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WikiLeaks Reveals an Isolated Iran | FrontPage Magazine.

WikiLeaks’ release of 250,000 diplomatic cables is a shameful act that will discourage countries from sharing information with the U.S. and officials from having frank discussions. In the shadow of this disgrace, however, one kernel information may rise above the subversions and deliver an unexpected benefit: the world, including the Iranian regime, now knows that many Arab states are secretly entreating the U.S. to strike Iran.

In March, a member of Israel’s parliament claimed that a “wall to wall coalition” of Muslim states had secretly informed the Jewish State that they’d be behind whatever action was necessary to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The files released by WikiLeaks show that the MP was not bluffing. The Sunni Arab states are petrified of the prospect of a nuclear Iran, and an unofficial alliance of necessity between Israel and the Arab states has been forged.

Saudi Arabia, despite its promotion of anti-Semitism and Wahhabism, was reported, on several occasions, to have offered Israel its air space to carry out an attack. Exercises to simulate such an event have taken place. The Saudis deny that any agreement exists, but the private communications revealed by WikiLeaks show that King Abdullah “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran.” He has told the U.S. that if Iran gets nukes, the rest of the countries in the Middle East, his own in particular, will follow suit. King Abdullah went so far as to tell the Iranians in March of 2009 that they had one year to change their approach. It is not clear from the documents what Abdullah planned to do after that deadline.

In a meeting in April 2008 between General Petraeus and the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., the ambassador said, “He [Abdullah] told you [Petraeus] to cut off the head of the snake,” a remark that could be interpreted as meaning the Saudis support regime change in Iran. If so, then they are on the same page as the Israelis. The director of Mossad, Meir Dagan, was recorded imploring the U.S. in August 2007 to support regime change in Iran by supporting the democracy movement and restive minorities like the Kurds, Baluch, and Azeris. The cable says that Dagan was “sure” the regime could be toppled.

The cables show that Bahrain is also part of the coalition. “The danger of letting it [Iran’s nuke program] go on is greater than the danger of stopping it,” King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa was recorded communicating to the U.S. In November 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Bahrain reported that King al-Khalifa had “argued forcefully for taking action to terminate [Iran’s] nuclear program, by whatever means necessary.”

Bahrain has good reason to want to stop Iran. It is a Shiite majority country, and the ruling Sunni government must worry about an uprising from its people. The country is very susceptible to Iranian manipulation, and should the regime aim to create a Hezbollah-type force there, the government could very likely be overthrown. The country has been targeted by terrorists trained in Syria, and so, King al-Khalifa is right to feel that he is seen by the Iranians as prey.

The leadership of the United Arab Emirates is also very vocal in their support for attacking Iran. Like the Saudis, the Foreign Minister explicitly told the U.S. in February 2009 that the rest of the region would be forced to build nukes if Iran is not stopped. The Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed told the U.S. that “I believe this guy is going to take us to war…It’s a matter of time. Personally, I cannot risk it with a guy like Ahmadinejad.” He even asked the U.S. if “all locations of concern” could be hit with air strikes and suggested that ground forces be used if they could not be. The UAE position isn’t news — the country’s ambassador to the U.S. said in July that Iran should be attacked if sanctions don’t work and that it would be worth the cost to his country.

Bombings Hit Atomic Experts in Iran Streets – NYTimes.com.

Reuters

One of the two cars bombed Monday in Tehran. One Iranian nuclear scientist was killed and another was wounded in the attacks.

By WILLIAM YONG and ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: November 29, 2010

TEHRAN — Unidentified assailants riding motorcycles carried out separate bomb attacks here on Monday against two of the country’s top nuclear scientists, killing one and prompting accusations that the United States and Israel were again trying to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the semiofficial IRNA news agency. His wounded colleague, Fereydoon Abbasi, is believed to be even more important; he is on the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions list for ties to the Iranian nuclear effort.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that “undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved” in the attacks. He also publicly acknowledged, apparently for the first time, that the country’s nuclear program had been disrupted recently by malicious computer software that attacked its centrifuges.

