welcome to "amanpour" on pbs. in a dramatic tv address israel's prime minister accuses iran of brazenly lying about its nuclear weapons program. for react, i'm joined by the renowned israeli investigative journalist ronan bergman who is more plugged in than anyone. and britain's ambassador to washington when the agreement was signed. good evening, everyone. welcome to the program. i'm christiane amanpour in london

london. in a highly show and tell tv address benjamin netanyahu laid out his case against the iran nuclear deal with what he says is new and conclusive proof tehran was lying about its nuclear weapons program. take a listen. >> we're going to show you something the world has never seen before. tonight we are going to reveal new and conclusive proof of the secret nuclear weapons program that iran has been hiding for years from the international community in its secret atomic archive. we're going to show you iran's secret nuclear files. you may well know that iran's leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons. you can listen to iran's supreme leader. >> translator: i stress the

islamic republic has never been after nuclear weapons. >> you can listen to iran's president, rouhani -- >> translator: nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have no place in iran's security and defense doctrine and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical convictions. >> this is repeated by iran's foreign minister. >> we didn't have any program to develop nuclear weapons. both irration as well as immoral. >> well, tonight i'm here to tell you one thing. iran lied. big time. after signing the nuclear deal in 2015, iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files. in 2017 iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret

location in tehran. this is the district in southern tehran. this is where they kept the atomic archives, right here. few iranians knew where it was. very few. and also a few israelis. now from the outside this was an innocent looking compound. it looks like a dilapidated warehouse. but from the inside, iran's secret archives locked in massive files. actually they're bigger than this. a few weeks ago in a great intelligence achievement israel obtained half a ton of the material inside these vaults. and here's what we got. 55,000 pages.

another 55,000 files on 183 cds. everything you're about to see is an exact copy of the original iranian material. you may want to know where are the originals. well, i can say they're now in a very safe place. here's what the files included. incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more. we've shared this material with the united states, and the united states can vouch for its authenticity. we will also share it with other countries and will share it with the international atomic energy agency. so let me tell you the history of this material.

we've known for years that iran had a secret nuclear weapons program called project ahmad. we can now prove it was a comprehensive program to design, build, and test nuclear weapons. we can also prove that iran is secretly storing project ahmad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons. here is what the goal was, creating nuclear weapons. this is an original presentation from these files, and here is the mission statement. design, produce and test five warheads, each with ten kiloton tnt yield for integration on a missile. you don't have to read farce to

see it here, tnt. this is the specific goal of project ahmad. that's like five hiroshima bombs to be put on ballistic missiles. this is an original iranian spread sheet from the archives of project ahmad. look at what it has here. centrifuge enrichment process. warhead project, simulation project, and tests. and, indeed, when we analyzed what's in these archives, we found that project ahmad had all the five elements, the five key elements, of a nuclear weapons program. i will take them one by one. first is designing nuclear weapons. this is an original iranian illustration of a weapon. again, you don't have to read

farce to understand this. this is u-235, enriched uranium at the core. that's the only place you find in the core enriched uranium. iran was faced with mounting pressure in 2003. that was following the gulf war. so it was forced to shell of project ahmad. you can draw four main conclusions. iran lied about never having a nuclear weapons program. 100,000 secret files prove that they lied. second even after the deal iran continued to preserve and expect for future users. why would a terrorist regime hide and meticulously catalog its secret if you can leer finu

to use them again. they lied in 2015 when they didn't come clean as required by the nuclear deal. and finally the iran deal, the nuclear deal is based on lies, iranian lies and deception. 100,000 files right here prove that they lied. here's the bottom line. iran continues to lie. >> this cache of material has yet to be vetted by the u.n. agency the iaea responsible for enforcing the agreement. trump's new secretary of state mike pompeo sent clear signals the u.s. president is ready to ditch the deal. >> president trump has been pretty clear this deal is very flawed. he's directed the administration to try to fix it.

