The Warehouse in Tehran

In February 2016, Mossad case officers found something extraordinary: the location of a nondescript warehouse in Tehran's Shorabad district where Iran had stashed the records of its nuclear weapons program — moved there, Israeli intelligence believed, to keep them hidden yet preserved. For nearly two years, the building was watched. Then, at the end of January 2018, in a single night, Mossad agents broke in.

According to the New York Times' account of the operation, the warehouse held 32 safes. The agents had limited time and — critically — expected Iran to claim any photographed documents were forgeries. So they didn't copy. They took the originals. Using cutting torches that burned at more than 3,600 degrees, they cut open the most important safes and removed their contents: some 55,000 paper pages and 183 compact discs holding another 55,000 files — roughly 100,000 documents in total, weighing about half a ton. When the operation ended, the agents split up and made for the border, carrying the archive out of Iran. A Mossad official later said that "tens of thousands of Iranian security and police personnel" were soon searching the country for the burglars — who were already gone.

The documents detailed Project Amad, Iran's nuclear weapons program: plans for designing, producing, and testing five warheads of 10 kilotons each, for integration onto missiles. The archive suggested the program had been larger, more sophisticated, and better organized than Western intelligence had judged — and that Iran had preserved its nuclear know-how for future use after the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal.

On April 30, 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the material public in a televised presentation from Tel Aviv, standing before shelves of binders and stacks of discs. "Iran's leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons," he said. "Well, tonight, I'm here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time." The White House called the information "new and compelling"; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the documents authentic. Eight days later, on May 8, President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the JCPOA.

What happened next is less cinematic but arguably more important: Israel handed the archive to the International Atomic Energy Agency in batches, and the IAEA — which must verify translations from Farsi, assess credibility against all other information, and follow its own procedures — began a painstaking review. Drawing on the material, the agency pressed Iran with new questions, including about a site in Tehran's Turquzabad district that Netanyahu identified in a September 2018 UN speech as another secret atomic warehouse. It was a strange, inverted moment in the history of intelligence: a spy agency's heist becoming, months later, the raw material of the world's nuclear watchdog.

The raid stands as one of the most audacious physical intelligence operations of the century — a half-ton of a rival's most guarded secrets, cut out of safes in the capital of a hostile power, and carried across its borders in a single night.