Trump claimed in his remarks Tuesday announcing the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal that: “Last week Israel published intelligence documents, long concealed by Iran, conclusively showing the Iranians’ regime and its history of pursuing nuclear weapons.”

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com, @GarethPorter
Available for a limited number of interviews, Porter is a noted independent investigative journalist and author of the book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He recently wrote the piece “The Latest Act in Israel’s Iran Nuclear Disinformation Campaign” and just signed the statement “Trump Urged Not to Pull Out of Iran Nuclear Deal” which states: “The evidence presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30 alleging a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program shows blatant signs of fabrication. … We believe that the renewed attention being given to claims that Iran is secretly working to develop nuclear weapons betokens a transparent attempt to stoke hostility toward Iran, with an eye toward helping ‘justify’ pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. …

“On April 30, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu displayed some of those documents in his slide show on what he called the Iranian ‘atomic archive.’ But those are precisely the same fraudulent documents that were acquired by the CIA in 2004.”The official accounts offered by the senior officials of the CIA about the provenance of these documents turned out be complete fabrication. Journalists were told variously that the documents (1) were taken from the laptop computer of an Iranian working in a secret research program; (2) were provided by a German spy; or (3) simply came from a ‘longtime contact in Iran.’

“However, Karsten Voigt, the former German Foreign Office official in charge of German-North American cooperation, revealed in an on-the-record interview [with Gareth Porter] in 2013 that senior officials of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, told Voigt in November 2004 that the documents had been passed to the CIA by a BND source. That source, the senior BND official said, was not considered trustworthy, because he belonged to the Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK), the armed Iranian opposition group that was known to have served as a conduit for information that Israeli intelligence (Mossad) wanted to provide to the IAEA without having it attributed to Israel. (In 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton removed MEK from the list of terrorist organizations.)

“Voigt recalled that the senior BND officials told him of their worry that the Bush administration was going to repeat the error of using fraudulent intelligence, as was the case with the notorious ‘Curveball,’ the Iraqi living in Germany, whom the BND had identified as unreliable.”

Also see from the American Conservative: “Giuliani’s MEK Pandering and Trump’s Iran Obsession.” From the New York Times: “MEK: The Group John Bolton Wants to Rule Iran.”