"Israel's Covert War on Iran: Targeted Killings"

Israel’s covert war on Iran faces White House opposition

By Richard Sale, 

Middle East Times Intelligence Correspondent

"Facing mounting U.S. opposition behind the scenes, Israel still plans to continue a covert operation to delay Iran’s nuclear program by assassinating key Iranian scientists, U.S. officials said.

    The Israeli program which has been in place for almost a decade, involves not only targeted killings of key Iranian assets but also disrupting and sabotaging the Iran nuclear technology purchasing network abroad, these sources said.

     Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst for Stratfor, a U.S. private intelligence company, commented publicly that key Iranian nuclear scientists were the targets of the strategy. “With cooperation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key (Iranian) assets involved in the nuclear program and the sabotaging of the Iranian nuclear supply chain.”

    But U.S. opposition to the program has intensified as President Barack Obama has made overtures aimed at thawing decades-old tension between the two countries. Part of this is due to America’s desire to use Iran’s roads into Afghanistan to help resupply U.S.-NATO forces there.

     But Israel’s interests in the region are not America’s, several U.S. officials said.

     Pat Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said of the Israeli killings, “That’s what the Israelis would do, what we would expect them to do. They would kill Iranian scientists.”

    Asked about the mounting administration disapproval, Clawson said of the killings, “It would be implausible to call off all covert ops.” He added, “If the U.S. pressures Israel, then the Israelis will simply stop talking to us about it.”

   Israel’s targeted killing program has taken on new urgency since Washington made clear last year that an Israeli air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was out of the question. “The goal now is to delay for as long as possible, Iran getting to the point of having a nuclear weapon,” a former U.S. intelligence official said.

      Asked to comment, Middle East expert Tony Cordesman, said of the killings, “There’s not that much of it going on,” and its success was dubious in any case.  Israel’s targeting killing program was done in concert with the Bush administration, former U.S. sources said.

A former senior CIA official described several joint U.S.-Mossad operations to derail Iran’s nuclear program as “something out of slapstick.” All had failed miserably, he said.

     A new wave of assassination and sabotage programs were launched in spite of the fact that in 2005, America had little to no intelligence about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. 

     According to U.S. sources, in 2004, the CIA had lost its entire agent network in Iran when a CIA headquarters communications officer was about to send instructions to an agent via its Inmarsat transmitter/receivers.  The CIA officer attempted to download data intended for a single operative, but accidentally hit a button that sent it to the entire U.S. spy network in Iran, these sources said.

     The information was received by a double agent who forwarded it to Iranian counterintelligence which quickly wrapped up the entire network, leaving Washington completely blind.

     Perhaps the earliest attempt to derail Iran’s efforts was launched in 2000, under the Clinton administration when, under the code-name “Operation Merlin,” it gave a Russian defector and nuclear engineer plans for an atomic bomb and he delivered it to a high-ranking Iranian official in Vienna. The operation was personally approved by President Bill Clinton.

     The plans were scary – they were for a Russian-made TBA 480 “firing switch” that could create an implosion that would trigger a chain reaction in a small spherical core of uranium.  The kicker was that the plans were full of flaws that would send the Iranian program into a technological dead end. The Iranians were not supposed to spot the inserted design flaws that would render any device based on the plans null and void.

     According to U.S. officials, the Iranians easily spotted the flaws, and the United States may have inadvertently placed a very dangerous document among one of the world’s most dangerous nations.

     Operation Merlin was still alive and kicking during the Bush administration, whose officials said they planned to try it on other countries......

      Israel’s prime minister personally approves each killing, and the work is done by “hit teams,” that are made up of squadrons of Kidon, a sub-unit of Mossad’s highly secret Masada department which stages the operations, former U.S. officials said.  Kidon is a Hebrew word meaning, “bayonet.” A U.S. official said that Israel has staged targeted killings, “in friendly countries,” but that the diplomatic world has greatly changed since President George W. Bush.  For one thing, the U.S. and Iran are engaged in talks on major issues.  For another, Iran is a long-standing and unforgiving enemy of the Taliban...... There is also energy gathering in the White House for a fresh push for a Middle East peace, sources there said. For Netanyahu, “the twilight is falling,” said one former U.S. official."