(Wall Street Journal) Laurence Norman - Iran secured access to secret UN atomic agency reports almost two decades ago and circulated the documents among top officials who prepared cover stories and falsified a record to conceal suspected past work on nuclear weapons, according to Middle East intelligence officials. Persian-language Iranian records reveal some of the tactics Tehran used with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is tasked with monitoring compliance with nuclear nonproliferation treaties and the 2015 nuclear deal. Iran's acquisition of sensitive IAEA documents "represents a serious breach of IAEA internal security," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former UN weapons inspector. "Iran could design answers that admit to what the IAEA already knows, give away information that it will likely discover on its own, and at the same time better hide what the IAEA does not yet know." The IAEA records accessed by Iran were among more than 100,000 documents and files seized by Israeli intelligence in January 2018 from a Tehran archive. Israel has passed the nuclear archive over to the U.S. intelligence community.
2022-05-26 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive