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Times
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Times
Israeli spies ‘in Iran for years' before war on nuclear sites
Israel's spies infiltrated the heart of Iran's missile and nuclear programmes to wage years of covert intelligence-gathering and assess that Tehran's weapons-building infrastructure was far more extensive than previously thought. Leaked intelligence documents shared with western allies, including the US and Britain, and seen by The Times, appeared to reveal the full extent of Iran's nuclear and missile ambitions. The conclusion of Israel's spy agency, Mossad, as well as other military intelligence arms, was that the capability, knowledge and components of the regime's development was racing ahead and it was far more extensive than just the main sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. An intelligence source told The Times on Friday that Israel had been monitoring multiple locations through intelligence agents for years, with each location having 'boots on the ground beforehand'. Israel began readying its attack on Iran from as early as 2010, based on intelligence about its accelerating weapons programme. The documents were leaked amid conflicting reports over the damage to nuclear sites after the 12-day war. While President Trump said the Fordow site had been obliterated by so-called 'bunker buster' bombs, some experts suggest that residual stocks of enriched uranium and manufactured centrifuges may still be able to produce a nuclear weapon in the future. America also mounted attacks on Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites. Israel's military operation was based on intelligence that identified the production of centrifuges, instruments used to enrich uranium, at three sites in Tehran and Isfahan. All were attacked and destroyed by Israel during the conflict. The attacks also focused on seven separate components in the Natanz facility, Iran's main enrichment site. Intelligence officers used spies on the ground to map the layout of Natanz, identifying overground and underground buildings which included piping, feeding and solidification of uranium. Israel also attacked the electricity infrastructure, a research and development building, the transformer station, and the generator structure to back up the electric grid. The attack also hit ventilation and cooling ducts. As well as Natanz, Israel's reconnaissance infiltrated, attacked and destroyed a facility in Isfahan, the Nur and Mogdeh sites for calculation and labs, the Shariati military site, and the large hangar at Shahid Meisami which manufactured the plastic explosives used for testing nuclear weapons, as well as other advanced materials and chemicals. Many of these sites were set up by the SPND, an umbrella organisation led by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian nuclear physicist who was assassinated in 2020 with a satellite-controlled machine gun — allegedly by Israel. The documents also pointed to the infiltration of the headquarters of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which was attacked in the later days of the war, and of nuclear sites such as the Sanjarian, which developed components involved in the creation of nuclear weapons, according to Israel. By the end of 2024, Iran had moved from the research stage of weaponisation to creating an advanced explosive and radiation system, running experiments and leading to nuclear capability 'within weeks', according to the report. The scale and detail of the assessment points to years of intelligence gathering which may still be going on. 'You know they have guys that go in there after the hit, and they said it was total obliteration,' Trump told reporters at the Nato summit in the Hague — suggesting that spies may yet remain on Iranian soil. The depth of Israel's infiltration was revealed as early as 2010, when an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated in broad daylight. Four others have since been assassinated. However, it was brought to the fore more recently with the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief, in July last year, when Mossad hired Iranian security agents to place explosive devices in several rooms of a guesthouse in Tehran. Israeli intelligence also reportedly raised the prospect a few weeks ago of assassinating Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — something Trump made clear he was against. Posting on Truth Social on Friday, Trump responded to Khamenei's recent claims Iran had given the US a 'big slap in the face', with the US leader saying he 'saved' the Supreme Leader from 'a very ugly and Ignominious death'. 'Why would the so-called 'Supreme Leader', Ayatollah Ali Khamenei… say so blatantly and foolishly that he won the War with Israel, when he knows his statement is a lie,' Trump said, adding he has 'dropped' work around sanctions relief in negotiations with Tehran as a result. The intelligence documents seen by The Times show that Iran was aiming to produce dozens of long-range, surface-to-surface missiles a month, leading to up to 1,000 a year with a reported aim of a stock of 8,000 missiles. Experts estimate Iran began the war with some 2,000 to 2,500 ballistic missiles. Agents in Iran visited every workshop and factory that were later attacked, enabling Israel to target 'the entire industry that supported the manufacturing of large amounts of missiles', according to an intelligence source cited in the documents, which added that the sites were both military and civilian in nature. One such site was Muad Tarkivi Noyad in Rasht, located on the coast of the Caspian Sea, which operated under the auspices of the Iranian Aerospace Industry Organisation. According to Israeli intelligence, this produced all the carbon fibre needed to produce missiles. It too was destroyed by Israeli bombs. MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/AP The dozens of locations and sites attacked in the last two weeks, including the Parchin military complex 30km southeast of Tehran, as well as sites for guidance, navigation and control of missiles and the production of warheads and engines needed to fly the missiles, reveal a complex production system that took decades to establish. The scale of the infiltration of the Iranian regime has only served to increase paranoia in Tehran. Over the course of the 12 days of hostility, Iran arrested dozens of people suspected of spying. Efforts to hunt moles began after the assassination of Haniyeh, with IRGC members suspecting one another of security breaches. That was illustrated on Friday when Mossad, in a post on X, warned Iranians to stay away from IRGC officials and vehicles belonging to the regime. Israel's methods of recruitment, including that of Iranian insiders, is a guarded secret, but has even prompted a popular spy thriller series, Tehran. One of Mossad's most famous heists within Iran was the seizure of Iranian nuclear archives from a giant safe in 2018. The top-secret documents were were later used as a basis to convince Trump to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal. Within the agreement, Iran would limit its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. • How badly damaged are Iran's nuclear sites and missiles? Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, admitted on Thursday evening that the Israeli and American campaigns had done 'excessive and serious' damage to the country's nuclear facilities, without giving further details. Araghchi added that there had been 'no agreement' on upcoming nuclear talks with Washington. 'For decades, Israel has been observing activities inside Iran,' said Dr Efrat Sopher, an Iranian-Israeli analyst who chairs the Ezri Centre for Iran and Gulf States Research at the University of Haifa UK. 'Mossad has played a pivotal role in the success in thwarting the Iranian threat, where its successful operations vis-à-vis Iran and its proxies will be chronicled in the history books.'
Wall Street Journal
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
WSJ Opinion: Trump, the Media and a Cease-Fire Amid Iran Talks
As talks with Iran get underway, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth condemns the news media's misleading coverage of the bunker bomb strikes on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, amid a mission briefing from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine. Photo:/Kevin Wolf/AP
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The truth behind Trump's bombings and the huge Iran secret kept from the world that's hoodwinked all of America
Two days before American B-2 stealth bombers dropped the biggest payload of explosives since World War II on Iran, trucks were seen lining up outside the primary target at Fordow. Satellite images showed scores of cargo vehicles outside a tunnel entrance to Iran's key nuclear base inside a mountain. Donald Trump has insisted that the Islamic Republic's nuclear program was destroyed in the precision strikes, an assessment backed by the CIA and Israeli intelligence. But there was also a frantic effort to move centrifuges and highly enriched uranium before US bombers attacked, the key question for the Pentagon now is: where did it go? One possibility, according to experts, is a secret facility buried even deeper under another mountain 90 miles south of Fordow: 'Mount Doom.' In Farsi, the potential new ground zero for Iran's nuclear program is Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, otherwise known in English as 'Pickaxe Mountain,' located in the Zagros Mountains in central Iran on the outskirts of one of the regime's other nuclear sites at Natanz. 'It is plausible that Iran moved centrifuges and highly enriched uranium (HEU) to secret or hardened locations prior to the recent strikes - including possibly to facilities near Pickaxe Mountain,' Christoph Bluth, professor of international relations and security at the University of Bradford, told the Daily Mail. Previous intelligence had showed 'large tunnels being bored into the mountain, with possible infrastructure for an advanced enrichment facility,' he claimed. 'The site may be buried 100 meters below the surface. So it is conceivable that advanced centrifuge cascades have been hidden there, but there is no specific evidence at this time to confirm where centrifuges and fissile material has been moved to.' A satellite picture provided by Maxar Technologies and taken on June 19, 2025, shows trucks positioned near the entrance of Iran's Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant Previous satellite images have shown heavy construction at Pickaxe, and Iran reportedly dismissed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) when asked what was occurring in the bowels of the mountain. Experts have suggested that, if there was a centrifuge hall being built there, it could be bigger than Fordow. The site has four tunnel entrances, each is 20 feet wide by 26 feet high, and experts who have analyzed satellite data suggest its tunnels could go well beyond 382 feet deep, further underground than Fordow. 'It would be much harder to destroy using conventional weapons, such as like a typical bunker buster bomb,' said Steven De La Fuente, a research associate at the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. According to Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the IAEA, the Iranian regime may have moved about 880lbs of uranium that was being stored in casks the size of scuba tanks and was transportable by vehicles. If material from Fordow was hauled to Pickaxe Mountain, it would have likely been driven for two hours along Iran's Route 7 freeway. The emergence of Pickaxe Mountain comes amid a furious row within the Trump administration over the impact of Saturday's strikes on Fordow and two other Iranian nuclear sites, Natanz and Isfahan. A preliminary US intelligence assessment determined with 'low confidence' that Iran's nuclear program was only set back by a matter of months. The initial report was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's main intelligence arm, which is one of 18 US intelligence agencies. However, the classified assessment is at odds with that of President Trump and high-ranking US officials who said the three sites had been 'obliterated.' Weapons expert David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, concluded the centrifuge halls at Fordow were destroyed by the numerous 30,000lb bombs the US dropped. A video shows a Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) 'buster bunker' bomb just before hitting a target during a Pentagon test After viewing satellite images, he said the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOP) were dropped at one end of the centrifuge hall, and on a ventilator shaft. 'Basically, what you have is a very big explosion that will blow one way and then perpendicular,' he concluded. 'It would have destroyed the inside of that centrifuge plant. 'We believe that the MOP went into the hall. We think those centrifuges have been mostly destroyed. I think these reports that somehow there weren't centrifuges taken out are just incorrect.' Albright added: 'It is pretty devastating. A lot of their above-ground facilities that are a critical part of the centrifuge program have been destroyed. A lot of what really is left is sort of what I call the residuals or the remnants of the program.' Iran likely lost nearly 20,000 centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow, he estimated, creating a 'major bottleneck' for any attempt to restart its nuclear program. Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the nonproliferation and biodefense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, concluded that, for Iran, 'weaponization may be impossible for the foreseeable future.' But, she added: 'Washington and Jerusalem must act swiftly to eliminate any of Tehran's remaining HEU stocks, advanced centrifuges, and weaponization capabilities.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
How badly damaged is Iran's nuclear programme? Here's the evidence
After the dust from the bombs and missiles settled, a war of words and a quest for the truth began. Donald Trump triumphantly claimed that America 'obliterated' Iran's nuclear programme, after striking three sites with GBU-57 bunker busting bombs and tomahawk missiles, setting it back 'basically decades'. But Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, said: 'The Americans were unable to accomplish anything significant.' Israeli intelligence said the damage was 'very significant' but the Pentagon's early assessment found that 'the US set them back maybe a few months, tops'. By analysing satellite images, decoding military assessments and cutting through the political posturing, The Telegraph examines what we know about just how badly damaged Iran's nuclear programme really is. Damage sustained Israel and America's attacks had two clear objectives: cripple Iran's ability to make weapons-grade uranium and stop them using their already enriched uranium to make a weapon. The first target was the Natanz enrichment plant. Israel's initial strikes on Natanz disabled its main electrical substation, the main power lines, back-up generators and the fuel tanks which make them run. Without a power supply, installed centrifuges – which spin at supersonic speeds to enrich uranium – would not work properly. Given the electrical structures were above ground, we can be sure that the strikes were successful. Satellite images and video from the ground shows smoke rising from the structures. 'The assumption is that they (the centrifuges) were pretty seriously broken,' said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies. Separately, three small explosive impact craters are visible on the surface above the enrichment halls, and suggest 'substantially more damage' than that first Israeli attack, according to analysis from the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). But 'because the damage is underground and unseen in satellite imagery, there were questions, even from Israeli officials, how effective the potentially up to three penetrators were', it noted. The US then dropped at least two 'bunker buster' bombs on Natanz on June 22. At least one penetration hole can be seen in satellite imagery, indicating a 'double-tap strike' to hit deeper underground, the institute said. A blow to the crown jewels The US military also dropped a dozen 30,000lb bombs on 'the crown jewels of Iran's nuclear programme', the Fordow enrichment plant, targeting two weak points in the mountain over the facility. Analysis shows that the ventilation shafts and the centrifuge cascade hall were targeted, as shown by two sets of penetration holes overlaid onto a map of what is believed to lie up to 80 metres below the surface. If everything happened according to plan, then the blast waves from the bombs would have run through the halls – and as they were perpendicular to one another, could have boosted the likelihood of maximum destruction, according to Mr Lewis. On Thursday, US defence officials described this exact attack plan for Fordow. But they also noted that because the relevant damage was underground, there was no video evidence. 'No one is under there, able to assess,' said Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary. Activity before the attacks gives us some clues as to how bad the damage may be. In advance of the US attacks, it appears Iran backfilled tunnels leading underground at Fordow and another site, Isfahan. Doing so 'can serve multiple purposes, such as inhibiting attack from the surface, as well as containing any explosion or preventing the ejection of hazardous materials from the internal complex in the event of an attack', according to the ISIS report. 'If we had seen all the dirt packed in the entrances blown out, I would think they had crushed the tunnel,' Mr Lewis said. 'Imagine if something happens inside your house, and your windows blow out – you know what happened inside is bad news.' Further evidence lies on the ground above the tunnels and halls. It is still intact. Had there been a major underground collapse, it is likely that subsidence would be visible in the satellite images. But the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Chair Rafael Grossi is more upbeat. He told Radio France Internationale the centrifuges at Fordow are 'no longer operational.' In the interview, Mr Grossi said IAEA officials know the installations 'like the back of our hand' and can 'can deduce fairly precise conclusions by looking at satellite images.' 'Given the power of these devices and the technical characteristics of a centrifuge, we already know that these centrifuges are no longer operational, because they are fairly precise machines: there are rotors, and the vibrations [from the bombs] have completely destroyed them.' The scientists Attacks also destroyed facilities linked to nuclear development, including the headquarters of Iran's defence research agency, and buildings at a university in Tehran believed to be associated with the nuclear programme. On top of all this, Israel's strikes assassinated 20 top military leaders and 14 nuclear scientists – people who would have directed and executed nuclear weapons development. Practically, their roles have been filled by new commanders and experts. The regime remains defiant. 'Even assuming the complete destruction of the sites, the game is not over, because enriched materials, indigenous knowledge and political will remain intact,' said Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Khamenei. What's left? There is little dispute that the bombs and missiles the Israelis and Americans used caused damage, but questions remain over whether any material survived the attacks, and if the intended targets underground – uranium stocks, enrichment technology – were still there to be destroyed when the attacks occurred. Before the war started on June 13, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it believed Iran had 408.6kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent. 'The moment you start an operation, a lot of the intelligence you had of where things were will no longer be useful, because the Iranians will move them around,' said Farzan Sabet, a managing researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute. A convoy of trucks and bulldozers were spotted in the days prior to the US attack at both the Fordow and Isfahan nuclear sites, as seen in satellite images. Experts immediately cautioned that Iran had moved materials off-site. Iranian officials later claimed this was the case, saying the majority of its enriched uranium stockpile had been taken out of Fordow and to a secret location. Iran's deputy foreign minister also said that the regime would not inform the IAEA about 'special measures' to protect its nuclear sites and materials. Mr Hegseth, when asked about the possibility that materials had been moved, did not deny it outright. Instead, he tiptoed around it by saying he wasn't 'aware of any intelligence that suggests things were not where they were supposed to be'. JD Vance, the US vice-president, hinted that the material had been moved at the 11th hour on Sunday 'We're going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel,' he told ABC News. But Mr Trump denied this position on his Truth Social on Thursday. 