Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration at the UN, in 2012, that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service. According to a leaked document, Mossad concluded at the time that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”
The secret report is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services leaked to the A-Jazeera investigative unit and shared with the Guardian.
The Israeli prime minister called for action to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons by using a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate Iran’s progress, but a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report shared with South Africa notes that even though there was enough 5 percent enriched uranium for several bombs and even some enriched to 20 percent, Iranians weren’t ready to enrich it to higher levels and they were allocating some of it to produce nuclear fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor.
The leaks coincide with the rising tensions between Israel and the US, ahead of Netanyahu’s planned visit at the beginning of March, as the White House fears the sensitive negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme could be damaged by the Israeli leader’s rhetoric. Netanyahu has already vowed to block any agreement because it would give Iran access to a nuclear weapons.
New confidential or top secret documents leaked to the press include detailed briefings, internal analysis and correspondence between South Africa’s State Security Agency and CIA, Britain’s MI6, Mossad, Russia’s FSB and Iran’s operatives, as well as dozens of other services from Asia to the Middle East and Africa. They cover a period from 2006 until December 2014 and include details of operations against al-Qaida, Islamic State and other terrorist organizations, but also the targeting of environmental activists, according to journalists from the Guardian, who independently authenticated the documents.
The new leak comes 20 months after US whistleblower Edward Snowden handed over tens of thousands of secret files. Unlike Snowden’s spy cables that revealed the scale of technological surveillance, the new ones deal with human intelligence that include surveillance reports, information trading, disinformation and even evidence of infiltration, theft and blackmail.