Israel Intensifies Covert Campaign Against Iran

from Homeland Security NewsWire:

Analysis // by Ben Frankel


"Whoever needs to know, knows": Israel intensifies covert campaign against Iran

Published 30 November 2010



Israel believes that the best guarantee of its security is the ability to maintain its regional nuclear monopoly; to that end, it used covert means to stop the nuclear weapons programs of Egypt (1960-63) and Iraq (1970s-1980s); it also used less covert means, such as attacking and destroying nuclear reactors in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007); if the past is an indication, Israel will see to it that Iran, too, will find its effort to acquire the bomb to be prohibitively costly, very painful -- and, ultimately, futile



The Israeli campaign to slow down, if not stop altogether, the Iranian nuclear weapons program is consistent with Israel’s approach to the issue of whether or not neighboring countries should be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.



The Israeli campaign against Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been going on for a while (for an authoritative account, see Ronen Bergman, The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power [2009]). It has gained momentum in mid-2008, after the George W. Bush administration deflected a secret request by Israel for specialized bunker-busting bombs Israel wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex. Bush told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s effort to develop nuclear weapons (the New York Times’s David Sanger broke the story in January 2009). The Israelis were not happy with the White House rejection of their request for the special munitions, and partly as a result of the tense exchanges, the White House stepped up intelligence-sharing with Israel and briefed Israeli officials on new American efforts subtly to sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.



Bush handed off this major, and growing, covert program to President Barack Obama.



With the United States hesitating about a direct military attack on Iran — and with U.S. refusal to give Israel certain specialized munitions to make an Israeli attack easier — Israel stepped up its own campaign.



It should come as no surprise to our readers that Israel has embarked on its own campaign of covert action to derail Iran’s accelerating nuclear weapons program. Indeed, Israel is experienced in such actions. Here is a sample of Israel’s actions (see “What’s past is prologue: Israel’s covert campaign against Iran’s nuclear program,” 11 June 2009 HSNW)





Egypt



In 1960 President Gamal Abed el-Nasser of Egypt began to recruit German (or “West German,” as they were called at the time) scientists — many of them with Nazi past and sympathies — to build a missile fleet and crude nuclear devices, called radiation bombs. The Mossad, Israel’s secret service, began a three-year campaign of intimidation and threats — and more — against these scientists after Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s chancellor, refused to ban their employment in Egypt’s weapon industry (in any event, soon other European scientists joined the initial group of Germans). The Mossad campaign ranged from “friendly” visits to the scientists and their families to pressure



them to leave Egypt, to letter bombs which killed some of the scientists (and, in a few cases, the local office staff), to more direct assassinations. The campaign was exposed in mid-1963 when two Mossad agents were captured in a Swiss hotel, where they were holding the family of a Swiss missile scientist, threatening to kill the wife and kids unless the scientist returned from Egypt.




Israel went to extremes to achieve its goal. For example, it employed Otto Skorzeni, a decorated officer of the special commando units of the Nazi Waffen SS, to obtain information about Germans doing work in Egypt. Skorzeni, who led the Fallschirmjäger unit which rescued Benito Mussolini from Italian anti-Fascist fighters on 12 September 1943, was entnazifiziert (denazified) in absentia in 1952 by the West German government. Still, before agreeing to cooperate with the Mossad, Skorzeni insisted on a written agreement that he would not be kidnapped and brought to trial in Israel as was the case with Adolph Eichmann, who was captured by Mossad operatives in Argentina on 11 May 1960.



Iraq

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Mossad advised Iraqi scientists involved in Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapon program to change their professional interests. Several Iraqi scientists who did not prove amenable to such advise were killed. Mossad agents also blew up the core of an Iraqi reactor while in port in France, waiting to be shipped to Iraq. The Mossad also disrupted other nuclear weapons-related shipments from European ports to Iraq.



On 22 March 1992, Israeli agents killed Gerald Bull outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium. Bull, a Canadian engineer, was helping the Iraqis develop a long-range gun capable of firing projectiles a long distance with great accuracy. His Extended Range, Full Bore [ERFB] GC-45 could routinely place rounds into 10 meter circles at ranges up to 30 km, extending this to 38 km with but little loss in accuracy. This was just the beginning.



Bull became convinced that a gun could launch objects into space — and do so more cheaply than missiles. He designed a 45 meters, 350 mm caliber gun for testing purposes, and then started work on the “real” machine — a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 2,100 tons, with a bore of one meter (39 inches). It was to be capable of placing a 2,000 kilogram projectile into orbit. The Iraqis told Bull they would finance his gun project only



if he would also help with development of their longer ranged Scud-based missile project. Bull agreed.




