While the media blabs on about (relatively) inconsequential WikiLeaks, real drama plays out on the streets of Teheran where two Iranian nuclear scientists were the targets of assassination attempts – one of them successful.
According to (the often-unreliable-but-frequently-fascinating) Debka file, the scientist assassinated — Majid Shahriari — was in charge of their program to deal with the Stuxnet malware that has infected Iranian computers. At that same time, Ahmadinejad publicly admitted setbacks. This isn’t a great time to be an Iranian nuclear scientist. From Debka:
The attacks occurred at 7.45 a.m. Iranian time, less than 12 hours after the WikiLeaks organization uncovered US diplomatic cables attesting to a proposal by Mossad director Meir Dagan to overthrow the Islamic regime as one of the ways of terminating its nuclear program. He proposed enlisting oppressed Iranian minority groups for the task, like the Baluchis and their liberation movement, Jundallah.
AdvertisementOur intelligence sources note that this was the fifth attack in two years on Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran. None of the perpetrators were ever apprehended. Some sources suggest that the latest double hit may have been the work of Jundallah, which recently began targeting nuclear scientists serving the hated regime and which two months ago reported abducting a scientist employed at the Isfahan nuclear facility.
Tehran played down that incident claiming the kidnapped man was a driver. But last week he appeared on the Saudi TV station Al Arabiya and described his nuclear work.
Ahmadinejad et al, of course, blame Israel and the West, and no doubt this “blame” is deserved. How it should be apportioned may be forever a mystery, but it is unlikely we will find out via WikiLeaks, which have thus far done little more than ratify the obvious and make the Obama administration look foolish for its ludicrously ineffective security. Intelligence work evidently has two levels – a completely incompetent one that produces WikiLeaks and a brilliant one that produces Stuxnet.
Speaking of Stuxnet, some recent reports have added Russia to the list of nations (in this case with the US and Germany, not Israel) who have conspired to construct the malware. Now that’s interesting – and undoubtedly crazy-making to the Iranians.
And speaking of ludicrous, over at the WaPo, Jackson Diehl makes the ludicrous assumption that someone working on nuclear weapons is a “civilian.” Not only has he abjured his civilian status, he’s become possibly the most lethal figure in the army.
It is most likely the Mossad as the CIA were emasculated completely in Jan 09 when the Progressives arrived and appointed a dim witted, inexperienced political hack as Director. He was sent to control the agency not promote it. None in the Obama Administration has the gonads to pull this off even if the desire existed. There has been no indication that anyone in this Administration has the brains or the creativity to to do this to their “intellectual allies”.
I completely agree. This was almost certainly an Israeli hit. The utopian Ivy League elites who run our security agencies might even send to prison any agent who assassinated this scientist! Few Americans seem to understand the extent of the damage caused by those who attended the so-called best universities. They often believe that a weaker America is better for world peace. Aggressive behavior will somehow only make our enemies angrier. And after all—it’s also probably our fault. We screwed them over.
You are spot on!
It’s good to know that bowing in all directions wasn’t the last bullet in our gun.
No one has mentioned the most important effect of Stuxnet: the staggering cost of carefully revising every line of code in search for malicious instructions. That alone will make it very hard for countries like Iran to maintain the production infrastructure.
As for the ones that already have the warheads… beware: launching an attack may result in blowing yourselves up. All it takes is a last-second change to a set of coordinates and voilá.
Who is behind the assassinations? It can be anyone including the Iranian regime trying to scare the surviving scientists into efficiency.
Mission Impossible redux: confuse your enemies into killing each other.
If Mr. Wikileaks is so brave, let’s see him get a hold of Russian, Chinese or Iranian cables and release them. How long would he still be alive?
in a word..NO
I think these were leaked with full knowledge and approval of this administration.. What better way to destroy us in the eyes of the world. Destroy trust and no one does business with you.
And, Ahmandinejad blames the Israelis. It was just blintzes, exploding blintzes. If not cooked properly they can be lethal. All I can say to the Israelis is keep on cooking.
You owe me a new laptop monitor and keyboard. I just spewed my beverage all over them after reading that comment.
HAHA!Mmmmmm ,blintzes!
As far as these assasinations go ill bet its was a persian resistance group inside Iran.They know they need to take the leadership down from the inside.Time marches on….
Idiot – they wouldn’t use Ashkenazi food to infiltrate Iran.
It was exploding falafel…
Wow. This dovetails nicely with Joel Rosenbergs’s new book. Truly the 12th Imam — the Shia Moslem messiah — has returned to exact bloody revenge on the 4/5′th of the human population (whom Allah ostensibly created, BTW) who does not believe that Allah (is He the same as God on High?) is the one true god or that Mohammed (the Sword of Islam) is his prophet (which is redundant, I know). So … I’m thinking that I will stick with my own Lord & Savior, Jesus Christ — Prince of Peace and teacher of the Golden Rule (and to heck with multi-culti religious correctness).
