8 | JUNE 24 • 2021 

PURELY COMMENTARY

S

pies steal secrets. 
Sometimes, those 
secrets must be care-
fully studied and analyzed by 
experts to turn them into prod-
ucts useful to 
policymakers.
The spies I’ll 
be talking about 
here worked for 
the Mossad. The 
expert who has 
painstakingly 
transformed 
the secrets they collected into 
actionable intelligence is David 
Albright. 
And the policymaker who 
should be revising his policies 
in response to a clearer picture 
of reality is President Joe Biden.
The story begins on a cold 
night in January 2018, when 
Israeli agents stealthily broke 
into a warehouse in southern 
Tehran where Iran’s rulers had 
stored an archive of their nucle-
ar weapons program.
In an interview recently 
broadcast on Israeli television, 
former Mossad chief Yossi 
Cohen revealed new details 
of the operation. Planning 
required two years and includ-
ed the construction of a replica 
of the warehouse. Twenty 
agents were trained for the 
mission. None of them were 
Israelis. They had less than 
seven hours to carry out their 
risky mission.
“In the morning, trucks, 
guards and workers arrive, and 
there’s a crowd and you can’t 
just jump over fences and break 

through walls,
” said Cohen. 
“Only when they broke into 
the formidable safes and began 
to go through the images and 
Farsi descriptions did we realize 
that we had what we wanted 
on the Iranian military nuclear 
program.
”
The agents quickly spirited 
the materials — more than 
55,000 pages of documentation 
and nearly 200 computer disks 
— out of the country. None of 
the agents was captured but, 
Cohen said, some had to be 
rescued from Iran.
Three months later, Prime 
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 
held a press conference. He said 
the materials proved that Tehran 
had a “program to design, 
build and test nuclear weapons 
… to use at a time of its choice 
to develop nuclear weapons.”
That meant that the nuclear 
deal President Barack Obama 
had concluded in 2015, the 
Joint Comprehensive Plan of 
Action (JCPOA), was predicat-
ed on lies told by Iran’s rulers, 
and that the JCPOA did not, as 
claimed, block their path to a 
nuclear weapons capability.
Proponents of the JCPOA 
insisted there was nothing 
earth-shattering in the materi-
als, and that Obama had con-
cluded as good a deal as could 
be expected. President Donald 
Trump, long mistrustful of the 
deal, soon formally withdrew.
David Albright, a physicist 
and the founder and president 
of the Institute for Science 
and International Security, 

also known as “the good ISIS,
” 
persuaded the Israeli govern-
ment to allow him access to 
the materials. Since then, he 
and his team have conducted a 
comprehensive forensic anal-
ysis.

THE TRUTH COMES OUT
The result is a new book: Iran’s 
Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear 
Weapons, co-authored with 
Sarah Burkhard. In it, Albright 
points out that the very “exis-
tence and maintenance of 
a secret archive containing 
nuclear weapon design and 
manufacturing data is not com-
patible with Iran’s legally bind-
ing nuclear non-proliferation 
commitments” under the Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 
the fundamental international 
agreement for preventing the 
spread of nuclear weapons.
Albright notes that by 
“secretly storing and curating 
an extensive archive focused 
on developing and building 
missile-deliverable nuclear 
weapons,
” Iran’s rulers also 
violated their “JCPOA pledge 
that ‘under no circumstances 
will Iran ever seek, develop or 
acquire any nuclear weapons.
’”
The Islamic Republic’s secret 
nuclear weapons development 
program, the Amad Plan, was 
suspended in 2003, after the 
U.S. military toppled regimes 

in both Afghanistan and Iraq, 
causing Iran’s rulers to fear 
they might be next. But that 
was a “tactical retreat, not an 
abandonment” of the regime’s 
“nuclear weapons ambitions or 
activities,
” writes Albright.
“The post-Amad goals are 
among the most critical reve-
lations of the archive,
” he con-
tinues. Over the past decade, 
an Iranian Ministry of Defense 
entity known as SPND has 
been responsible for developing 
various nuclear capabilities. 
 “Iran’s lack of cooperation 
with the IAEA [International 
Atomic Energy Agency] up 
until today has increased con-
cerns that a subset of SPND’s 
activities have remained 
focused on preserving or carry-
ing forward the activities of the 
Amad Plan.
”
The archive also reveals that 
Iran’s rulers have “a host of 
undeclared nuclear sites and 
activities, all previously ded-
icated to a covert, and illegal, 
nuclear weapons program.
” 
What activities are taking place 
at those sites now is unknown 
because IAEA inspectors have 
been barred from visiting most 
of them.
Under the flawed JCPOA, the 
IAEA also is not permitted to 
inspect military facilities where 
nuclear weapons research has 
been conducted in the past and 

Clifford D. 
May
JNS.org

essay

continued on page 10

Iran’s Nuclear 
Secrets Have 
Been Exposed

NANKING2012, WIKIMEDIA

Arak’s IR-40 
Heavy water 
reactor in Iran

