Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad
Seumas Milne, Ewen MacAskill and Clayton Swisher
Gulf
between Israeli secret service and PM revealed in documents shared with
the Guardian along with other secrets including CIA bids to contact
Hamas
• Read the leaked document here [use the link to read the document. D]
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
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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