The two scientists are among the most prominent in the Iranian nuclear world, and the brazen daylight attacks on them seemed certain to worsen tensions over the country’s controversial uranium enrichment efforts.

Israel and the United States have often signaled that they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Neither has acknowledged pursuing sabotage or assassinations there, but both are widely believed to be pursuing ways to undermine the country’s nuclear program short of bombing reactor sites, including damaging the centrifuges to slow down the production of enriched uranium.

“They’re bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb,” said a federal official who assesses scientific intelligence and spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re both top scientists.”

Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, did not address the Iranian accusations in detail. “All I can say is we decry acts of terrorism wherever they occur and beyond that, we do not have any information on what happened,” he said.

Diplomatic efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear program appear to have failed, and this year, the United Nations and Western powers imposed a new, tougher round of sanctions. On Oct. 29, Iran said it was willing to resume talks with the European Union over its nuclear program, a step that American officials view as a sign that the sanctions were having an effect on Iran’s troubled economy. Iran has delayed a major economic reform package, apparently concerned about possible unrest if prices for basic goods rise further.

Dr. Shahriari published dozens of esoteric conference reports and peer-reviewed articles on nuclear research, at least five of which list Mr. Salehi, the Iranian nuclear agency chief, as a co-author. He was an expert on neutron transport, a field that lies at the heart of nuclear chain reactions in bombs and reactors. Some Iranian media reports said he taught at the Supreme National Defense University, which is run by the Iranian Army.

The United Nations describes Dr. Abbasi as a senior scientist in the Ministry of Defense “working closely” with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps whom Western intelligence considers a leader in Tehran’s effort to acquire a nuclear warhead. The federal analyst said that Dr. Abbasi was more deeply entwined with secretive aspects of the Iranian effort than was his slain colleague.

“Abbasi is the big one,” the analyst said. “He goes way, way back.”

Mr. Salehi issued an angry warning to the Western powers and their allies on Monday, saying “the patience of the Iranian people has its limits.”

“If our patience runs out,” he said, “you will suffer the consequences.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad, speaking at a news conference, vowed that the nuclear program would continue, but acknowledged damage from the computer worm. “They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts,” he said.

Iranian officials had previously acknowledged unspecified problems with centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium that can be used for peaceful energy generation or atomic weapons. But the Iranians had always denied that the problems were caused by malicious computer code.

A worm known as Stuxnet is believed to have struck Iran over the summer. Experts said that the program, which is precisely calibrated to send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control, was probably developed by technicians working for a government.

Mr. Ahmadinejad did not specify the type of malicious software or those behind it, but said that “fortunately our experts discovered that, and today they are not able anymore” to damage Iran’s centrifuges.

The motorcycle attackers attached the bombs to the professors’ cars, then drove off, detonating them from a distance, according to Iranian news media reports. Dr. Abbasi’s wife was also hurt, the reports said.

Last January, a remote-controlled bomb killed a physics professor, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, outside his home. The Iranian authorities also blamed that attack on the United States and Israel, a charge the State Department dismissed as absurd.

In 2007, state television said that another nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, had died of gas poisoning.

Both Dr. Mohammadi and Dr. Shahriari were associated with a nonnuclear scientific research unit, based in Jordan and operating under United Nations auspices, known as Sesame, for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East. Unusually, its nine-member council includes representatives from Israel, along with Iran and other Muslim countries. It was not clear whether the bomb attacks on the two Iranian scientists were linked to their association with the organization.

The latest bombings came a day after leaked State Department documents quoted several Arab leaders as urging the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, but many in the West and in Israel maintain that Tehran’s aim is to build a nuclear bomb.

Iran war drums reverberate in diplomatic documents.

The world thinks like us – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: WikiLeaks boosted Israel by revealing that most world leaders share our views

Had WikiLeaks not existed, Israel would have had to invent it. The massive leak of US diplomatic documents produces a clear, unequivocal picture: The whole world, and not only Israel, is terrified by the Iranian nuclear threat.

