How a False Nuclear Claim About Iran Ricocheted From India to Washington

On the morning of Aug. 5, an anonymous account on X in India posted seemingly sensational news. The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had vowed that his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons, the account said.

It was not true, and there’s no evidence that the commander made the remark or that Iran has developed nuclear weapons. The claim soon caromed around the internet anyway.

The quotation appeared on Israeli accounts, and then a television channel there posted it, calling it the first public declaration that Iran was working to build a nuclear bomb. That evening, it made its way into remarks that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the country’s national cemetery.

In the United States, Mike Waltz, the Trump administration’s ambblockador to the United Nations, reposted the quotation, as did Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican. Fox News also reported the claim, as anchors and guests cited it as evidence of Iran’s duplicity.

The quotation, attributed to Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, was part of a campaign that succeeded in misleading politicians and news organizations around the world, according to a review by The New York Times. The claim’s spread showed how easily viral disinformation can twist the public debate over matters as serious as war and peace.

It is unclear who fabricated the quotation. However, it appeared intended to bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s longstanding claim that Iran is determined to build a nuclear weapon and that war against Iran was necessary.

President Trump, who had tried to justify the war by citing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, has been searching for a way out of it, and the quotation went viral three days after he said he was halting all attacks on Iran to give peace negotiations a chance.

“This quote was clearly crafted to drive a wedge into peace negotiations,” said Darren L. Linvill of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who tracks how disinformation and propaganda spread on social media.

Iran’s nuclear program has been a source of international concern and diplomacy for three decades, but the country’s officials have maintained that it has a civilian, not a military, focus. The status of Iran’s nuclear development remains unclear.

The spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Esmail Baghaei, criticized the fake post, calling it “an example of the flood of lies against the Islamic republic.” He blamed Israel, but did not cite evidence.

“The allegations of a link to a nuclear bomb are based on the same thing, a lie they have been feeding the international community for 20 years to justify military aggression,” he told reporters on Sunday.

General Vahidi, who took over command of the Revolutionary Guards in March, has issued numerous statements about the war since it started but not about Iran’s nuclear program. Last year, he addressed the topic in an interview with state media after a 12-day conflict with Israel that culminated in American airstrikes. While Iran would “do things it has not done previously” to defend itself, he said, the country’s position on nuclear weapons “has been stated with complete clarity in the past.”

Questions about the origins of the claim were first reported by Ynet, an Israeli news outlet. Since then, new details about how it spread so widely have emerged.

The first known appearance of the quotation — on the Indian account on X — had numerous red flags. The account, which has 175,000 followers, has been criticized by fact-checkers and the government of Pakistan for sharing false and Islamophobic content.

The quotation was accompanied by a picture of General Vahidi and a cartoonish, A.I.-generated mushroom cloud. The English text contained spelling and grammatical errors.

Two hours later, another Indian account on X posted the same quotation, this time translated into Hindi. That account, which has 82,000 followers, had posted another fabricated quote from General Vahidi with a similar claim a week before, according to the Bodkim Project, an independent fact-checking organization in Israel.

The narrative took off globally after a post by a prominent Israeli account. “The regime is not preparing to abandon its nuclear ambitions. It is buying time. There will be no deal,” warned the account, Mossad Commentary, which shares a name with the Israeli intelligence agency but has no known connection to it.

The account belongs to Gedaliah Blum, an entrepreneur who leads the Heartland Institute, an organization that organizes tours and other promotional exchanges in Israel.

Mr. Blum said in an email that he believed the quotation had come from a radio interview with General Vahidi, though he could not recall the source. He said he had posted the quotation because he believed that Iran was determined to acquire a nuclear weapon, even if there was a question about “whether those exact words were spoken.”

Half an hour later, the quotation appeared in an English-language post by Israel’s Channel 14, a privately owned, conservative television broadcaster that supports Mr. Netanyahu. That post, which claimed that it was the first time Iran had acknowledged pursuing the bomb, has been viewed more than 440,000 times.

Mr. Netanyahu’s son Yair, a podcaster and political consultant who lives near Miami, responded to the posts in Israel within minutes. Less than three hours later, the narrative appeared in his father’s speech.

“We heard today the commander of the I.R.G.C., Vahidi, ***ly declaring Iran’s intention to keep developing nuclear weapons,” the prime minister said.

A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu did not address how a fabricated quotation had appeared in his speech that day but defended his longstanding warnings about the threat from Iran.

On Azriel, a co-founder of the Bodkim fact-checking organization in Israel, said the quotation “gained credibility every time an outlet or a politician repeated it,” feeding its spread.

In Washington, the claim was sensational — at first.

Mr. Waltz, the U.N. ambblockador, reposted it. Iran was “finally admitting what’s been obvious for years,” he added.

On Fox News, the anchor Bill Hemmer read the quotation during an interview with a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph L. Votel. “That’s as close to an admission as I have heard, and we’ve been watching this story for years,” Mr. Hemmer said.

Skepticism, however, soon emerged. Mr. Waltz’s post was removed from X without explanation. Neither Mr. Waltz nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

On Thursday, after inquiries from The Times, Mr. Hemmer read a statement on the air saying Fox had learned that the quote was “unverified and inaccurate.”

Senator Scott’s post about the claim remains online, as do the original fabrications and the tens of thousands of responses treating the fabricated quote as genuine. Senator Scott did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Linvill of Clemson described the spread of the claim as a textbook case of narrative laundering, a tactic that propagandists use to seed and then shuffle falsehoods through enough sources to make them seem authentic.

“It is a simple campaign,” he added, “but simple campaigns can still be very effective, and this seems to have certainly had bang for the buck.”