Inside The United States' Secret Sabotage Of Iran

The United States has used economic sanctions, censure by the United Nations, diplomatic engagement and the threat of military action to accomplish these goals — all with little or no success.

At the same time, other, unacknowledged activities have been under way. They have included cyberattacks, assassinations and defections. As it turns out, these efforts have had some success.

'A Covert War'

Covert action is meant to stay just that — covert, clandestine, in the shadows.

And in Iran, it did, for quite some time. But in the last year, much has become known about intelligence operations in Iran, says Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who is now an analyst with the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution.

"There's little doubt that there's a covert war under way against Iran," he says. "There are at least two players in it, the United States and Israel."

And often, it appears, those players work together.

That was especially true with the Stuxnet worm. The computer virus, apparently developed in Israel with the help of the CIA, was launched in 2009. Sometime the following year, the worm found its way into the computers that control Iran's most important nuclear facility, the uranium enrichment operation at Natanz.

It told the gas centrifuges that enrich uranium to spin too fast. Many broke and destroyed other centrifuges — nearly a thousand of them.

The impact of the worm spread even wider, says Muhammad Sahimi, a professor at the University of Southern California who writes for the website Tehran Bureau.

"In fact, not only it destroyed a thousand centrifuges at Natanz — it also forced the government to actually shut down the enrichment facility for a few days," Sahimi says.

That was last year. Computer security companies got wind of it, in part because it may also have affected companies and equipment outside of Iran. And the story became public.

Other Viruses On The Way?

Computer security experts believe the original worm was programmed to mount multiple attacks. That may have occurred, but only up to a point, says David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

"This idea of multiple destruction was built into the planning of the program, and Iran thwarted it just by the simplest of steps — which is panic and shut down everything until you get a sense of what's going on," he says.

Iran may have had to buy new computers to replace those that were affected, and it can't be sure that new computers won't be sabotaged.

In fact, nothing that Iran buys on the international market that could be used in its nuclear program is safe from sabotage, says Sahimi.

"To say the least, probably the uncertainty whether there is a virus somewhere that they haven't detected, that causes a lot of problems for them," he says. Continued…