1.As far as we know, what does the agreement with Iran include, and does it reflect Israel’s interests?

“In principle, the agreement with Iran will be very bad, much worse than the former one in 2015. They will call it ‘going back to the 2015 agreement,’ but it’s much worse. Seven years passed since that agreement, and we know about many things happening since, that the agreement will not fix.

“On the other hand, the limitations on the Iranian nuclear program are about to expire. So, if in 2015 President Obama said that in 13 years there will be zero minutes to a bomb, now it’s no longer 13 years – some of the limitations already expired, some that deals with ballistic capabilities will expire next year, in 2025 the limitations that include the ‘snapback’ mechanism will finish, and the longest ones will expire in 2030. At this time, Iran’s path to a nuclear bomb will be clear.

“In the agreement that is going to be signed – and this is the last thing that is still under debate, as the papers are still being worded – we aren’t sure yet what will happen with the ‘open files.’ In 2015 they closed all the cases about the PMD (Possible Military Dimensions), and now there are four new files that were discovered due to the inspections.

“Those are not necessarily things that were included in the 2015 agreement, but are Iranian violations prior to that. It was discovered that in 2015, when the Iranians said all kinds of things, they bluntly lied to the whole world. And yet, the parties won’t change the agreement in a way that will address all the [issues about which] Iran lied. 

“So they will tell us that we are back to the 2015 agreement, but this is impossible, because we found things in the Iranian archive that tells us that in 2015, when they signed the agreement, they were far more advanced than they said they are – for instance, a lot of things that happened in the nuclear sites. Therefore, it is impossible to go back to the 2015 agreement, and the bottom line is that they will sign an agreement which is far worse.”

2. Latest reports in Israel and abroad claim that Iran is very close to obtaining a nuclear bomb. What are the chances that this agreement will manage to “rollback” Teheran’s nuclear capabilities?

“One needs to remember, when you talk about building a nuclear bomb, that you need three things – fissile material, carrier capabilities (such as ballistic missiles) and an ability to transform the fissile material to nuclear warheads (weaponization). This material could be uranium, which involves enrichment, or plutonium, that requires a reactor, and for now the Iranians are not promoting the plutonium option.

“Many people are paying attention only to the enrichment issue, whether it’s to 5, 20, or 60 percent, which is indeed important and crucial for a state to become nuclear – but this is not the most important thing, and not what will determine if a state could become nuclear or not.

“For instance, the agreement in 2015 took care of only a small part of the fissile material. Now we get to a situation where it will be far worse. The 2015 agreement didn’t deal with the weapon systems issue and it doesn’t do it now. Part of this issue includes an invasive inspection of the nuclear sites which many people claim this is one of the great achievements of that agreement.

“The weaponization is a matter of both technological capability and knowledge. In 2003 the Iranians stopped working on this issue because they were afraid someone might attack them.

“I can tell, as I was the head of the Israeli professionals’ team, and we worked with the other nations day and night for three years, that in the 2015 agreement there is a chapter called ‘Section D’ – which was written ‘because of the Israelis,’ who basically wrote it themselves. Later we found out – and I am afraid that there might be similar things in the current agreement, though I don’t know anything yet – that while one page had very clear things, that whoever does them is considered as producer of nuclear weapons, in 2017-18, when Trump’s team went for the first time to Vienna and met Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, they asked about this article – and Amano asked if they are crazy. He said that after the agreement was signed, the Americans, Iranians and the Organization met, and it was decided that this clause will not be inspected [The clause’s instructions].

“He might have denied this if he were still alive, but he did say he has no intention of inspecting the Iranians according to this chapter, and that he doesn’t know how. After the Americans insisted, he convened an absurd press conference, where he asked if anyone has any idea how to implement this article – and if so, let that person call him.

“Therefore, the supervision on the weaponization issue should be done by the American, European and Israeli intelligence, and this is hard – because weaponization is done in a small room with several dozen people. And even during the act itself you can’t always be 100 percent sure, unless you have very good intelligence.

“To get back to the fissile material issue – What is the additional difference since 2015? In the previous agreement, the Iranians were allowed to continue their R&D of advanced centrifuges. The difference is that when you take centrifuge that enriches 10 times faster, if in the past you needed 5,000 centrifuges to transform a specific amount of fissile material, now you need only 500. You can’t hide 5,000 centrifuges, but you can hide 500 of them.

“That’s why I always say there are no more such things like ‘breakthrough time’ – or as the Americans said, as Obama told Kerry: ‘Give me a year for a breakthrough.’ Today the Americans also say that the breakthrough time is only months. But even this is only evasion time now. The Iranians can build secret underground sites, and no one will know about anything there. That’s our main problem.”

3. Following a deal, what should Israel’s policy vis-à-vis its signatories be in the future? How will it impact the current government’s relationship with the current Administration in Washington, and the US-Israel alliance strategically?

“We tell the Americans, when they want to hear, what should be fixed and why they are wrong. But they don’t listen to us, because their interest is to take the Iranian issue off the agenda, to checkmark it, and move on. That’s our main issue in this regard at this moment. The Europeans, just like in 2015, are grinding their teeth, and joining the Americans because there are weak. The Russians and the Chinese are happily looking at this from the side.

“In Vienna, right now, the Americans and the Russians led the negotiations, and on the other hand, they are heading to half a war in Ukraine. This is a strange world. There’s a possibility that while in one room there’s agreement, hugging and kissing between the Americans and the Russians, in the other room they fire missiles towards one another.”

4. When Israel refers to the “military option”, what exactly does it entail, and what is the likelihood that we will reach this scenario?

“Israel says now, as it did in the past, that it is not limited by any agreement and not obligated to respect it, and therefore it reserves its freedom to act as it should in order to defend itself. This means we need to be prepared.

“People always ask what our capabilities are and if we could attack tomorrow, and all I can say is that in 2012-13, when I was the deputy of [National Security Advisor Yaacov] Amidror, Wendy Sherman would always call and say, ‘I heard that Israel is about to attack.’ Those conversations were usually done via secure video conference, and we would open the window, look backwards and say: ‘We look at the sky and don’t see any jets, so this means it will not be today. Tomorrow, maybe.’

“Israel will do what it must do, if it will conclude that tomorrow it will be too late. Israel will try to take care of the Iranian nuclear program – and it must succeed, because Israel said it will not allow Iran to become a threshold state, and definitely not a nuclear state, and we are not committed to this agreement. 

“I saw that many commentors claimed that if there’s an agreement, Israel can’t do many things. So, I say that even with an agreement, Israel will do whatever it needs to do. And even after 2015, when there was an agreement – according to knowledgeable sources, Israel took care of several things in Iran.

“So maybe this was not done in the same level of cooperation with the Americans as in the ‘Olympic Games’ [the Israeli-American cyber warfare against Iran, that included ‘Stuxnet’], but when things need to be taken care of – they were taken care of.”