Israel's History Of Manufacturing The 'Iran Nuclear Threat'

Israel Has Been Peddling Their Current Iran War Deception For A Long Time.

It probably won’t surprise you that Israel’s justification for its regime change war in Iran is a lie.

While claiming the attack is about Iran supposedly being close to developing a Nuclear weapon, even U.S. intelligence admitted there was no evidence Iran was actually intent on building one.

In October of 2024, Joe Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, came out publicly and said, “We do not see evidence today that the supreme leader (of Iran) has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program”.

Again in March of this year, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, came out to say “the intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.

The official “annual threat assessment” report from March of this year, put out by U.S. intelligence, wrote, “We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.

Inflating An Iran Threat

Israel’s lie that Iran poses a Nuclear threat to Israel is nothing new and in fact is a continuation of a longtime Israeli pro-war deception.

In fact forever, Israel has massively inflated the threat Iran actually poses to them.

In 2011, Israel’s Mossad chief Tamir Pardo admitted that “A nuclear-armed Iran wouldn't necessarily constitute a threat to Israel's continued existence”.

Haaretz reported that “Pardo addressed an audience of about 100 Israeli ambassadors. According to three ambassadors present at the briefing, the intelligence chief said that Israel was using various means to foil Iran's nuclear program and would continue to do so, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean the destruction of the State of Israel.”

Pardo was quoted as saying “if one said a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands was an existential threat, that would mean that we would have to close up shop and go home. That's not the situation. The term existential threat is used too freely”.

Furthermore, Israel has often claimed Iran wants to “wipe it off the map” but the evidence for this is more often mistranslated bellicose statements from Iranian officials.

In 2012, the outlet FAIR media wrote :

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor acknowledged on Al Jazeera English that Iranian leaders have never called for Israel to be ‘wiped’ off the map.

Meridor agreed with interviewer Teymoor Nabili’s suggestion that the supposed remarks were never actually made by Iranian leaders, Meridor said,

come basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say ‘we’ll wipe it out,’ you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed.

Hostile words, to be sure, but not the menacing threat endlessly reported in corporate U.S. media in recent years. (Iran, Israel and “wiped off the map” occur together more than 8,500 times in the Nexis news database in the last seven years.)

While Iranian officials may use some harsh rhetoric towards Israel in speeches, prior to Israel’s attack on the country, their solution to the overall Israel/Palestine issue was actually far more moderate than Israel’s.

As The Times of Israel noted in 2013 , “According to the Arab Peace Initiative, 57 Arab and Muslim states will establish ‘full diplomatic and normal relations’ with Israel, in exchange for a ‘comprehensive peace agreement’ with the Palestinians. The Islamic Republic of Iran is among the countries that endorse the initiative” while “Jerusalem remains steadfast in rejecting the overture”.

As journalist Aaron Mate noted , in 2017, Iran “endorsed an offer from the Arab League to Israel that would offer regional peace in exchange for a ‘two-state solution with east Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine’” which Israel then rejected.

As Mate noted, “Israel, with US support, rejects this compromise solution, in which Palestinians would accept just 22% of their stolen homeland, because it insists on denying Palestinians their freedom and stealing more of their territory.”.

As the veteran investigative journalist Gareth Porter had meticulously documented over the years, Israel has consistently inflated and invented the supposed “Iranian Nuclear Threat”.

Manipulation at the IAEA

Israel has pointed to the fact that the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), “has formally declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years”, but Porter has documented endless instances of Israel sharing fake documents in order to manipulate the organization, calling this claim into serious question.

In an interview about his book on the subject Porter noted the most Hawkish members of the Bush administration colluded with Israel in an attempt to launch a war with Iran. As porter said:

I don’t think the problem was so much George W. Bush as it was his group of neo-conservative advisors and high officials, specifically the Vice President Dick Cheney and his senior Middle East advisor David Wurmser, as well as John Bolton, the then under-secretary of state in charge of policy toward Iran and the main administration’s policy maker on Iran as well as weapons of mass destruction; we know that Bolton cooperated with the Israeli government closely. He traveled to Israel frequently; he met in some cases with the Mossad chief in 2003, which were not approved by the State Department, and the circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that the manufactured crisis was really planned by Bolton in conjunction with the Israelis. They together mapped out a plan that they expected to lay the groundwork for what they believed would be ultimately the military option on Iran. So, I think we are talking about a plan for striking Iran that was planned by the Israelis and their strongest supporters and allies in the Bush administration.

Porter noted that Israel and the United States previously manipulated the IAEA, noting that Israel fabricated documents sent to the IAEA falsely claiming there was “a military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program prior to 2003”.

As Porter said:

I recently had an interview with the former senior official of the agency who further elaborated on those differences and pointed out that outside the safeguards department, senior officials were not at all convinced by these documents, including the laptop documents which the IAEA called the alleged studies, and the green salt papers, believing that they were probably fabricated, and they suspected Israel all long as the logical candidate.

Porter noted that there is “evidence that Israel was fabricating these documents that the IAEA received in 2005 as well as later documents turned over to the IAEA directly by Israel in 2008 and 2009”.

He noted that “the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) turned these documents over to German intelligence; that’s where they came from. A former German intelligence official gave me a detailed account of that in an interview I did with him last year for my book. So, that’s the first indication that it was an Israeli job, because the MEK, we know, has been used by Israel to provide the intelligence they didn’t want to be known as coming from Israel on more than one occasion”.

