Israeli agents covertly extracted documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program in a dramatic 6½-hour operation in Tehran in January, removing a trove of materials that included partial designs for a nuclear warhead, senior Israeli intelligence officials said.
The Israeli team secretly reached the warehouse holding the materials and broke in during a tight time window when it knew the building would be unguarded, the officials said. To avoid drawing attention to the nondescript facility, Iran had not posted full-time guards, they said, but rather relied on alarm systems that the Israeli agents disabled.
The Israeli operation was revealed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at an April press conference in which he declared the stolen documents proved Iran had lied for years in claiming it did not have a nuclear-weapons program.
In a lengthy briefing at a security facility in Tel Aviv last week, senior Israeli intelligence officials disclosed additional details about the operation. Those include specifics on how the documents were removed from Iran; the presence of the warhead designs, for which Israel said Iran had got unspecified foreign assistance; the operation of a secret explosives-testing facility that international inspectors had long sought in vain; and a scramble by Iranian officials to keep their nuclear program alive after international inspectors concluded it had been suspended.
Read the article by Gerald Seib in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal).