Tuesday, 1 May 2018

Exposiвng Netanyahu's lies on Iran

Deconstructing Bibi Netanyahu’s slide presentation

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj
Esfandyar Batmanghelidj has spent the last five years working on business diplomacy projects between the West and Iran. He is the founder of the Europe-Iran Forum, the leading annual gathering for business, government and civil society leaders committed to Iran's economic development. He is a graduate of Columbia University



1. The first slide of 's powerpoint session tonight claimed that in 2017, "Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran." I think this slide was a give away for something. Netanyahu didn't get his trove of images and files from .
9:17 AM - 1 May 2018



2. Netanyahu shows a screenshot from Google Earth of Shurabad, a warehousing district in the southern reaches of Tehran. I'm no / OSINT ninja but let's see what is around there today.
9:17 AM - 1 May 2018



3. The image Netanyahu used seems to be older than the most recent Google Earth satellite image, which is dated to 4/30/2018. One of the buildings next door has a shiny new red roof. Why use older imagery?

9:17 AM - 1 May 2018



4. My guess is that this image isn't something Israel created recently. This suggests that either: A) Israel has been sitting on this information for a while (*yeah right*) B) Israel acquired the satellite view as part of its "nuclear archive" intelligence haul (*probably*)
9:17 AM - 1 May 2018


 4 hours ago
5. So how do we date the photo? Well let's look at the eye-catching red roofs (Photo 1). The red-roof warehouse facility was only completed between August 2014 (Photo 2) and October 2014 (Photo 3), as per unfinished middle structure. Can't be any earlier.

 4 hours ago
6. If we use the smaller red roof warehouse in the bottom left as a guide for how late the photo could have been taken, we get an upper bound of between October 2015 (Photo 1) and November 2015 (Photo 2).

1 reply7 retweets15 likes

 4 hours ago
7. What is special about these dates (Sep 2014-November 2015)? Well they correspond to the implementation period of the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) which began in January 2014 and ended when the JCPOA came into effect in July 2015.


  1. 10. It is clear that the "nuclear archive" was known to the IAEA at the precise time the satellite image of the facility was taken. This fits with the assessment of many experts that there was nothing new in Netanyahu's presentation. See thread:

    <THREAD> redux: The Iran archive appears to confirm what the IAEA and western intelligence already knew, (1/n)
    Show this thread
    1 reply10 retweets27 likes

  2.  4 hours ago
    11. It strikes me as very unlikely that the Iranians would have added such a satellite image to their own archive of old material just because. It is the kind of thing you do to show where the facility is to those who need to know... such as IAEA inspectors.
    1 reply3 retweets18 likes


  3.  4 hours ago
    12. But perhaps even more likely, the IAEA inspectors themselves saved the birds-eye image as part of their reporting on the site. Google Earth and other "virtual globes" are a part of the IAEA toolkit. See this 2014 symposium paper:
    1 reply4 retweets14 likes


  4.  4 hours ago
    13. This raises an interesting question. Did Israel hack the IAEA to access information Iran had willfully shared in 2014-2015 in order for Netanyahu to spin a story about a secret and unceasing nuke program? thinks that is the case. See thread:

    (Thread) Honestly, I'm surprised Bibi has had such a successful political career. It's so easy to see through him. He had an audience of one tonight: the man who gets his intel briefing from TV theatrics ()
    Show this thread
    2 replies18 retweets47 likes


  5.  4 hours ago
    14. Importantly, the IAEA concluded in 2015 that while Iran did conduct work on weapons design, "these activities did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.”


  6.  4 hours ago
    15. So not only is Netanyahu blowing hot air on , he may have violated the integrity of an international agency to craft his second-rate powerpoint. He also did very little to hide the fact (though maybe that was intentional too).


  7.  4 hours ago
    16. As a final OSINT lesson, the people working at this secret archive facility were lucky because "Garden Restaurant" at the end of the street looks pretty delicious. A 4 star review!


 4 hours ago
8. What was one critical element of the JPOA? It opened the door to IAEA's investigations and monitoring of Iran's nuke program. This was bolstered by a separate agreement between Iran and the IAEA that focused on "possible military dimensions" of the program. Text from JPOA:




  2.  4 hours ago
    9. As reported in May 2014, Iran had by then "provided the IAEA with additional information related to the agency’s investigation into Iran’s activities possibly related to the development of nuclear weapons."




1 reply4 retweets16 likes


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