An Iranian nuclear technician with information about the Islamic republic's nuclear program was smuggled into the United Kingdom on New Year's Eve last year in a joint operation involving MI6, the CIA and Israeli Mossad, the Sunday Express newspaper reported on Sunday.
According to the report, the 47-year-old nuclear technician had been "an Israel asset for years" who also "helped plan" the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan in 2012. Roshan, a director at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was killed by a magnetic bomb attached to his car in Tehran. His driver also died. Iran accused the Mossad of carrying out the assassination.
The plan to smuggle the alleged Israeli nuclear spy out of Iran, meanwhile, reportedly involved a "3,000-mile dash across Europe" and a final 22-mile crossing of the English Channel in a dinghy, hidden among other illegal Iranian immigrants.
Initially, the alleged spy was reportedly smuggled out of his homeland and into neighboring Turkey by the Mossad.
Britain, the report said, tried to conceal its involvement in the operation because it opposed the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran and remained a party to it.
A British intelligence source told the Sunday Express: "[The nuclear technician's] absence was noted quickly [by the Iranians] and we were informed that a special unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been dispatched. Once in France, the question of how to get him into Britain remained. We couldn't simply fly him in. Though unusual, it was determined infiltrating him into a group of fellow migrants preparing to cross the channel by boat offered one solution."
The report also said that MI6 agents debriefed the nuclear technician on Iran's nuclear plans before he was flown to the United States.
