Israeli Intelligence Brings Iran Deal Into Sharp Focus

1. The half-ton of intelligence smuggled out of Iran by Israel shows the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was negotiated in bad faith.

Netanyahu said Monday that Iranian officials lied time and again to the public and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is responsible for inspections under the deal, about its past nuclear activities.

A senior administration official told THE WEEKLY STANDARD the evidence presented Monday underscores the flaws underlying the 2015 agreement. “The president called it the worst deal ever. I think it’s worse than we even thought,” they said. “Our choices are that they were lying to us and we knew they were lying, and we still chose to go into the deal, which is bad, or we didn’t know, we were tricked.”

“In either case, the deal is based on a lie—and that can’t be the basis for a transparent, verifiable, nonproliferation instrument.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said much the same in a statement after Netanyahu’s address: “Among the flaws of the Iran nuclear deal was the whitewashing of Iran’s illicit activities related to its military nuclear program … Iran’s nuclear deception is inconsistent with Iran’s pledge in the nuclear deal “that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons.””

The documents seized by Israeli intelligence include details about Project Amad, which Netanyahu described Monday as a “comprehensive program to design, build, and test nuclear weapons.”

2. The fact that Iran preserved and hid this intelligence long after it was “forced to shelve” Project Amad around 2003 signals Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

“Even after the deal, Iran continued to preserve and expand its nuclear weapons know-how for future use,” Netanyahu said. “Why would a terrorist regime hide and meticulously catalog its secret nuclear files, if not to use them at a later date?”

Israel reportedly discovered the archive in February 2016. Netanyahu said Monday that Iran “intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files” after the deal was reached in 2015.

“One has to ask: Why exactly was Iran hiding half a ton of nuclear weaponization files while implementing the Iran deal?” Pompeo said in his statement. “It is worth recalling that from 2006-2015, Iran was prohibited by Security Council resolutions from enriching any nuclear material.”

3. Netanyahu said Monday that Iran shelved Amad around 2003, but the country’s work to “further develop its nuclear weapons related capabilities” did not end there.

Iran divided its work post-Amad into covert and overt activities, he said, with the same top official who ran Project Amad now overseeing “special activities” to be “carried out under the title of scientific know-how developments.”

“Today, in 2018, this work is carried out by SPND, that’s an organization inside Iran’s Defense Ministry,” Netanyahu said. “Iran planned, at the highest levels, to continue work related to nuclear weapons under different guises and using the same personnel.”

Experts have raised questions about whether such activities are consistent with the 2015 deal or the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

A senior administration official told TWS: “The research and development permitted under the [nuclear deal] is theoretically not supposed to be related to any military dimension of the nuclear program, and this suggests that they may well have continued that work.”

“By basically changing its name and keeping the personnel, what they demonstrated was an interest in keeping the work alive, not just a record of it,” they added. “It remained an active project, and there was a deliberate obfuscation.”

The State Department said Monday that the documents it has reviewed are authentic. Officials are still combing through the thousands of files shared with the U.S. by Israel.

“Everything we’ve reviewed, we assessed to be authentic,” the official said. “We would have no reason to disagree with any of his assertions.”

Supporters of the deal:

1. Former Obama administration officials and defenders of the deal have said that there is “nothing new” in the intelligence presented by Netanyahu on Monday.

The IAEA reiterated in a statement Tuesday that its 2015 assessment said that “before the end of 2003, an organizational structure was in place in Iran suitable for the coordination of a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” And that “although some activities took place after 2003, they were not part of a coordinated effort.”

Defenders of the deal point also to a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which said in part, “we assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons,” and “we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

Opponents counter: the documents provided by Israel contain plenty of new information.

“The existence of the Amad program that ended roughly December of 2003, January of 2004, it is accurate to say that the knowledge of that has been known for—the fact of that had been known for quite some time,” Pompeo told reporters Monday. “But there are thousands of new documents and new information. We’re still going through it. There’s still a lot of work to do to figure out precisely the scope and scale of it.”

According to the Institute for Science and International Security, which received a background briefing about the Israeli intelligence, the new information includes:

Opponents also ask: if supporters argue that there is “nothing new,” does that mean they knew about Iran’s lies regarding its past nuclear activities during negotiations over the deal, and after it was implemented? They point to the controversy over ascertaining the possible military dimensions (PMDs) of Iran’s nuclear program.

2. Iran’s nuclear plans (and its lies) as laid out Monday are exactly why the U.S. must stay in the deal.

As stated in an NBC report: “The existence of Iran’s active nuclear weapons program before 2003 was exactly why the Bush administration sanctioned Iran, the Obama White House tightened those sanctions, and the Obama team sought an agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

But, as noted by TWS in an editorial this week: “We need the Iran deal, we’re told, because it’s only by ‘engaging’ with the regime that we can monitor what it does through JCPOA-mandated inspections. The Iranians may be hiding all sorts of things from the inspectors, the thinking goes, but without the deal there would be no inspections at all.

But by this logic there is nothing Iran could ever do, short of launching a nuclear attack on Saudi Arabia or Israel, that would persuade the deal’s proponents that discarding it is a good idea. The more Iran lies, the more it’s shown to have deceived western powers before and since signing the agreement, the more its proponents insist on preserving it.”

3. The IAEA and Trump administration officials say that Iran is in compliance with the deal.

Opponents counter: the bar for “compliance” is low. And they say that the hidden trove raises questions about the authority of the IAEA.

4. Some have cast doubt on the veracity of the Israeli intelligence itself. We’ll just leave this here.

Netanyahu’s presentation came just ahead of a May 12 deadline at which time the president must decide whether to extend certain nuclear deal-related sanctions waivers.

U.S. and European officials have been discussing a potential supplement to the nuclear deal for months. A senior administration official said that Monday’s evidence would have to influence “any discussions of verification” related to a potential add-on or new agreement.

“Our ability to verify the extent of their PMDs to their nuclear program has been revealed as flawed,” they said.

Monday’s intelligence is also sharpening concerns about the deal’s expiring provisions for those who want to see a supplementary or new agreement.