On the night of January 31, 2018, the Mossad stole a substantial part of Iran’s nuclear archive from a warehouse in southern Tehran. Not photographed. Taken away.

In southern Tehran stood a warehouse that looked like nothing special. No reactor. No military base. No building that would have attracted attention when passing by. Yet behind its nondescript walls were tens of thousands of pages, data storage devices, technical documents, photographs and project material from a former Iranian program involving coordinated activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.

Shorabad is an industrial district in southern Tehran: halls, workshops, storage areas. An environment in which a building can hide extremely well precisely by not being hidden.

According to Israeli assessments, that was exactly where Iran had brought together large quantities of older documents. For the Mossad, it was a rare opportunity: A substantial part of the documentation was in one place.

What began that night became one of the most spectacular Mossad operations to become publicly known.

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A warehouse, 32 safes, one target

According to Israeli accounts and later reconstructions, Iran had brought together documents on its former militarily relevant nuclear research from various collections and concentrated them in Shorabad.

The documents had not been destroyed, but collected and stored. Why Tehran wanted to preserve them cannot be proven from this. The only clear point is that the documentation still had value.

Later reconstructions reported that there were 32 safes in the building. The agents therefore knew the layout of the complex, the staff’s routines and apparently also the safes containing the most valuable holdings.

The Mossad did not come to Shorabad to find out whether anything was there. It came because it already knew what it was looking for.

Six hours and 29 minutes

The operation began after dark. Contemporary reconstructions speak of fewer than two dozen agents directly involved. Looking back in 2021, then-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen said there were approximately twenty people on the operational team.

A reconstruction published in 2018 identified an operational window of six hours and 29 minutes. The early shift was due to arrive at around 7 a.m. According to reports at the time, the instruction was therefore to leave the building by around 5 a.m. at the latest.

By then, the agents had to overcome security measures, enter the building and open the crucial safes. According to published reports, they brought high-temperature torches for this purpose.

They did not simply work through one safe after another. The preparation had given them indications of which containers had to be opened first. Every minute spent on the wrong safe would later have been missing during the retreat.

The operation was monitored at the Mossad command center in Israel. Cohen reported in 2021, that images and descriptions of the documents found were transmitted to Israel in real time. When the first Persian-language documents appeared on the screens, it was clear to the operations leadership: The team had the sought-after archive in front of it.

Inside the opened safes were documents from a program whose name had long been known to Western intelligence services and the International Atomic Energy Agency: Project Amad.

The IAEA had already determined in 2015, that before the end of 2003 Iran had conducted coordinated activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. Some work continued afterward, though no longer as part of the same coordinated overall program. For relevant activities after 2009, the agency found no credible indications.

The Mossad therefore did not discover for the first time that Iran had conducted militarily relevant nuclear research in the past.

What was in Shorabad was something else: Iranian project documents, technical records, photographs, videos, data storage devices and organizational plans.

Not the analysis of a foreign intelligence service. Not an inspector’s supposition. Its own archive.

Don’t photograph it—just take it

For an intelligence service, it would already have been a tremendous success to photograph the documents and disappear again. But the plan went further. Israel wanted originals.

Original material could be examined, compared and presented to other states or experts for review. Provenance, material and connections could be verified far better using the originals than on the basis of individual photographs.

So folders and data storage devices disappeared from the safes. How the material was subsequently taken out of Tehran and ultimately out of Iran is still not fully known publicly. The specific escape route has not been documented. Anything more would be speculation.

The break-in was discovered at around 7 a.m. Iranian authorities then launched a nationwide manhunt. According to Israeli accounts, the material was transported along several routes. How it left Iran remains publicly unknown to this day. There was no known arrest of the operations team.

Half a ton of secrets

The operation remained publicly unknown for almost three months. But then came April 30, 2018.

Benjamin Netanyahu appeared before the cameras in Tel Aviv. Behind him stood shelves full of folders and rows of data storage devices. Israel now told the world what had happened on that January night.

Netanyahu put the material at approximately 55,000 paper pages, as well as another 55,000 digital files on 183 CDs. Together, around half a ton.

His best-known formulation that evening was brief: “Iran lied. Big time.”

What Iran’s nuclear archive really showed

The presentation did not show that Iran already possessed a finished nuclear bomb in 2018. Something else was decisive: The archive documented in detail how far Iran’s former militarily relevant nuclear work had gone.

A later analysis published by the Institute for Science and International Security concluded, based on archive documents, that the Amad Plan aimed at five nuclear warheads with a planned explosive yield of approximately ten kilotons each and envisaged their later integration into ballistic delivery systems.

Further analyses referred to work on high-explosive devices, technical activities connected with Parchin, as well as organizational plans and records concerning various areas of the program.

The IAEA already knew the outlines of the former militarily relevant work. What was new was the density of the material and its origin: an extensive collection of original Iranian documents about its own program.

