Reports detail Mossad raid on Iranian nuclear documents

Earlier this year Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled what he said were Iranian nuclear documents dating back to 2003 illicitly seized by Israeli intelligence, arguing they provided more reason for President Trump to withdraw from the Iran deal. (Photo: U.S. Department of State/Public Domain)

JERUSALEM – Some U.S. media reported new details on Sunday from a Mossad operation that smuggled Iranian nuclear documents out of Tehran, though none of the material appeared to show that Iran wasn’t abiding by its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers.

The information relayed to the outlets shed more light on the daring operation but offered few other details on what Israel has already claimed.

The New York Times reported Sunday Israeli agents had six hours and 29 minutes to break into the facility before the guards arrived in the morning. In that time, they infiltrated the facility, disabled alarms and cut through safes to remove the secret documents before leaving undetected.

It said certain documents demonstrated that Iran had worked to “systematically assemble everything it needed to produce atomic weapons,” but noted that exculpatory could have been left out of the hand-picked documents shown to its reporter. It added that Iran maintains the entire document trove is fraudulent.

Earlier this year Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled what he said were Iranian nuclear documents dating back to 2003 illicitly seized by Israeli intelligence, arguing they provided more reason for President Trump to withdraw from the Iran deal. He said the trove included some 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs of secret information from an Iranian nuclear weapons program called “Project Amad.”

The Washington Post, also invited to view the documents, reported on Sunday that Iran “was as on the cusp of mastering key bombmaking technologies” when that program ended last decade.

There was no immediate comment from Netanyahu’s office.