Iran spied on IAEA to hide work from nuclear inspectors — report

Iran used internal UN documents to evade and mislead the world body’s nuclear watchdog over 15 years ago, the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the report, Iranian officials secured access to International Atomic Energy Agency documents and circulated them among top officials involved in its nuclear program between 2004 and 2006, allowing them to prepare cover stories, falsify information and gain insight into what inspectors did and did not know.

“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,” David Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, tells the newspaper.

The documents and accompanying notes in Persian were included in the trove of information Israel squirrelled away from Iran’s nuclear archive, according to WSJ.