WarSclerotic

Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer – CSMonitor.com.

In an exclusive interview, an engineer working to unlock the secrets of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel says they exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran.

This photo released on Thursday, Dec. 8, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, claims to show US RQ-170 Sentinel drone which Tehran says its forces downed last week, as the chief of the aerospace division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, right, listens to an unidentified colonel, in an undisclosed location within Iran.
(Sepahnews/AP)

By Scott Peterson, Staff writer, Payam Faramarzi*, Correspondent
posted December 15, 2011 at 11:41 am EST

Istanbul, Turkey

Iran guided the CIA‘s “lost” stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone’s systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.

“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran’s “electronic ambush” of the highly classified US drone. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

The revelations about Iran’s apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran’s missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.

Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.

“Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but the technology is there.”

In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have downloaded live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to actually take control of a drone is far more significant.

Iran asserted its ability to do this in September, as pressure mounted over its nuclear program.

Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided missile – a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.

“We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

Gholizadeh said that “all the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.”

That interview has since been pulled from Fars’ Persian-language website. And last month, the relatively young Gholizadeh died of a heart attack, which some Iranian news sites called suspicious – suggesting the electronic warfare expert may have been a casualty in the covert war against Iran.

Iran’s growing electronic capabilities

Iranian lawmakers say the drone capture is a “great epic” and claim to be “in the final steps of breaking into the aircraft’s secret code.”

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US will “absolutely” continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence of any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such surveillance, now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.

US officials skeptical of Iran’s capabilities blame a malfunction, but so far can’t explain how Iran acquired the drone intact. One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”

Yet Iran’s claims to the contrary resonate more in light of new details about how it brought down the drone – and other markers that signal growing electronic expertise.

A former senior Iranian official who asked not to be named said: “There are a lot of human resources in Iran…. Iran is not like Pakistan.”

“Technologically, our distance from the Americans, the Zionists, and other advanced countries is not so far to make the downing of this plane seem like a dream for us … but it could be amazing for others,” deputy IRGC commander Gen. Hossein Salami said this week.

According to a European intelligence source, Iran shocked Western intelligence agencies in a previously unreported incident that took place sometime in the past two years, when it managed to “blind” a CIA spy satellite by “aiming a laser burst quite accurately.”

More recently, Iran was able to hack Google security certificates, says the engineer. In September, the Google accounts of 300,000 Iranians were made accessible by hackers. The targeted company said “circumstantial evidence” pointed to a “state-driven attack” coming from Iran, meant to snoop on users.

Cracking the protected GPS coordinates on the Sentinel drone was no more difficult, asserts the engineer.

US knew of GPS systems’ vulnerability

Use of drones has become more risky as adversaries like Iran hone countermeasures. The US military has reportedly been aware of vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.

Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all drone data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant laptops loaded with days’ worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that they were “subject to listening and exploitation.”

Perhaps as easily exploited are the GPS navigational systems upon which so much of the modern military depends.

“GPS signals are weak and can be easily outpunched [overridden] by poorly controlled signals from television towers, devices such as laptops and MP3 players, or even mobile satellite services,” Andrew Dempster, a professor from the University of New South Wales School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, told a March conference on GPS vulnerability in Australia.

“This is not only a significant hazard for military, industrial, and civilian transport and communication systems, but criminals have worked out how they can jam GPS,” he says.

The US military has sought for years to fortify or find alternatives to the GPS system of satellites, which are used for both military and civilian purposes. In 2003, a “Vulnerability Assessment Team” at Los Alamos National Laboratory published research explaining how weak GPS signals were easily overwhelmed with a stronger local signal.

“A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time that it is not,” reads the Los Alamos report. “In a sophisticated spoofing attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false position.”

The vulnerability remains unresolved, and a paper presented at a Chicago communications security conference in October laid out parameters for successful spoofing of both civilian and military GPS units to allow a “seamless takeover” of drones or other targets.

To “better cope with hostile electronic attacks,” the US Air Force in late September awarded two $47 million contracts to develop a “navigation warfare” system to replace GPS on aircraft and missiles, according to the Defense Update website.

Official US data on GPS describes “the ongoing GPS modernization program” for the Air Force, which “will enhance the jam resistance of the military GPS service, making it more robust.”

Why the drone’s underbelly was damaged

Iran’s drone-watching project began in 2007, says the Iranian engineer, and then was stepped up and became public in 2009 – the same year that the RQ-170 was first deployed in Afghanistan with what were then state-of-the-art surveillance systems.

In January, Iran said it had shot down two conventional (nonstealth) drones, and in July, Iran showed Russian experts several US drones – including one that had been watching over the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.

In capturing the stealth drone this month at Kashmar, 140 miles inside northeast Iran, the Islamic Republic appears to have learned from two years of close observation.

Iran displayed the drone on state-run TV last week, with a dent in the left wing and the undercarriage and landing gear hidden by anti-American banners.

The Iranian engineer explains why: “If you look at the location where we made it land and the bird’s home base, they both have [almost] the same altitude,” says the Iranian engineer. “There was a problem [of a few meters] with the exact altitude so the bird’s underbelly was damaged in landing; that’s why it was covered in the broadcast footage.”

Prior to the disappearance of the stealth drone earlier this month, Iran’s electronic warfare capabilities were largely unknown – and often dismissed.

“We all feel drunk [with happiness] now,” says the Iranian engineer. “Have you ever had a new laptop? Imagine that excitement multiplied many-fold.” When the Revolutionary Guard first recovered the drone, they were aware it might be rigged to self-destruct, but they “were so excited they could not stay away.”

* Scott Peterson, the Monitor’s Middle East correspondent, wrote this story with an Iranian journalist who publishes under the pen name Payam Faramarzi and cannot be further identified for security reasons.

Europe calls on Assad to step down as Iraq says it will send peace team to Damascus.

Al Arabiya

Thursday, 15 December 2011

Anti-government protesters throw rice on the coffin of Abdul Haleem Baqour during his funeral in Hula, near Homs. (Reuters)

inShare0

Turkey, Egypt in Joint Naval Exercises – Middle East – News – Israel National News.

Turkish vessel (right) in an exercise

U.S. Navy

Egyptian navy ships were on their way to the waters off Turkey Thursday afternoon, where they will rendezvous with Turkish navy vessels for a joint exercise. Egypt’s top naval commander, Muhav Mamish, said in an interview that the the exercise is “not directed against any specific country, and is designed to strengthen ties and exchange information between Turkey and Egypt.” The name of the exercise, Voice of Israel radio reported, was “Sea of Friendship.”

Israeli officials speculated that the exercise was not necessarily aimed at Israel, but against Iran, which has both Turkey and Egypt worried. Turkey, long a rival with Iran for leadership of the Islamic world, is concerned over recent Iranian threats against it. In recent weeks, Iranian officials have threatened Turkey with attack if the U.S. or Israel attempt to attack its nuclear facilities. Iran, the officials said, would attack the NATO missile shield.

A report Sunday, for example, quoted Hussein Ibrahim, the vice president of the Iranian parliamentary national security and foreign policy panel, as saying that “it is Iran’s natural right to target the missile defense shield system in Turkey in case of an attack, and we will definitely resort to that.” Several days earlier, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ aerospace division, said that “should we [Iran] be threatened, we will target NATO’s missile defense shield in Turkey and then hit our next targets.”

Other Iranian officials have made similar statements in recent weeks. On Tuesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu met with his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi and questioned him on the statements, but Salehi said that the comments did not represent Iranian policy, but the “personal opinions” of officials.

Meanwhile, say analysts, the Egyptian military is seeking friends outside the Iran/Islamic fundamentalist orbit, considering that the country is likely to be run by those groups in the near future. Thursday was the second day of the second round of voting in Egypt’s first democratic election in decades, and once again, the Islamist parties – the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist al-Nour party – are said to be doing very well, according to informal polls by Egyptian and foreign media. This round of voting is taking place in areas such as Giza, Luxor and Aswan, which in the past have favored conservative Islamic candidates in local elections. Egyptian military leaders believe that there is a close connection between the Islamists and Iran, and are thus seeking to improve their ties with Turkey, the only other country in the region they believe can take  on Iran politically.

Iranian lawmaker: New nuclear pl… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

    An Iranian lawmaker said Thursday that the Islamic Republic has begun construction on a new nuclear plant in Isfahan, where a mysterious explosion reportedly occurred at the site of a nuclear facility last month.

Avaz Heidarpour, A member of Iran’s Majlis Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy, was quoted by Press TV as saying that the site was under construction in the city of Shahreza in the Isfahan province. According to Heidarpour, the new plant’s objective will be to supply the country’s demand  for civilian nuclear products.

The Iranian lawmaker stated that the facility would be completed within the next three years.

He said that the site would help serve Iran’s medical and agricultural needs.

The Times of London reported shortly after the mysterious blast that hit Isfahan on Novemebr 28 that a nuclear facility in the city was damaged in the explosion.

The report quoted Israeli intelligence officials as saying that there was “no doubt” that the blast damaged a uranium enrichment site, and asserted that it was “no accident.”

Officials from Isfahan denied that the city had been hit by an explosion.

Two weeks prior to the Isfahan explosion, on November 12, an explosion hit an Iranian military base near the town of Bid Kaneh, killing 17 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Maj.-Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, chief architect of the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program. Israel’s Mossad has been accused of orchestrating the blast.

Head of the Military Intelligence Research Directorate Brig.-Gen. Itay Brun told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the November 12 blast at the missile base could delay Tehran’s development of long-range missiles.

“The explosion at the site to develop surface-to-surface missiles could stop or delay activities on that track and in that location, but we must emphasize that Iran has other development tracks in addition to that facility,” Brun said.

Syrian army deserters kill 27 soldiers in … JPost – Middle East.

    BEIRUT – Syrian army deserters killed at least 27 soldiers and security force personnel in a series of clashes in the southern province of Deraa at dawn on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The British-based group said the deserters fought forces loyal to President Bashar Assad in two locations in the city of Deraa itself, as well as a checkpoint at a crossroads about 25 km (15 miles) to the east of the city.

It did not say how the clashes broke out, but the high casualties among security forces suggested coordinated strikes by the army rebels, who have escalated their attacks on military targets in recent weeks.

Rami Abdulrahman of the Observatory said in the fighting near Musayfrah, east of Deraa, all 15 personnel at a joint army and security checkpoint were killed.

The United Nations says 5,000 people have been killed in Assad’s crackdown on protests against his rule which erupted in Deraa nine months ago, inspired by uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world.

The protests have been increasingly overshadowed by the armed insurgency against Assad’s forces. Authorities say armed groups have targeted civilians and security forces since the start of the uprising, killing more than 1,100 soldiers and police.

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that Syrian army commanders have ordered troops to halt protests against Assad “by all means necessary”, often giving explicit instructions to fire on demonstrators.

In a report based on dozens of interviews with army and intelligence defectors, it quoted one special forces soldier saying his brigade was told to “use as many bullets as you want” on protesters in the southern province of Deraa in April.

A sniper in the city of Homs said his commanders ordered that a specific percentage of demonstrators should die. “For 5,000 protesters, for example, the target would be 15 to 20 people,” he told Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Assad denied last week that orders were issued “to kill or be brutal”. Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said security forces were clearly instructed not to use live ammunition.

But HRW said all defectors it spoke to said their commanders ordered them to stop the protests “by all necessary means” – a phrase they understood to authorize lethal force.

About half of the defectors said officers also gave direct orders to fire at protesters or bystanders, and assured them that they would not be held accountable, it said.

“Our general orders were to kill, destroy stores, crush cars in the streets and arrest people,” HRW quoted a soldier who defected from the Syrian army’s 5th Division as saying.

US fears Iran weeks from produci… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

    The Obama administration is concerned Iran is on the verge of being able to enrich uranium at a facility deep underground near the Muslim holy city of Qom, which may strengthen those advocating tougher action to stop Iran’s suspected atomic weapons program.

Iranian nuclear scientists at the Fordow facility appear to be within weeks of producing 20 percent enriched uranium, according to Iran analysts and nuclear specialists who are in close communication with US officials and atomic inspectors. Enriched uranium is used to fuel power plants and reactors, and may be further processed into atomic weapons

Administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue say Iran’s actions may bolster calls for military or covert action against the Persian Gulf country from Republican presidential candidates. It may also fuel pressure on the administration to impose measures approved by Congress to limit Iran’s oil exports.

“Senior advisers to US President Barack Obama privately express concern that Israel might see Iran’s commencement of the Fordow facility” as a justification for a military strike, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who has frequent discussions with the White House.

The US and Israel have said military action remains an option if needed to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Sadjadpour said some White House officials are questioning whether Iran is trying to provoke an Israeli strike as a way to rally support and sympathy at home and abroad, and “repair internal political fractures, both among political elites and between society and the regime.”

On Sept. 19, the head of Iran’s nuclear energy program, Fereydoun Abbasi, said 20 percent uranium enrichment would start at the Fordow site within six months, and said the facility was built deep underground “to make the Americans and their allies work tougher to destroy” it.

Gholamreza Jalali, head of Iran’s civil defense organization, said Wednesday that Iran will move its uranium enrichment centers to locations that are safer from attack if necessary, according to the state-run Mehr news agency.

US officials say Iran is now close to starting up Fordow’s two cascades of 174 centrifuges each, fast-spinning machines that enrich uranium for use as a nuclear fuel by separating its isotopes. Uranium enriched at higher concentrations of 90 percent can be used for a bomb. Iran says it needs more 20 percent material for a medical reactor and has plans for more, a claim inspectors have challenged.

US officials say they are in close consultation with Israel, European allies and inspectors over sensitive activities at Fordow, which the US claims would breach Iran’s obligations under UN Security Council resolutions. Defense Minister Ehud Barak is in Washington for meetings with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and Congressional leaders.

Dennis Ross, who was until last month special assistant to  Obama and National Security Council senior director for the region including Iran, said yesterday Israel has reason to be concerned about enrichment at Qom.

Iran’s accumulation of low-enriched uranium, its decision to enrich to nearly 20 percent “when there is no justification for it,” its hardening of sites, and other “activities related to possible weaponization” are factors that “affect the Israeli calculus and ours,” Ross, now a counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in an e-mail. “Qom is important, but it is worth remembering that IAEA inspectors go there, and I would not isolate Qom and say this alone is the Israeli red-line” to spur a military response.

Last month, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency reported Iran moved a large cylinder of 5 percent enriched uranium from the Natanz fuel enrichment plant to the Fordow facility near Qom. Iranian nuclear engineers have installed centrifuges that need only to be connected to cooling and electric lines to become operational, the IAEA said.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report December 15, 2011, 10:44 AM (GMT+02:00)

Iran unveils third-generation enrichment centrifuges

Iran announced on Wednesday, Dec. 14, that it had completed the transfer of its nuclear facilities underground, including its uranium enrichment centrifuges, and that the Iranian nuclear program was now safe from US and Israeli attack. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Passive Defense Division, Gholamreza Jalali, said: “Our vulnerability in the nuclear area has reached the minimum level.” And if circumstances demand it, he said, uranium enrichment facilities would be placed in more secure locations.

Israeli Defense Minister Barak has repeatedly warned that once it was buried in underground bunkers, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could no longer be attacked; nor would it be possible to find out what was happening there. His meaning was that that no one would know when Iran started building nuclear bombs in deep underground chambers.

Then, Monday, Dec. 12, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon said, “Iran will acquire military nuclear capability within months.”

debkafile‘s intelligence sources report that in the second part of his comment, the Iranian Guards official was referring to the first-generation P1 and P2 centrifuges which remain at the regular Natanz. It is the newer and faster IR2 and IR4 machines which are being moved to the new underground nuclear city at Fordo near Qom. When these advanced models have all been transferred to Fordo, Iran can start enriching the 20-percent grade uranium it has accumulated to 60 percent, a step before weapons grade.
This accumulated stock is sufficient for four or five nuclear bombs. Nothing but a decision by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stands between this and the final enrichment leap to the military level and the assembly of the first bomb.

Western and Israeli intelligence experts have assumed until now that Iran was held back by serious problems with the new centrifuges which arose from a shortage of the specialized aluminum alloys, tungsten-copper plates, tungsten metal powder and maraging steel for their blades, the key to smooth enrichment up to weapons-grade.
In recent weeks, US and Israeli officials have argued that Iran’s inability to manufacture these rare metals themselves or obtain them on international markets was delaying Tehran’s progress. This argument supported their claim that there was still time to stop the nuclear program before it produced a weapon.

But debkafile‘s intelligence sources now report exclusively that Iran has solved this problem. Since early November, North Korea has been sending the Islamic Republic consignments of the missing metals following a deal brokered by Chinese middlemen who also helped arrange their shipment. Tehran is already in receipt of the hundreds of tons of rare metals needed to keep its high-tech centrifuges spinning uninterrupted.

Western intelligence officials conclude that Iran deliberately exaggerated the explosion Sunday, Dec. 11 at a steel plant in the central Iranian town of Yazd intending to imply that the Americans or Israelis had conducted another covert attack on the production of special metals for Iran’s nuclear industry.

Iran hoped to mislead the West into believing that Iran was still stalled by lack of a regular supply of those metals, when in fact the shortage has been overcome and advanced uranium enrichment was racing ahead deep underground.

Top Stories.

CTVNews.ca Staff

US House passes bill to expand s… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

    WASHINGTON – The US House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday that would expand sanctions on Iran, cracking down on a wider range of energy issues and closing some loopholes in existing energy and financial sanctions.

Some senators in both parties are also working on legislation to tighten sanctions on Iran, the world’s fifth biggest oil exporter, because of concerns it is developing a nuclear bomb.

In a 410-11 vote, the House passed a bill that would expand sanctions on companies involved in the oil industry, including on investments, selling Iran goods or services used in refineries, or providing Iran with refined products worth $5 million or more in a year.

The bill would also place sanctions on developing infrastructure or ports, or buying Iranian sovereign debt.

Earlier this week, congressional leaders agreed to legislation on new sanctions on Iran’s central bank that they hope to quickly pass.

Israeli officials say Syria’s Assad is doomed – The Washington Post.

By Joel Greenberg, Published: December 14

JERUSALEM —In a shift, Israeli officials are welcoming the prospect that Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, will be overthrown, an event Defense Minister Ehud Barak says could be weeks away.

The officials’ new tone contrasts with conventional thinking here in years past, when Assad was credited with maintaining calm along the frontier with the Israeli-held Golan Heights and considered a stable alternative to a possible takeover by Islamic fundamentalists.

As Assad has come under mounting pressure from a revolt at home and moves to isolate him abroad, initial wariness by Israeli officials of speaking publicly about the fate of his regime has given way to open speculation about how long he can hold on to power, who might replace him and the possible risks of a chaotic disintegration of his rule.

“Basically, it’s inevitable,” Barak said in a telephone interview before flying Wednesday to Washington for meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other administration officials. “The Assad family, through their own behavior, have lost their last drop of legitimacy and put themselves beyond the point of no return with their brutal slaughter of their own people. He has ceased to be something relevant.”

“It might take many weeks,” Barak added, “but it’s not a matter of months or years.”

In a separate interview, Moshe Yaalon, the minister of strategic affairs, said: “It’s a matter of time and bloodshed before we will witness Assad’s departure. That is our assessment.”

Obama administration officials have expressed equal certainty that Assad will eventually leave, but they and Arab countries that are trying to persuade him to stand down anticipate a far longer timeline extending well into next year.

“Our view is that this regime is the equivalent of [a] dead man walking,” Frederic Hof, the State Department’s point man for Syria, told a congressional subcommittee Wednesday. “But the real question is, how many steps remain?”

“I think it is very, very, very difficult to predict or project how much time this regime has,” Hof said.

Hof fended off calls by lawmakers to provide military support to the Syrian opposition, saying it is not yet unified and needs to gain the support of frightened minorities convinced by Assad that their rights won’t be respected in any new government. Promoting a violent response from heretofore peaceful demonstrators would play into Assad’s hands, he said.

A ‘major blow’ for Iran

Barak predicted that an eventual ouster of Assad would undermine an alliance of Israel’s enemies, including militant Islamist groups in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, backed by Iran and Syria, that have fought Israel across its northern and southern borders.

“When the Assad family falls, it will be a major blow to the radical axis led by Iran,” Barak said “It will weaken Iran, it will weaken Hezbollah and weaken the backing for Hamas, and it will deprive the Iranians of a real stronghold in the Arab world. It will strengthen Turkey, which is a natural rival to Iran’s hegemonic intentions. . . . This is something positive for Israel.”

Yaalon said that in the event that Assad was toppled, Iran and Hezbollah would “lose an asset in Damascus,” a development that would “serve our interest.”

The makeup of Syria’s society, which is more secular than those of some of its Arab neighbors, gives reason to think that a change of government in Damascus could produce “something more promising and clearly more legitimate than what we have now,” Barak said.

Yaalon said that in contrast to developments in post-revolutionary Egypt, where Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, have emerged as a dominant force in recent elections, “we do see moderate Sunni [Muslim] elements” in Syria that could come to the fore in a post-Assad government.

Shift in Israeli outlook

The upbeat assessments of the consequences of a possible end to Assad’s rule signal a departure from previous Israeli attitudes toward the Syrian leader, who was seen as a tough but predictable adversary.

In 2005, when the George W. Bush administration advocated regime change in Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned against the move, arguing that Assad was “the devil we know” and that he could be replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood.

That view shifted in subsequent years when it was discovered that Syria had cooperated with North Korea on a suspected nuclear program, and after wars against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza drove home the extent of Iranian and Syrian support for the groups, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington who was Israel’s chief negotiator with Syria in the 1990s.

“The Israeli view of Assad became more negative,” Rabinovich said, and now “the sense is that it won’t be a great loss if he is going.”

But a possible toppling of Assad also carries risks, Israeli officials say, and there have been suggestions from the Syrian regime that it will not go quietly. Assad and his associates have warned that instability or outside intervention in Syria could inflame the region, with consequences for Israel. In May and June, Palestinian protesters were allowed to breach the Syrian frontier on the Golan Heights and march toward Israeli lines, breaking the decades-long calm there.

“There are certain uncertainties — what will follow, what if something will happen along the border — and we are staying on alert,” Barak said.

Other officials have raised concerns that a chaotic collapse of the Assad regime, with its reported stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, could lead to a flow of arms to Hezbollah or other militant groups, similar to the smuggling of arms out of Libya after the fall of Moammar Gaddafi.

“If the result is that not only Assad is removed but the Syrian military structure disintegrates, then there’s no telling who will control what,” Efraim Halevy, a former head of the Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, said in an interview Tuesday with Israel Army Radio. “How he goes, and under what circumstances, is very important.”

Staff writer Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.