WarSclerotic

WikiLeaks Archive – Murkier View on Iran’s Missiles – NYTimes.com.

By MARK MAZZETTI and WILLIAM J. BROAD

But a review of a dozen other State Department cables made available by WikiLeaks and interviews with American government officials offer a murkier picture of Iran’s missile capabilities. Despite the tone of the February cable, it shows there are disagreements among officials about the missiles, and scant evidence that they are close to being deployed.

The conflicting portraits illustrate how the batch of diplomatic documents made available by WikiLeaks can be glimpses of the American government’s views, sometimes reflecting only part of the story, rather than concrete assertions of fact.

While there are a range of opinions about the details of the weapons sale and the readiness of the missiles, what most American officials appear to agree on is that at the very least North Korea sold a number of ballistic missile parts to Tehran in 2005.

The sale set off alarms in Washington, because the parts were for BM-25 missiles, a weapon with powerful engines that — if deployed by Iran — could bolster Tehran’s ability to strike far beyond the Middle East, State Department cables show.

But five years later, American officials in interviews said that they had no evidence that Iran had used the parts or technology to actually construct a BM-25, let alone begin the years of flight testing necessary before it could reliably add the missile to its arsenal.

It is unclear why Iran appears to have had trouble with the BM-25. According to one American official, it is possible that Iran did not get complete “missile kits” from the North Koreans in 2005, or that Iranian scientists have had difficulty mastering the technology.

Both American officials and outside experts appear to agree, however, that Iran did use some of the BM-25 technology to launch a satellite into space last year, and that Iranian scientists probably used data from that launching for its military program.

“Just because the BM-25 program hasn’t progressed as far as the Iranians hoped it would, the concern remains,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because assessments about Iran’s missile program are classified.

The dozen cables provide a glimpse of secret discussions between the United States and a number of foreign governments about the BM-25, described earlier this week in an article in The New York Times. Their views are colored by their relationships with Iran.

The Israelis, for instance, take a more alarmist stance than the United States because Israel regards Iran as its greatest threat. Russia, on the other hand, denies that the BM-25 even exists.

In the cables, American officials argue that North Korea developed the medium-range weapon based on a Russian design, the R-27, once used on Soviet submarines to carry nuclear warheads.

The cables describe how the North Koreans, in turn, transferred “missiles” or “missile systems” to Iran. The cables do not refer to missile parts or “kits.”

But the cables, written over four years, vary in the certainty with which Americans make the claim about the technology transfer, with one cable saying Iran “has probably acquired” BM-25s and another discussing “substantial data indicating Iranian possession of a missile system.”

The public release of the cables has stirred debate among experts outside the government on the existence of the BM-25 and whether, if Iran has the weapon, it poses an immediate threat to Western Europe.

Many experts say the BM-25 has undergone no flight testing either by North Korea or Iran, and they note that traditionally it takes a dozen or so tests over several years to perfect a missile and prepare it for military deployment.

On the other hand, NATO last month agreed to establish an antimissile shield and has invited Russia to take part, suggesting growing concern in Europe of an Iranian missile threat.

One of the most knowledgeable public analysts of Tehran’s endeavors in rocketry is Michael Elleman, a missile engineer who contributed to a report on Iran’s program issued in May by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London.

That report was skeptical of Iran’s having obtained the BM-25 from North Korea. Now, Mr. Elleman said, he is less certain.

“It is possible that the BM-25 does not exist,” he said in an e-mail message. “However, it is more likely that it does, in some fashion. We just do not know, precisely, because it has never been tested.”

The first cable in the WikiLeaks cache that refers to the BM-25 came from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, sent to Washington on May 5, 2006. The cable discusses a meeting a month earlier between Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, and Meir Dagan, director of Mossad, Israel’s main spy agency.

According to the cable, Mr. Dagan talked of Iran’s having a medium-range missile, the Shahab-3, that “can currently carry nuclear material, and reported that Iran is also trying to adapt the BM-25 missile, which already has a longer range, for this purpose.”

American intelligence officials do not believe that Iran has yet mastered the technology to put a nuclear warhead on top of a missile.

But the most detailed discussion about the missile is contained in a cable from Feb. 24 of this year, which describes the disagreements between American and Russian officials about the missile.

The cable shows that American officials firmly believed that Iran had obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, and that there was direct evidence of the weapons transfer. But it goes on to indicate that the Russians dismiss that claim as a myth driven by politics.

Cables expose Arab states’ hypocrisy over Iran | The Australian.

WASHINGTON has little help to contain the nuclear threat.

THE US is leading a quite desperate struggle to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation around the world to rogue states with mad leaders, to unstable states and to terrorists. The four nations which are at the centre of its concern are Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and China.

This is the central geo-strategic struggle of our time. This week we know a little more about it than we did last week.

The explosion of leaked US diplomatic cables courtesy of WikiLeaks revealed very few state secrets and nothing which compromises Western security.

Instead at almost every point they profoundly confirm the narrative which the US, and incidentally Australian, governments have been broadcasting relating to Iran, North Korea, China and the Middle East.

There is a danger that the bitchy gossip in the cables – a perfectly normal part of the diplomat’s need to assess the subjective qualities of significant figures, as well as their formal policies – will obscure their substance.

The over-arching theme of the cables is the growing danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology and the sustained, difficult, pretty much thankless task the Americans are engaged in, on behalf of all of us, to try to stop this from happening.

For my money the single most startling set of revelations concerns the Arab world’s view of Iran. Over the years many American, Israeli and British contacts have told me the Arab regimes are even more concerned about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran than Israel is. David Miliband, then British foreign secretary, told me this last year in an interview at the British Foreign Office.

Although I trusted and believed all these contacts, even I thought they were probably gilding the lily a bit: that the Israelis were really scared of a nuclear Iran but the Arabs were probably just pretty uncomfortable about it. I was wrong. If anything, my contacts were understating the Arab fear of Iran.

One of the clear revelations from these leaked cables is that numerous Arab leaders have asked the Americans to take military action to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons.

One might note that this does rather give the lie to the insane notion – peddled not least by US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt – that an all-powerful Jewish lobby is the only group in the world so exercised about a nuclear Iran as to consider supporting military action.

Instead, all over the Arab world, rulers are begging the Americans to do anything they can, even military action, to stop Tehran acquiring nukes.

Here’s a sample of Arab rulers’ opinions. Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and the deputy commander of the United Arab Emirates’ armed forces, used Israeli terminology to describe Iran as an “existential threat”. He urged the US to strike Iran from the air, but went further, saying if such strikes were not enough then the US should consider using ground forces against Iran.

He also described Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as “another Hitler” and called on the Americans not to appease Iran.

The UAE Foreign Minister, according to the cables, describes Iran as “a huge problem that goes far beyond nuclear capabilities . . . Iranian support for terrorism is broader than just Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has influence in Afghanistan, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia and Africa.”

The most important Arab view on Iran comes from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. His ambassador in the US, on the king’s behalf, repeatedly urged Washington to attack Iran and “cut off the head of the snake”.

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt regards the Iranian government as pathological liars. Egypt’s Major General Muhammad al-Assar tells the Americans “Egypt views Iran as a threat to the region.”

Bahrain’s King Hamad said last year: “The (Iranian nuclear) program must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.” (Is the king of Bahrain a neo-conservative, do you think?)

The king of Jordan is equally distressed about Iran. His officials call for its nuclear program to be stopped “by any means”. There are many more such comments. These I think are the most important revelations in WikiLeaks. They help explain the increased urgency of the Obama administration’s approach to the Iranian nuclear threat. However, they are profoundly significant for several other reasons.

They refute the nonsensical idea the key dispute in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian one. There is no Israeli dimension to the Saudi fear of Iran.

Secondly, while the gossip in many cables can have many different explanations, in these matters the Arabs knew exactly what they were saying to the Americans and exactly what its consequences might be. They are all tightly controlled, top-down regimes.

They know that among the options Washington is considering is a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. These communications therefore are not idle diplomatic chit-chat. This is the Arab leadership begging the Americans to take military action against Iran.

However, the cables also show the weakness, one might even say the hypocrisy, of much Arab politics. The only Middle Eastern leader who seems to talk about Iran in private in exactly the same way as he talks about them in public is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Indeed, Netanyahu emerges from all these cables very well. He tells the Americans in private, just as he says in public, that he does not want to rule over the Palestinian West Bank. If he can get rid of it in a way which does not involve massive security risk to Israel, he will do so as soon as possible.

But the Arab leaders understand that the chief threat to them and their societies is Iran. They take many covert actions against Iran, they help the Americans in such actions, but they will not speak openly or honestly to their own people about this issue. Yet probably if the Americans took their advice and took action against Iran they would then criticise the Americans for doing so.

The roles of North Korea and China in helping Iran become a nuclear weapons state is also etched in these WikiLeaks cables and is deeply disturbing. This is not exactly new. We knew of this before. But here are repeated American entreaties to Beijing to stop North Korean assistance to Iran on matters nuclear.

One cable shows then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice urgently asking the Chinese to stop a shipment of missile components from North Korea to Iran, which is passing through China. The cable claims at least 10 such previous shipments have gone through China.

Here there is a little question of interpretation. Some cables show some Chinese diplomats disparaging North Korea, in talks with US and South Korean diplomats. One Chinese official says China would not mind a unified Korean peninsula under South Korean leadership, even if South Korea remains allied to the US, so long as there were no American forces in the North Korean part of the peninsula. Another shows a Chinese speculating that North Korea could fall apart after the death of the dictator, Kim Jong-il.

Not all diplomatic cables have equal authority. It depends who is talking and what their purpose is. The value of the Arab messages to Washington on Iran is that they are so consistent and repeated, they come from such senior Arab leaders, and their context is so specific, that there can be no doubt of their meaning.

Chinese diplomatic talk on North Korea is much harder to interpret. As this column has previously outlined, Western analysts believe there are varying views of North Korea within the Chinese leadership. Undoubtedly the most important views are those held by the People’s Liberation Army and the politburo.

Typically, in the Chinese decision-making process, the Foreign Ministry is not very powerful at all. It may be that these cables confirm the existence of differing views within Beijing. It may be that the diplomats involved were engaging in soothing talk with their American and South Korean interlocutors.

But the best way to come to a judgment is to look at Chinese actions. The Chinese will not even acknowledge that the North Koreans torpedoed the South Korean navy corvette, the Cheonan, killing 46 South Korean sailors. Beijing has stopped any UN Security Council resolution on this. Similarly, it has refused to criticise North Korea for firing artillery shells at South Korean civilians. And it provides critical economic and fuel assistance to North Korea every year. In other words, there is no indication in its actions that Beijing is sincere in its criticisms of North Korea.

North Korea’s involvement with Iran is profoundly disturbing. If, as these cables suggest, a part of that is routed through China, then it is a fair assumption that China is complicit in the North Korea-Iran co-operation. That is a deeply disturbing conclusion. It is not proven, but it seems the most likely explanation.

Finally, the cables show the extreme danger of nuclear weapons proliferation from Pakistan.

All of this is not exactly new to people who have been following these matters. But these cables do give us a lot of detail about just how bad the situation really is, how much of an effort the Americans are making to contain it, and how relatively little help they get from their allies.

They show the paranoid interpretations of Washington are untrue, but the paranoid interpretations of Washington’s enemies substantially understate the problems, problems about which there’s no point any longer being diplomatic.

Security and Defense: Changing of the guard.

The diplomatic coup no one expected – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Netanyahu said in advance that he didn’t think the WikiLeaks cables would seriously damage Israel. But he probably had no idea they would give credence to the right.

By Aluf Benn

Benjamin Netanyahu strode into Tel Aviv’s Beit Sokolow, the home of the Israeli Journalists Association. The prime minister’s annual meeting with the Editors Committee, which legend holds used to be devoted to exchanges of secrets in David Ben-Gurion’s era, has long since become an open press conference. Last year Netanyahu skipped the event, but this Monday he showed up to display his mastery of the public agenda and tenacious adherence to his message.

	Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and the Emir of Qatar.
	Photo by: Getty Images

The night before, WikiLeaks had published the first package of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. Even before the publication, Netanyahu had said he believed Israel would not be harmed. He was undoubtedly delighted at this second disaster that was befalling U.S. President Barack Obama within a month. Thanks to WikiLeaks, there is now no fear Washington will exert heavy pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction or to accelerate negotiations on a withdrawal from the territories.

It’s doubtful, though, that Netanyahu anticipated a publicity triumph on the scale of what happened. The Israeli right has always claimed that criticism of the occupation and the settlements is only a red herring and that the real problem in the Middle East is extremist regimes that support terrorism and pursue nuclear arms. The cables show that the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states are also fearful of the Iranian threat.

Some of them – Egypt’s foreign minister and ranking Jordanian officials – urged the Americans to establish a Palestinian state as a way to contain Iran and curb its influence. Saudi King Abdullah is quoted as calling on Obama to press Israel on the settlements, because otherwise there will be no peace. But none of these leaders said that Ariel and Immanuel should take precedence over stopping the centrifuges at Natanz.

Iran “will threaten Israel’s existence should it go nuclear,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, warned. It is surprising that the Israelis still want peace after what happened in Lebanon and Gaza, the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, is quoted as saying. Nor does he have any complaints against Israel’s leaders: “The Israeli leaders need to represent the people of Israel, who themselves do not trust Arabs. The emir said this is understandable and ‘we can’t blame them’ because the Israelis have been ‘under threat’ for a long time,” according to one cable. It would be interesting to know whether the emir would have spoken differently had he known that in talks with members of Congress, Netanyahu had attacked Qatar for its policy of appeasing Iran and that Mossad chief Meir Dagan had tried to persuade the Americans to punish Qatar by removing their bases from the emirate.

