As Israel waged its air power campaign against Iranian military sites last week, a new German intelligence report from the state of Lower Saxony warned that the Islamic Republic of Iran made efforts in 2024 to secure technology for weapons of mass destruction.
The intelligence agency for the state of Lower Saxony reported that “most of the leads in 2024 concerned Russia, China, and Iran” regarding illicit proliferation activities in the state. Germany’s mainstream media have ignored the findings in the Lower Saxony report.
The state’s intelligence report defines “proliferation” as “the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons systems, as well as their associated delivery systems. A key characteristic of proliferation is that it is usually carried out not by individuals, but by states, often with the involvement of their secret or intelligence services.”
The Lower Saxony document did not delineate the types of technology Iran sought for weapons of mass destruction. While the major media and Western intelligence agencies have focused on the Islamic Republic’s illegal atomic weapons program, Tehran also has been involved in illicit chemical weapons proliferation.
While the major media and Western intelligence agencies have focused on the Islamic Republic’s illegal atomic weapons program, Tehran also has been involved in illicit chemical weapons proliferation.
The German paper Bild revealed in 2018 that rockets used in chemical attacks in Syria poisoned dozens of civilians, including children, and contained material “Made in Germany.” Krempel, an “advanced engineering company” in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, sold the “dual-use” material to an Iranian businessman in Tehran that was found in chemical missiles in Syria. The Green Party governor of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, has showed no appetite to crack down on companies and banks in his state who engage in trade with Iran.
The Lower Saxony report also warned about Iranian regime penetration into emerging technologies: “The problem is further exacerbated by the civil-military dual-use nature of many so-called EMTs [emerging technologies]. Iran sends numerous visiting scientists to German and Lower Saxony universities and research institutions.”
Germany’s federal government and each of the 16 German states release an annual domestic intelligence report, outlining threats to the democratic constitutional order. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), which is akin to the FBI in the U.S., asserted on June 10 that “procurement activities in Germany in the area of Iranian missile technology/missile programs remain high—and are on the rise.”
The Directorate State Protection and Intelligence Service, Austria’s equivalent of the FBI, issued the most damning report about Iran’s illegal atomic weapons program in late May. According to the Austrian report, “The Iranian nuclear weapons development program is well advanced, and Iran possesses a growing arsenal of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads over long distances.”
The Austrian document added, “In order to assert and enforce its regional political power ambitions, the Islamic Republic of Iran is striving for comprehensive rearmament, with nuclear weapons to make the regime immune to attack and to expand and consolidate its dominance in the Middle East and beyond.”
The city-state of Hamburg noted in its newly published intelligence report on Monday that Iranian intelligence agencies’ “spying interests continue to focus primarily on obtaining information from the political, military, economic, and scientific fields in Western countries.”
Recent European intelligence reports from the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Austria have refuted the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which claimed that Iran’s military superstructure closed its program in 2003 to weaponize its nuclear program and it has not been re-activated.
Iranian intelligence agencies’ “spying interests continue to focus primarily on obtaining information from the political, military, economic, and scientific fields in Western countries.”
With his decision to bomb Iran’s core nuclear weapons facilities in Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, President Donald Trump rejected the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate and the testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in March, in which she told a Senate Intelligence Committee that the American intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
David Albright, a physicist who is the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., has long argued that the U.S. intelligence community, in sharp contrast to the European intelligence bodies, used an obsolete definition of what constitutes an active Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Often, anti-war progressives advance the calumny that opponents of Iran’s nuclear program twist intelligence to justify action. Ironically, it appears the real politization of intelligence occurs in efforts to exculpate the Iranian regime from its illegal and well-documented ambitions.
