The chief of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service recently visited Israel to discuss the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, The Times of Israel reported Friday.
Israel’s Channel 13 reported that Alex Younger, the MI6 chief, arrived in Israel on Monday and met with Yossi Cohen, head of the Mossad, and other Israeli intelligence officials.
Cohen said last April that he was 100% certain that Iran was committed to developing nuclear weapons. A few weeks later, it was revealed that Israel had captured an archive of documents from Iran, showing that the Islamic Republic was still intending to build nuclear weapons.
According to the television report, Israeli intelligence believes that Iran is “making preparations” to develop nuclear weapons without blatantly violating the 2015 deal. However, the Islamic Republic has not yet made the political decision to break out, according to the Israeli assessment.
The Channel 13 report, citing Western intelligence sources, said that Iran’s nuclear efforts were also the subject of discussions among participants at last week’s Munich Security Conference.
The report assessed that Iran was “preparing the infrastructure… in an accelerated fashion,” should it decide to openly violate the restrictions of the accord.
The Israeli report came just hours after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a report saying that it found Iran to be in compliance with specific provisions of the 2015 nuclear accord.
However, experts from the Institute for Science and International Security and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), who have reviewed the files and documents from the archive, have concluded that IAEA doesn’t have a complete understanding of the full scope of Iran’s nuclear program.
A November paper authored by David Albright, a former weapons inspector and president of the institute; Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA official and a senior advisor at FDD; and Andrea Stricker, a senior policy analyst at the institute, assessed that information in the archive showed that Iran “had put in place the infrastructure for a comprehensive nuclear weapons program capable of one day building far more, if required.”
Albright, Heinonen, and Stricker faulted the IAEA for failing to act on the information contained in the archive recovered by Israel.
The report that the nuclear threat posed by Iran is concerning world powers comes as Josh Block, President and CEO of The Israel Project, wrote an op-ed criticizing Europe for sabotaging “bipartisan US efforts to hold Iran accountable for its illicit nuclear and non-nuclear activities.”
[Photo: CBS / YouTube ]