Six hours and 29 minutes: That's how long it took Mossad spies to disable the alarms, break through two heavy doors, cut open 32 safes and smuggle nearly a half-ton of classified documents out of a top-secret facility in Iran earlier this year, the New York Times reported.
The new information reported Sunday shed more light on the daring Mossad operation but offered few other details beyond what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled in April in what he said was a trove of secret Iranian nuclear documents dating back to 2003 seized by Israeli intelligence.
The Israeli leader argued that the 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs of the Iranian program, dubbed "Project Amad," provided more reason for U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal with world powers.
After a year of closely surveilling the site, according to The New York Times, Mossad agents arrived at the nondescript facility in a commercial district in the Iranian capital, Tehran, at around 11 p.m. on January 31, knowing that the guards would only arrive at 7 a.m.
The agents had orders to leave the building by 5 a.m. to give them enough time to escape the country.
The agents were equipped with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees Celsius, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. The agents, the report continued, also left many untouched, focusing on the ones containing the black binders containing the most critical nuclear designs.
Iran maintains the entire document trove is fraudulent.
At the invitation of the Israeli government, three reporters, including one from The New York Times, were reportedly shown key documents from the intelligence trove last week, the paper said.
Many of the documents, The New York Times reported, confirmed what inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have always suspected: Iran had worked in the past to systematically assemble everything it needed to produce atomic weapons, despite insistence that its program was for peaceful purposes.