'The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts. Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!' Moving Iran's uranium stocks would have been challenging to do quickly but not impossible, especially amid wartime survival mentality, experts have said. The perfect hiding place, as revealed by The Telegraph, could be Pickaxe mountain. This facility, just minutes away from Natanz, has a size and depth that suggest facilities with a significant enrichment capacity. Its underground chambers are possibly 100 metres deep, which puts it even deeper than Fordow – and harder to strike. Separately, only one day before Israel attacked, Iran said it had built another new nuclear enrichment facility. It has never been inspected, and its location has not been revealed. And there may be more nuclear sites that the Iranians simply have not disclosed. 'My guess is they probably have at least one more beyond that,' Mr Lewis said. Political posturing For both the US and Israel, it is important to project the attacks as a win – to bolster the political standings of both Mr Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Destroying Iran's nuclear programme was the main justification that Mr Netanyhau gave for directly attacking the country. For Mr Trump, it's important to emerge triumphant as the decision to get directly embroiled in conflict in the Middle East has divided his supporters – given that he campaigned on getting America out of its 'forever wars'. Publicly, too, Iran could leverage widespread belief that its programme has been delayed significantly, giving the regime some cover to accelerate development secretly, if its leadership decides to race towards building a nuclear weapon. An initial assessment from the US defence intelligence agency also reportedly used signals intelligence – likely intercepted communications of Iranian officials. Mr Trump referred to intercepts when he spoke with journalists on Thursday morning. 'Two Iranians went down to see it and they called back and they said, 'This place is gone',' he said. But the leadership remains defiant. 'The Americans were unable to accomplish anything significant in the attack on nuclear sites,' Khamenei said on Thursday. 'It became clear that the American president needs to exaggerate – they exaggerate to cover up the truth.' When will we know for sure? The Pentagon intelligence leaked to CNN and The New York Times that has so enraged Mr Trump was a 'low confidence' preliminary assessment that said the attack had only set back Iran's ability to produce the bomb by a matter of months. The CIA was more optimistic, with director John Ratcliffe saying there was 'credible intelligence' Iran's nuclear programme had been 'severely damaged'. The full truth will take weeks or months – if ever – to emerge, after Iran conducts its own damage assessments and their information filters into communications channels. 'A professional battle damage assessment takes time,' an Israeli official told Axios. 'Israeli intelligence services haven't arrived at any bottom lines for now,' the official added. 'But we don't think there was any bug in the operation, and we have no indications the bunker buster bombs didn't work. Nobody here is disappointed.' One way for foreign agencies to gauge underground damage is to use radar imagery to see if the mountains above the facilities shrunk in size, suggesting significant geological changes. But possibly the most useful information will come from on-the-ground work, relying heavily on Israeli intelligence 'to be hunting in Iran, even under the ceasefire, for non-destroyed residuals such as nuclear materials, centrifuges, and nuclear weapon manufacturing capabilities', the ISIS report said. Some clues could come from a deal struck between the US and Iran. The two countries will meet next week. As part of an agreement, Mr Trump will demand that Tehran hands over all its enriched uranium, according to Israeli reports. Only Iran knows how much of that 400kg stock is left, and where it is. It will be expected to provide answers or face further sanctions. In any case, the impact of the attacks has become clear. Spencer Faragasso a senior research fellow from the resected ISIS said: 'Overall, it may possibly take years for Iran to reconstitute the capabilities it lost at these facilities.' In the meantime, the evidence shows that they are determined to carry on with their programme. This week, Iran's parliament unanimously agreed to suspend all cooperation with the IAEA – the main window through which the world could track the regime's nuclear ambitions. 'The Iranians might decide that the only way to prevent future military attacks on its territory is not only to reconstitute the programme, but to push toward weaponisation,' said Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think tank. At least one Iranian MP, Ahmad Naderi, is unequivocal. 'I believe we need to conduct a nuclear bomb test. There is no other way for us.'
