The spy dossier that triggered Israel to rain missiles on Iran

When Israel launched its series of strikes against Iran last week, it also issued a number of dire warnings about the country's nuclear program, suggesting Iran was fast approaching 'a point of no return' in its quest to obtain nuclear weapons and that the strikes were necessary to preempt that outcome.
Israel shared the intelligence with the US and other Western partners, as per an exclusive report by British newspaper, The Economist which has not seen the material directly, but has gained insights from an 'authoritative source.' The report gives a view of Israel's dossiers and the claims they make over enriched uranium and the 'speeding up' of Iran's programme.
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Notably, US President Donald
Trump
also recently repudiated Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's assessment that Iran has not been building a nuclear weapon, publicly contradicting his spy chief for the first time during his second term.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he returned early to Washington from the G7 summit in Canada, Trump was asked how close he believed Iran was to having a nuclear weapon.
Live Events
"Very close," he responded.
Although Iran denies developing nuclear weapons, saying its uranium enrichment program was only for peaceful purposes.
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But what concrete evidence prompted Israel to launch strikes against Iran?
The dossier
Israel's dossiers shared with its allies had new details about Iran's plans of 'creation of an explosive nuclear device', as per The Economist.
The information presented by Israel includes a detailed account of a recent, more urgent, push by Iranian scientists towards 'weaponisation', or the creation of an explosive nuclear device, the report said. The dossier provides two key pieces of reported evidence for this claim.
'The first is that an Iranian scientific team has squirrelled away a quantity of nuclear material, of unclear enrichment status, that is unknown to the monitors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN watchdog (on June 9th the IAEA assessed Iran had official stockpiles of over 400kg of highly enriched uranium).'
'The second piece of reported evidence is that the scientists have accelerated their work and were about to meet commanders of Iran's missile corps, apparently to prepare for the future 'mating' of a nuclear warhead with a missile.'
Israel's intelligence assessments also repeat some of the information that is already known through the IAEA's several reports documenting Iran's activity related to nuclear weapons.
'A secret special progress group'
Israeli intelligence dossiers suggest that roughly six years ago, the scientists formed a secret 'Special Progress Group', under the auspices of the former AMAD director, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
AMAD was Iran's formal nuclear-weapons research programme that it shut down in 2003, probably because it feared an American attack, says The Economist report.
'The secret Special Progress Group's aim was to prepare the way for a much quicker weaponisation process, if and when a decision was made by Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, to rush for a bomb.'
Fakhrizadeh was assassinated by Israel in November 2020.
On June 13th in the first hours of the war, the Israeli government published slides describing the backstory. But, The economist has been told that it also shared further assessments with allies that suggest the Special Progress Group stepped up its research at the end of last year.
'Iran had a new incentive to advance to a bomb. It was reeling from the limited impact of its missile attacks on Israel, and the depletion of its air defences by Israeli strikes in October 2024. And it was facing the collapse of its proxies, Hamas and Hizbullah, in Gaza and Lebanon.'
Another key finding from the report was a meeting between the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
's air force, who are in charge of ballistic missiles, and the country's scientists.
The Economist says, 'The proposed meeting was a rubicon, with the missile chiefs being let in on the secret for the first time, suggesting in turn that planning for the 'mating' process of a nuclear device to a missile warhead was about to begin.'
Israel's latest strike
The Israeli military said today it had targeted the
Arak nuclear reactor
in Iran overnight and struck what it said was a nuclear weapons development site in the area of Natanz.
Among its nuclear sites, Iran had a partially built heavy-water research reactor originally called Arak and now Khondab.
Iranian media reported on Thursday morning that air defences were activated in the area of the Khondab nuclear facility, with two projectiles hitting an area close to it.
Officials told Iranian state TV that evacuations were made prior to the strikes and that no risks of radiation or casualties were detected. There was no mention of any damage.
Natanz, which Israel had previously struck during its six-day-old aerial war with Iran, was the site of a complex at the heart of Iran's nuclear programme that included two enrichment plants.
The Israeli military added that it targeted the structure of the reactor's core seal in Arak, which it identified as a key component in plutonium production.
Khondab hosts a partially-built heavy-water research reactor.
Construction was halted under a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, and the reactor's core was removed and filled with concrete to make it unusable.
However, Iran informed the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog it planned to start operating the reactor in 2026.
Heavy-water reactors pose a nuclear proliferation risk because they can easily produce plutonium which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make the core of a bomb.

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