June 14, 2022: On May 25th at least half a dozen explosive carrying quadcopters made an attack on the Iranian Parchin military base that included a secret nuclear weapons research facility. The attack destroyed structures and left one Iranian engineer dead and another wounded. At first Iran described the incident as an industrial accident Days later the dead engineer was hailed as a “martyr”, a term only used for someone killed by enemy action.

Parchin is 30 kilometers southeast of Tehran, which means it is hundreds of kilometers from the nearest border and that the quadcopters used to attack Parchin were launched from somewhere inside Iran. This is similar to a number of other attacks on nuclear facilities in the last year. Iran likes to blame Israel for attacks on its nuclear program but there have been so many of them recently that Iran has to admit that Israel has a large network of agents in Iran. Worse yet, most of these operatives are Iranians who oppose the current government and the nuclear weapons program.

Parchin is another of those secret research facilities that Iran always insisted was not involved with nuclear weapons research. Doing so was a condition of the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) treaty. This is the group of six nations (China, France, Russia, Britain, the U.S. and Germany) that negotiated and signed the 2015 treaty with Iran to lift economic sanctions in return for Iran halting its nuclear weapons program (which Iran insisted it did not have). The treaty was signed in mid-2015 despite doubts about Parchin. There was mounting evidence that Iran was already working to continue its nuclear weapons research program. Before and after mid-2015 there were satellite photos available showing work performed at the underground nuclear facilities at Parchin that was long suspected of housing a nuclear research facility. Iran never let UN IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors inspect this base. Yet satellite photos showed Iran “cleaning up” evidence that nuclear weapons research was going on there. One condition of the 2015 treaty was to let the IAEA visit Parchin before the end of 2015. The facilities IAEA wanted to inspect were all destroyed or modified and much material removed before the inspectors finally arrived.

Meanwhile there were new underground facilities being built at Parchin that the inspectors were not allowed near. That was because Parchin was where Iran was going to develop, manufacture and test the special conventional explosives that surround the nuclear material in a nuclear bomb. Those explosives explode inward, towards the nuclear material and trigger the nuclear reaction. Parchin had long been used to develop and test conventional explosives and it made sense that Parchin was where you would do that for the explosives needed for a nuclear weapon. The May attack on Parchin was similar to the February attack, with eight quadcopters, on the UAV factory outside the city of Kermanshah and destroyed hundreds of UAVs. In February and March there were similar attacks on a UAV factory in Tabriz.

In 2021 there were three attacks on the underground nuclear weapons facilities at Natanz and Fordow. The Iranian response to these attacks on their two underground nuclear fuel production sites was to build the new Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La underground facility near the Natanz site. The new operation is 1,600 meters underground, 50 percent deeper than Natanz or Fordow. The space available inside Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La will be about 50 percent less than the two current underground sites and Iran is installing more efficient centrifuges to match current Natanz/Fordow production while occupying less space. The new facility may be more difficult to disable with an airstrike, but the last two attacks were carried out using malware or bombs planted by Israeli Mossad operatives, with the assistance of Iranians opposed to the current Iranian religious dictatorship and its obsession with creating nuclear weapons.

Iran continues to work on nuclear weapons despite the fears that the Israel agent network in Iran growing fast. The government insists all these agents are Israeli but most Iranians believe that a lot, if not most, of them are Iranian. That’s because there are more anti-government demonstrations involving more Iranians from all parts of the country. They are all calling for the end of the religious dictatorship. Some call for an end to Islam in Iran while even more openly support Israel.

The Iranian monarchy and Israel were allies from 1953 to 1979, when a revolution led by religious leaders replaced the monarchy with a theocracy. The religious rulers were against much of what the monarchy supported, especially Israel and the United States. Any Iranian who opposed this was a traitor and many Iranians were executed for openly opposing the religious leaders on this. Some of the victims were executed just because they were suspected of supporting ties with America and Israel. That support still existed but Iranians learned how to keep it a secret. As the religious rulers did more damage to the Iranian economy and tried to impose Islamic lifestyle rules on all Iranians, the quiet opposition grew. There were periods of public protests that were temporarily halted by gunfire. Many senior clerics did the match and tried to carry out reforms from the inside. That has not worked, especially among the senior clerics who have become corrupt as well as oppressive. That led to more Iranians working clandestinely to destroy nuclear weapons facilities and other weapons production. Many of these Iranians were knowingly or unknowingly doing it in cooperation with Israel. The Israeli Mossad (foreign intelligence organization) has a reputation for taking better care of foreign operatives than Iran does. This is why Iran is increasingly blaming these attacks on accidents rather than confirming that Israeli and Iranians are responsible.