But enough about my take on things. What does B. Hussein Obama think? Tell us, Dear Leader, whom do Ye serve?
Remember, this is a report from DEBKA. It is speculation at best, and probably nothing more than that. If a completely different, reputable source confirms this, then maybe I’ll give it some credence.
That said, we know someone wanted Professor Shahriari dead. It could have been anyone for any reason.
One thing that is not a conspiracy theory: We know from Symantec’s dossier on stuxnet that the malware was designed to morph with instructions from outside. As far as we know, the damned thing may still be active, still giving the Iranian government lackeys no end of heartburn.
It couldn’t happen to a better bunch of people.
Nasty virus that Stuxnet. I understand it spreads in the Siemens.
Damn, I wish I’d thought of that…
Thanks for this article. I have been fascinated with Stuxnet and would love to read more about it. It is such a brilliant idea that frankly, and sadly, I doubt if it came from us. Our present regime is so decison-challenged that I doubt if anyone in the administration, and certainly not our lefty-pres,, is up to giving the go-ahead to such an imaginative and effective act.
That would NOT stop him taking credit for it.But he would pass any benefits on to the unions.
I’ll be interested to see what, if any, effect this has on Iranian public opinion vis-a-vis Israel.
As I understand it, many Iranians are still not eager for regime change, not yet. But Iranian nukes put a big fat target on them — and Ahmadinejad has explicitly said that he’s willing to sacrifice millions of Iranians to get Israel.
In other words, Stuxnet is Good News indeed for ordinary Iranians.
In re attribution — we may never know for sure who wrote Stuxnet. I think it’s worth looking at national history, though, and a sense of style.
This was an extremely clever operation, supposedly requiring years of work from the best computing minds in the world, and it worked correctly the first time. It took out the target with pinpoint precision, taking pains to avoid collateral damage, and covered its tracks expertly. The intention was to stop a rogue state from going nuclear. In order to work correctly, it needed first-rate espionage to acquire closely-guarded security certificates; it also needed controllers good enough to predict what people would do (since the Iranian computers had no electronic contact with the rest of the world, meaning that Stuxnet had to be brought in as a Trojan horse by an unsuspecting carrier).
All of the above points squarely at Israel. Israel has prevented a state from going nuclear before (Iraq, 1981); the US and Russia have not. Israeli intelligence, and the Israeli military, have a long tradition of pinpoint-accuracy attacks (no carpet-bombing, as both the US and Russia have done). The Israelis also have an almost fanatical devotion to reducing collateral damage (Osirak 1981, Beirut International Airport 1973, and many other examples). It’s been a long time since the 1950s, when Israeli intelligence assassinated a high-profile target using a mail bomb — knowing in advance that only the target would open it, and not any of his underlings — but they certainly have not forgotten how. Oh, and a lot of the world’s latest computer equipment, and a lot of its cutting-edge software, is developed in Israel.
In short, Stuxnet fits precisely into the Israeli military tradition. It’s not impossible to imagine the United States or Russia in on the action, but it seems highly unlikely. And the more countries one imagines involved, the less likely it is that the secret has been kept for this long.
My hat’s off to the programmers involved! Kol hakavod.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Too bad they didn’t get Armadinijad.
The world must condemn the stateterrorism comitted by the the US/USRAEL. They say they fight terrorism but are the biggest terrorists themselves. UN should take over the Israhelli regime, since Israel is the sole threat to world peace.
If wiping Israel off the map would solve the world’s problems and bring about peace in our lifetime, I’m sure the Israelis themselves would do it. If not, I would help them. However, this notion is nothing short of delusional.
The existence of a Jewish state is not the cause of the world’s problems. It is the hatred of those who want to see the state handed over to a bunch of two bit Arab despots. I could cite the history, but you have the facts you want to believe and there is little I could say to change them.
I don’t have any solutions for you. You have painted yourself in to an intellectual corner and the only way you can imagine you can get out of it is to condemn others.
I pity you.
Facinating to say the least. I kiss the cheek of the beautiful minds that created this cybermissle. Absolutely incredible!
The milworm, the nuke scientists, a few months back drons land on top of Iran’s nuke plant, and further back a bunch of Iranian guards got blown up to Allah.
Iran has shown they will rape, and murder their own. Should we guard our schools a bit more, and square away our gear?
On to the next!
Dr. Frank Lippenheimer: looks as if you are correct sir.
Oh, how sad. Even the Saudai’s want to pull the plug on these clowns.
During WWII, Britain bombed the Peenemunde rocket-research site with the intent of killing as many as possible of the scientists & engineers working on the V-1 and V-2 missiles. Many of these men had their families living with them, and quite a few were killed.
I guess Jackson Diehl, had he been in a policy-making role, would have foregone the bombing and regarded additional *British* civilian causalties as acceptable collateral damage for preserving his own moral purity.l