Desk Report
Publish: 12 Jun 2021, 01:28 pm
On July 3, 2016, Yossi Cohen, then the director of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, attends the funeral in Jerusalem of a rabbi killed by Palestinian gunmen. Cohen, the outgoing chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence service, offered the closest acknowledgment yet his country was behind a series of recent attacks targeting Iran's nuclear program and a military scientist in a television interview aired Thursday, June 10, 2021. (AP Photo)
The outgoing chief of Israel’s Mossad
intelligence service has offered the closest acknowledgment yet his country was
behind recent attacks targeting Iran’s nuclear program and a military
scientist.
The comments by Yossi Cohen, speaking
to Israel’s Channel 12 investigative program “Uvda” in a segment aired Thursday
night, offered an extraordinary debriefing by the head of the typically
secretive agency in what appears to be the final days of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule.
It also gave a clear warning to other
scientists in Iran’s nuclear program that they too could become targets for
assassination even as diplomats in Vienna try to negotiate terms to try to
salvage its atomic accord with world powers.
“If the scientist is willing to change
career and will not hurt us anymore, than yes, sometimes we offer them” a way
out, Cohen said.
Among the major attacks to target
Iran, none have struck deeper than two explosions over the last year at its
Natanz nuclear facility. There, centrifuges enrich uranium from an underground
hall designed to protect them from airstrikes.
In July 2020, a mysterious explosion
tore apart Natanz’s advanced centrifuge assembly, which Iran later blamed on
Israel. Then in April of this year, another blast tore apart one of its
underground enrichment halls.
Discussing Natanz, the interviewer
asked Cohen where he’d take them if they could travel there. Cohen said “to the
cellar” where “the centrifuges used to spin.”
“It doesn’t look like it used to
look,” he added.
Cohen did not directly claim the
attacks, but his specificity offered the closest acknowledgement yet of an
Israeli hand in the attacks. The interviewer, journalist Ilana Dayan, also
seemingly offered a detailed description in a voiceover of how Israel snuck the
explosives into Natanz’s underground halls.
“The man who was responsible for these
explosions, it becomes clear, made sure to supply to the Iranians the marble
foundation on which the centrifuges are placed,” Dayan said. “As they install
this foundation within the Natanz facility, they have no idea that it already
includes an enormous amount of explosives.”
They also discussed the November
killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist who began Tehran’s military
nuclear program decades ago. U.S. intelligence agencies and the International
Atomic Energy Agency believe Iran abandoned that organized effort at seeking a
nuclear weapon in 2003. Iran long has maintained its program is peaceful.
While Cohen on camera doesn’t claim
the killing, Dayan in the segment described Cohen as having “personally signed
off on the entire campaign.” Dayan also described how a remotely operated
machine gun fixed to a pickup truck killed Fakhrizadeh and later
self-destructed.
Cohen described an Israeli effort to dissuade
Iranian scientists from taking part in the program, which had seen some abandon
their work after being warned, even indirectly, by Israel. Asked by the
interviewer if the scientists understood the implications if they didn’t stop,
Cohen said: “They see their friends.”
They also talked about Israel’s
operation seizing archival documents from Iran’s military nuclear program.
Dayan said 20 agents, none Israelis, seized material from 32 safes, then
scanned and transmitted a large portion of the documents. Cohen confirmed that
the Mossad received most of the material before it was physically taken out of
Iran.
Cohen defended Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s decision to go public with the results of the operation, going
against a long-standing practice of secrecy involving Mossad activities.
“It was important to us that the world
will see this, but this thing should also resonate with the Iranian leadership,
to tell them, ‘Dear friends: One, you have been infiltrated. Two, we see you..
Three, the era of ... lies is over,’” Cohen said.
Media in Israel operate under a
decades-old policy that requires journalists to clear stories involving
security matters through military censors. That Cohen’s remarks apparently
cleared the censors suggests Israel wanted to issue a new warning to Iran amid
the Vienna nuclear negotiations.
Iran has repeatedly complained about
Israel’s attacks, with Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA Kazem Gharibabadi warning
as recently as Thursday that the incidents “not only will be responded to
decisively, but also certainly leave no option for Iran but to reconsider its
transparency measures and cooperation policy.”
Shahrokh Nazemi, a spokesman for
Iran’s mission to the United Nations, told The Associated Press early Saturday
that Cohen’s comments reflected a long-running pattern of “criminal” sabotage
against Tehran that includes the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Natanz over a
decade ago.
“This lawlessness has reached a point
when the former official of this regime is shamelessly and blatantly
threatening our nuclear scientists with death,” Nazemi said. “This madness must
not be tolerated.”
Cohen, who was replaced by former operative David Barnea, acknowledged in the interview he might one day seek the prime minister’s office himself.
Source: Jon Gambrell, Associated Press
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