"Sabotage programs" have been tried, but they haven't halted Iran's march toward mastery of the nuclear technologies..."

Ignatius, in the WaPo, here

"...But there is another option for impeding the Iranian program -- a covert campaign to disrupt and deceive Iran's nuclear establishment. Despite the secrecy surrounding such efforts, reports about Israeli and U.S. sabotage efforts have surfaced recently in newspaper stories, which undoubtedly have been read with interest in Tehran. These published reports raise an interesting question: Do secret sabotage programs offer a "magic bullet" for dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat -- raising the cost to Iran of pursuing its program, while avoiding the chaotic backlash that would follow a conventional military strike?

The answer, I'm afraid, is no. It's pretty clear these covert programs have been tried, but it's also pretty clear they haven't halted Iran's march toward mastery of the technologies necessary to produce a nuclear weapon....

The latest story about sabotage appeared May 16 in the Wall Street Journal in an op-ed by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, "Israel's Secret War With Iran." Bergman reported that ..."The results have been tremendous," .... An Israeli source tells me that there has indeed been a disruption effort, in which the Israelis managed to penetrate the Iranian supply chain ....But this source cautions that Bergman's claims of "tremendous" success are overstated.

My guru on Israeli intelligence is Yossi Melman, a columnist for Haaretz who has written several books on the Mossad. He says that Dagan did, indeed, make a commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons after he took over Mossad, expressing that determination in a letter to the chiefs of other Israeli intelligence services. But Melman thinks that this covert effort has had only limited success. Whatever setbacks the Iranians experienced along the way, they have been able to keep moving. "I don't think Mossad is capable of mobilizing a massive sabotage campaign that would halt the Iranian program," Melman told me last week.......

.....we have to be frank: The quiet, deniable covert activities undertaken so far haven't stopped the Iranian program, and they're not likely to do so in the future. There is no magic bullet. The best hope of stopping Iran from making a bomb is diplomacy, backed by the threat of tough sanctions, backed by the ultimate threat of overt military power."