WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Although seriously burned in their efforts to stay abreast of Iran’s signal progress toward a nuclear bomb (see the two previous items in this issue), the American CIA, the French DGSE foreign intelligence service and the German BND spy agency now conclude that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has beaten President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in their duel for dominance.
This does not mean that the sparring incidents between their two camps are over, a Western intelligence official who follows events in Iran told DEBKA-Net-Weekly. Last week, officials in the president’s immediate circle were arrested. This provoked a statement Wednesday, June 29, from Ahmadinejad that the Cabinet of Ministers is at the forefront and “if anyone touches them, it is my duty to stand in their defense.”
He may still talk big but he has known for some weeks that his day is over and his importance shrunk from executive president to a ceremonial figure without real power.
Our Iranian sources report that he realized the game was up in mid-June when Gen. Ali Jafari Mohammad, supreme commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and his top staff – after sitting on the fence for months – finally shifted their considerable military and economic weight and placed it behind the Supreme Leader.
The power somersault in Tehran, like the acceleration of Iran’s military nuclear program, caught Western and Middle East capitals unprepared.
Ahmadinejad brought Iran to N-bomb capability. Now he can go
It was taken for granted until now that Ahmadinejad, though an inflammatory speaker, was more pragmatic than Khamenei. It was hoped in Washington that he would come around to a deal on Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the limits of its expansion through the Middle East and Persian Gulf.
This perception gained ground after President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 – and especially after Ahmadinejad brought his father-in-law and chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, the most pro-Western figure in Tehran, to prominence.
But most people tend to forget that just six years ago, Khamenei picked the then obscure Mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for president as the only member of the top leadership capable of putting the sagging nuclear program on its feet and achieving the goals desired by the Supreme Leader, namely, the ability to produce a nuclear weapon and to organize the production of nuclear-capable missiles.
Last week, a Western intelligence figure confided to a senior Israeli intelligence official: “In just five years, Ahmadinejad has brought Iran to a nuclear level on a par with Israel, an achievement which took Israel 35 years to complete.
Now that he has brought Iran’s nuclear industry to the desired level, Khamenei can afford to drop the president and his following from power, say DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iranian sources – especially since Ahmadinejad began to entertain his own political ambitions.
Parliamentarians demand his hat (head)
The Supreme Leader’s style of rule leaves no room for peers or high-profile factions like Ahmadinejad and his circle. They committed the cardinal sin of believing their control of the country’s nuclear and military assets made them all-powerful and forgot that real power rested exclusively in the hands of Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) high command.
The IRGC chief’s defection made the president’s downward slide irreversible.
In a desperate attempt to save himself, Ahmadinejad at a private meeting last week hurled charges against the Guards: “There is a record of illegal transfer of goods from abroad into the country. Smuggling equals thefts from public funds… [The large sums spent on cigarettes] invite all first class smugglers of the world, let alone our own ‘smuggler brethren.'” Gen. Jafari closed the argument by replying: “This organization, just like other military institutions, has military jetties but has never used them for commercial activities.”
In the Majlis, Mohammad Karami-Rad, parliamentarian and former Guardsman, commented: “If His Lordship (the Supreme Leader) asks us to bring him a hat, we know what to bring him… regardless of whose hat it may be.”
(DEBKA-Net-Weekly: An old Persian proverb says that if the king demands someone’s hat, his servants understand they are to cut off his head and bring it to the king.)
Khamenei faked economic collapse to hide boom
The shift of power away from the president has damped down US President Barack Obama’s tentative moves towards engaging Iran on the nuclear controversy and the division of spheres of influence between Washington and Tehran in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.
The other bad news reaching the US from Iran is that the appearance of damage to the economy caused by international sanctions is bogus. US intelligence experts were stunned to discover that Khamenei’s henchmen had trumped up sham economic hardship to deceive the Obama administration into believing that the sanctions were effective, had brought Iran to the brink of economic and financial collapse and the population was on the point of rising up against the Islamic regime.
In fact, our sources report, the country is experiencing a boom.
Western businessmen who visited Iran in the past month confirm this: They report that activity in the streets, markets and banks as well as a building surge attest to a thriving economy the likes of which has not been seen in all 32 years of Shiite Revolutionary rule. Prosperity is not only the lot of big city dwellers but has also reached remote rural areas.
Iran makes hay from the Arab Revolt
Tehran is also taking advantage of opportunities presented by the unrest in the Arab world.
This was confirmed too in the spate of disclosures spilling out from different American, Israeli and French quarters on Tuesday and Wednesday, July 6-7.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Iran’s elite military unit, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, has transferred lethal new munitions to its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, according to senior US officials, in a bid to accelerate the US withdrawals from these countries.”
Later that day, Israel military intelligence AMAN chief Gen. Aviv Kochavi lectured the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee on widespread Iranian meddling in the affairs of Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. He reported that Iranian intelligence agents had penetrated the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in order to influence the results of the elections there in September.
On Wednesday, the French Le Monde, citing Western intelligence sources, said that last month Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had instructed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to begin transferring to Libyan rebels arms, including surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, as well as grenade launchers.
The article said the aim was to drag the US and the NATO countries in a protracted and expensive war that would exact heavy losses, so as to preclude their military intervention in Syria.
Does this rush of revelations about Iran’s doings mean the Obama administration is laying the groundwork for a military operation against Iran and its Supreme leader? Time will tell.

DEBKA.