He also noted that “the Israelis had a program in Mossad to influence the foreign governments and news media in Iran and that office sometimes basically claimed that there were documents that come from inside Iran that they would share with the governments and the press. So they had a special office for operations against Iran”.

The former Head of the IAEA, Hans Blix agreed with Gareth Porter’s assessment, saying “In a way, I'm somewhat more worried about the intelligence, because there is as much disinformation as there is information. There was a book published by Gareth Porter in the U.S. some time ago about the whole Iranian affair, and, well, he certainly maintains that much of the evidence that was given to the IAEA was really cooked, was not authentic. And I wouldn't be at all surprised”.

One of the documents provided to the IAEA, Porter reported showed “a set of technical drawings of efforts to fit what appears to be a nuclear payload into the reentry vehicle of Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile” which was proveably fabricated because “the drawings depict a reentry vehicle that had already been abandoned by the Iranian missile programme in favour of an improved model.”

Porter noted that

According to Michael Elleman, the author of the most definitive account of the Iranian missile program, as early as 2000, Iran’s Defense Ministry had begun developing an improved version of the Shahab-3 with a reentry vehicle boasting a far more aerodynamic ‘triconic baby bottle’ shape – not the ‘dunce-cap’ of the original.

As Elleman told this writer, however, foreign intelligence agencies remained unaware of the new and improved Shahab missile with a very different shape until it took its first flight test in August 2004. Among the agencies kept in the dark about the new design was Israel’s Mossad. That explains why the false documents on redesigning the Shahab-3 – the earliest dates of which were in 2002, according to an unpublished internal IAEA document – showed a reentry vehicle design that Iran had already discarded.

More recently, Porter has uncovered more deceptions Israel has sent to the IAEA over Iran.

Israel claimed in 2018 to have obtained “50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran” which Gareth Porter reported in the Grayzone were “likely an elaborate fiction and the documents were fabricated by the Mossad itself”.

He noted that “not one (document) contained the official markings of the relevant Iranian agency” and that “Tariq Rauf, who was head of the Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2001 to 2011, told The Grayzone that these markings were practically ubiquitous on official Iranian files”.

Tariq Rauf said, “Iran is a highly bureaucratized system,Hence, one would expect a proper book-keeping system that would record incoming correspondence, with date received, action officer, department, circulation to additional relevant officials, proper letterhead, etc.”

Despite the fact that these documents were likely faked, Porter reported that in 2020, “the IAEA has demanded that Iran provide ‘clarifications’ regarding ‘possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities’” based on them.

Porter noted that “Netanyahu’s new ‘Iranian Nuclear Archive’ included what was purported to be a May 2003 letter from the ‘project manager’ of the ‘Health and Safety Group’ for that same alleged covert nuclear weapons program. The letter described a large covert uranium conversion plant and three plant designs. But the letter bore no marking that connected it with any Iranian government entity – only a crudely drawn symbol that could have been drawn by anyone.”

He also noted that “What’s more, nothing about the facility designs supported the documents’ authenticity, especially considering a senior Israeli intelligence official’s acknowledgment to pro-Israel lobbyist David Albright that no such plant was ever built. Nevertheless, the Israelis continued to deploy those dubious documents to hammer home their point.”

Given the IAEA’s history of being manipulated by “Iranian documents” fabricated by the Israeli Mossad, there is almost no doubt that their current claim follows the same trend.

A Fabricated Threat.

Israel’s fabrication of Iranian threats goes back to the 1990s. As far back as 1995 Israel was claiming that “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought, and could be less than five years away from having an atomic bomb”.

The New York Times wrote in 1995 :

The reassessment of Iran's nuclear potential is now described by Israeli officials as the most serious threat facing their country.

Senior Israeli officials say that if the program is not halted, they will be forced to consider attacking Iran's nuclear reactors, a tactic they used against Iraq in 1981, when Israeli warplanes bombed an Iraqi reactor

As Gareth Porter noted, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “deliberately exaggerated that threat, as one of his advisors later acknowledged, in part to ensure that the United States would continue to see Israel as its irreplaceable ally in the Middle East and not be tempted to come to terms with Iran.”

Porter noted, “In fact, as Rabin’s director of Mossad recalled two decades later, Israeli intelligence still considered Iran to rank much lower than Iraq and other threats to Israel during Rabin’s tenure, because Iran was still preoccupied with Iraq and would have no missile that could reach Israel for many years.”

Netanyahu doubled down on this fear mongering, but even the former head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, Uzi Eilam, acknowledged that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is employing needless fear mongering when it comes to Iran's atomic aspirations, in order to further his own political aims”.

In 2014, the Israeli newspaper Ynet reported that he “does not believe that Tehran is even close to having a bomb, if that is even what it really aspires to”.

He said that “Netanyahu and other politicians have struck terrible, unnecessary fear into the hearts of the Israeli public,” saying “I'm not even sure that Iran would want the bomb”.

He noted that “Netanyahu is using the Iranian threat to achieve a variety of political objectives; these declarations are unnecessarily scaring Israel's citizens, given Israel is not party to the negotiations to determine whether Iran will or will not dismantle its nuclear program”.

In reality, Israel's attack on Iran has nothing to do with Nuclear Weapons and is actually about regime change, the last phase of an American/Israeli plan to reshape the Middle East and allow Israel to be the dominant power.

This plan included the war in Iraq, regime change in Libya and Syria, wars in Yemen, Wars against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and increased settlements and likely the eventual annexation of the West Bank.

Regime change in Iran in the final phase of this regime change plan.

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