However, Sir John Sawers said it was now likely Iran would achieve that goal by 2014, making a military strike from the US and Israel increasingly likely, The Daily Telegraph reported Friday.
It is extremely rare for any head of MI6 to disclose details of operations by the intelligence service. Sir John made his remarks at a meeting of around 100 senior civil servants in London last week in only his second public speech since he was appointed to head MI6 in 2009.
According to the Telegraph, Sawers said Iran was now “two years away” from becoming a “nuclear weapons state.”
The Telegraph’s report, however, showed that Sawers agrees with US officials and intelligence analysts who almost uniformly say Tehran has not yet decided whether to build a bomb but only decided to master all the technology required for a bomb.
The newspaper quoted Sawers as saying, “The Iranians are determinedly going down a path to master all aspects of nuclear weapons, all the technologies they need.”
Sawers, however, said that without MI6’s work dealing with the threat, “you’d have Iran as a nuclear weapons state in 2008 rather than still being two years away in 2012.”
US intelligence never said Iran could have a bomb that early. During the first decade of this century, it spoke of 2010 as the earliest Iran could build a bomb on its own.
Sawers said it was up to MI6 to “delay that awful moment when the politicians may have to take a decision between accepting a nuclear-armed Iran or launching a military strike against Iran.”
When that moment came, he said: “I think it will be very tough for any prime minister of Israel or president of the United States to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.” He was silent about what a prime minister of Britain would have to decide.
Iran has previously said covert operations by Mossad, MI6 and the CIA were aimed at disrupting Iran’s program by assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. Britain and America have denied that, but Israel has remained silent.
Sawers disclosed that MI6 has “run a series of operations to ensure that the sanctions introduced internationally are implemented, and that we do everything we can within the Middle East to slow down these remaining problems.”
That was a curious turn of phrase. Covert operations to ensure that sanctions were implemented would logically be carried out in countries other than Iran—that is, in countries that would have to decide whether to implement or ignore sanctions.
Sawers said, “I take great pride in the fact that, in the last 10 years, over a number of jobs, I’ve been involved in an issue of global concern, and I feel that I as an individual [have made] an impact in the outcome of events.”