Assassins, cyber worms and Iran’s nuclear ambitions – Herald Scotland | News | World News.
5 Dec 2010
Some say it was a “sticky bomb” attached to the car by riders on a passing motorcycle.
Others insist the device was inside the vehicle and detonated remotely. Whatever the precise method the assassins used last Monday morning in a northern Tehran car park, the resulting explosion killed Dr Majid Shahriari, the top nuclear scientist and senior manager of Iran’s nuclear programme.
But Shahriari wasn’t the only target that morning. In another part of the city, around the same time, Dr Fereidoon Abassi was driving along Tehran’s Artash Street on his way to work at Shahid Beheshti University when two other assailants on motorbikes swept alongside, sticking a device to the driver’s side door. Moments later, a blast injured Abassi and his wife, both only escaping death because their driver and bodyguard took evasive action at the last moment.
Abassi, like Shahriari, was a nuclear specialist and adviser to Iran’s Defence Ministry. He was also associated with the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps. Both scientists were not the first, and some say won’t be the last, of those targeted in Iran. In the past four years alone this is at least the fourth attempt to assassinate Iranian scientists linked with running what western governments say is a secret nuclear weapons programme. Other attempts may simply never have made the headlines.
Not only has the timing of the latest assassination efforts caught the imagination of intelligence analysts, it has also fueled widespread speculation that Israel’s Mossad espionage agency is behind the hit squads. Let’s take the question of the timing first. To begin with, both Tehran “hits” occurred on the very same day as the leaking of US State Department documents dealing with concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme. That same day too saw the departure of the former chief of Israel’s Mossad, Meir Dagan, and the appointment of his successor, Tamir Prado, and some say the attacks may have been Dagan’s parting shot at the Iranians. Coincidentally, however, the assassination strikes came exactly a week before European Union talks with Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, scheduled to get underway in Geneva tomorrow.
While there is no solid evidence to suggest that any of these events are connected, their coincidental timing has once again thrown the focus on to fears over Iran’s nuclear programme. For some time now it has been clear that Israel, most likely with US and possibly British help, has been determined to deal Iran’s nuclear ambitions a body blow. Public statements by Israeli political and military leaders have time and again warned of the measures they would be prepared to take to thwart Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
As for Tehran’s own political elite, most assume that Mossad was behind the latest attacks, including the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who blamed “western governments and the Zionist regime” for the attacks.
Global commentators too have added to the theory of Mossad responsibility by pointing out how the Tehran assassination employed a familiar modus operandi and bore all the hallmarks of the Israeli secret service, whose guiding principle is said to be; “By way of deception, thou shall do war”. In any operation of this kind a team of Mossad agents are said to put the target and his routines under surveillance over many months, weighing up weaknesses in security and opportunities to escape afterwards. Most of the operatives are usually on their way out of the country by the time the bomb is detonated by the remaining members of the assassination team.
“It’s like a suit, an assassination must be custom-made,” Time magazine last week quoted one western intelligence expert as saying. The same “expert” is said to have knowledge of the latest Tehran operation. Certainly in the past Mossad has used moto cycle-mounted bombs and assasins. In January this year Masoud Ali Mohammadi, an Iranian expert on particle physics was killed by a remote-control bomb strapped to a motorcycle as he was leaving his Tehran home on his way to work. And back in 1995, two Mossad agents codenamed Gil and Ran, drove up on a motorcycle as Dr Fathi Shkaki, the leader of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad strolled along the waterfront in Valletta, Malta, before shooting him six times in the head.
Most likely the Mossad men on that occasion, as with the recent Tehran assassination, were members of the “kidon”, a unit within the agency that takes its name from the Hebrew word for bayonet. While Israel has always officially denied the existence of the kidon, who are effectively are state-sanctioned assassins, these Mossad hit men and women are known to exist, undergoing their training at a base deep in Israel’s Negev Desert, where they practice their “tradecraft”, learning how to shoot, conceal bombs or make killings look accidental.
Of course, in the case of the Tehran strikes, making them look accidental was the thing furthest from the assassins’ minds. By demonstrating they could attack with relative impunity in the very heart of the Iranian capital during the rush hour, Mossad – if indeed it was them – sent out a powerful message of deterrence to Iran’s scientific community. For some time now western intelligence has known that many of Iran’s nuclear physics, engineering departments and other research facilities are often littlemore than covers for its military nuclear programme.
