guardian | Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran
was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by
his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.
It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from
the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks
in recent times.
Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his
point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran
would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for
action to halt the process.
But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later,
Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the
activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf
between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and
the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.
