‘Target Tehran’; Behind the Complex Operation of Mossad to Acquire Iran's Nuclear Archive

A seemingly ordinary woman wandered daily in the Shahrabad neighborhood, one of the southernmost suburbs of Tehran. She had such a normal appearance and behavior that no one paid attention to her; her Persian was fluent, and her clothing was like that of all other women in the area, with a hijab typical of the impoverished working-class neighborhood. Our story's woman never went alone to the streets and, unlike in religious and fanatical neighborhoods, a man always walked beside her. When you looked at them, they appeared to be a completely ordinary and impoverished couple, immersed in the struggles of their daily lives and hard livelihood. The security guards from one of the abandoned buildings in this remote, yet supposedly industrial, area of Tehran never paid special attention to this woman or her male companion. Perhaps, from the other side of the story, the warehouse they were guarding was so simple and without any special markings that no one noticed it. It seemed like a storage of scrap metal or wood, where the owner, fearing theft, had a few people watch over it; a balanced game to mislead competitors. The guards of that warehouse, who were not even on the level of the old neighborhood's 'Sergeant Ghandali,' might not have realized that the same woman, with a different appearance but still very ordinary and unremarkable, had passed by them many times. Analyzing 'Iran's Nuclear Archive,' according to two Israeli authors, these guards could not even imagine in their worst nightmares that this 'ordinary' woman was an Israeli citizen, a Mossad agent with an engineering degree, tasked with gathering information from this 'simple warehouse' as part of one of the most perilous missions assigned by Mossad, the Israeli special operations agency abroad. If they had become suspicious, perhaps one of the 'boldest operations in Mossad's history,' as it was named, would have failed. It is said that on the day when Yossi Cohen, the then-head of Mossad, attended a meeting of the leaders of Western intelligence agencies, the attendees stood up and applauded in admiration of Mossad's daring operation to access Iran's nuclear archive. For a long time, some media outlets referred to that operation as a mission that surpassed any astonishing similar missions in the mysterious world of espionage and intelligence. At the height of intense debates during Donald Trump's presidency regarding the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA or Washington's remaining in this nuclear agreement with Iran, which Israel had vehemently opposed since the U.S. gained access to it during Barack Obama's administration, Benjamin Netanyahu pulled down black curtains from two shelves containing files and CDs and announced Israel's acquisition of the nuclear archive of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Shortly after that, Donald Trump proudly signed the order for the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA in the Oval Office of the White House. The report of sending an Israeli female agent to gather information from the Shahrabad warehouse later enabled the planning of sending 24 other agents to break locks and remove the nuclear archive from southern Tehran to Mossad's headquarters in Tel Aviv, which is one of the intriguing sections of a new book published about this operation. This book is the result of research by two Israeli authors and journalists; Yona Jeremy Babb, a senior military reporter who also writes as a European correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, and Ilan Aviatar, who was previously the editor of the news section at the Jerusalem Post; both authors have a rich background in covering issues related to Israeli security and regional affairs. They consider the operation to access the documents in Shahrabad to be completely unusual and extraordinary in terms of complexity and audacity. The book, titled in English 'Target; Tehran' and in Hebrew 'Mossad in Tehran,' states that the effort to access Iran's nuclear archive at Mossad began in 2016, shortly after Yossi Cohen took over as head of Mossad at the end of Tamir Pardo's term. The retired general Meir Dagan, who was the head of Mossad before Pardo, spoke of a 'divine hand' regarding the mysterious events that had occurred in Iran's nuclear program, which had slowed the progress of these plans. The book also reveals, based on conversations with former Mossad officials, the story of the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whom Benjamin Netanyahu referred to as the father of Iran's nuclear bomb during the same conference where he disclosed Israel's acquisition of the nuclear archive, saying, 'Remember this name,' and details of some previous failed plans to assassinate this 'Iranian Robert Oppenheimer.' The book also recalls many other operations attributed to Israel, for which the country never took responsibility, such as the series of mysterious explosions in late spring and early summer of 2020 at the Natanz facility. Perhaps the Shahrabad operation is the only operation for which Israel took responsibility, while the rest of the events were merely attributed to Mossad. The authors of the book told Israeli media that the idea of writing such a book came to their minds after Netanyahu's press conference, and access to Mossad officials to speak about this matter became easier, and from then on, the only challenge was gaining the trust of these officials to express their views. According to the authors, Yossi Cohen completely agreed with Benjamin Netanyahu that a comprehensive effort to eliminate the JCPOA was 'a necessity.' However, Netanyahu told Cohen that convincing the world that Iran was lying about its nuclear program was not enough; they needed to prove this lie. At that time, Mossad was aware of the existence of Iran's nuclear archive, but its exact location and content remained a sealed secret. Yossi Cohen decided to acquire this archive by any means necessary. The book reports on a 'fateful meeting' within the leadership of Mossad, attended by Yossi Cohen, Ehud Lavie, head of the Mossad's elite secret operations division at the so-called 'Kisaria' headquarters, and responsible for operations in enemy territories, Dadi (David) Barnea, the head of the 'Tzomet' division in Mossad and responsible for recruiting and utilizing human intelligence sources, and Dr. Eyal Holata, head of the technology division at Mossad. David Barnea succeeded Cohen as head of Mossad and still holds this position, while Eyal Holata, born to an Iranian mother and a European father, became the head of Israel's National Security Council during the short one-and-a-half-year tenure of rotating Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. The book states that some clues that the Western intelligence community