A former member of the National Security Council in the Reagan administration, Thomas C. Reed, wrote in his 2004 book that during the Cold War the CIA tampered with the computer code embedded in Canadian components of a new trans-Siberian gas pipeline system. In 1982, a surge in pressure caused a three-megaton blast in the Siberian forest visible from space.
The U.S. doesn’t regard Iran as an innocent victim. Washington has accused Tehran of sponsoring terrorist groups in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, of sending arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan and aiding al-Qaida’s leadership in Pakistan. The U.S.-supported Iran Human Rights Documentation Center has said that Iranian intelligence agents have killed more than 160 expatriate political activists abroad.
“We’ve been in a contest with the Iranians now for 30 years, and this is just one phase of it,” said James Lewis, a former State Department official and an expert on technology and security. “The Iranians do things that appeal to them, and they are noisy and physical and explosive.”
The U.S., he said, has preferred quieter methods that leave few fingerprints. “If I was Iran, I would wonder if my stuff would work,” Lewis said.
The U.S. and its allies have avoided discussing the suspected sabotage campaign publicly. At least until recently, Iran has seldom raised the issue and even then has provided few details.
For both sides, the most sensitive issue is the question of who is killing Iran’s nuclear scientists.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer now at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies think tank, said a faction within Iran’s government might have ordered the assassinations. He said one researcher supported Iran’s persecuted opposition, while the others may have been suspected of spying for the West.
Other former officials and diplomats said the killings appear to be an effort by Iran’s adversaries to disrupt its nuclear weapons-related work.
Several warned that targeted killings can backfire if they were to inspire surviving engineers and scientists to work harder, or if Iran were to retaliate by targeting Western scientists. They also questioned whether assassinating a few researchers could slow such a large program.
“If the state and progress of the Iranian nuclear program depends on what is walking around inside the heads of one or two key officials, then we’ve got a lot less to worry about this program than most of the discourse would lead us to believe,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.
Former officials and experts generally agree that the Stuxnet worm was an effort to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges, which can be used to make fuel for reactors or weapons-usable material for atomic bombs. Western experts estimate that the malware destroyed 1,000 centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz plant last year.
Some former U.S. officials said that Israel’s Unit 8200, the Defense Force’s electronic intelligence service, probably led the development of Stuxnet, with the help of the U.S. and perhaps other nations. Others said they suspected the U.S. was the chief developer of what has been called the world’s first cyberweapon of mass destruction.
German Stuxnet expert Ralph Langner said in a speech this spring that such advanced software must have been created by what he called a cybersuperpower. “There is only one,” said Langner. “And that is the United States.”
Art Keller, a retired CIA officer who worked in the Middle East and South Asia, said Stuxnet’s self-destruct mechanism, its painstaking focus on a single target and other fail-safe features all suggest the program was vetted by U.S. government lawyers concerned about limiting collateral damage.
“These are all the hallmarks of a U.S. covert action,” he said.
Insiders are divided on whether the West has conducted sabotage operations against Iran’s oil and gas pipeline networks.
Fitzpatrick, the former State Department nonproliferation expert, said U.S. and U.N. sanctions have cut off Iran’s supply of replacement parts and forced it to manufacture crude knockoffs that frequently fail. “Only in that sense can one say with certainty that the West is responsible” for the country’s refinery and pipeline blasts, he said.
The Bushehr nuclear power plant suffered a rash of equipment malfunctions over the past year, including the failure of one of the plant’s emergency cooling pumps and flaws found in two bearings on one of the plant’s huge turbines.
Former U.S. officials said that Iran’s agreement to buy fuel for Bushehr from Russia and to return the plutonium-bearing spent fuel back to Russia for reprocessing eased concerns the plant could be used as part of a nuclear weapons effort. They doubted there was any U.S. interest in disrupting its operations.
Russian engineer Alexander Bolgarov, who spent two years working on the Iranian plant, told The Associated Press in an interview last month that Stuxnet had no effect on Bushehr, despite media reports.
Bolgarov said he saw no other evidence of sabotage, either. Instead, he blamed Bushehr’s construction problems and breakdowns on inexperienced workers, poor oversight and overlapping Russian and Iranian bureaucracies.
Sometimes an accident is just an accident, even in Iran.
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Article source: http://www.startribune.com/nation/130490263.html
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