which
is about to ramp up dramatically. US's most expensive option
is a direct military confrontation, boots on the ground. The
second option is something more indirect like drones on
Iran's territory. Then come targeted assassinations. Finally
there is the cyber option, which has already been used once.
; drones are
the most obvious, cyberweapons the least discussed. It does
not quite add up to a new Obama Doctrine, but the methods
are defining a new era of nearly constant confrontation and
containment. Drones are part of a tactic to keep America’s
adversaries off balance and preoccupied with defending
themselves. And in the past two and a half years, they have
been used more aggressively than ever. There are now five or
six secret American drone bases around the world.
On the other side of town, 20 minutes later, a nearly
identical attack played out against Mr. Shahriari’s
colleague Fereydoon Abbasi, a nuclear scientist and longtime
member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Perhaps
because of his military training, Mr. Abbasi recognized what
was happening, and pulled himself and his wife out the door
just before his car turned into a fireball. Iran has charged
that
was behind the attacks — and many outsiders believe the
“sticky bombs” are the hallmarks of a Mossad hit.
Perhaps to make a point, Mr. Abbasi, now recovered
from his injuries, has been made the director of Iran’s
atomic energy program. He travels the world offering
assurances that Iran’s interest in nuclear weapons is
peaceful.
Even for the Iranian scientists who get to work
safely, life isn’t a lot easier. A confidential study
circulating through America’s national laboratories
estimates that the Stuxnet computer worm — the most
sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed against another
country’s infrastructure — slowed Iran’s nuclear
progress by one to two years. Now it has run its course.
But there is no reason to believe the attacks are over.
Iran may be the most challenging test of the Obama
administration’s focus on new, cheap technologies that
could avoid expensive boots on the ground; drones are
the most obvious, cyberweapons the least discussed. It
does not quite add up to a new Obama Doctrine, but the
methods are defining a new era of nearly constant
confrontation and containment. Drones are part of a
tactic to keep America’s adversaries off balance and
preoccupied with defending themselves. And in the past
two and a half years, they have been used more
aggressively than ever. There are now five or six secret
American drone bases around the world. Some recently
discovered new computer worms suggest that a new,
improved Stuxnet 2.0 may be in the works for Iran.
“There were a lot of mistakes made the first time,”
said an American official, avoiding any acknowledgment
that the United States played a role in the cyber attack
on Iran. “This was a first-generation product. Think of
Edison’s initial light bulbs, or the Apple II.”
Not surprisingly, the Iranians are refusing to sit
back and take it — which is one reason many believe the
long shadow war with Iran is about to ramp up
dramatically. At the White House and the C.I.A.,
officials say the recently disclosed Iranian plot to
kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States — by
blowing up a tony Georgetown restaurant
frequented by senators, lobbyists and journalists — was
just the tip of the iceberg. American intelligence
officials now believe that the death of a Saudi diplomat
in Pakistan
earlier this year was an assassination. And they see
evidence of other plots by the Quds Force, the most
elite Iranian military unit, from Yemen
to Latin
America.
“The Saudi plot was clumsy, and we got lucky,”
another American official who has reviewed the
intelligence carefully said recently. “But we are seeing
increasingly sophisticated Iranian activity like it, all
around the world.” Much of this resembles the worst days
of the cold war, when Americans and Soviets were
plotting against each other — and killing each other —
in a now hazy attempt to preserve an upper hand. But
Iran is no superpower. And there are reasons to wonder
whether, in the end, this shadow war is simply going to
delay the inevitable: an Iranian bomb or, more likely,
an Iranian capability to assemble a fairly crude weapon
in a matter of weeks or months.
For understandable reasons, this is a question no
one in the Obama administration will answer publicly. To
admit that Iran may ultimately get a weapon is to admit
failure; both George W. Bush and Barack Obama vowed they
would never let Iran achieve nuclear arms capability,
much less a bomb. Israelis have long argued that if Iran
got too close, that could justify attacking Iran’s
nuclear sites. Reports in Israel last week suggested
that such a pre-emptive attack is once again being
debated.
The worries focus on renewed hints from top Israeli
officials that they will act unilaterally — even over
American objections — if they judge that Iran is getting
too close to a bomb. (It is worth noting that they have
made similar noises every year since 2005, save for a
brief hiatus when Stuxnet — which appears to have been a
joint project of American and Israeli intelligence — was
doing its work.)
To many members of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s government — and, by the accounts of his
former colleagues, to the Israeli leader himself — the
Iran problem is 1939 all over again, an “existential
threat.”
“WHEN Bibi talks about an existential threat,” one
senior Israeli official said of Mr. Netanyahu recently,
“he means the kind of threat the United States believed
it faced when you believed the Nazis could get the
bomb.”
Israelis worry that as Iran feels more isolated by
sanctions and more threatened by the Arab Spring, which
has not exactly broken Tehran’s way, it may view racing
for a bomb as the only way to restore itself to its
position as the most influential power in the Middle East.
The fate of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi may
strengthen that impulse.
“One should ask: would Europe have intervened in Libya
if Qaddafi had possessed nuclear weapons?” the Israeli
defense minister, Ehud Barak, said on army radio last
week, referring to the Libyan leader’s decision to give
up his program in 2003. “Would the U.S. have toppled
Saddam Hussein if he had nuclear weapons?”
To many in the Obama administration, though, the
Iranian threat seems more akin to 1949, when the Soviets
tested their first nuclear device. That brought many
confrontations that veered toward catastrophe, most
notably the Cuban Missile Crisis. But ultimately the
Soviets were contained. Inside the Pentagon
and the National Security Council, there is a lot of
work — all of it unacknowledged — about what a parallel
containment strategy for Iran might look like.
The early elements of it are obvious: the
antimissile batteries that the United States has spent
billions of dollars installing on the territory of Arab
allies, and a new Pentagon plan to put more
ships and antimissile batteries into the Persian Gulf,
in cooperation with six Arab states led by Saudi Arabia.
It was the Saudi king who famously advised American
diplomats in the cables revealed by WikiLeaks last year
that the only Iran strategy that would work was one that
“cut off the head of the snake.”
The big hitch in these containment strategies is that
they are completely useless if Iran ever slips a bomb,
or even some of its newly minted uranium fuel, to a
proxy — Hezbollah, Hamas or some other terrorist group —
raising the problem of ascertaining a bomb’s return
address. When the Obama administration ran some tabletop
exercises soon after coming to office, it was shocked to
discover that the science of nuclear forensics was
nowhere near as good in practice as it was on television
dramas. So if a bomb went off in some American city,
or in Riyadh
or Tel
Aviv, it could be weeks or months before it was
ever identified as Iranian. Even then, confidence in the
conclusion, officials say, might be too low for the
president to order retaliation.
The wisdom of a containment strategy has also taken
a hit since the revelation of the plot to kill the Saudi
ambassador. Emerging from a classified briefing on the
plot, a member of Congress said what struck him was that
“this thing could have gotten Iran into a war, and yet
we don’t know who ordered it.” There is increasing talk
that it could have been a rogue element within the Quds
Force. If so, what does that say about whether the
Iranian leadership has as good a hand on the throttle of
Iran’s nuclear research program as Washington
has long assumed?
That issue may well come to a head this week after
the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear
watchdog that has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with
Iran’s nuclear establishment for a decade now, issues
what may be one of its toughest reports ever.
IF the leaks are an accurate predictor of the final
product, the report will describe in detail the evidence
the I.A.E.A. has amassed suggesting that Iran has
conducted tests on nuclear trigger devices, wrestled
with designs that can miniaturize a nuclear device into
the small confines of a warhead, and conducted abstruse
experiments to spark a nuclear reaction. Most likely,
the agency will stop short of accusing Iran of running a
bomb program; instead, it will use the evidence to
demand answers that it has long been refused about what
it delicately calls “possible military dimensions” of
the nuclear program.
Much of the work on those “possible military
dimensions” is done, the I.A.E.A. believes, by
scientists who have day jobs at Iran’s major
universities, including one just across the street from
what is believed to be the nuclear project’s
administrative center. Among the scientists was Mr.
Abbasi, the survivor of last November’s bomb attack,
who was named in 2007 to the United Nations’ list of
Iranian scientists subject to travel bans and economic
sanctions because they were believed to be central to
the bomb-development effort.
Mr. Abbasi, according to people familiar with the
I.A.E.A.’s investigation, worked on calculations on
increasing the yield of nuclear explosions, among other
problems in manufacturing a weapon. He was a key
scientist in the Iranian covert nuclear weapons program
headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an academic and strong
supporter of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. For the
past decade, Mr. Fakhrizadeh has run programs — with
names like “Project 110” and “Project 5,” they seem
right out of a James Bond movie — that the West believes
are a shell game hiding weapons work. Suspicions have
been heightened by Iran’s refusal to allow him or his
colleagues to be interviewed by the United Nations’
nuclear inspection teams. And since last year’s attacks
— and another this past summer — Mr. Fakhrizadeh has
gone completely underground.
No one expects the United Nations’ revelations of
the evidence to prompt more action against Iran. Most
governments have had access to this evidence for a
while. The Iranians will say it is all fabrication, and
because the agency will not reveal its sources, that
charge could stick. The Chinese and the Russians have
already protested to the I.A.E.A. head, Yukiya Amano,
that revealing the evidence will harden Iran’s position.
They oppose any new sanctions.
While the Obama administration may act unilaterally
to shut down transactions with Iran’s central bank,
officials concede that the only economic step that could
give the mullahs pause would be a ban on Iranian oil
exports. With oil already hovering around $93 a barrel,
no one in the administration is willing to risk a step
that could send prices soaring and, in the worst case,
cause a confrontation at sea over a blockade.
For all the talk about how “all options are on the
table,” Washington says a military strike isn’t worth
the risk of war; the Israelis say there may be no other
choice. But they have said “this is the last chance”
every year since 2005.
All of which raises the question: how much more
delay can be bought with a covert campaign of
assassination, cyberattacks and sabotage?
Some more, but probably not much. It has taken the
Iranians 20 years so far to get their nuclear act
together — far longer than it took the United States and
the Soviets in the ’40s, the Chinese and the Israelis in
the ’60s, the Indians in the ’70s, and the Pakistanis
and the North Koreans in more recent times. The problem
is partly that they were scammed by Abdul Qadeer Khan,
the Pakistani who sold them his country’s discards.
The assassination and the sabotage have taken a
psychological toll, making scientists wonder if every
trip to work may be their last, every line of code the
beginning of a new round of destruction. Stuxnet was
devilishly ingenious: it infected millions of computers,
but did damage only when the code was transferred to
special controllers that run centrifuges, which spin at
supersonic speed when enriching uranium. When operators
looked at their screens, everything looked normal. But
downstairs in the plant, the centrifuges suddenly spun
out of control and exploded, like small bombs. It took
months for the Iranians to figure out what had happened.
But now the element of surprise is gone. The
Iranians are digging their plants deeper underground,
and enriching uranium at purities that will make it
easier to race for a bomb. When Barack Obama was sworn
into office, they had enough fuel on hand to produce a
single weapon; today, by the I.A.E.A.’s own inventory,
they have enough for at least four. And as the Quds
Force has shown, sabotage and assassination is a two-way
game, which may ratchet up one confrontation just as
Americans have been exhausted by two others.
David E. Sanger is the chief Washington
correspondent of The New York Times.