Iran’s nuclearization is not Israeli paranoia, as certain camps try to argue. It makes all world leaders, from Riyadh to Moscow, lose sleep. The Iranian issue is the common thread in the hundreds of thousands of documents that were leaked and it produces a narrative whereby the world expects Israel and the United States, in this order, to do something to stop “Hitler from Tehran.”

Some people feared WikiLeaks’ leaks because of the embarrassment to American diplomacy and the fears that the lives of US agents would be jeopardized. Yet that was a false alarm. The leak does not hurt America’s foreign policy, with the exception of a few tales recounted by junior diplomats.

The leak reinforces the main message of two US administrations – which turned out to be incredibly similar to the main message conveyed by Israeli governments: Iran constitutes the clear, immediate and greatest threat to the world’s stability, and the world needs to act towards uprooting this malignant tumor. All the rest is dwarfed by it.

Israel largely unscathed

Some media outlets indeed tried to make a big deal out of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s supposed order to US diplomatic staff to spy after senior UN officials. However, scrutinizing the documents makes it clear that this had to do with concerns about close cooperation between some UN officials and Hamas/ Hezbollah. This theme had been frequently raised by Israel too.

In fact, the ocean of leaks has not yet produced an item that casts a negative light on Israel. Netanyahu came out of it (relatively) ok, Olmert came out of it (relatively) ok, and even Mossad Chief Meir Dagan’s statement about the US need to encourage the protest of intellectuals and students in Iran is commensurate with a liberal, democratic worldview and with accumulated experience in toppling dictatorships. It is doubtful whether in recent years Israel’s foreign and defense policy received such significant backing and reinforcement as happened Sunday. At least on the Iranian front, and apparently in respect to quite a few other issues too, world leaders – including the Arab world – think like us but are ashamed to admit it. WikiLeaks exposed this shame.

Analysis: Burying linkage between peace process, Iran.

Since the earliest days of Barack Obama’s presidency, there have been two major conceptual differences between how Israel and how the US administration view the Middle East.

The first difference has to do with the region. While the US maintains that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum is the key to unlocking peace in the Middle East and getting other countries in the region on board to help stop the Iranian threat, Israel’s position is to first deal with Iran – neutralize it – which will then make it easier to reach an accord with the Palestinians.

Israel’s logic is that Hamas and Hizbullah – Iran’s two proxies – will be much less able to gum up the works whenever diplomatic progress looms if Iran is defanged.

The second key conceptual difference has to do with how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the US still tied into the land-forpeace formula – Israel gives up land and gets peace in return – and much of Israel, bitten badly by reality, no longer convinced that formula is relevant.

And along comes the cache of WikiLeaks documents and reveals that Obama’s linkage of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran is nothing short of fiction – a fiction he and his key aides have been spinning since the beginning of his tenure.

At his very first White House meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in May 2009, that famous meeting in which Obama called for a complete halt to all settlement construction, Obama was asked what he thought about Israel’s position that only if the Iranian threat were solved could there be real progress on the Palestinian track.

“Well, let me say this,” Obama said. “There’s no doubt that it is difficult for any Israeli government to negotiate in a situation in which they feel under immediate threat. That’s not conducive to negotiations. And as I’ve said before, I recognize Israel’s legitimate concerns about the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon when they have a president who has in the past said that Israel should not exist. That would give any leader of any country pause.

“Having said that,” the president went on, “if there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians – between the Palestinians and the Israelis – then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”

And that position, that progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue – that stopping settlement construction – would somehow magically mollify the Arab world and get it to put its shoulder to the wheel regarding Iran has been a constant thread throughout the Obama regime. Here it was popularly dubbed “Yitzhar for Bushehr.”

What the WikiLeaks cache revealed, however, was that this argument was a fabrication. There was no need to crack the Palestinian-Israeli nut before getting the “moderate” Arab nations in the region – Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states, Egypt and Jordan – on board regarding Iran, because those nations were already fully camped out on board the deck of the ship, just waiting for action against Iran.

Now this doesn’t mean efforts should not be made toward trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but don’t say the reason is to get the Arabs to stop Iran.

The following quotes from Arab leaders culled from the WikiLeaks trove do not exactly portray a picture of leaders who need any further enticements before “getting on board.”

• Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, quoted by the monarchy’s envoy to the US in 2008 as exhorting the US to attack Iran and end its nuclear weapons program, said in reference to Iran – according to one cable – that it was necessary to “cut the head of the snake.”

• King Hamad of Bahrain was quoted in 2009 as saying, “That program [the Iranian nuclear program] must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.”

• Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed in 2009 urged the US, according to another cable, not to appease Teheran and said, “Ahmadinejad is Hitler.”

• Maj-Gen. Muhammad al-Assar, assistant to the Egyptian defense minister, was quoted in a cable in 2010 as saying that “Egypt views Iran as a threat to the region.”

Obama was obviously well aware of the views of these leaders, most of whom he personally met, yet he continued to propagate what he must have known to be a falsehood – that these countries would only sign on to sanctions and otherwise support efforts to neutralize Iran if there were progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track.

Obviously these countries wanted to see progress on that track, but this desire had nothing to do with Iran. Nor would an Israeli-Palestinian accord lead them to be supportive of aggressive steps toward Iran, because they were already practically dreaming of those steps.

To link the two issues – the conflict with the Palestinians, and Iran – was to badly muddle the issue. Why exactly Obama felt compelled to do so is one of the key questions the WikiLeaks documents raised in relation to our region.

The WikiLeaks effect.

Prominent pundits of Mideast affairs have argued Israel alone was pushing for military attack on Iran, WikiLeaks debunked these theories.

In recent years, prominent pundits of Middle East affairs such as Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch, The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss, and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, have argued that Israel alone was pushing for a military attack on Iran.

It was the ubiquitous “Israel lobby” that would make sure the US continued to threaten Iran with military strikes, said Walt and Mearsheimer. It was clear to all that “for Saudi Arabia the worst thing that could happen would be… an Israeli attack on Iran,” Dreyfuss claimed just this month. Lynch, meanwhile, asserted that “while Arab leaders would certainly like Iranian influence checked, they generally strongly oppose military action which could expose them to retaliation.”

Warmongering Israel, ran the thesis, was single-handedly endangering geopolitical stability by attempting to plunge the Middle East into a war with the US.

All of these learned gentlemen also posited the premise of “linkage,” according to which all Middle East pathologies are a direct outcome of Israeli aggression and obstinacy. Only after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved, they have argued, can other issues, such as Iran’s belligerence, be addressed.

Sunday’s revelations provided by WikiLeaks conclusively debunk these risible theories.

From the flood of classified documents, it has become unequivocally clear that Israel is not alone in arguing that Iran, rather than perceived Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian issue, is the principal destabilizing element in the Middle East. We can read in black on white that a broad coalition of Arab countries, particularly in the Persian Gulf area, have been articulating to American leaders for some time, in private and intense conversations, their fear of Iran and, in some cases, the desperate need to take military action.

The documents show that in 2008, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia implored Washington to “cut off the head of the snake [Iran]” while there was still time.

The king of Bahrain, who provides the base for the American Fifth Fleet, told the Americans that the Iranian nuclear program “must be stopped,” according to another cable. “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it,” he said.

The United Arab Emirates’ defense chief, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, told US Gen. John Abizaid that America needed to take action against Iran “this year or next.”

“Ahmadinejad is Hitler,” he declared in July 2009.

For his part, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called the Iranians “big fat liars.”

ARAB LEADERS have preferred to keep their true position on Iran from the masses out of a desire to avoid a backlash of public opinion. One wonders, far more in hope than expectation, whether “moderate” Arab leaders will now be prepared to stop separating their private opinions on Iran from their public statements to their people, and in so doing set the groundwork for a coalition encompassing Israel against Iran. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday urged such Arab leaders to speak as honestly about the Iranian danger in public as they have done in private contacts with US diplomats.

It is striking that Israel will feel itself little damaged by the WikiLeaks exposures, which show top officials saying much the same to the US in private as they say to their people in public. The gulf between Arab leaders’ private and public positions, by contrast, is now evident for all to see.

