in
common is the mark of a rubber stamp for a filing system showing numbers for a
“record”, a “file” and a “ledger binder” — like the black binders that
Netanyahu flashed to the cameras during his slideshow. But these could have
easily been created by the Mossad and stamped on to the documents along with
the appropriate Persian numbers.
Forensic confirmation of the
documents’ authenticity would have required access to the original
documents. But as Netanyahu noted in his April 30, 2018 slide show, the
“original Iranian materials” were kept “in a very safe place” – implying that
no one would be allowed to have any such access.
Withholding access to outside experts
In fact, even the most
pro-Israeli visitors to Tel Aviv have been denied access to the original
documents. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International
Security and Olli Heinonen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – both
stalwart defenders of the official Israeli line on Iranian nuclear policy
– reported in October 2018 that they had
been given only a “slide deck” showing reproductions or excerpts of the
documents.
When a team of six specialists
from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs visited Israel in January 2019 for briefings on the archive, they too
were offered only a cursory browse of the supposedly original documents. Harvard
Professor Matthew Bunn recalled in an interview with this writer that
the team had been shown one of the binders containing what were said to be
original documents relating to Iran’s relations with the IAEA and had “paged
through a bit of it.”
But they were shown no
documents on Iran nuclear weapons work. As Bunn admitted, “We weren’t
attempting to do any forensic analysis of these documents.”
Typically, it would be the job
of the U.S. government and the IAEA to authenticate the documents. Oddly, the
Belfer Center delegation reported that the U.S. government and the IAEA had
each received only copies of the entire archive, not the original files. And
the Israelis were in no hurry to provide the genuine articles: the IAEA did not
receive a complete set of documents until November 2019, according to
Bunn.
By then, Netanyahu had not only
already accomplished the demolition of the Iran nuclear deal; he and Trump’s
ferociously hawkish CIA-director Mike Pompeo had maneuvered the president into
a policy of imminent confrontation with Tehran.
The second coming of fake missile drawings
Among the documents Netanyahu
flashed on the screen in his April 30, 2018 slide show was
a schematic drawing of the missile reentry
vehicle of an Iranian Shahab-3 missile, showing what was obviously supposed to
represent a nuclear weapon inside.
Technical drawing from page 11 of David Albright, Olli
Heinonen, and Andrea Stricker’s “Breaking Up and Reorienting Iran’s Nuclear Weapons
Program,” published by the Institute for Science and
International Security on October 28, 2018.
This drawing was part of a set
of eighteen technical drawings of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle. These were
found in a collection of documents secured over the course of several years
between the Bush II and Obama administrations by an Iranian spy working for
Germany’s BND intelligence service. Or so the Israeli official story went.
In 2013, however, a former
senior German Foreign Office official named Karsten Voigt revealed to this
writer that the documents had been initially provided to German intelligence by
a member of the Mujaheddin E-Khalq (MEK).
The MEK is an exiled Iranian
armed opposition organization that had operated under Saddam Hussein’s regime
as a proxy against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. It went on to cooperate with
the Israeli Mossad beginning in the 1990s, and enjoys a close relationship with
Saudi Arabia as well. Today, numerous former US officials are on the MEK’s
payroll, acting as de facto lobbyists for regime
change in Iran.
Voigt recalled how senior BND
officials warned him they did not consider the MEK source or the materials he
provided to be credible. They were worried that the Bush administration
intended to use the dodgy documents to justify an attack on Iran, just as it
exploited the tall tales collected from Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball” to
justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As this writer first reported in 2010, the appearance of
the “dunce-cap” shape of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle in the drawings was a
tell-tale sign that the documents were fabricated. Whoever drew those schematic
images in 2003 was clearly under the false impression that Iran was relying on
the Shahab-3 as its main deterrent force. After all, Iran had announced
publicly in 2001 that the Shahab-3 was going into “serial production” and in
2003 that it was “operational.”
But those official claims by
Iran were a ruse aimed primarily at deceiving Israel, which had threatened air
attacks on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. In fact, Iran’s Defense
Ministry was aware that the Shahab-3 did not have sufficient range to reach
Israel.
According to Michael Elleman,
the author of the most definitive account of the Iranian missile program,
as early as 2000, Iran’s Defense Ministry had begun developing an improved
version of the Shahab-3 with a reentry vehicle boasting a far more aerodynamic
“triconic baby bottle” shape – not the “dunce-cap” of the original.
As Elleman told this writer,
however, foreign intelligence agencies remained unaware of the new and improved
Shahab missile with a very different shape until it took its first flight test
in August 2004. Among the agencies kept in the dark about the new design was
Israel’s Mossad. That explains why the false documents on redesigning the
Shahab-3 – the earliest dates of which were in 2002, according to an unpublished internal IAEA document –
showed a reentry vehicle design that Iran had already discarded.
The role of the MEK in passing
the massive tranche of supposed secret Iranian nuclear documents to the BND and
its hand-in-glove relationship with the Mossad leaves little room for
doubt that the documents introduced to Western intelligence 2004 were, in
fact, created by the Mossad.
For the Mossad, the MEK was a
convenient unit for outsourcing negative press about Iran which it did not want
attributed directly to Israeli intelligence. To enhance the MEK’S credibility
in the eyes foreign media and intelligence agencies, Mossad passed the
coordinates of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility to the MEK in 2002. Later,
it provided to the MEK personal information such as the passport number and
home telephone number of Iranian physics professor Mohsen Fakhrizadh, whose
name appeared in the nuclear documents, according to the co-authors of a best-selling
Israeli book on the Mossad’s covert operations.
By trotting out the same
discredited technical drawing depicting the wrong Iranian missile reentry
vehicle – a trick he had previously deployed to create the original case for
accusing Iran of covert nuclear weapons development – the Israeli prime
minister showed how confident he was in his ability to hoodwink Washington
and the Western corporate media.
Netanyahu’s multiple levels of deception have been
remarkably successful, despite having relied on crude stunts that any diligent
news organization should have seen through. Through his manipulation of foreign
governments and media, he has been able to maneuver Donald Trump and the United
States into a dangerous process of confrontation that has brought the US to the
precipice of military conflict with Iran.
Gareth
Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national
security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for
Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to
the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
