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The ‘nuclear material’ that Mossad agents allegedly discovered during their 2018 raid on a Tehran warehouse said to contain thousands of documents on Iran’s nuclear program was probably yellowcake, a partially refined form of uranium which can be turned into nuclear fuel when further processed, John Bolton has said.
Recalling a August 2018 visit to Israel, three months after the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, Bolton wrote that the nuclear archives from the Turquzabad site supposedly “revealed human-processed uranium”.
“It was not enriched uranium, but perhaps yellowcake (uranium oxide in solid form) and certainly evidence contradicting Tehran’s repeated assertions it had never had a nuclear weapons programme,” Bolton claimed. “Iran had tried to sanitise Turquzabad, as it had tried to sanitise Lavizan in 2004 and the explosive test chambers at Parchin between 2012 and 2015, but it had failed again. This could well be evidence that Iran kept alive its ‘Amad plan’ for nuclear weapons after it was supposedly ended in 2004, and would definitely put Tehran on the defensive internationally,” he added.
According to Bolton, “Israel knows for certain what form the uranium is in since it has stolen documents, as does the [International Atomic Energy Agency], which has collected samples.”
Mossad used the documents supposedly obtained during the Turquzabad raid to lobby the Trump administration to pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. In late April 2018, less than a week before the US scrapped the agreement, Netanyahu held a press conference in which he accused Iran of “lying” about the extent of its nuclear activities. A year later, Israeli media reported that Israeli intelligence had carefully crafted the presentation right down to the smallest detail for maximum effect on President Trump.
Iran vocally denied the claims made in Netanyahu’s presentation, blasting the Israeli leader as “the boy who can’t stop crying wolf” and saying that the presentation was a “rehash of old allegations” aimed at untying Trump’s hands to pull out of the JCPOA. According to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the presentation was just one of multiple efforts by the Mossad to “kill” the nuclear deal.
Déjà vu
Bolton’s ‘Iranian yellowcake’ claims hearken back to the Bush administration’s claims in the run-up to the Iraq War about Saddam Hussein’s supposed efforts to obtain “several tonnes” of yellowcake from Niger as part of a secret Iraqi nuclear weapons program. In 2002, Joe Wilson, a US diplomat who travelled to Niger in 2002 to investigate the yellowcake claims, reported that he had found no evidence that Iraq was trying to buy the nuclear material from the African nation. Later that year, French intelligence called the bush administration’s theory “bull****” and said the information was forged.
Nevertheless, in December 2002, Bolton, Bush's undersecretary of state, pushed to have the Nigerian yellowcake claims placed into the administration’s ‘Fact Sheet’ on Iraq’s so-called efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. In March 2003, the US began its invasion of Iraq on the pretext of Baghdad’s alleged pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The Iraqi government was toppled and Saddam Hussein was put on trial and executed, but the weapons were never found.