What is also now clear is that some American foreign policy experts, who may have had significant influence on the Obama administration, were wrong to single out Likud-led Israel and the neocon “cabal” in America as the sole driving force behind the military option for Iran. And their insistence that a Palestinian state is prerequisite to mustering Arab support for sanctions or military action against Iran is definitively disproved – revealed as either a severe analytical error or part of a deliberate bid to prompt unwarranted US pressure on Israel.

Whatever the wider repercussions of the WikiLeaks cable deluge, it has exposed the hypocrisy of those Arab leaders who publicly blame Israel for their woes while privately pleading for military measures to thwart their true enemy, Iran. And it has exposed the incompetence, too, or malice, of the analysts who took those Arab leaders’ public utterances at face value, and utilized them in a bid to ratchet up pressure on, and to besmirch, Israel.

Whether or not Israel took out Iran nuclear scientist, Tehran will get the bomb – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

(I don’t agree with this piece, but felt it was important to read.  – JW)

History teaches that a state striving to acquire nuclear weapons will ultimately do so – and North Korea is far from being the only example.

By Yossi Melman

Three apparently unrelated news events were reported on Monday: Iranian nuclear scientists were targeted via two separate bombing attacks in Tehran, leaving one dead and the other wounded; the first of the leaked U.S. State Department documents were published, including many dealing with diplomatic fears over Iran’s nuclear program; and Tamir Pardo was appointed head of the Mossad.

Even if these events had some connection, their coincidental timing would clearly be random. Nevertheless, there is something symbolic about this coincidence.

Even as journalists worldwide were raising a storm and warning that the WikiLeaks publication would cause irrevocable damage, the attacks on the Iranian scientists proved that national interests are not influenced by news reports.

Clearly the assassination and attempted assassination were no coincidence. Behind them stands a person or group employing a modus operandi with certain discernible characteristics.

	Technicians measuring parts of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant in this undated photo.
	Photo by: AP

The Iranians are not alone in assuming the Mossad is responsible for the attacks: Commentators worldwide think so, too. This assumption is strengthened by the fact that there have been at least four attempts to assassinate Iranian scientists in less than four years. Additional attempts that have not been reported have presumably been made as well.

The attacks’ modus operandi does not suffice by itself to ascertain which organization is behind them. Any criminal gang, let alone an intelligence organization, is capable of carrying out assassinations using motorcyclists hurling explosives or shooting at their targets, and many have in fact done so. So although the Mossad has used this modus operandi in the past – the most famous example being its assassination of Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shkaki in Malta in October 1995 – one can hardly say this tactic is exclusive to the Mossad.

But it is clear that Israel, as demonstrated by both its leaders’ public statements and the leaked documents, is extremely concerned over Iran’s nuclear progress and is making every effort to thwart it. This is a covert operation whose elements are interconnected. Thus an invisible line can be traced from the sale of flawed equipment for the centrifuges at Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in Natanz through the Stuxnet computer worm, which some claim impeded operations at this site, to the attacks on the Iranian scientists.

All were intended to convey a deterrent message to Iran’s scientific community and scare Iranian scientists into stopping work on their country’s nuclear program. The message is directed mainly at researchers employed by the universities, whose nuclear physics and engineering departments and other research facilities serve as a cover for Iran’s military nuclear program, according to International Atomic Energy Agency reports.

Alongside the deterrent message delivered by these attacks, the intelligence communities of Israel, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and other states are making a comprehensive effort to stall and obstruct Iran’s nuclear program. But even the people behind these efforts know there is no certainty of success.

History teaches that a state striving to acquire nuclear weapons will ultimately do so. And North Korea is far from being the only example.

WikiLeaks blows cover off Israel’s covert Gulf states ties – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Diplomatic cable dating from 2009 indicates that then FM Tzipi Livni had a good working, personal relationship with U.A.E. Foreign Minister Abdullah Ibn Zayed.

By Barak Ravid

Israel’s covert relations with the United Arab Emirates were yet another issue exposed by the recent leak of 250,000 diplomatic cables by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks on Sunday.

	Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert, March. 24, 2009.
	Photo by: Limor Edrey

In a cable dating to March of 2009, Marc Sievers, the political advisor of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, provides an overview of Israel’s relations with the Gulf states, following a meeting with the head of the Middle East division of the Foreign Ministry, Yaakov Hadas.

The overview details a “good and personal relationship” to have been developed between then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and U.A.E. Foreign Minister Abdullah Ibn Zayed, adding, however, that the two officials would not “do in public what they say behind closed doors.”

While Israel and the U.A.E. do not have official diplomatic relations, the diplomatic cable exposed by WikiLeaks uncovers the secret and persistent dialogue between the two countries during the administration of former Prime Minster Ehud Olmert.

In addition to the Foreign Ministry, which was reportedly in charge of most of these covert contacts, reports have also emerged that the Mossad Meir Dagan chief was entrusted with secret talks with Saudi Arabia.

Another part of the cable also addressed Israel’s ties with Qatar, which were severed several months prior to the reported meeting over Israel’s war against Hamas in early 2009.

Hadas is quoted as pointing out that there were signs that pressure on Qatar to renew its relations with Israel was beginning to bear fruit. The Israeli officials also indicated that he had been invited to talks at Doha by Qatari officials geared at discussing the possibility of reopening the Israeli mission in the country.

“The Qataris need to understand that they cannot expect Israeli cooperation without agreeing to reopen the Israeli mission,” Hadas is quoted as saying.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report November 29, 2010, 2:49 PM (GMT+02:00)

Targeted nuclear scientist’s car

World Exclusive from debkafile‘s intelligence sources:

Prof. Majid Shahriari, who died when his car was attacked in North Tehran Monday, Nov. 29, headed the team Iran established for combating the Stuxnet virus rampaging through its nuclear and military networks. His wife was injured. The scientist’s death deals a major blow to Iran’s herculean efforts to purge its nuclear and military control systems of the destructive worm since it went on the offensive six months ago. Only this month, Stuxnet shut down nuclear enrichment at Natanz for six days from Nov. 16-22 and curtailed an important air defense exercise.

Prof. Shahriari was the Iranian nuclear program’s top expert on computer codes and cyber war.
Another Iranian nuclear scientist, Prof. Feredoun Abbassi-Davani, and his wife survived a second coordinated attack with serious injuries. He is Dean of Students at the Beheshit Basijj Forces University , a key political appointment. …
Ali Salehi, Director of Iran’s Nuclear Energy Commission, reacted bitterly that there is a limit to Iran’s patience and whoever committed the murder is playing with fire. Tehran held US intelligence and the Israeli Mossad for responsible for the scientist’s death.

Tehran’s official account of the attacks is only half-correct, are sources report.  There were indeed two motorcycle teams of two riders each who shadowed the scientists’ vehicles on their way to their laboratories and offices at Beheshti University in North Teheran early Monday. It was initially reported that the motorcyclists sped past them, attached explosives to the targeted Peugeots and were gone before they exploded.

However, the first photos of the scientists’ vehicles showed them to be riddled with bullet holes rather than explosive damage, meaning they were hit by drive-by shooters.

It is important to note that the attacks took place in the most secure district of Tehran, where the top-secret labs serving Iran’s nuclear facilities are located. They must therefore have been set up after exhaustive and detailed surveillance.

debkafile reported earlier:  The attacks occurred at 7.45 a.m. Iranian time, less than 12 hours after the WikiLeaks organization uncovered US diplomatic cables attesting to a proposal by Mossad director Meir Dagan to overthrow the Islamic regime as one of the ways of terminating its nuclear program. He proposed enlisting oppressed Iranian minority groups for the task, like the Baluchis and their liberation movement, Jundallah.

Our intelligence sources note that this was the fifth attack in two years on Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran. None of the perpetrators were ever apprehended.  Some sources suggest that the latest double hit may have been the work of Jundallah, which recently began targeting nuclear scientists serving the hated regime and which two months ago reported abducting a scientist employed at the Isfahan nuclear facility.

Tehran played down that incident claiming the kidnapped man was a driver. But last week he appeared on the Saudi TV station Al Arabiya and described his nuclear work.