The “enormous amount of material” gleaned from the 2018 Mossad commando raid on an Iranian nuclear warehouse was aimed not only at proving that “Iran lied” about its nuclear program, but at undermining the program, if possible, Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed in a new book.
In his new autobiography entitled ‘Bibi: My Story’, Netanyahu said he and then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen first discussed a potential operation to steal the files at some point in 2017, and that he had asked Cohen whether Iran had a backup “copy” of the atomic archive.
“I don’t know,” was Cohen’s reported answer. “But they are so sure that no one knows about the existence of the archives, that it is very possible that they did not maintain a copy of it,” the Mossad chief added.
When asked if Iran may have backed the information up using computers, Cohen said possibly not, if they were afraid of being hacked.
Netanyahu says he instructed Mossad to move forward with the operation to steal the files in part to set back the country’s alleged nuclear weapons program (which Iran has consistently denied pursuing) in hopes of stealing materials which were “irreplaceable.”
The former prime minister said he first informed Trump of the Mossad operation via a video presentation on March 5, 2018, two months before the US president pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement.
“The president pointed to the other senior officials in the Oval Office and said, ‘Maybe they needed to see this. I didn’t I’ve already decided to leave the deal,’” Netanyahu wrote.
The Israeli prime minister held his famous ‘Iran Lied’ presentation on ‘Iran’s atomic archives’ on April 30, 2018, complete with a set piece studio including prop folders designed to look like part of the archive. The US withdrew from the agreement a week after he held his presentation.
In his book, Netanyahu said that he deliberately kept the atomic archive find under wraps from the European leaders until his April 30 speech to prevent them from speaking to Trump to attempt to convince him to stay in the deal.
Elsewhere in his book, Netanyahu accused former president Barack Obama of having “malice” toward Israel, and expressed frustration at the US leader’s unwillingness to “stop Iran” from going nuclear during his tenure.
In 2019, Netanyahu’s head of public relations revealed that staffers from the Prime Minister’s Office went through dozens of variations of Netanyahu’s speech to try to get “the largest impact” on Western policy and global public opinion on Iran, with even the smallest details, including Bibi’s custom transparent podium, specially picked.
Israel claims it stole about 55,000 pages of documents from a secret atomic warehouse in Tehran during the 2018 raid.
Iran has vocally denied that Israel had gotten its hands on any nuclear files, and accused Netanyahu of acting like “the boy who can’t stop crying wolf” in characterizing Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons ambitions. Then Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suggested the ‘Iran Lied’ speech was little more than a public spectacle aimed at untying Trump’s hands to pull out of the JCPOA, and accused Mossad of using the speech and other covert efforts to “kill” the nuclear deal.
Tehran has repeatedly stressed that it has no intention of pursuing nukes, and has slammed Israel over its own widely suspected status as the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state.
The Biden administration entered negotiations on restoring the JCPOA in 2021 with Iran and the other remaining parties to the agreement, but talks have stalled amid escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington in recent months.