Israel Discloses Iran Nuclear Black Bag Op

Well, this is certainly curious.  There are many stories today about how Israel managed to steal documents related to the Iran nuclear weapons program from a warehouse in Tehran.  You have to admit the brazenness of this is off the charts, but we are used to that from Israel, as anyone who has ever seen The Raid on Entebbe can testify.

The story Israel is telling is a fanciful one, but plausible, the most important ingredient of a covert operation.  It basically says Israeli agents went into Iran in January and stole documents out of an occasionally unguarded warehouse.  That would have to say the Iranians did not see the importance of these documents.  They were stored in safes, but the safes were breached and the documents (including electronic media) were extracted and brought back to Israel.  The article says:  “They said the stash is enormous, running to some 50,000 pages of printed material, plus 183 computer disks with additional files”.  That would be an enormous amount of data, some of it very sensitive in that it disclosed underground facilities being used which were not known before.  Now the inspectors have more data to work with, if they ever get to see the places before Iran undoes what was disclosed.  The Iranians certainly knew what happened so that possibility is probably long been eliminated.  

Many Europeans will poo poo the idea that this information is of any value because it was created before Iran promised to stop developing nuclear weapons and focus on peaceful development of nuclear technologies.  Those people have their heads in the sand.  Among the documents was a summary of what technologies have to be protected from outside eyes because they were solely weapons related.  

Remember how many people still have political capital in the Iran Nuclear Agreements.  The signatories are still leaders in their respective parties and look like they were taken in by a not so clever evasion.  The US former Secretary of State was all over Europe trying to protect his bosses’s “legacy” and preserving an agreement that was thin at the beginning, and transparent now.  I would not want my legacy riding on such a thing, but the same leaders that put it together are reluctant to admit they were taken by Iran.