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Operation Sabotage: Our Secret War Against Iran

(New Republic) Eli Lake - New York Times reporter David Sanger's book The Inheritance, published at the end of the Bush administration, discusses sabotage efforts targeting Iran. David Kay, who led the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq, says he is positive that such sabotage is taking place. "The Israelis have been doing this for years and so have the British." Michael Adler, an expert on Iran's nuclear program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, said: "There is an active and imaginative sabotage program from several Western nations as well as Israel involving booby-trapping equipment which the Iranians are procuring, tricking black-market smugglers, cyber-operations, and recruiting scientists." Three current U.S. government officials confirmed that sabotage operations have been a key part of American plans to slow down the Iranian program - and that they are continuing under Obama. According to a former Mossad operations officer, in 1998, the Mossad and the CIA developed a plan to sell a supposedly helpful chemical substance - which would, in fact, gum up centrifuges over time - to Iran on the black market. According to David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, high-quality vacuum pumps crucial for uranium enrichment - that were produced in Germany and sold to the Iranians and Libyans - were first modified in the U.S. "to make them break down under operational conditions." "If you can break the vacuum in a centrifuge cascade, you can destroy hundreds of centrifuges or thousands if you are really lucky." In the end, however, as Israel Defense Forces Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Uzi Dayan noted: "This approach can delay the program and slow it down....But it cannot prevent Iran from achieving their goal."
2010-07-15 09:08:06
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