previously had regarding Iran's nuclear program helped Israel, but Iran's efforts to prevent unlimited access for the International Atomic Energy Agency to the country's past nuclear documents led the Iranians to relocate those documents. The book claims that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was personally involved in choosing the dilapidated and ordinary building in Shahrabad for transferring documents, believing that no one would suspect such a place. According to the authors, the Iranian intelligence agencies also did not imagine that Mossad was monitoring the movements of key figures in Iran's nuclear program and was close to identifying the final hiding place of the documents. The book explains that when the location of the archive was confirmed, there were still many details regarding access to it at the center of Mossad's discussions, and whether these documents indeed contained definitive evidence to prove the Islamic Republic of Iran's intentions to acquire a nuclear bomb. It was then that the critical decision to send a female Mossad agent to Shahrabad began. She stayed at the location for a while, working on the 'preparations' for accessing the archive. The book indicates that when the 'green light' was given to begin the main operation, a team of 24 agents, including Israelis and also some Iranians, entered Iran from various routes and arrived at the Shahrabad warehouse on the designated night. The guards left the site as they did on any other night, and the next team of guards was supposed to arrive in the early morning. The dispatched Mossad agents had six and a half hours to neutralize the alarm systems and break locks and transfer the documents. At 10:31 PM on that winter night, the locks melted, and while a group of agents kept watch at the heavy iron doors of the warehouse to monitor the surroundings, another group successfully entered the internal section of the warehouse. However, a problem arose, and it became clear that just the day before, changes had been made to the contents and location of the warehouse, and some of the desired items had been moved, and the arrangement of the warehouse had changed. Months of information gathering, meticulous planning, and training could have been lost. The team of agents, in consultation with Mossad in Israel, whose officials were monitoring events from the Tel Aviv headquarters moment by moment, was instructed to continue their mission as planned. According to the authors, the 24-member team utilized their technical capabilities to expedite the work; one of the teams used special metal cutting torches that generated temperatures of around 3,600 degrees. This temperature melted the heavy metal vaults, and the team members began examining the necessary documents, leaving behind less important documents. The book states that at that time, the agents discovered a 'massive treasure'; alongside paper files, charts, and maps, they obtained over 100 CDs containing files and documentaries from Iran's nuclear program, along with an additional hidden memory and images from various nuclear tests. Half a ton of disks and documents were loaded onto two trucks that left the Shahrabad warehouse at exactly 5 AM Tehran time and headed towards the border with Azerbaijan via different routes. The book states that two and a half hours later, Iranian guards arrived at the warehouse and realized the truth, but it was already too late. The trucks had executed a plan that the book refers to as a complex deception, crossing the border, and then all participants in that plan were extracted from both Iran and Azerbaijan. The Iranian nuclear archive reached Israel from Azerbaijan that night, but it took more than two months for Benjamin Netanyahu to hold that press conference. A group of Israeli experts says that despite the flawless execution of that extraordinary operation, it was, in fact, a failure and did not achieve Israel's ultimate goal of preventing Iran from advancing in its nuclear program. However, Jeremy Babb rejects this view, arguing that these Israelis do not have an accurate understanding of the situation, and without Israeli efforts against Iran's nuclear program, Tehran might have reached a nuclear bomb decades ago. He and Ilan Aviatar emphasize that based on Mossad's assessment in the 1990s, Iran could have reached a nuclear bomb in just 'two years' back then, but the fact that Tehran has not yet reached such capability should be considered 'a definitive success' for Israel. The book reflects these internal debates as well. According to Eyal Aviatar, if Israel can continuously slow down Iran's nuclear program, perhaps as a result of internal changes in Iran, foremost among them the desire for the fall of the clerical regime, Israel's goal of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb may also be realized. The original version of the book in English was published about two weeks before the attack by the extremist group Hamas on Israeli territory and the start of the Israeli army's war in Gaza. The Wall Street Journal introduced it as 'the best book of the year' regarding Israel's intelligence superiority over the Islamic Republic of Iran. The authors believe that the Hamas attack increased the book's significance because even if Hamas did not directly carry out that attack on the orders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the actions of the internal leadership of this extremist organization are entirely in line with the doctrine of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which seeks to create a ring of fire around Israel and engage the country in severe and consecutive problems until its destruction. The authors believe that one day after Hamas's attack on the people of Israel, Tehran ordered its proxy groups to initiate a wave of relentless attacks against Israel. Thus, a new chapter, following the Hamas attack on Israel, was added to the Hebrew version of the book. The Hebrew narrative of the book is currently published by 'Yediot Sfarim' (Y.Books) during one of the most controversial periods in the 46-year hostility of the Islamic Republic of Iran against Israel. The two authors of the book believe that the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, and other countries in the region in intercepting hundreds of drones and missiles that the Islamic Republic of Iran fired towards Israel in its first direct military action on the night of April 14 this year, proved the practical application of the understandings among all entities concerned about the Islamic Republic of Iran, and this trend of cooperation will likely increase further. Ilan Aviatar believes that the night of Iran's missile and drone attack on Israel was one of the most dramatic hours in over four and a half decades of Tehran's hostility towards Israel, but even more dramatic events may still be on the way.