In Beit Sokolow, Netanyahu urged Arab leaders to say openly about Iran what they had whispered to the Americans. That’s unlikely to happen. But Obama might feel that only an act of force against Iran will extricate him from his troubles and reestablish American leadership in the Middle East. His weakness, which is seen clearly in the cables, does not suggest he harbors aggressive intentions, but his approach might change.

No one will now be able to allege that Israel is acting irresponsibly . When the king of Saudi Arabia and the king of Jordan call for lopping off the head of the Iranian snake, no one will believe them when they denounce an Israeli operation. The Americans heard from Defense Minister Ehud Barak that the time for action is running out, and that message was received loud and clear. The WikiLeaks cables show clearly that the international community expects an Israeli operation. The crown prince of Abu Dhabi says he believes Israel will attack Iran, and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates believes Israel has the offensive capability. Both of them think such an attack will do no more than delay the manufacture of an Iranian nuclear bomb by a few years.

Bolshevikileaks

At the height of World War I, in early 1917, the British cryptography unit (“Room 40” ) decoded a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to his country’s embassy in Mexico City, proposing the Mexicans launch a war against the United States and retake Texas. The British showed the telegram to American diplomats. The publication of the document helped induce Congress and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany; the Americans’ decision to join the Allies contributed to Germany’s defeat at the end of 1918.

	U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Prime Minsiter Benjamin Netanyahu.
	Photo by: Reuters / AP

A few months after the episode of the “Zimmermann Telegram,” the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia. One of the new leaders’ first decisions was to declassify the documents of the czar’s Foreign Ministry. The new people’s commissar for foreign affairs, Leon Trotsky, asserted that secret diplomacy serves the minority in its desire to impose its will on the majority. “Imperialism,” he added, “with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level.”

The most famous document revealed by the Bolsheviks was the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which Britain and France planned how they would carve up the Ottoman Empire and also promised a hefty slice to Russia, which coveted Istanbul and the Black Sea straits. The exposure of secrets can influence events, if it is focused and comes at the right moment, as in the case of the Zimmermann telegram. The publication of thousands of documents in order “to denounce imperialism” changed nothing.

At the same time those diplomatic secrets were being made public, General Allenby conquered Jerusalem, and the Great Powers moved ahead with their plans to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. The only ones who got nothing were the Russians, who in the meantime had pulled out of the war and signed a separate peace with Germany.

Indeed, nearly a century later, the consequences of the Sykes-Picot Agreement are still generating conflict. Most of the protracted regional conflicts – in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, not to mention the fall and rise of Turkey – stem from the secret pact between Britain and France.

With WikiLeaks, there is no need to wait for official archives to be opened after being vetted to avoid embarrassment. Now the raw material can be read almost in real time and one can bask in the quotations of leaders and officials who are still in office. Everyone is a witness to the politicians’ embarrassment.

Netanyahu this week said he was proud Israel maintains information security, and sensitive conversations are not conveyed in diplomatic cables but in face-to-face meetings or via secure telephones. He’s right – the preparations for the attack on the Syrian reactor, for example, were discussed via other channels – but quite a bit can be gleaned from the American cables, too. Israeli journalists had almost no access to the outgoing Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, but now, thanks to WikiLeaks, everyone can read his briefings to foreign VIPs and quote what he said. Similarly, the director general of the Atomic Energy Commission, Shaul Horev, keeps his distance from the media, but he too is quoted in conversation with U.S. officials, expressing concern at the treaty being formulated to freeze the production of plutonium. According to the cables, the AEC, which supposedly is a civilian body, submits intelligence evaluations to Netanyahu about the Iranian project.

The cables show senior civil servants, such as Dagan and Amos Gilad of the Defense Ministry, serving for years and presenting policy as they understand and interpret it, irrespective of who is prime minister or which party is in power. No difference in their opinions is discernible under any of the last three prime ministers, Ariel Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu.

	U.S. President Barack Obama.
	Photo by: AP

The current premier is quoted telling Congress members the same things he says in public: Iran is dangerous, the Palestinians are being difficult, I want an agreement, I had a good talk with Obama. When he was in the opposition, Netanyahu made the mistake of being frank in a conversation with Representative Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York, a veteran expert on the Middle East and one of Israel’s most important friends in Washington. Netanyahu assailed the behavior of the Olmert government in the Second Lebanon War, saying Israel “dropped troops into [Hezbollah’s] gunsights,” and offering his assessment that Olmert would not survive in power.

But if Netanyahu spoke more freely back then, he left the journalists he met this week yawning. Not least because two hours after the event, the Prime Minister’s Bureau announced the appointment of Tamir Pardo as the new head of the Mossad.

Unconventioanl Warfare on Iran – Op-Eds – Israel National News.

No hacker could have been able to launch the cyber attack on Iran, says the writer, who thinks he knows who did. The article below has also been published in Dutch by the Volkskrant.

The Dutch newspaper ‘De Volkskrant’ published a Missing Peace article titled ‘Iran makes Mideast peace impossible’. In the article we wrote the following about the Stuxnet worm, that is causing havoc in computer systems all over Iran:

“The long awaited attack on Iran by Israel could take place in a total different shape than commonly expected. Just this week news broke that the Iranian Nuclear Agency tries to limit damage caused by a computer virus named Stuxnet. The virus has paralyzed a large part of the Iranian industrial complex en could be the result of a combined action by the CIA and the Mossad”.

The idea that the Stuxnet worm could be the long overdue attack on Iran’s nuclear program seemed to be speculation at the time. But now however, it is clear that Iran has indeed been targeted by an unprecedented cyber  attack and Israel may be  behind it.

New Findings

Last week leading international media and experts published new findings about the Stuxnet worm.

The New York Times was one such example. The paper published an article that revealed new information about the design of Stuxnet.

The virus has been specially designed to sabotage frequency controllers which determine the speed of the P-1 centrifuges used at Natanz.

Stuxnet causes rapid changes in driving speeds of the rotors in these centrifuges. This ultimately causes cracks and destroys the rotor causing the centrifuge flying apart.

According to former IAEA inspector David Albright the worm has the potential to destroy entire centrifuge plants like Natanz.

The German industrial computer expert Langner also published findings about his research into Stuxnet. He explained that the virus contains two different digital warheads. One of them is aimed at the frequency controllers in the P-1 centrifuge.

The other one causes disruptions in the Siemens turbine controller at the Busher nuclear power plant. This is the Siemens S7-417 controller. Siemens has been involved with the Iranian nuclear program since the reign of the Shah.

The disruptions in the turbine controller could eventually lead to the melt down of the reactor. This way Stuxnet could even be more effective than an airstrike on Busher.

Langner compared the malware to the introduction of an F-35 stealth fighter on the battlefield of World War 1.

It is clear that the cyber attack must have been the result of years of research and preparation, he said.

It is also obvious no hacker would have been able to launch such a cyber attack.