The Israelis were afraid that the Iraqis would use the long-range weapons Bull was designing to launch chemical or biological weapons at Israel. Several attempts to persuade Bull to cease and desist proved futile, and Mossad agents killed him.



Bull, by the way, had a colorful career: His efforts on behalf of the U.S. military in the 1970s earned him a U.S. citizenship. The end of the Vietnam war saw funding for his projects dwindle, and he turned more and more to rogue countries such as Iraq, South Africa, and North Korea for financial support.





Less-covert operations



In addition to covert activities, Israel has also intervened more openly in the nuclear plans of its neighbors:



•On 7 June 1981, Israel sent eight F-16s, with six F-15s as escorts, to bomb and destroy Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor.

•On 6 September 2007, a squadron of Israeli F-15s destroyed a Syrian nuclear facility in north-east Syria. The sophisticated Syrian air defense system was paralyzed by a first-of-its-kind Israeli electronic warfare attack, allowing the Israeli planes to go in, attack, and come out of Syria unnoticed and unmolested. A Shaldag air force commando team was waiting near the nuclear site to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team arrived on foot from a neighboring country a couple of days before and hid near the site. Exploiting the Syrian radar blindness, the team was lifted by helicopters and taken back to Israel.

Iran



U.S. intelligence sources told the Telegraph’s Philip Sherwell that Israel has launched covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Teheran’s nuclear program. Israel is using hit men, sabotage, front companies, and double agents to disrupt the regime’s illicit weapons project, these experts say. The most dramatic element of the “decapitation” program is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations.



One reason for the Israeli emphasis on covert action is the awareness by Israeli officials of the change in mood in Washington since President Barack Obama took office. These officials privately acknowledge the new U.S. administration is unlikely to sanction an air attack on Iran’s nuclear installations and Obama’s offer to extend a hand of peace to Tehran puts any direct military action beyond reach for now.



The aim of the covert campaign is thus to



slow down or interrupt Iran’s research program, without the gamble of a direct confrontation that could lead to a wider regional war. A former CIA officer on Iran told the Telegraph:






Disruption is designed to slow progress on the program, done in such a way that they don’t realize what’s happening. You are never going to stop it. The goal is delay, delay, delay until you can come up with some other solution or approach. We certainly don’t want the current Iranian government to have those weapons. It’s a good policy, short of taking them out militarily, which probably carries unacceptable risks.



Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with Stratfor, the U.S. private intelligence company with strong government security connections, told Sherwell that the strategy was to take out key people. “With co-operation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear program and in sabotaging the Iranian nuclear supply chain,” she said. “As U.S.-Israeli relations are bound to come under strain over the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran, and as the political atmosphere grows in complexity, an intensification of Israeli covert activity against Iran is likely to result.”



Mossad agents, for example, were behind the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, a top nuclear scientist at Iran’s Isfahan uranium plant, who died in mysterious circumstances from reported “gas poisoning” in 2007. Other recent deaths of important figures in the procurement and enrichment process in Iran and Europe have been the result of Israeli hits, intended to deprive Tehran of key technical skills at the head of the program, according to Western intelligence analysts. “Israel has shown no hesitation in assassinating weapons scientists for hostile regimes in the past,” a European intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Sherwell. “They did it with Iraq and they will do it with Iran when they can.”



Note that this campaign is not limited to undermining Iran’s nuclear weapons activities: it aims more generally to curb Iran’s influence in the Middle East. Thus, when Iran began to use the territories of Sudan and Somalia to warehouse weapons and munitions for the purpose of delivering them, via the Sinai Peninsula, to Hamas in Gaza, the Israeli Air Force, in late January 2009, attacked and destroyed a couple of Iranian convoys carrying Iranian arms from a military base in Sudan to the port city Port Sudan (“Sudan attack demonstrates new U.S.-Israel counter-Iran policy,” 26 March 2009 HSNW).



U.S. and Israeli officials refuse to comment on the covert campaign — any covert campaign — against Iran. We note, however, a speech the then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert gave on 26 March 2009 in an academic gathering in Herzlyia, outside Tel Aviv. We do not know whether he was referring — obliquely — to the attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure or to the efforts to contain Iran’s influence in the Middle East by preventing it from arming its two regional agents, Hamas and Hezbollah. Perhaps he was referring to both efforts.



He warned Israel’s adversaries that Israeli forces, in defending the country, were operating “near and far.”



We are operating in every area in which terrorist infrastructures can be struck. We are operating in locations near and far and attack in a way that strengthens and increases deterrence. It is true in the north and in the south … there is no point in elaborating. Everyone can use their imagination. Whoever needs to know, knows.



Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire