MI6 Iranian spy disclosed Fordo and Fakhrizadeh: NYT
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“Fordo’s discovery changed the world’s understanding of Iran’s nuclear program and redrew the West’s military and cyber plans for countering it,” the report noted, citing Yoni Koren, who was the chief of staff for Israel’s defense minister at the time that said in 2019, “The information about Fordo shocked us.”
“The great contribution of the British to the combined Western efforts to gather data from inside the Iranian nuclear project was always in human intelligence,” he said. “They had a foot on the ground in places where neither we nor the Americans had a presence.”
In 2019, Iran discovered “with the assistance of Russian intelligence officials that he had revealed the existence of a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons program deep in the mountains near Tehran, according to two Iranian sources with links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,” the report stated.
Britain has never publicly acknowledged that Akbari, who became a British citizen in 2012, was its spy. “It is our longstanding policy not to comment on matters relating to intelligence,” William Archer, the spokesman on Iran for the British Foreign Office told The New York Times.