Cyber war

Earlier,  ‘The Australian’ published an article about the cyber war between Israel and Iran. In the article, unnamed European security experts declared that Stuxnet must have been designed by a well funded military laboratory.

Since the discovery of the virus, speculation about the origin of the attack has pointed in the direction of Israel.

Israel has proportionally one of the largest cyber war units in the world. The IDF unit in charge with cyber warfare is code named Unit 8200 and has thousands of soldiers.

At the first cyber warfare conference in Israel in February this year, military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin declared Israel the world leader in the field of cyber war.

He also said – perhaps a hint to the planned Stuxnet attack- that this type of war gives small countries the military power which was until recently only reserved for superpowers

Source of Stuxnet

Speculation about the source of the Stuxnet virus will not disappear anytime soon and the question who was responsible for the design of the virus and the attack will probably remain an open question.

The direct results of the attack however, have recently become visible.

On November 23 IAEA officials announced that none of the P-1 centrifuges on Natanz were working during a check by IAEA inspectors earlier that month.

The Israeli TV news show Mabat revealed the same evening that the enrichment activity at Natanz has not returned to the same level ever since.

Earlier the IAEA announced that the number of operating centrifuges at Natanz has fallen from 4920 in May 2009 to 3722 in September 2010.

Iran however, denies that Stuxnet has caused any damage at Natanz. But in September Iranian officials admitted that the virus has caused extensive damage to computer systems in Iran.

Among them the systems of the Iranian nuclear complex.

Israeli design?

Stuxnet contains in its code a couple of hints that could be a fingerprint pointing to Israeli design.

Buried in Stuxnet’s code is a marker with the digits “19790509”.

Symantec researchers discovered that on May 9 1979 an Iranian Jew by the name of Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran. The execution sent shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community.

Anoher hint that this could be the work of the Israelis is that the malware creates a directory called myrtle. In Hebrew myrtle is called “hadas” The name Hadassah (Esther), is very similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle and the Targums say: “They call her Hadassah, because she was just, and those that are just are compared to myrtles”.  Esther was the Jewish Queen who in Biblical times prevented genocide of the Jewish people in Persia (Iran).

The revelations of the past few weeks however, give a better indication about the possible Israeli origin of the Stuxnet worm.

It is clear by now that the cyber attack was directed at Iran’s nuclear program. Israel has always been very clear that it will not allow a nuclear Iran. At the same time the predicted military attack on Iran did not take place even when it was clear that Iran was able to pass the nuclear threshold. But by now it seems entirely possible that Israel decided to choose to launch an unprecedented and unconvential attack on Iran: a cyber attack.

Unconvential attack

The development of Stuxnet may have been costly since it is the most sophisticated malware ever designed.

However, the price that Israel would have to pay for a conventional attack on Iran would cost the country much more in terms of loss in human life and resources.

It is almost certain that such an attack would cost Israel dearly and would trigger a much wider conflict.

So this cyberspace attack could fit into the rapidly changing military doctrines in the IDF and elsewhere.

The IDF is a world leader in high-tech military inventions, such as drones which are introduced on battle fields worldwide.

Stuxnet however, is unique by any standard because no conventionally known military means were used in the attack on Iran.

That makes it probably the first time in military history that a military attack of this proportion did not cause the loss of human life.

And that would be no small accomplishment for a state so often accused of the disproportionateuse of  force.

Tehran warned to leave ‘path of confrontation’.

VIENNA, Dec 2, (Agencies): Three European Union heavyweights accused Iran on Thursday of continuing “down the path of non-compliance and confrontation” with its nuclear work, four days before world powers are to resume talks with Tehran.
In a statement read out at a closed-door meeting of the 35-nation governing board of the UN nuclear watchdog, Germany, France and Britain urged Iran to address their concerns about the nature of its nuclear programme.
“There is no alternative: Iran must actively address the lack of confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme,” it said, according to a copy made available to Reuters.
Talks between Iran and six big powers — the United States, France, Russia, Britain, China and Germany — are due to resume next week in Geneva in the first such meeting in more than year.
“We are convinced that this is an opportunity for Iran to demonstrate its readiness to engage and to address the substance of our concerns on the nuclear issue in good faith, while other issues of mutual interest can be addressed as well,” the statement said.
UN nuclear agency chief Yukiya Amano complained on Thursday about Iran’s lack of cooperation with his inspectors, four days before long-stalled talks resume between Tehran and major powers.
Amano’s comments to the 35-nation governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) highlight the challenges that negotiators will face in seeking to resolve a dispute over the Islamic state’s nuclear ambitions.
“The agency needs Iran’s cooperation in clarifying outstanding issues which give rise to concerns about possible military dimensions to its nuclear programme, including by providing access to all sites, equipment, persons and documents requested by the agency,” Amano said in a speech.
Western powers accuse Iran of seeking to develop atom bombs and want the country to suspend uranium enrichment activities, which can have both civilian and military uses.
Iran says its nuclear programme is aimed at generating electricity and has repeatedly rejected demands to curb it.
Arrests
Iran has arrested a number of people it says were behind the murder of a nuclear scientist and were linked to foreign spy agencies, state television quoted Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi as saying on Thursday.
The arrests come as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili is preparing to hold talks with European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton in Geneva on Dec 6-7, the first such meeting between Iran and major powers in more than a year.
Scientist Majid Shahriyari was killed in a bomb attack on his car in Tehran on Monday, and another nuclear scientist was wounded in another bombing in the city at the same time.
“A part of a group behind the recent terrorist attacks have been arrested. Mossad, CIA and MI6 have played a role in this incident and by arresting these people we have found new clues,” television quoted Moslehi as saying, referring to the intelligence services of Israel, the United States and Britain.
“Those who cooperated with these spy agencies … had more plans, but they were stopped,” he added, without giving the number of those arrested or any other further details.
No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Iranian officials have said those behind the attack aimed to stop the country’s nuclear programme.
Iran is at odds with the West over its nuclear programme. Western countries fear Tehran’s nuclear work is aimed at making a bomb but Iran denies this, saying it only wants to generate electricity.
Iran will step up security for its nuclear scientists after a prominent physicist was assassinated and another wounded in bomb attacks, its atomic chief said in a report on Thursday.
“Based on a recent decision, it has been arranged that the security detail (of nuclear scientists) will be multiplied and other protection techniques will also be applied,” Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency.
Assailants attached bombs to the cars of two senior scientists in Iran’s nuclear programme on Monday, killing one of them, Majid Shahriari, and wounding the other, Fereydoon Abbasi Davani. Three other people were wounded.
“Dr Shahriari was not alone as he was with his security detail,” Salehi said. “But the evil methods that enemies employ are unpredictable.”
Tehran has blamed the attacks on the United States and Israel, which accuse Iran seeking to make nuclear weapons under the guise of a civilian programme. Tehran denies the charge.
“Since last year, we put under protection… hundreds of our scientists and experts working in the nuclear field,” Salehi said.
In January, another Iranian nuclear scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, was killed in a bomb attack which Tehran blamed on “mercenaries” in the pay of Israel and the United States.
Concern
The UN atomic watchdog expressed “great concern” Thursday over North Korea and also turned up the heat on Syria and Iran, which are both under investigation for alleged illicit nuclear activity.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano told a meeting of the body’s board of governors that he was worried by reports North Korea has built a state-of-the-art uranium enrichment facility, which the United States suggested dated much further back than the reclusive Stalinist state claims.
“It was with great concern that I learned of recent reports about a new uranium enrichment facility, as well as the construction of a new light water reactor, in the DPRK” or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Amano said in his opening address to the closed-door meeting.
Earlier this month a US scientist revealed he had been shown a new uranium enrichment plant at the Yongbyon nuclear complex outside the capital North Korean capital Pyongyang.
The news has heightened international concern that North Korea — which has conducted two nuclear weapons tests — could produce highly-enriched weapons-grade uranium on top of the plutonium already in its possession.
The IAEA is not in a position to verify the reports since its inspectors have been barred from North Korea since last year.
Washington’s envoy to the IAEA, Glyn Davies, described the revelations as “disturbing” and said the US believed North Korea “has been pursuing enrichment for an extended period of time — long before April 2009 when the DPRK claims to have begun its Yongbyon enrichment facility construction.”
Furthermore, “there is a clear likelihood that DPRK has built other uranium enrichment-related activities in its territory,” Davies said.
IAEA chief Amano also appeared to ramp up pressure on Syria, saying he had written to the government there for the first time to try to bring some movement into a stymied two-year-long IAEA probe.
“I wrote a letter to the minister for foreign affairs of the Syrian Arab Republic on November 18 to request the government to provide the agency with prompt access to relevant information and locations” connected to an alleged nuclear site, Amano said.
“I also requested Syria’s cooperation regarding the agency’s verification activities in general.”
It was the first time that Amano has contacted the Syrian government directly with regard to the agency’s probe and diplomats close to the IAEA saw it as a sign of his growing impatience with Damascus.
“He’s trying to move things along,” one diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Syria is accused of building an undeclared reactor at a remote desert site called Dair Alzour until it was bombed by Israeli planes in September 2007.
Turning to Iran, Amano complained the Islamic republic was continuing to stonewall a separate investigation there, even as he welcomed the resumption of long-stalled talks between Tehran and world powers.
Iran “has not provided the necessary cooperation to permit the agency to confirm that all (its) nuclear material is in peaceful activities,” he said.
Iran was defying UN Security Council resolutions and pressing ahead with its sensitive uranium enrichment activities.
It was also refusing to answer questions about possible military dimensions to its atomic work.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran’s nuclear programme for eight years now to try to establish whether it is entirely peaceful as Tehran claims or whether it masks a covert drive to build a bomb as western powers believe.
Iran is under four sets of UN sanctions over its refusal to suspend enrichment of uranium, which can be used to make nuclear fuel or, in highly refined form, the fissile core of an atom bomb.