and if we can't fix it he will withdraw from the deal. >> iran's president rohauhani ss they are in breach in implementing the deal. as britain's ambassador to the united states at the time it was negotiated held meetings in congress to promote the deal. and from israel ronan bergman, a military analyst and one of israel's most influential reporters. his latest book is "rise and kill first: the secret history of israel's targeted assassinations." let me go straight to you, ronan, then. what do you make of that? what do you make of it? >> yes. so we need to put into perspective what prime minister netanyahu has revealed. there was a huge intelligence operation that took place in the recent weeks, i think more than

that, and brought to israel the archive of the secret nuclear military project of iran. he does not claim -- and this is something very important to emphasize, he does not claim iran has violated the jcpoa since it was signed. what he does claim is the jcpoa is based on fraud, on iranian bluff, that all of what iran has told the atomic -- the iaea, the international atomic energy and the world and everybody that they negotiatd. during the negotiation he used that video clip to show that. that was based on lies. the iranians have, "a," had a very advanced secret military project called ahmad, that this was converted into so-called overt project after 2003, but the goal was to preserve the

knowledge of the secret military project for iran to be as close to the bomb as possible. i think this could be a major blow to the supporters of the jcpoa, one of them is in your studio now. >> so let me ask you, peter, you just heard what ronan said. he was clear prime minister netanyahu did not produce evidence that iran is currently or has violated the particular deal that was signed in 2015. and from what i was able to see, this was about project ahmad that was between 1999 and 2003. so is this in the way it's being laid out a death knell to the jcpoa? >> as i was saying, we did know there was something that looked like a military program going on until about 2003, the same date that bebe netanyahu has now chosen. this is a huge way of putting pressure on president trump to walk away from the jcpoa when he

is making miss decision on the 12th of may. the timing is not coincidental. does this mean death knell to the agreement? think the key point is leaving aside whether iran was telling the truth or not, and it sounds as though they may not have been telling the full truth at the time it was concluded in 2015. have they been in compliance since then? now ronan is right in saying prime minister netanyahu did not say iran has not been in compliance with the deal but he did say they've been continuing with nuclear activity since signing the deal. that is in contravention of what the deal is. i'm not sure what that means. the key question were they in compliance. a dozen different reports by the iaea saying they are in compliance. so i think in assessing this stuff, and none of us have seen it before, this is brand-new. the government may have seen it. what does it mean in terms of iran's good faith since the deal was signed? yes, there may be issues whether

it told the truth before hand but the important point in good faith over the last two and a half years. >> ronan, would you agree that to follow on from what you said and what you pointed out that since the deal has been signed, prime minister netanyahu did not show evidence of noncompliance. so in your opinion, do you think that it's still better to have the deal to restrain precisely what prime minister netanyahu put out there, or is it better to pull out of the deal and then what would plan b be? >> fortunately for me i'm not the decision maker in israel. but let me point to two things. i don't think israel is trying to exercise pressure on president trump. it is trying to support a decision of president trump i think was already taken. this is not a coincidence this

publication of this archive is done in a very extraordinary and different way than anything israeli intelligence has done so far. usually they use some foreign media to leak it without retribution to the source. now they are declassifying this, publishing this, and basically claiming not of breach but the fact iran has the knowledge to be very close to a bomb. >> ronan, how does one kill knowledge -- how does one eradicate knowledge? that clearly is the question you've just raised. >> right. well, you know, there are many sources who would say israel killed iranian scientists in order to kill knowledge. let me say this. as much as i hear from sources in israeli intelligence they don't think even if the u.s. declares it is no longer a part of the jcpoa it would revert to

the international sanction regime that was imposed on iran before that. the israeli assessment -- it is important whatever trump decides, but if it decides to step away from the deal, it will not change things in reality because europe will continue. russia will continue its support with iran. and i don't think we will revert back or see the same situation. we will have further examination of the evidence, so-called evidence, that prime minister netanyahu. i think my guess the iaea will find them authentic and corroborated with other sources, they will find iran at least as a lying country to the international community. >> so lies, peter. we've just had a tweet we're going to read from prime minister and foreign minister of sweden around the time these negotiations were going on. he says nothing really new in

netanyahu's iran speech confirms iran closed down nuclear weapons program in 2003. continued technology efforts. in principal all of this well known. no allegation that iran cheats on 2015 nuclear deal. clearly this dissection of what just happened is going to be very robust in the days and weeks ahead of president trump's decision. >> clearly it will be. the knowledge is not going to be unlearned. we all know the iranians had knowledge about the nuclear program, how the military was in the last ten years we do not fully know. i think the real point is that because we know that iran was not far away from having the capability of making nuclear weapons, there were no weaponized missiles, that is why the deal was worth having. it is in order to prevent iran having nuclear weapons, the jcpo was signed. if we walk away from it there is the possibility iran will once

again be a few months away from the threshold. that is why the deal is worth having. the sanctions will no longer be in place because the chinese russians will not be as ready to apply those sanctions as they were in the past. >> which is even more dangerous then. >> even more dangerous. i won't say that because america will have its own sanctions which have an extra territorial impact. other countries find it hard to deal and to trade with iran which is one of the reasons they feel it's not quite fair to them. i think it will have an impact. i would question whether the rest of the p-5 plus 1 as we call the group two and a half years ago would be able to keep the deal in place without american support. >> and that presupposes, ronan, that iran actually wants to stay in. already we're seeing a lot of

