theguardian
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Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim
contradicted by Mossad
Gulf between Israeli secret service
and PM revealed in documents shared with the Guardian along with other secrets
including CIA bids to contact Hamas
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Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim
contradicted by Mossad, leaked spy cables show
Monday 23 February 2015 18.06 GMT
Last modified on Tuesday 24 February 2015 00.30 GMT
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Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic
declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran
was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own
secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.
It is part of a cache of hundreds of
dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one
of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.
Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with
a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in
New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year
and called for action to halt the process.
But in a secret report shared with
South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that
Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report
highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli
politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence
establishment.
An
extract from the document Photograph: The Guardian
The disclosure comes as tensions
between Israel and its staunchest ally, the US, have
dramatically increased ahead of Netanyahu’s planned address to the US Congress
on 3 March.
The White House fears the Israeli
leader’s anticipated inflammatory rhetoric could damage sensitive negotiations
between Tehran and the world’s six big powers over Iran’s nuclear programme.
The deadline to agree on a framework is in late March, with the final settlement
to come on 30 June. Netanyahu has vowed to block an agreement he claims would
give Iran access to a nuclear weapons capability.
The US president, Barack
Obama, will not meet Netanyahu during his visit, saying protocol
precludes a meeting so close to next month’s general election in Israel.
The documents, almost all marked as
confidential or top secret, span almost a decade of global intelligence
traffic, from 2006 to December last year. It has been leaked to the al-Jazeera
investigative unit and shared with the Guardian.
The papers include details of
operations against al-Qaida, Islamic State and other terrorist organisations,
but also the targeting of environmental activists.
The files reveal that:
• The CIA
attempted to establish contact with Hamas in spite of a US ban.
• South Korean intelligence targeted
the leader of Greenpeace.
• Barack Obama “threatened” the
Palestinian president to withdraw a bid for recognition of Palestine at the UN.
• South African intelligence spied
on Russia over a controversial $100m joint satellite deal.
The cache, which has been
independently authenticated by the Guardian, mainly involves exchanges between
South Africa’s intelligence agency and its counterparts around the world. It is
not the entire volume of traffic but a selective leak.
One of the biggest hauls is from
Mossad. But there are also documents from Russia’s FSB, which is responsible
for counter-terrorism. Such leaks of Russian material are extremely rare.
Other spy agencies caught up in the
trawl include those of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, the UAE, Oman and
several African nations.
The scale of the leak, coming 20
months after US whistleblower Edward Snowden handed over tens of thousands of
NSA and GCHQ documents to the Guardian, highlights the increasing inability of
intelligence agencies to keep their secrets secure.
While the Snowden trove revealed the
scale of technological surveillance, the latest spy cables deal with espionage
at street level – known to the intelligence agencies as human intelligence, or
“humint”. They include surveillance reports, inter-agency information trading,
disinformation and backbiting, as well as evidence of infiltration, theft and
blackmail.
The leaks show how Africa is
becoming increasingly important for global espionage, with the US and other
western states building up their presence on the continent and China expanding
its economic influence. One serving intelligence officer told the Guardian:
“South Africa is the El Dorado of espionage.”
Africa has also become caught up in
the US, Israeli and British covert global campaigns to stem the spread of
Iranian influence, tighten sanctions and block its nuclear programme.
The
Mossad briefing about Iran’s nuclear programme in 2012 was in stark
contrast to the alarmist tone set by Netanyahu, who has long presented the
Iranian nuclear programme as an existential threat to Israel and a huge risk to
world security. The Israeli prime minister told the UN: “By next spring, at
most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the
medium enrichment and move[d] on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a
few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for
the first bomb.”
He said his information was not
based on secret information or military intelligence but International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) reports.
Behind the scenes, Mossad took a
different view. In a report shared with South African spies on 22 October 2012
– but likely written earlier – it conceded that Iran was “working to close gaps
in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce
the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually
given”.
But the report also states that Iran
“does not appear to be ready” to enrich uranium to the higher levels necessary
for nuclear weapons. To build a bomb requires enrichment to 90%. Mossad
estimated that Iran then had “about 100kg of material enriched to 20%” (which
was later diluted or converted under the terms of the 2013 Geneva agreement).
Iran has always said it is developing a nuclear programme for civilian energy
purposes.
Last week, Netanyahu’s office
repeated the claim that “Iran is closer than ever today to obtaining enriched
material for a nuclear bomb” in a statement in response to an IAEA report.
A senior Israeli government official
said there was no contradiction between Netanyahu’s statements on the Iranian
nuclear threat and “the quotes in your story – allegedly from Israeli
intelligence”. Both the prime minister and Mossad said Iran was enriching
uranium in order to produce weapons, he added.
“Israel believes the proposed
nuclear deal with Iran is a bad deal, for it enables the world’s foremost
terror state to create capabilities to produce the elements necessary for a
nuclear bomb,” he said.
However, Mossad had been at odds
with Netanyahu on Iran before. The former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left
office in December 2010, let it be known that he had opposed an order from
Netanyahu to prepare a military attack on Iran.
Other members of Israel’s security
establishment were riled by Netanyahu’s rhetoric on the Iranian nuclear threat
and his advocacy of military confrontation. In April 2012, a former head of
Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, accused Netanyahu of “messianic”
political leadership for pressing for military action, saying he and the then
defence minister, Ehud Barak, were misleading the public on the Iran issue. Benny Gantz, the Israeli military chief of
staff, said decisions on tackling Iran “must be made carefully, out
of historic responsibility but without hysteria”.
There were also suspicions in
Washington that Netanyahu was seeking to bounce Obama into taking a more
hawkish line on Iran.
A few days before Netanyahu’s speech to the UN, the then US defence secretary,
Leon Panetta, accused the Israeli prime minister of trying to force the US into
a corner. “The fact is … presidents of the United States, prime ministers of
Israel or any other country … don’t have, you know, a bunch of little red lines
that determine their decisions,” he said.
“What they have are facts that are
presented to them about what a country is up to, and then they weigh what kind
of action is needed in order to deal with that situation. I mean, that’s the
real world. Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to
put people in a corner.”
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