IranNew book confirms Israel behind killing of Iran nuclear scientists
A book to be published today offers details about, Israel’s campaign to take out Iranian nuclear scientists, a campaign which is part of the Israel’s broader effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; the book also says that the cyber campaign against Iran’s nuclear program was an Israeli innovation, not an American one as recently reported; it was the brainchild of Israel’s military intelligence agency (AMAN) and Unit 8-200 — Israel’s equivalent of the eavesdropping, code-breaking National Security Agency (NSA) — and endorsed by the White House at Israel’s suggestion
This may not qualify as breaking news, so we may say the story belongs in the category of confirmatory news: a new book confirms, and offers details about, Israel’s campaign to take out Iranian nuclear scientists, a campaign which is part of the Israel’s broader effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The book, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, is written by two respected journalists — Dan Raviv of CBS and Yossi Melman of Haaretz (the two collaborated on an earlier book on Israel’s intelligence services — Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community).
The Mossad agents “excel at accurate shooting at any speed and staying steady to shoot and to place exquisitely shaped sticky bombs” and consider it their hallmark, Raviv said Friday during a Fox News interview with both authors.
After the fourth Iranian scientist was killed last year, news stories claimed that the actual shooting was being done by members of the MEK, an anti-regime group which has been at war with the Ayatollahs since 1980s (the MEK is on the U.S. terror watch list, and there is a campaign underfoot to have it removed from the list, as the EU did in 2009). The reports said that Israel and the CIA operate training camps in the Kurdish area of Iraq, in which anti-regime groups are being trained for intelligence gathering and sabotage activities inside Iran. The reports suggested that Israel provided the MEK with the right equipment, a list of scientists to be removed, and intelligence about their daily routines — then sent them into Iran for the mission,
Raviv disagrees. “They [the Israelis] don’t farm out a mission that is that sensitive,” so sensitive that Israel’s prime minister has to sign off on it personally, Raviv said. “They might use dissidents for assistance or logistics but not the hit itself. The methodology and training and use of motorcycles is all out of the Mossad playbook. They wouldn’t trust anybody else to do it.”
In Friday’s Fox News interview, co-author Melman said Israel believes the campaign successfully disrupted Iran’s nuclear program not only by taking out key scientists but also dissuading other up-and-coming scholars from joining the program.
For Israel to engage in a covert killing of scientists trying to develop nuclear weapons is not new: it pursued similar campaigns in Egypt in 1961-63 (the targets then were European scientists, mostly German – or, rather, West German – who tried to help President Gamal Abed al-Nasser to build nuclear bombs and a missile fleet), and in Iraq in the 1980s.
The campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program does have a new feature: Israel has tried to derail the Iranian program not only by killing the program’s leading scientists, but also by using cyber warfare on an unprecedented scale. Melman said the cyber campaign was an Israeli innovation, not an American one as recently reported. It was the brainchild of Israel’s military intelligence agency (AMAN) and Unit 8-200 — Israel’s equivalent of the eavesdropping, code-breaking National Security Agency (NSA) — and endorsed by the White House at Israel’s suggestion, he added.
Israel’s cyber warriors then worked with NSA to build malware. Melman told Fox News that the program Flame was built first — a Trojan horse code designed to penetrate the Iranian nuclear sites and “suck information about the (uranium-enriching) centrifuges and how they operate,” Melman said. Once the Israeli and U.S. cyber experts got that information, they were able to build Stuxnet.
Readers interested in the subject should also read Ronen Bergman, The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power.
