An adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Israel stole the country’s nuclear archive, in what appears to be the first public admission of the 2018 Mossad operation by an Iranian official. Momeen Rezaei, secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council that reports directly to the supreme leader, told Iran’s Mehr News on Wednesday that the country needs a major revamp of its security. “The country has been widely exposed to security violations, and the example is that in less than a year, three security incidents have occurred: two explosions and one assassination,” said Rezaei. The two explosions took place at the Natanz nuclear site, first in July, taking out about three-fourths of the above-ground centrifuge assembly facility, and then on Sunday night, when the site’s electric grid and backup system were destroyed, along with large numbers of centrifuges. The assassination was of the head of Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in November.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the 2,500 U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan would be pulled out by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. That feels like a very arbitrary date and very well could be setting the United States up for a future disaster. It was former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who wrote in his 2014 memoir that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Gates has reaffirmed that assessment multiple times since. In 2012, Biden, by his own admission (though he’s tried to clarify since), opposed the raid of the previous year that took out the 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden. The killing of Bin Laden was the most successful national security achievement of the Obama administration, and Biden was on the wrong side of it. The Washington Examiner has reported that not only Gates but also former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director Leon Panetta and former President Barack Obama himself are on record confirming Biden’s opposition to the raid.