"Iran secured access to secret United Nations 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 and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency documents and accompanying Persian-language Iranian records reveal some of the tactics Tehran used with the agency, which is tasked with monitoring compliance with nuclear nonproliferation treaties and the later 2015 nuclear deal.
The U.S. and the IAEA have said for years that Iran has failed to answer questions about its past nuclear work in a cat-and-mouse game that continues to this day and now complicates a revival of the nuclear deal, which lifted most international sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on Iran’s nuclear activities.
Middle East intelligence officials said the IAEA documents, marked confidential by the agency, and Iranian records were circulated between 2004 and 2006 among senior Iranian military, government and nuclear-program officials. The agency was investigating information that suggested Iran had worked on nuclear weapons.
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 U.N. 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 that Iran wants to keep that way.'...
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. Some documents include handwritten notes in Persian on IAEA documents and attachments with Iranian commentary. In several of the documents reviewed by the Journal, Iranian officials credited 'intelligence methods' for obtaining the IAEA reports.
Israel has passed the nuclear archive over to the U.S. intelligence community, said people familiar with the matter, and given partial access to independent experts, including from the Belfer Center at Harvard University. The Belfer Center concluded in April 2019 that the archive showed Iran’s nuclear work had advanced further than previously understood. The Journal reviewed documents from the archive that haven’t been disclosed publicly..."