The then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on the day of the presentation that American experts had examined numerous documents. The documents they examined were authentic.

It was also remarkable that these documents still existed at all. A program can be ended. The knowledge generated within it remains.

More than an intelligence operation

The disclosure had a political dimension from the outset. In Washington, there was a debate at the time over whether the United States should remain in the JCPOA.

According to Axios citing a senior Israeli official, Netanyahu had already informed President Donald Trump and members of his administration on March 5, 2018, about an initial analysis of the archive.

The public presentation on April 30 came only a few days before Trump’s decision on the future of the agreement. Netanyahu used the material as an argument that Iran had not fully disclosed its military nuclear past. Supporters of the JCPOA countered that this very past showed why strict restrictions and international controls were necessary.

For the agreement’s critics, the archive struck a sensitive point: Tehran had preserved extensive original documents from a former militarily relevant program. This gave new urgency to the question of how completely Iran had actually disclosed its nuclear past.

On May 8, 2018 Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the JCPOA. In his speech, he explicitly referred to the intelligence documents published by Israel shortly beforehand and cited them as evidence of Iran’s earlier pursuit of a nuclear weapons program. Eight days after Netanyahu’s presentation, the nuclear archive had thus become part of the official American justification for the policy shift.

Why the 30-year criticism falls short

Israel has been warning of an Iranian bomb for decades, the objection goes. Yet Iran still has no proven nuclear weapon to this day. Therefore, the warning must have been exaggerated.

That falls short. The decisive issue is not that Iran still has no proven bomb, but how far the program would have progressed without limitations, monitoring, sabotage and repeated setbacks.

Some predictions about specific timelines were too definite and proved wrong. At the same time, Barack Obama’s administration assumed in 2015 that Iran’s so-called breakout time was only approximately two to three months. This meant the time needed to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, not the time needed to produce an operational bomb.

A program being set back does not disprove the danger that caused it to be set back.

The clock was repeatedly reset

The JCPOA was intended to extend precisely this period again. Among other measures, Iran reduced its uranium stockpiles and the number of centrifuges in operation. According to the U.S. administration at the time, this was intended to increase the breakout time to at least one year.

Added to this were sanctions, international inspections, technical problems and covert operations. The best-known example is Stuxnet. The malware attacked the control systems of Iranian centrifuges in Natanz, disrupted operations and damaged centrifuges. Later reporting attributes its development to American-Israeli cooperation. In subsequent years as well, acts of sabotage struck parts of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure; Israel was repeatedly blamed for them, although it did not officially confirm every one of these operations.

Iran’s nuclear program therefore did not develop undisturbed for three decades. It was constrained, accelerated again and repeatedly set back.

Seven years later

This could be where the story ends in 2018. But it does not.

After the American withdrawal from the JCPOA, Iran began in 2019 to gradually scale back its commitments under the agreement. On February 23, 2021, Iran ceased implementing its JCPOA-related additional measures, including the provisional application of the Additional Protocol.

At the same time, the enrichment level rose. As of June 13, 2025, the IAEA put Iran’s estimated stockpile of uranium enriched to up to 60 percent at 440.9 kilograms.

Sixty percent is not yet a bomb, nor is it weapons-grade material. However, it considerably shortens the additional enrichment path to around 90 percent U-235, a level generally considered weapons-grade.

From shadow war to open attack

On June 13, 2025 Israel began extensive attacks on Iranian nuclear and military targets. The IAEA confirmed damage at facilities in Natanz and Isfahan, among others.

On June 22, the United States also attacked the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

In June 2025, the decades-long shadow war acquired an open military front. Sanctions, diplomacy, inspections, cyberoperations and sabotage were followed by attacks on central parts of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

And once again, uncertainty begins

The attacks damaged facilities. The open question regarding material, knowledge and remaining capabilities remained.

In June 2026, the IAEA stated that it still could not fully verify the status of the bombed facilities or the whereabouts of the highly enriched uranium stored there. Inspections remained severely restricted.

This does not establish that Iran has an operational nuclear weapon. But neither is the nuclear question resolved.

The morning after…

And with that, back to Shorabad.

Perhaps Netanyahu’s presentation itself is not the most powerful image in this story. Not the cameras, not the shelves full of folders, but the image of that morning in Tehran.

Someone comes to work, one door is opened, then another, and finally someone stands in front of the safes. All open.

A substantial part of their contents is gone; what had been hidden for years is suddenly no longer fully under Iranian control.

Iran had hidden the archive—the Mossad had found it.

What Israel took from Shorabad was not an atomic bomb. It was the documented memory of a former structured program: plans, technical work, organizational knowledge and experience.

Seven years later, Iran’s nuclear question was still open. The program had once again grown beyond previous limits, inspections were restricted, and key facilities had been attacked.

Shorabad was therefore not an endpoint. It gave Israel a head start.

The clock was ticking, and someone kept trying to set it back.