The Redhunter

A new U.S. national intelligence estimate for Iran has been stalled for nearly a year, but U.S. officials familiar with the estimate say they expect a new classified estimate to be released as soon as this month.

Iran's difficulties also are likely to be the result of a covert Israeli program of sabotage and U.S. efforts against the country's nuclear program.

A powerful computer virus known as Stuxnet reportedly attacked Iran's nuclear facilities earlier this year. Since then, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has spoken publicly about computer problems the nuclear program has experienced.

In November, Iran's president said, "they succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts."

No country has claimed credit for launching the sophisticated Stuxnet computer virus that reportedly varies the speeds of the delicate high-speed centrifuges, speeding them up and slowing them down so they are rendered useless.

The Internet site WikiLeaks disclosed last month a State Department cable confirming that Israel has waged a covert war against Iran's nuclear program under Mr. Dagan.

The cable, which recounted a Aug. 17, 2007, meeting between Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns and Mr. Dagan said the Israeli spy chief outlined Israel's five-pillar strategy for preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Those five pillars included both something the memo called "covert measures" and "force regime change," or support for elements of Iran's opposition.

In the meeting, Mr. Dagan said, the United States and Israel had different estimated timelines for when Iran would acquire a nuclear weapon. "The threat is obvious, even if we have a different timetable," the cable quotes Mr. Dagan as saying.

A recent analysis of the Stuxnet virus by the U.S.-based Institute for Science and International Security estimated that the virus had been sent as early as 2009.

The paper noted that Iran replaced 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz facility in late 2009 or early 2010. The paper also quoted Ali Akbar Salehi, then the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization and currently the country's foreign minister, as saying in a November interview that Westerners had sent a computer virus to Iran's nuclear program "one year and several months ago."

Patrick Clawson, a specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: "Certainly, the IAEA reports and what we hear from people knowledgeable about the nuclear program is that Iran is encountering significant technical problems."

"The great worry is that Iran has clandestine facilities that will allow it to overcome these technical problems," he said.

Mr. Clawson noted that he was also worried that Iran could still gain nuclear fuel because of its ties to North Korea, which has tested a nuclear device already.

Stuxnet was obviously planted by a foreign intelligence service. It's a very complex and sophisticated virus, and from what I've read just isn't the type of thing a team of basement hackers can come up with. Only a few countries have the capability of coming up with this; the U.S., Japan, Israel, China, the larger Western European countries, maybe Russia. Most have financial or political (read "weak knees") reasons for not doing it.

As the article insinuates, Israel was probably in on it. But my guess is this was a team effort, and that we helped them in some way. Certainly (I hope!) we share intelligence on this sort of thing and Obama knew and approved.

Or the article could be wrong and it could have been a U.S effort.

Good News with Cautionary Flags

Surely for the most part this is all very good news. Time works in our favor.

The danger is that we become complacent.

The closer the Iranians get to completing a bomb that harder it will be for military action to stop them. This of course because by that point their facilities will be all the more larger and sophisticated. And unless you get lucky and kill key scientists you can't wipe out the all-important knowledge base.

DEBKAfile also raises some cautionary flags (h/t Dreams into Lightning)

1. Not all Iran's concealed nuclear facilities have been discovered by Western intelligence - not even Mossad. Given Iran's record of concealment, it would be foolish, for instance, to ignore the possibility of a secret plant enriching uranium at full speed somewhere underground out of range of the UN nuclear watchdog's cameras recording every centrifuge spinning at Natanz. They may still be undetected by spy satellites and unbeknownst even to the defectors and double agents willing to collaborate with the West.

A single secret facility of this kind would invalidate the current Western estimate of Iran's stock of low-grade enriched uranium as standing at 3,000 kilos. The real amount could be 20 times or even 100 times as much, enough for three or four bombs.

2. The same applies to the "malfunctions" undoubtedly holding up the program. No competent agency would risk guaranteeing that every last Iranian facility has been crippled or exposed to cyber invasion. The publicity surrounding Stuxnet and the deaths or defections of Iranian nuclear scientists has conveyed the impression of a nation on the point of collapse, whose every nook and cranny is wide open to the long arm of Western and Israeli spy agencies.

But who knows what really goes on in the top-secret laboratories of Shahid Beheshti University in northern Tehran, which employed the two nuclear scientists targeted for attack last month? It is there that much of the research is conducted from Iran's nuclear and missile programs. But there is no certainty that a parallel research institution is not operating in some other dark place.

3. Iran has been known in the past to have established or transferred sensitive nuclear facilities outside the country to remove them from the sight of alien intelligence agencies and safeguard them against sabotage, like the audacious attack of Oct. 12, 2010 against a hidden Shehab-3 missile store at the Revolutionary Guards Imam Ali base in northwest Iran. The consequences of this attack were as destructive as the Stuxnet invasion.

It will be recalled that only when the Israeli Air Force struck the North Korean-built plutonium reactor at A-Zur in northern Syria in Sept. 2007 was this vital external link in Iran's nuclear program revealed.

This is a dangerous business with Iran, and if our experience with Saddam Hussein's WMD program told us anything it's that all the world's intelligence services working together don't even always get it right.