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
What's next for Iran's nuclear programme?
Barely 72 hours after United States President Donald Trump's air strikes against Iran, a controversy erupted over the extent of the damage they had done to the country's uranium enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz. The New York Times and CNN leaked a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that the damage may have been 'from moderate to severe', noting it had 'low confidence' in the findings because they were an early assessment. Trump had claimed the sites were 'obliterated'. The difference in opinion mattered because it goes to the heart of whether the US and Israel had eliminated Iran's ability to enrich uranium to levels that would allow it to make nuclear weapons, at least for years. Israel has long claimed – without evidence – that Iran plans to build nuclear bombs. Iran has consistently insisted that its nuclear programme is purely of a civilian nature. And the US has been divided on the question – its intelligence community concluding as recently as March that Tehran was not building a nuclear bomb, but Trump claiming earlier in June that Iran was close to building such a weapon. Yet amid the conflicting claims and assessments on the damage from the US strikes to Iranian nuclear facilities and whether the country wants atomic weapons, one thing is clear: Tehran says it has no intentions of giving up on its nuclear programme. So what is the future of that programme? How much damage has it suffered? Will the US and Israel allow Iran to revive its nuclear programme? And can a 2015 diplomatic deal with Iran – that was working well until Trump walked out of it – be brought back to life? In his first public comments since the US bombing, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the attack 'did nothing significant' to Iran's nuclear facilities. Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera's Resul Serdar said Khamenei spoke of how 'most of the [nuclear] sites are still in place and that Iran is going to continue its nuclear programme'. Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Tuesday said that 'preparations for recovery had already been anticipated, and our plan is to prevent any interruption in production or services'. To be sure, even if they haven't been destroyed, Natanz and Fordow – Iran's only known enrichment sites – have suffered significant damage, according to satellite images. Israel has also assassinated several of Iran's top nuclear scientists in its wave of strikes that began on June the DIA said in the initial assessment that the Trump administration has tried to dismiss, that the attacks had only set Iran's nuclear programme back by months. It also said that Iran had moved uranium enriched at these facilities away from these sites prior to the strikes. Iranian officials have also made the same claim. The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had accused Iran of enriching up to 400kg of uranium to 60 percent – not far below the 90 percent enrichment that is needed to make weapons. Asked on Wednesday whether he thought the enriched uranium had been smuggled out from the nuclear facilities before the strikes, Trump said, 'We think everything nuclear is down there, they didn't take it out.' Asked again later, he said, 'We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn't get to move.' Without on-site inspections, nobody can be sure. Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday posted a statement saying, 'several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years'. That's a very different timeline from what the DIA suggested in its early assessment. But it's important to remember that the DIA and CIA also disagreed on whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. The DIA sided with the UN's view that inspections had proven Hussein didn't have such weapons. The CIA, on the other hand, provided intelligence that backed the position of then-president George W Bush in favour of an invasion – intelligence that was later debunked. In that instance, the CIA proved politically more malleable than the DIA. Amid the current debate over whether Iranian nuclear sites were destroyed, Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has also weighed in favour of the president's view. 'Iran's nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,' she posted on Twitter/X. But Gabbard has already demonstrably changed her public statements to suit Trump. In March, she testified before a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that 'Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003'. On June 20, Trump was asked for his reaction to that assessment. 