From Tehran to Tel Aviv, a half-ton nuclear delivery courtesy of the Mossad

According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the half-ton of material was seized in an intelligence operation inside Tehran a few weeks ago. Based on the nature of the operation it is almost certain that the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, was responsible.

The complexity of this operation is something to behold. For a start, the Israelis would have had to locate the document storage site in Tehran. Because of Iran’s significant caution about transmitting valuable information via intercept-vulnerable networks, like phone or Internet cables, the Israelis probably had to rely on a human agent inside the Iranian government to give them the documents storage location.

Next, the Israelis would have had to get a team onto Iranian soil in order to extricate the material. (Although the Mossad retains a covert intelligence presence in Tehran, it would be unlikely to risk the cover identities of long-embedded assets to carry out this operation.) They would have had to access the storage facility, almost certainly controlled by the Revolutionary Guard or intelligence officers, in order to remove the material. That would have required a great deal of planning to ensure that no alarm was raised during the operation. If it had been, the Israeli team would have been caught, tortured, and executed, and their intelligence prize hidden away.

It is also possible that the Israelis hired an Iranian official at the storage site to remove the materials himself and then meet up with a exfiltration team who could move the material and official to safety — likely in Azerbaijan.

The simple point?

A lot of things had to go right for this to work. Whoever in Mossad was responsible here, they had a lot of skill, patience, and courage. Or, as Ben Collins, a former U.S. Army Special Forces captain, aptly put it: