SAFED, ISRAEL — Former Mossad director Yossi Cohen said Tuesday that Israeli intelligence operatives had visited Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear facility many times as part of efforts to understand the site.
Cohen made the comments while speaking at the Galilee Conference in Safed, offering a rare public reference to Israeli intelligence operations connected to Iran’s nuclear program.
“We toured the Fordo nuclear site many times in order to understand the site,” Cohen said, according to Hebrew media reports.
He did not provide dates for the alleged visits. He also did not clarify whether the statement referred to Mossad personnel physically entering the facility or to intelligence operations that allowed Israel to obtain detailed information about the site.
Cohen comments on U.S. strike on Fordow
Cohen also discussed the U.S. military operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities during the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025.
The United States struck Iran’s three major nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. The Fordow facility was targeted with U.S. bunker-penetrating weapons. The operation was publicly known as Operation Midnight Hammer, while Israel’s campaign against Iran was known as Operation Rising Lion.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said after the strikes that the underground damage at Fordow could not immediately be fully assessed. Satellite imagery showed large impact craters at the facility, but the extent of damage below the surface remained uncertain.
Cohen described the U.S. bombing of Fordow as “the fulfillment of all my dreams.”
Debate over Iran’s enriched uranium
Cohen also commented on Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent, saying that material at that enrichment level was still “far from a bomb.”
The status and location of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile have remained a major issue since the 2025 strikes. A June 2026 analysis based on IAEA reporting said the IAEA did not have confirmed information on whether enriched uranium was being stored at locations including Fordow, the new Pickaxe Mountain facility and other underground sites. The same analysis cited an estimated Iranian stockpile of about 441 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60 percent.
Nuclear experts have noted that uranium enriched to 60 percent can be further enriched to weapons-grade levels. The distinction between possessing highly enriched uranium and actually producing a nuclear weapon remains important, as additional steps are required to produce a usable weapon.
Focus shifts to Pickaxe Mountain
Attention has increasingly shifted to Iran’s underground Pickaxe Mountain complex near Natanz following the damage to Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
Reuters reported in July that Pickaxe Mountain is located about 220 kilometers south of Tehran and about 2 kilometers from the Natanz nuclear complex. The underground facility was not targeted during the 2025 strikes and has since become a focus of U.S. and Israeli concerns over Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Recent satellite imagery has shown continued construction activity at the site. However, the exact status and purpose of the facility remain subjects of intelligence assessments, and Iran has denied nuclear activity there.
Cohen’s previous disclosures about Mossad operations
Cohen has previously spoken publicly about Israeli intelligence operations against Iran after leaving Mossad in 2021.
In a television interview following his departure, he discussed the 2018 Mossad operation in which Israeli agents stole Iran’s nuclear archive from a warehouse in Tehran. He also spoke about Israel’s efforts against Iran’s nuclear program and its long-standing intelligence focus on Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was killed in 2020.
His latest remarks provide another public indication of the level of intelligence attention Israel had directed toward Fordow before the U.S. military strikes.
Cohen did not provide further operational details about the alleged visits to Fordow, leaving the timing and exact nature of those operations undisclosed.
Source : timesofisrael
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