The operation began with a question: could Israel prove that Iran had lied about its nuclear ambitions? The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the JCPOA, had given the IAEA access to declared nuclear facilities. But the Iranians had not declared everything. Mossad director Yossi Cohen and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw an opportunity. If they could obtain physical proof of a clandestine weapons program, the evidence might convince the Trump administration to withdraw from the deal. Using a combination of human intelligence sourced from within the Iranian government and signals intelligence from intercepted communications, Mossad identified the key decision-makers who had chosen the Shorabad warehouse: Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian and nuclear program chief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Then came reconnaissance. A female Israeli agent, fluent in Farsi, traveled to Tehran. Dressed in appropriate Islamic clothing and accompanied by a male guardian to avoid suspicion, she walked the streets of the Shorabad district, mapping the warehouse's security arrangements. Her conclusion was critical: to avoid drawing attention to the archive's significance, the Iranians had posted no 24-hour guard.

Fewer than 24 agents arrived at the warehouse on the night of January 31, 2018. They carried torches capable of burning through safe doors. At one minute past midnight, they activated a jamming device to override the alarm system and breached the iron entrance doors. Inside stood 32 safes. Time did not permit opening all of them. The agents focused on six -- the ones intelligence had identified as holding the most sensitive material. What they found exceeded expectations. Beyond the anticipated blueprints and paper files, the team discovered dozens of CD-ROMs containing thousands of electronic documents and videos about Iran's nuclear program. As agents photographed and packed material in the warehouse, images of selected documents were transmitted in real-time to a Mossad command center in Tel Aviv for immediate verification. By the time security officials arrived at 7 a.m., the agents and their cargo were gone. They had extracted approximately 50,000 paper documents and 55,000 additional pages of information stored across 183 CD-ROMs.

The 100,000 documents painted a detailed picture of Iran's AMAD Project, the country's covert nuclear weapons development effort that ran between 1999 and 2003, with related activities continuing afterward under different organizational structures. Journalists from the New York Times, inspectors from the IAEA, and British and American officials confirmed the trove's authenticity. The documents included warhead designs, production plans, and evidence of systematic weapons research that Iran had consistently denied. None of this was entirely new to Western intelligence agencies, which had known about pre-2004 nuclear weapons research. But the archive demonstrated something politically crucial: Iran had preserved its weapons documentation in violation of the JCPOA, which required full disclosure of all nuclear program activities and prohibited further research and development. The gap between what Iran had declared and what the documents revealed was now a matter of physical evidence rather than suspicion.

Three months passed before the documents went public. On April 30, 2018, Netanyahu delivered a televised presentation in English from Tel Aviv, displaying boards covered with photographs and diagrams from the archive. He had already briefed President Trump privately. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed that the United States had reviewed the documents before the broadcast. The Mossad shared the full archive with intelligence officials from Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Netanyahu personally contacted the leaders of Australia, India, Britain, Russia, France, and Germany about the contents. Days after the public presentation, Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA -- the outcome that Mossad and Netanyahu had pursued from the operation's inception. An unmarked warehouse in a Tehran industrial district had become the fulcrum on which an international agreement tilted and fell.