infighting in iran between the people that prime minister benjamin netanyahu spoke about and showed the video clip, those are so-called moderates who negotiated the deal. they're under huge pressure from the even bigger threats to your country which are the revolutionary guard and all the others who want to get out of the deal. so, ronan, what is more dangerous for israel, do you think? >> well, it's clear iran proves people like the foreign minister was wrong in negotiating with the west and if trump decides to step away from the deal they would be proven right. let me add something to this equation and this is the israeli concern they will retaliate very soon in syria for israel repeated bombing of its bases in syria. i think what israel is trying to

do now is to put iran in a tight spot in the international community and, therefore, i would say make less confident or less secure to start confrontation in syria. everything is connected to everything and the situation is just getting more and more complex. >> ronan, presumably as prime minister netanyahu says, he has already briefed the americans, he's briefed president trump and his national security and rat t -- apparatus. therefore i wonder whether you find this comment interesting from john bolton just this sunday, that means yesterday, he would have already seen this intelligence about staying in or out of the deal. let's play it. >> he has made no decision on the nuclear deal whether to stay in or get out. he is certainly considering the framework, the four pillars president macron laid out in their meetings last week, the

iran nuclear situation now, the iran nuclear situation of the future, regional peace and security. and that, i think, is something that's of interest to the president and worth pursuing. but in terms specifically of the nuclear deal there's no decision on that yet. >> i mean, peter, you're a diplomat. that was a headline. there's no decision yet. presumably despite having seen all this stuff from the israelis, this treasure trove of intelligence. >> what it sounds like, and that is why i was saying just now i think this is about putting pressure on donald trump before he takes the decision. he may in private be moving in that direction. president macron said he gets the impression president trump will walk away from the deal on the 12th of may. john bolton his national security adviser saying there is no decision yet. at the diplomatic level, state

department people, mike pompeo and others, are looking at the value of the side agreements which the europeans have been working on for several months never mind what congress is also putting together in terms of giving the president the new framework to monitor iranian behavior to see whether there is enough in this to stick with the deal. the fundamental problem is even if iran does turn out to be less than the full truth, do we or do we not want to keep this deal, or do we want to leave iran totally free to move ahead with an iranian military nuclear weapons program unleashing a regional arms race? if we don't have that deal in place what measures are there in place to stop iran from developing nuclear weapons? i think it's better to stick with the deal. >> ronan, the last point to you. in view of the fact, of course, north korea is the next in play and president trump is about to potentially, he says, sit down with kim jong-un about its actual nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic

missiles, this is what president macron of france trying to keep president trump in the deal told congress just last week during his state visit. we'll talk about it. >> it is true to say that this agreement may not address all concerns and very important concerns. this is true. that we should not abandon it without having something substantial and more substantial instead. that's my position. >> so, ronan, isn't that the bottom line? isn't that the bottom line? what is plan "b"? president macron says, sure, let's get the perfect deal. in the absence of that, let's not throw out a good deal. >> my reading about what is

going to happen are different from the ambassador to the studio. i think president trump is hiding the decision that was already made in order to create a big tv moment when he made the press conference. this was already discussed in the few meetings between american and officials. the last one between secretary of state pompeo and prime minister netanyahu. the exact timing of israeli release of the secret archives is coordinated not to pressure but to support a decision already made. israeli sources are under the impression trump has made his decision to step away from the deal unless much different deal is accepted not just by russia and china but also by iran. something that i don't think is likely to happen. >> well, interesting you say that because president macron

got the impression president trump was going to step away from it and we'll wait to see. thank you so much for your analysis, your closeness to this issue, and for telling us all about it. and peter, thank you very much indeed. and just finally tonight we celebrate the life and work of iranian-born photographer who died in paris last week. his evocative photos captured the violence following the revolution in 1979. before his work shifted focus to face across the world. his death robs the world of one of its guiding lidghts. ten journalists were murdered alongside more than 20 others in kabul after a series of explosions. among them shah marai, the afp's chief photographer in kabul. all of this a reminder how

difficult and dangerous a job it is being an eyewitness to history, a warrior for the troops. we will keep covering the issues of the iran nuclear deal in the tense days ahead. thanks"amanpour" on pbs. join us again tomorrow night.

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