DEBKA.

All top Iranian scientists were given bodyguards and placed under stringent security after Prof. Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a quantum field theorist, elementary-particle physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of Tehran’s the Department of Physics, was assassinated on January 12, 2010.
Since then, nuclear physicists have not been allowed to leave home unaccompanied by a bodyguard or drive their cars. Before taking the wheel, their personal guards carefully check for explosives inside the vehicle or planted nearby. These precautions were enforced after a booby-trapped motorcycle parked next to Prof. Mohammadi’s car was detonated by remote control when he sat down at the wheel.
Monday, Nov. 29, they proved woefully inadequate.
The Shahid Beheshti University in northern Tehran is the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ (IRGC) space and rocket science institute. On Nov. 29, two of university’s senior staff were targeted for attack. Prof. Majid Shahriari was killed and Prof. Fereydoun Abbasi badly injured, their personal bodyguards presenting no impediment to the assassins.
Two motorcycles, each carrying two riders, zoomed up to the scientists’ cars in coordinated attacks in Army Square, one of the most traffic-clogged areas of the Iranian capital. According to the official version, the killers attached small explosives charges, called “sticky bombs” because of the magnets which adhere to the metal parts of vehicles, and within seconds pulled away. The explosives were detonated by remote control.
According to another Iranian version, the two teams of motorcyclists riddled the car with bullets fired from automatic weapons while driving at high speed.
The Natanz enrichment plant faces more idle times
Whereas Prof. Mohammadi worked under cover, the last two victims were familiar names to the UN International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and the Western intelligence agencies following Iran’s nuclear program.
Prof. Fereydoun Abbasi, who survived with serious injuries, is identified by DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources as the director of the Natanz centrifuge facility for uranium enrichment, and the most prominent Iranian centrifuge specialist.
Prof. Majid Shahriari, who died in the attack, was Iran’s top expert on codes for the computer systems running its nuclear program. In this capacity, he oversaw operations for purging the system of the Stuxnet plague. The two scientists were well acquainted. From the second week of November, they worked together to beat the cyber attack on the centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
The plant was totally shut down Nov. 16-22 because Shariari insisted he could not fight the Stuxnet invasion as long as unaffected production elements continued functioning. He warned that as long as they did, they too were susceptible to infection by the virus.
It therefore looks very much as though by killing the two professors, the assassins were meant to preempt the effort to cure the systemic paralysis inflicted by the Stuxnet malworm and keep the Natanz enrichment plant idle. With Hahriari and Abbasi out of the way, the facility could not avoid a second shutdown before long.
Iran’s counterattack on the malworm goes back to square one
Tehran has imposed a heavy news blackout on the state of the plant and the scale of the viral infection. But its deep distress over the loss of its number one Stuxnet expert was hard to conceal.
On Monday, November 29, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: “They (the enemy) had been successful in making problems for a limited number of our centrifuges, with software they had installed in electronic devices. Fortunately, our experts have discovered the origins of the problems, and today they (Iran’s enemies) are unable to repeat these acts.”
Ahmadinejad refused to say whether the Stuxnet computer virus had been responsible for the problems. To the journalist who ventured to put this question, he said: “Write this down – The Iranian president’s answer to this question is silence. That’s it.”
The tone of frustration running through the president’s replies and his acknowledgment of problems with the centrifuges imply that the damage is substantial and that, even seven months after Stuxnet first struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, Tehran remains uncertain if and when the attack will be over and which parts are vulnerable to a second wave of attacks. The death of Shahriari, who led the counterattack on the malworm, sends the battle back to square one.
Nuclear staff panicked
The entire body of scientists, engineers, technicians and other staff employed in the nuclear program is moreover in a panic. They have to assume they and their families are under hostile scrutiny and their movements an open book. The killers of Shariari and Abbasi must have watched and recorded their victims’ actions for months and drawn up a model of their routines, locations and timetables.
For many mornings, they must have shadowed the professors’ cars driving from home to Shahid Beheshti University before they fixed the exact point and moment for attacking them and getting away without being caught.
The big question now is how did the watchers for so long escape the notice of the dozens of Iranian bodyguards working in shifts to protect the two scientists? What good were the bodyguards for preventing the killers hitting the men they were protecting and escaping without leaving a trace?
These days, Tehran looks as vulnerable to terror and assassination as Damascus.

DEBKA.

Tamir Pardo

This week’s appointment of Tamir Pardo, 57, as Director of Mossad, Israel’s external espionage service, coupled with Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi‘s assumption of the post of Director of Israeli military intelligence- IMI has put in place two important pieces of the sweeping reform which Israel’s intelligence-espionage-clandestine system is quietly undergoing.
Israel’s three cloak-and-dagger agencies are in the process of being reoriented on operations rather than intelligence-gathering and analysis, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources report. Furthermore, the Mossad is to be recognized as the senior clandestine agency tasked with covert operations, including those conducted by Israel Defense Forces-IDF combat units.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are directing this radical rearrangement of the national military and intelligence order, conducting the system’s first shakeup since the 2006 Hizballah-Israel war.
In the summer of that year, the Israeli armored columns advancing into southern Lebanon up to the northern banks of the Litani River were unable to smash Hizballah’s military strength. To redress the imbalance, IDF commandos struck deep behind enemy lines twice. The first raid on August 2, 2006 aimed at seizing Hizballah command centers around the ancient city of Baalbek, about 130 Km (80 miles) north of Israel, and knock them over. It failed because Hizballah, forewarned by the sound of the helicopter engines ferrying the Israeli troops in, were given enough time to evacuate.
Four days later, on August 5, 2006, Israeli commandos raided the Mediterranean port town of Tyre, 30 kilometers (18 miles) north of Israel, killing 27 Hizballah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard operatives, including senior commanders.
This time, the commandos took their lesson from the first raid and approached their target noiselessly by sea under cover of dark.
Tamir Pardo picked as covert operations master-planner
Both these operations behind Hizballah lines were supervised by Tamir Pardo, then head of the Mossad’s operations branch. It was the first time that a Mossad officer had ever been given command of an IDF special operations unit for a covert mission inside enemy territory.
This method was not applied in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, because of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert‘s objections. That campaign too like the Lebanon war ended unresolved and without a clear victory for either side.
But DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources report that Olmert’s successor as prime minister recalled those two raids in Lebanon. He and the defense minister carefully studied the transformation of the American Central Intelligence Agency and its revised methods of operation in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan into a fighting force for covert warfare under a civilian DCI as supreme commander, currently Leon Panetta.
They also took to heart US objections to using the IDF for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
All these factors combined to make Netanyahu, Barak and national military and intelligence chiefs realize that a drastic overhaul had become necessary for the Mossad, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet domestic security agency and a sweeping redistribution of their tasks. This process would have a profound impact on the IDF as well.
Four major changes are in the making therefore, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence and military sources:
Intel chiefs relieved of policy briefing, strategic analyses
1. From now on, all heads of military and intelligence organizations will be required to have background experience in field combat operations on the tactical or strategic level to qualify for appointment. This proviso will apply to the Chief of Staff, Mossad Director, Military Intelligence Chief and Shin Bet Director. All of them will need to be proven “field animals” – in military parlance, rather than specialists in political analysis and military strategy as heretofore. Netanyahu and his advisers no longer want to hear intelligence and military officers offering opinions and judgments in the realms of decision-making and statecraft.
This ruling will apply to the sort of briefings to cabinet and other closed forums heard recently, in which the Mossad and IMI Directors informed policy-makers the time was right for negotiations with Syrian President Bashar Assad, in one case, and the need to retrieve ties with Ankara at all costs and ignore Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan‘s implacable hostility – in another.
From now on, elected policy-makers alone will be responsible for diplomacy and strategic planning and judgments. All they want to hear from the generals and spymasters is recommendations on such matters as covert operations for halting Iran’s nuclear progress and the flow of North Korean rockets to Iran, and from Iran and Syria to Hizballah.
In the event of war, they will first demand plans for Mossad and IMI special operations behind enemy lines for sabotage, and only in their wake, dispatch the armored and armored infantry columns to breach them. To enforce homeland security, special Shin Bet commando units will be deployed deep inside Palestinian territory and Israeli Arab population centers while the IDF commando units are fighting on the front.
Only field combat experts need apply for top jobs
These directions are strongly blazed by the latest military and intelligence appointments.
Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, a field operations tactician of the first rank with little interest in politics and policy-making has just been appointed Israel’s next Chief of Staff after Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi.
Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, even more of a “field animal” has been chosen as his deputy. His strengths lie in his ability to focus totally on preparing the armed forces for war and skills in setting up surgical field operations.
Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the new Military Intelligence chief is another field operations man who hails from the Paratroops Brigade’s special commando unit and command off the Gaza front.
Kochavi has no previous experience in the intelligence trade. While managing the IMI Corps’ several departments, he is expected to concentrate on expanding undercover combat units and enhancing their operational capabilities, for which he is amply qualified.
Tamir Pardo will perform similar functions in the Mossad.
Netanyahu has not yet selected the next Shin Bet Director to follow Yuval Diskin, who retires after three decades of clandestine activity and management. Our intelligence sources report that all three candidates are insiders of the organization who came up through the ranks and are active field operations men.
2. Of the three services, the Mossad faces the most radical change in its character, structure and methods of operation.
The drawing-up of strategic assessment studies, developing policy guidelines and generating ties with governments which have no formal relations with Israel will be transferred to the National Security Council headed now by Dr. Uzi Arad, a former Mossad officer himself.
Mossad and its chief promoted to command of all covert operations
While the Mossad’s glory days of running networks in the US, Russia, China and Europe recede into the distant past, it emerges from its traditional chrysalis as Israel’s primary covert military force, whose intelligence-gathering duties are limited to operational needs.
3. DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources report that, after obtaining the defense minister’s acquiescence, the prime minister has assigned Tamir Pardo additional high office as head of the Committee of Israeli Intelligence Directors, a body still in formation. This position is equivalent to America’s Director of National Intelligence-DNI and places him at the top of the national intelligence pyramid. In this role and as architect of the Mossad’s reshaping into the national covert special combat force, he rises in rank as the equal of IDF Chief of Staff.
4. This wholesale reform will no doubt be reflected in the national defense budget, Israel’s largest, and necessitate a fundamental redistribution of appropriations between the military and intelligence. Our military sources predict the transfer of large slices of the cake from the military to the clandestine agencies arising from shifts in manpower and combat and logistical resources.
It will have to be decided, for example, whether the new covert combat force is to be equipped with autonomous air, naval and logistical arms or draw on IDF support in these fields. It may also be decided to furnish the intelligence force with a UAV arm like the CIA.

DEBKA.

