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Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has published documents he says show Iranian intelligence spied on the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency. According to the accusations Iran gained access to sensitive IAEA documents it used to create cover stories and falsify records to hide its nuclear developments. The IAEA has also published a report stating that Iran is refusing to provide information on a number of hidden nuclear sites and its stockpile of enriched uranium is more than 18 times the limit agreed upon in 2015.
Bennet posted a video and tweeted a link to the documents, which are in Persian, on Tuesday. A number of documents contain handwritten notes, one of which by the Iranian Defence Minister to Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was assassinated in November 2020. In the note, Fakhrizadeh wrote: “Sooner or later they (referring to the atomic agency) will ask us-and we’ll need a comprehensive cover story for them.”
In the video Bennett stated: “You see, after Iran stole classified documents from the UN’s Atomic Agency, Iran used that information to figure out what the atomic agency was hoping to find, and then created cover stories and hid evidence to evade their nuclear probes”.
Another report stated last week that Iran had been spying on the IAEA, based on documents Israel took from Iran. According to the report, Iran gained access to IAEA documents and gave them to its top officials involved in its nuclear programme between 2004 and 2006. It used them to prepare cover stories, falsify information and understand what IAEA inspectors already knew about their programme.
These revelations come alongside an IAEA report on Monday, on suspected undeclared nuclear material found at three sites and Tehran’s refusal to respond to questions about the locations. In May, the IAEA said it was “extremely concerned” by the Iran’s silence on potential undeclared nuclear sites and this week, estimated that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium had grown to more than 18 times the limit agreed on in the 2015 nuclear pact.
Iran responded to the report calling it “unfair” and that it feared “the pressure exerted by the Zionist regime and some other actors has caused the normal path of agency reports to change from technical to political”. Iran’s representative to the IAEA, Mohammad Reza Ghaebi stated: “The agency should be aware of the destructive consequences of publishing such one-sided reports”.