In the latter part of June, the US, Israel, the Saudi-led Arab group and Turkey suddenly realized that by the first half of 2012 Iran would most probably have accumulated two-to-four – or as many as six – nuclear bombs or warheads and enough ICBMs to deliver them anywhere on earth.
The discovery, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military and intelligence sources report, came as a shock to world leaders: Presidents Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Prime Ministers David Cameron in London, Silvio Berlusconi in Rome and Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem had not been alive to Iran’s spectacular breakthrough in its push for a nuclear weapon – or how close the Islamic Republic has come to being able to perform its first nuclear test if it so chooses.
The first responders were Saudi King Abdullah and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. They informed the heads of US and European governments that they had fast-forwarded their plans for getting hold of their own nuclear weapons.
Our intelligence sources report that the US and Israeli governments were among others who secretly ordered probes to find out how their intelligence services had been caught unawares by Iran’s nuclear progress and why the CIA and Mossad in particular had briefed their policy-makers with outdated timetables.
These inquiries sparked infighting and mutual accusations of responsibility in and among Western intelligence agencies (more about which in the next article in this issue).
Uranium enrichment accelerated after glitches overcome
The inquiries also seek to discover how Iran managed to keep its impressive advances from their attention for almost a year since October 2010 – even though some were carried out in full sight.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly pins down the four key components of Iran’s nuclear breakthrough:
1. The dramatic acceleration of the uranium enrichment process resulting in expanded product.
This has been achieved without affording the UN nuclear watchdog, Western intelligence or research agencies, so much as a clue to the quantities produced and stocked.
For six months, therefore, Iran has managed to keep the full scope of its enrichment activities hidden from IAEA inspections. Even though monitors were admitted to the known enrichment facility at Natanz, they were unable to gauge how many active centrifuges were present and how many removed to unknown site or sites. The sophisticated cameras supposed to monitor the Natanz facility are no longer recording all Iran’s enrichment activities because production sites have been moved out of shot.
Only three things are known for sure about Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment industry:
– The faster the pace of enrichment, the slower the pace of data reaching the outside world and the less information. There is no reason to assume that the true state of international knowledge about other branches of Iran’s nuclear program is any better.
– The Iranians have solved all the technical glitches plaguing their centrifuge machines – no one knows how – and all 6,000 at least are spinning smoothly and continuously.
– They have also vanquished the Stuxnet computer virus which started attacking the program’s centrifuges and control systems in June 2010. Those systems, the crippled enrichment facility in Natanz and the nuclear reactor in Bushehr are all working efficiently.
The move to Fordo for raising enrichment to weapons grade
It took a whole year for Iranian and Russian computer cyber war experts to cleanse the Iranian nuclear system of the malworm. Now, for the first time, military and intelligence agencies have a yardstick for measuring the time it takes to beat off a potential cyber-terror attack and they can work on counter-measures to reduce the damaging time scale.
2. All 20 percent-capable uranium enrichment plant is being transferred from Natanz to the new clandestine facility at Fordo 100 kilometers away in the arid mountains near the holy city of Qom. The facility bored deep into a mountainside is heavily guarded by Revolutionary Guards units. It will operate free of international inspection. Every European and IAEA request to monitor the Fordo site and any other new nuclear facilities has been rejected.
3. Western nuclear experts estimate the Fordo facility will be operational by the end of the summer – i.e., late August or early September. It will enable Iran to further enrich uranium from 20 percent to 60 percent. Iranian officials claim this is the level required for their research reactors. The experts stress that enhancement to 60 percent is the critical step towards 90 percent, the grade necessary for nuclear bombs and warheads.
4. In addition to weapons-grade uranium enrichment, Iran has in the last three months secretly built a nuclear warhead prototype.
On June 27, Iran unveiled an underground missile silo for launching its SHAHAB-3 missiles.
The next day came an announcement that a monkey would be launched into space by a homemade Kavoshgar-5 rocket. Five monkeys were said to be in training, one of which would be selected for the flight.
Monkey in space – key to nuclear payload
In terms of Iran’s capabilities, this means that in the two years since the February 2009 launching into orbit of the the Omid satellite – which weighed only 27 kilos – Iran has attained a missile with a payload capacity of 330 kilos. By launching the monkey, Iran will for the first time also be testing the equivalent weight of a nuclear warhead.
The two achievements – both announced by Tehran – show that, if the next space launch succeeds, Iran will be in command of rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads launched from underground missile silos and able to hit any point on the planet
The day after these disclosures, British Foreign Secretary William Hague came forward with the information which he reported to the British Parliament that Iran has also been carrying out covert ballistic missile tests and rocket launches, including testing missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload in contravention of UN Resolution 1929.
Until then, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military, intelligence and Iranian sources had been reporting for nearly a year – alone of all Western publications and defiance of US and Israeli denials – that Iran already had operational missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads.
Now those sources add that Iran has so far carried out four such missile tests – three during the five months between October 2010 and February 2011 and the fourth and last test on Tuesday, June 28, as part of its Great Prophet War Games 6.
In the first series beginning October 2010, two Sejjil missiles and one SHAHAB-3 Kadar missile were launched successfully and one failed. Both types are powered by solid fuel and have a maximum range of 2,510 kilometers. The missile tested successfully Tuesday was another SHAHAB-3 Kadar.
Work is now continuing to improve the targeting accuracy of these nuclear-capable missiles.