Julian Assange

Obama administration officials say that Julian Assange, 39, editor-in-chief of the WikiLeaks organization, must be hunted down and prosecuted – or at least restraints clamped down on the website providing front-page fodder worldwide. But US Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged Monday, November 29, the day after the site began dumping 250,000 US diplomatic cables, that although the US believes crimes have been committed, the investigation is complicated by the fact that key individuals are outside the US and its legal jurisdiction.
So Assange, an Australian, whose whereabouts are unknown, may get away with never standing trial in America – depending on Washington’s determination to go after him.
Interpol has issued a Red Notice requesting information about his whereabouts, and the Swedish police want him on two rape charges against which he has appealed claiming they are an attempt to damage his credibility. But he may yet defy the long arm of American justice, like the ex-CIA whistleblower, Philip Burnett Franklin Agee, nearly half a century before him.
Agee was the object of a relentless agency pursuit in the 1960s after he started telling the world that his Roman Catholic conscience had compelled him to reveal what he had seen during his service, especially in Mexico and Greece. In 1975, while in London, where he was lionized by the Left, he managed to publish his book “Inside the Company.” It was eventually translated into 27 languages.
In 1978 and 1979, Agee published a two-volume work: “Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe” and “Dirty Work: The CIA in Africa,” which blew the covers of 2,000 CIA personnel. His US passport was revoked in 1979. After obtaining citizenship in Germany and in various South American and Central American countries under pro-Communist regimes, Agee finally settled in Cuba, where he died in 2008.
The CIA never managed to lay hands on him.
Diplomacy has lost its cachet and diplomats no longer make policy
The damage the former CIA insider caused US intelligence and its worldwide reputation was inestimably greater than the harm the outsider Assange has caused as a rogue element on the loose.
While avidly sensationalized by the media across the world, with high-profile editorial production teams picking out the juicy bits, WikiLeaks’ third release of classified US files was by and large shrugged off by political, diplomatic and intelligence insiders as containing very little new material, although it gained weight by being sourced directly to official US documents.
The horrified protestations by some distinguished officials and academic scholars that international diplomacy will never be the same fell pretty flat too. For years now, since top leaders have been able to communicate directly through hot lines and jet diplomacy, diplomats have lost their cachet as behind-the-scenes policy-makers and holders of state secrets.
In the 21st century, even foreign ministers have dropped down their government’s power chains. Less than a handful of distinguished officials, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, and, more recently, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu, are exceptions that prove the rule.
The post of British Foreign Secretary currently held by William Hague is a special case by virtue of his responsibility for the British spy agency MI6. Its every operation is subject to his personal approval and signature. Without this prerogative, the British foreign secretary’ would hold no more than a junior position in policy-making like his counterparts in Berlin, Paris, Rome and Jerusalem.
Ahmadinejad is leery of leaks’ credibility
Today’s diplomats find themselves reduced to two functions as gatherers of information or bureaucrats.
In their first capacity they may be borderline spies, although at some point in their past careers they may have been the real article. Their assignment by US Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton to collect the credit card numbers, email addresses and fax numbers of political and military personalities in the countries where they serve does not make them full-blown spies. It only attests to the decline of their calling without demonstrating their intelligence skills.
As bureaucrats, their work is largely confined to technicalities.
That is precisely the point. The fact that the diplomatic files tossed to the media, though refreshingly blunt and entertaining, are small beer insofar as they determine US administration policies, is the feature which intelligence circles from Moscow to Caracas, and Beijing find the most intriguing.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predictably pointed to the disclosures as “worthless” and an American attempt to harm its enemies rather than itself.
The leaked calls from Arab leaders to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities he dismissed as “mischief” and a “Satanic plot” which would have no impact on his country’s “friendly” relations with regional states.
Ahmadinejad denied they were leaks at all, insisting they were deliberately orchestrated by the US government for “political” reasons and “psychological warfare” – meaning that Julian Assange was working for Washington.
The trove is geared to vilifying Iran. Who by?
While Ahmadinejad in shooting the Islamic Republic’s propaganda line goes too far as usual, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources gathered from political and intelligence circles in Asia and Europe at least four questions common to most about the flood of revelations still incoming – unless it is assumed that Assange tossed into cyberspace every file that came to hand without checking its content or making selections:
1. How did Iran come to be the party injured most by the WikiLeaks documents – and not the US? If the earth shook anywhere this week it was in Persian Gulf and Middle East capitals, where Arab rulers’ extreme antipathy for Iran and its revolutionary Shiite regime was displayed for all the world to see.
Saudi King Abdullah was documented as urging the US to carry out a preemptive strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak called Iran the overriding threat to its own and the region’s security. He warned that if Tehran acquired a nuclear weapon, Egypt would have no choice but to follow suit.
Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani of Qatar, regarded as Tehran’s closest ally and diplomatic partner after Syrian President Bashar Assad, sang a different tune in private: He is quoted as asking the commanders of the big US Al Udeid Air Base, the largest outside America, how he could seize Iran’s Persian Gulf oil and gas fields straight after an US strike against the Islamic Republic. According to the WikiLeaks files, Washington pays no rent for the base and had 60 percent of the cost of improvements covered by the Emir, but has not obtained his permission to use the facility for “kinetic operations” against Iran.
Cutting Iran down to size – from Mid East superpower to regional menace
Much of the trove depicts Iran in quite different colors from its self-image as a rising Middle East superpower, but rather as the menace perceived by the Arab world, one which is uniting the region’s majority Sunni Muslims against its Shiites. On the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, Iran has the failure of its revolutionary religious and political ideology to take root in the Sunni world shoved down its throat.
(See a separate item in this issue: For Tehran, this may be the last straw.)
2. Even though the WikiLeaks cables record Ahmadinejad as saying confidentially: ‘We managed to beat the Americans in Iraq, but the last battle between us (and the Americans) will take place on Iranian soil,” they intimate that an attack on Iran faces a single obstacle, namely the United States. Both President George W. Bush and Barack Obama have gone to extreme lengths to hold Israel back from an attack and fended off collective Arab pressure for an American offensive to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
Another question asked in Beijing, Moscow, Berlin and also Tehran, is why the Wikileaks release began Sunday, November 28, just one week before the start of the resumption of world power nuclear talks with Tehran. The Russians, Chinese, Germans and Iranians are asking themselves if the timing wasn’t meant to intimate to Iran that it faces two hard choices: Either knuckle under to the international limitation on uranium enrichment to a harmless measure of purity and freeze its military nuclear program, or Washington will remove the restraints holding Israel back from striking Iran and be more receptive to Arab demands for an American attack.
Leaks don’t put the Saudis off their drive for attack on Iran
The Saudis also showed some skepticism about WikiLeaks credibility in the longish story they ran in the semi-official Arab News of Tuesday, Nov. 30 on the changeover of directors of Israel’s external spy agency under the caption: Mossad insider succeeds embattled spy agency chief.
(See an analysis in this issue of the fundamental reform underway in Israel’s intelligence organizations.)
Saudi experts were astonished to find this report when never before had any Saudi publication published a word about military or intelligence appointments in Israel.
However, to show they were not embarrassed or put off by the WikiLeaks disclosure of their demand of the US to attack Iran, Saudi rulers chose to indicate that, notwithstanding Washington’s refusal, they still favored intelligence cooperation with Israel for setting up such an attack. They ran this unusual item as a signal to the incoming Mossad Director Tamir Pardo that, as far as Riyadh was concerned, things must go on as before.
It fits into the background of the ongoing intelligence cooperation established in more than a year of meetings, mostly in the Jordanian capital of Amman, between the outgoing Mossad Director Meir Dagan and Saudi Intelligence chief Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz, revealed largely as a result of past DEBKA-Net-Weekly disclosures.
No discreditable American secrets betrayed
3. Once again, timing raises questions. For instance, was it just coincidence that the publication occurred on the second night of Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri‘s visit to Tehran as he was about to be received by Iranian leader supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Monday, November 29)? That meeting fatefully sealed Hariri’s surrender to Tehran’s demand for the Lebanese national army to acquiesce to “cooperation” with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.
One of the US diplomatic cables released that day cited the Lebanese prime minister as being in favor of an attack on Iran. Tuesday, when he arrived in Paris from Tehran to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy, he made haste to issue a muddled and feeble denial of this leak, finding himself boxed into becoming the first statesman in the world to comment on the classified material swamping the media.
4. And a final question piquing the curiosity of all the intelligence analysts poring through the mountains of US cables: How can it be that in the hundreds of files so far examined not a single one betrays any significant military, intelligence or political secrets or anything really discreditable about the Americans or the governments covered in US diplomatic correspondence with Washington?
No one seriously believe that such omissions are fortuitous.

