Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Iran Just Two Years From Bomb: Britain

In an unusually frank briefing to senior British civil servants, Sir John Sawers, the chief of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service said that British agents have been active against Iran’s nuclear program since 2008. Despite their efforts though, Sawers said that Iran would likely achieve nuclear capability by 2014.

Sawer’s remarks reported today in the Daily Telegraph were made last week at a lecture to a hundred senior civil servants in London. He said that since Iran was “two years away” from becoming a nuclear power, and that Israel and the United States would have to decide before then whether to attack Iran. He is quoted saying that “the Iranians are determinedly going down a path to master all aspects of nuclear weapons; all the technologies they need,” and that “it’s equally clear that Israel and the United States would face huge dangers if Iran were to become a nuclear weapon state.”

Regarding his own service’s performance, he took credit for delaying Iran’s ambitions saying that without MI6’s operations, “you’d have Iran as a nuclear weapons state in 2008 rather than still being two years away in 2012” and that the service’s goal was to “delay that awful moment when the politicians may have to take a decision between accepting a nuclear-armed Iran or launching a military strike against Iran… it will be very tough for any prime minister of Israel or president of the United States to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.”

This is the first official confirmation that Britain’s intelligence services are actively involved in the campaign against a nuclear Iran, though the Tehran regime routinely accuses Britain of cooperating with the U.S. and Israel against its interests.

For more, go to Haaretz.com

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.