CAIRO
A blistering presentation in 2012 by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he claimed Iran was just one year from making a nuclear bomb, has been contradicted by Israel's spy agency, leaked Mossad documents have revealed.
According to top-secret documents published on Tuesday by U.K. daily The Guardian, Israel's Mossad spy agency found that Iran was "not performing the activity necessary to produce [nuclear] weapons."
The report was part of a massive cache of classified cables involving the world's top intelligence agencies – revelations The Guardian described as "one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times."
In a speech delivered before the UN General Assembly in September 2012, Netanyahu held up a cartoon of a bomb that featured a red line, which, he claimed, indicated that Iran would be able to produce a nuclear warhead within one year.
At the time, he had said his information was based not on secret intelligence but on reports prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Netanyahu's presentation came at a time when Israel's longtime ally, the United States, was trying to bring the Iranian nuclear file to the negotiating table.
One year later, the P5+1 grouping – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany – reached an interim agreement with Iran by which Western sanctions on the Islamic republic were eased in return for Iran halting some uranium enrichment activities.
Both sides are currently negotiating a framework agreement with a March 31 deadline for reaching a deal.
In a secret document shared with South Africa's intelligence agency on October 22, 2012, the Mossad concluded that Iran was "working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time instructions are actually given."
The report goes on to assert, however, that Iran "does not appear to be ready" to enrich uranium at the 90-percent rate required for making nuclear weapons.
The Mossad report estimated that Iran at the time had "about 100kg of material enriched to 20 percent."
This amount, The Guardian reported, was later diluted or converted under the terms of a 2013 agreement inked in Geneva.
The British daily said the cache of documents and cables covered almost a decade – from 2006 to 2014 – of "global intelligence traffic."
The cache, which was leaked to Al Jazeera and shared with The Guardian, mainly involves exchanges between South Africa's intelligence agency and its counterparts around the world.
According to The Guardian, the leaked documents have been independently authenticated.