DEBKA.

Prof. Majid Shahriari

On Wednesday, December 1, Tehran directly accused Washington of responsibility for the attacks Monday, Nov. 29, in the heart of Tehran on two of its top nuclear scientists, Prof. Majid Shahriari, who was killed, and Prof. Freydoun Abbasi, who was critically injured. Since then, the heads of Iran’s government, military and intelligence have been meeting non-stop to determine how America is to be punished.
According to one proposal, rather than hitting out at a US Middle East target or Israel, the more effective reprisal would be to simply finish building a nuclear bomb forthwith.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iranian sources report that this option had at least at three advocates at the high-powered conference, Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) commander Gen. Ali Jafary, Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Suleimany, and Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi. They objected to a military response on three grounds:
1. It would not stop the covert war the US and Israel are waging with mounting intensity in the last three months, of which more details in this article, and might even spur it on.
2. The IRGC and Al Qods have their hands full engineering Hizballah’s takeover of Beirut and other strategic areas of Lebanon, an operation that would represent part of Iran’s punishment for the assassination of its scientists.
3. They are certain Iran can build up its first stock of 19.5 percent enriched uranium in no more than 8 to 10 weeks – enough for a short leap to weapons-grade material and the manufacture of its first nuclear weapon. Our intelligence sources quote all three as maintaining that this achievement would be fitting punishment for the attack on the two scientists.
The marathon meetings continue as we close this issue.
Tehran sees US covert-psychological war entering second round
The Director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Commission, Ali Akbar Salehi, was given the job of holding the United States responsible for the attacks. He will represent his government at the resumed nuclear negotiations with the Six Powers on Dec. 6. Using the opportunity of Shahriari’s funeral, he accused the West of carrying out the assassination to bring Iran to heel ahead of those talks.
“These wicked people wanted to show their hideous side which demonstrates their carrot and stick policy in the run-up to the new nuclear talks,” he said.
Tehran has clearly taken the attacks on the two scientists as an ultimatum from Washington: If you behave rationally i.e. according to the American – or, as Salehi put it “the Western” – dictate, your nuclear scientists will be safe and the strength massed around your shores – the USS Truman, the USS Lincoln and the French Charles de Gaulle and their strike forces – will withdraw.
But persist in irrational conduct and you will endure more possible assassinations, harsher sanctions and irreparable harm at the hands of “Western” agents already at large in your country.
Tehran believes it is undergoing the second round of a disastrous United States covert intelligence campaign, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iranian sources report.
The first round took was launched in the second half of September (See our issue no. 466 of October 22: An Undeclared Covert War Takes its Toll on Iran).
Stuxnet marches on the heels of the Shehab-3 store’s destruction
It began on September 22 with a bomb attack on an Iranian military parade in the northwestern Iranian city of Mahabad, which killed at least 12 soldiers and wounded 70.
Then, on October 7, gunmen shot at Iranian security forces near Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan. At least 5 Iranians died in that attack.
The next day, on October 8, the Baluchi Liberation Front Jundallah claimed to have snatched Amir Hossein Shirani from his place of work at one of Iran’s secret nuclear facilities in Isfahan and transferred him to the group’s headquarters in Baluchistan.
This week, Sunday, November 28, the day before the two scientists were hit in Tehran, Shirani appeared on the Saudi television station Al Arabiya with a full report on Iran’s plans to produce nuclear weapons.
The top officials closeted behind closed doors in Tehran see that appearance as a connecting link between the two rounds of clandestine assaults and evidence of an elaborate, large-scale covert organization at work inside the country. They believe that only a major intelligence power like the American CIA commands the unlimited manpower and financial resources for a campaign on this scale.
Add to this the mysterious explosions occurring on Oct. 12 at the Revolutionary Guards’ biggest and most secret missile store at Khorramabad in southwestern Iran, destroying a major part of their Shihab 3 ballistic missile stock.
To this day, Iranian investigators have not discovered how it happened and postulate the cause as being a missile released by an American or Israeli drone. Since that episode was not followed by any more such attacks, the Iranians decided to grit their teeth and shut up.
Washington has gone too far
But then, two weeks later, in early November, the Stuxnet virus was on the march again and managed to disable a large number of centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Friday, Nov. 26, a passenger who boarded a Damascus-bound Air Iran flight at Tehran tried to hijack the plane. That incident too was initially blacked out by Iranian authorities. It later emerged that Iranian marshals aboard the plane subdued the attacker in a struggle. Intelligence Minister Moslehi tied the incident to spy networks and claimed the hijacker admitted he wanted to direct the flight to “occupied Palestine.”
Then came WikiLeaks and its disclosures of US diplomats reports that Iran was held in fear and loathing by Arab rulers. Then came the deaths of the two scientists, the last straw in what Tehran perceives to be a well-laid American covert, cyber and psychological war.
As far as Iran’s rulers are concerned, Washington has gone too far, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iranian sources report, and they are resolved to exact punishment and draw the line against any further hostile acts.
Retaliation may come in the form of a direct attack on an American Middle East target or on Israel – or both.
Wednesday, Dec. 1, the Kuwaiti Al-Rai newspaper quoted an Iranian source as reporting that Hizballah has finished its preparations for war with Israel: its weapons stores are full and underground tunnels dug for catching Israeli troops unawares.
Our military sources confirm this report. Hizballah’s war preparations are known to have been going on for two months. On the other hand, it may be a red herring to distract attention from Iran’s plans to strike somewhere else.