'She's wrong,' he said. Gabbard later that day posted that her testimony had been misquoted by 'the dishonest media' and that 'America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalise the assembly'. Gabbard's clarification did not contradict her earlier view, that Iran was not actively trying to build a weapon. Asked in an interview with a French radio network whether Iran's nuclear programme had been destroyed, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi replied, 'I think 'destroyed' is too much. But it suffered enormous damage.' On Wednesday, Israel's Atomic Energy Commission concurred with the CIA, saying Iran's nuclear facilities had been rendered 'totally inoperable' and had 'set back Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come'. Also on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the destruction of Iran's surface facilities at Isfahan was proof enough of Iran's inability to make a bomb. 'The conversion facility, which you can't do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility, we can't even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,' he told reporters. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated with Iran by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the US, China, Russia and the European Union in 2015, was the only agreement ever reached governing Iran's nuclear programme. The JCPOA allowed Iran to enrich its own uranium, but limited it to the 3.7 percent enrichment levels required for a nuclear reactor to generate electricity. At Israel's behest, Trump abandoned the agreement in 2018 and Iran walked away from it a year later – but before that, it was working. Even though Trump has said he will never return to the JCPOA, which was negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, he could return to an agreement of his own making that strongly resembles it. The crucial question is, whether Israel will this time back it, and whether Iran will be allowed to have even a peaceful nuclear programme, which it is legally entitled to. On Wednesday, Trump didn't sound as though he was moving in this direction. 'We may sign an agreement. I don't know. I don't think it's that necessary,' he told reporters at The Hague. Any JCPOA-like agreement would also require Iran to allow IAEA inspectors to get back to ensuring that Tehran meets its nuclear safeguard commitments. 'IAEA inspectors have remained in Iran throughout the conflict and are ready to start working as soon as possible, going back to the country's nuclear sites and verifying the inventories of nuclear material,' the IAEA said on Tuesday. But Iran's powerful Guardian Council on Thursday approved a parliamentary bill to suspend cooperation with the IAEA, suggesting that Tehran is at the moment not in the mood to entertain any UN oversight of its nuclear facilities.'If Iran wants a civil nuclear programme, they can have one, just like many other countries in the world have one, and [the way for] that is, they import enriched material,' Rubio told journalist Bari Weiss on the Podcast, Honestly, in April. 'But if they insist on enriching [themselves], then they will be the only country in the world that doesn't have a weapons programme, quote unquote, but is enriching. And so I think that's problematic,' he said. Ali Ansari, an Iran historian at St. Andrews University in the UK, told Al Jazeera that 'there have already been calls to cease uranium enrichment from activists within the country'. But the defiant statements from Iranian officials since the US strikes – including from Khamenei on Thursday – suggest that Tehran is not ready to give up on enrichment. Trump has, in recent days, suggested that he wants Iran to give up its nuclear programme altogether. On Tuesday, Trump posted on TruthSocial, 'IRAN WILL NEVER REBUILD THEIR NUCLEAR FACILITIES!' He doubled down on that view on Wednesday. 'Iran has a huge advantage. They have great oil, and they can do things. I don't see them getting back involved in the nuclear business any more, I think they've had it,' he told reporters at the end of the NATO summit in The Hague. And then he suggested the US would again strike Iran's facilities, even if it weren't building a bomb. 'If [Iran] does [get involved], we're always there, we'll have to do something about it.' If he didn't, 'someone else' would hit Iran's nuclear facilities, he suggested. That 'someone' would be Israel – which has long tried to kill any diplomatic effort over Iran's nuclear programme. At the NATO summit, Trump was asked whether Israel and Iran might start a war again soon. 'I guess some day it can. It could maybe start soon,' he said.