This has been borne out by documentary evidence garnered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Few doubt that many of those scientists and researchers involved with such facilities will now be nervously looking over their shoulders following the latest hits.
Some analysts, however, are less convinced that all the assassinations have necessarily been clear-cut Mossad operations. Domestic rivals of the Iranian regime would also benefit from the attacks or may even have carried them out on behalf of foreign powers and intelligence agencies in return for material support. Kurdish militants like the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan have conducted numerous assassinations against Iranian officials in Iran’s western province of Kordestan. Sunni rebel group Jundullah, in the southeast province of Sistan-Balochistan, may also have been involved and has targeted Iranian interests in eastern Iran in recent years.
Other regional militant opposition groups like Mujahideen-e Khalq, which has offered intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme to the United States, and Azeri separatists, pose marginal threats to the regime. In the immediate aftermath of the latest Tehran attacks, opposition Iranian bloggers also discussed the possibility that the killings were the work of Iran’s own state security services as retribution for betrayal over the leaking of secrets or to stop defections of leading nuclear researchers. Such theories, though, seem to have little basis in fact, and it seems unlikely that Iran would sacrifice badly needed specialist scientists in this way. The focus on likely perpetrators falls firmly on foreign intelligence services like Mossad and/or the CIA.
“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 to the Stuxnet computer worm, which some claim impeded operations at this site, to the attacks on the Iranian scientists,” says Yossi Melman, a senior commentator for the Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper who specialises in strategic issues, terrorism and intelligence.
Melman’s observations highlight the other extensive covert operations by Israel, the US and others to stall or sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. While bomb and bullet constitute the obvious heavy-handed approach, there is evidence that the use of far more sophisticated financial sanctions and cyber warfare are also deployed by Israel and its allies.
Last week the US Treasury Department extended weapons-related sanctions against Iran to 10 additional businesses and five individuals it said were affiliated with the state-owned Bank Mellat and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. Previously the Treasury Department had blacklisted both under sanctions targeting alleged supporters of what the US describes as Iran’s nuclear weapons development programme. Such moves effectively cut off international financing to sanctioned entities.
Then there is the speculation surrounding the use of the Stuxnet virus. Designed to target the industrial control systems that manage installations such as power plants, sanitation facilities and other similar facilities, earlier this year the virus hit computers around the world but appeared to affect Iranian industrial plants disproportionately, particularly in the nuclear programme. Even President Ahmadinejad admitted the worm had affected Iran’s uranium enrichment.
“They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts,” he confirmed.
Certainly the Israeli military and intelligence establishment has form when it comes to such cyber attacks. Operation Orchard, carried out in September 2007, was an Israeli airstrike on what was claimed was a nuclear facility in Syria. Israel’s attack involved disabling Syrian radar and anti-aircraft defences. A report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source as raising the possibility that the Israelis had used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radar.
Whatever the method, according to one former member of the United States intelligence community, the task had fallen to Israel’s equivalent of America’s National Security Agency, known as Unit 8200. Not much is known about this highly secretive unit’s operations, which like Mossad’s kidon is based in the Negev Desert. The unit, which is said on occasions to have even recruited talented “criminal” hackers into its ranks, has developed into a respected leader in high technology warfare, with one American consultancy rating Unit 8200 as the sixth biggest initiator of cyber attacks on industrial plants. Many security experts are convinced that Unit 8200 is responsible for the creation of the Stuxnet virus.
Indeed, one German researcher, Ralf Langner, claims to have discovered a biblical reference embedded in the code of the computer worm that has pointed to Israel as the source of the cyber attack. The code contains the word “myrtus”, which is the Latin biological term for the myrtle tree. The Hebrew word for myrtle, Hadassah, was the birth name of Esther, the Jewish queen of Persia. In the Bible, The Book of Esther tells how the queen pre-empted an attack on the country’s Jewish population and then persuaded her husband to launch an attack before they were attacked themselves.
Fanciful as such things sound, nothing should come as a surprise in this murky and deadly intelligence battle between Israel and its sworn enemy.
Last week, on the same day that the two Iranian nuclear scientists were being targeted by their assassins, Mossad was saying goodbye to Dagan, and welcoming his replacement, Prado.
“Meir Dagan will be leaving an organisation that is far sharper and more operational than the organisation he received, and all of the accusations from Tehran yesterday are a good indication of that,” it was pointed out in the Israeli daily Hayom. The article condluded: ‘Iran will be the focal point for the next Mossad director too.”
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