LONDON, July 13, (Agencies): Britain’s foreign intelligence chief believes his agents prevented Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons but that the pariah state will become armed within two years, the Daily Telegraph reported Friday.
In a rare public speech, MI6 boss John Sawers told a meeting of around 100 senior civil servants in London that British agents had foiled Iran’s attempts to produce a nuclear weapon as long as four years ago, according to the Telegraph. “You’d have Iran as a nuclear weapons state in 2008 rather than still being two years away in 2012,” the report quoted Sawers as saying last week.
When Iran does finally acquire nuclear status, the intelligence chief warned that Israel and the United States “would face huge dangers.”
“I think it will be very tough for any prime minister of Israel or president of the United States to accept a nuclear-armed Iran,” he suggested.
The US unleashed a fresh wave of sanctions against Iran on Thursday, ratcheting up pressure to convince Tehran to take seriously concerns about its suspected nuclear weapons programme.
The actions impose additional sanctions on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation networks and identify Iranian “front” companies and banks to assist in compliance, the Treasury Department said.
“The Treasury and State Department actions target more than 50 entities tied to Iran’s procurement, petroleum, and shipping networks,” the Treasury said.
Meanwhile, a US cyber war against Iran’s nuclear program may have only just begun and could escalate with explosions triggered by digital sabotage, experts say.
Although the Iranian regime remains vulnerable to more cyber attacks in the aftermath of the “Stuxnet” worm that disrupted its uranium enrichment work, Tehran may be receiving help from Russian proxies for its digital security, some analysts say.
The nuclear program is “really not that well protected” from more digital assaults and Iran will be hard-pressed to safeguard its uranium enrichment efforts from tainted software, said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
“With Stuxnet, they lost about a year. And it caused a lot of confusion. They really didn’t know what hit them,” he said. “It looks like a viable way to disrupt their program.”
The United States, which reportedly masterminded the Stuxnet operation along with Israel, has every incentive to press ahead with a cyber campaign to undermine Iran’s atomic ambitions, according to analysts.
The next cyber attack, possibly in combination with more traditional spycraft, could shut off valves or issue incorrect orders that might cause an explosion at a sensitive site.
“I think that it could get more violent,” Albright told AFP. “I would expect more facilities to blow up.”
A major explosion at a missile plant in Iran in November sparked speculation that the incident was the result of sabotage.
“There is of course the possibility of sending in a team to modify a system in a way that would make it vulnerable, and then use a cyber weapon at a later date as a trigger event,” said David Lindahl, research engineer at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.
A new wave of cyber attacks could involve inserting hardware with infected chips into the industrial process, possibly through an agent or a duped employee, or penetrating diagnostic software used to gauge uranium enrichment or other work, Lindahl said.
But some cyber security experts suspect Russian proxies could be assisting Iran with its digital defenses, and possibly helped Tehran trace the origins of Stuxnet.
“The part that we probably miscalculated on in Stuxnet was the (possible) assistance of the Russians in attribution,” said James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The Iranians never would have figured this out on their own,” said Lewis, a former senior government official with the Departments of State and Commerce.
By pushing the boundaries of cyber warfare, the United States has left itself open to retaliation. But US officials clearly view the risks associated with digital strikes as dwarfed by the dangers of an all-out war with Iran.
Bombing raids are “more likely to explode the region and certainly could lead to a conflict with Iran, and that would be very messy,” said Lewis. “Cyber is much cleaner.”
Although unnamed officials told The New York Times that the United States and Israel were behind the digital operations, cyber attacks — unlike air strikes — allow for “plausible deniability,” he said.
The Stuxnet worm broke new ground by successfully hijacking a program designed to supervise power plants or other large industrial systems, said Sean McGurk, a consultant who previously led cyber security efforts at the Department of Homeland Security.
“Stuxnet demonstrated going from a disruptive capability to a destructive capability and that’s what made it unique,” he said.
In another development, war games this month showcased missiles with improved accuracy and firing capabilities, Iranian media reports said Friday, an apparent response to stepped up Western moves against Iran’s nuclear program.
Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards conducted the exercise in the central desert, firing ballistic missiles including a long-range variety meant to deter an Israeli or US attack. The targets were models of foreign military bases, and the stated goal was to show that Iran’s missiles can hit Western bases and Israel.
Several Iranian news websites reported Friday that 90 percent of the missiles hit their targets and said this showed their increased accuracy.
Another achievement, the reports said, was Iran’s capability of firing multiple missiles within seconds. The media reports said this would create a challenge for the US or Israel to intercept incoming missiles should a war break out.
Iran has a variety of missiles. including a Shahab-3 variant with a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) that can reach Israel and southern Europe. The missiles, which can carry a nuclear warhead, are also capable of hitting US bases in the region.
Some of the missiles used during the war games used solid fuel, the reports said, improving the accuracy of the missiles.
The elite Revolutionary Guard’s Aerospace Division is in charge of Iran’s missile program.
“Within 10 minutes, a considerable number of missile were fired at a single target. The achievement, called high firing density, makes it impossible for anti-missile systems to intercept and destroy them. In the end, the target is definitely hit,” said a report on irannuc.ir.
Britain said on Thursday Sweden would look after its interests in Iran as part of a deal hammered out after the UK closed its Tehran embassy late last year at the height of a diplomatic confrontation.
Iranian protesters broke into two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran in November, ransacking offices and burning British flags in protest against new sanctions.
The incident sparked a major row between the two countries, with Britain shutting its embassy in Tehran and then expelling all Iranian diplomats from London.
Oman said last month it had started representing Iran in London, indicating a possible slight thawing in Anglo-Iranian relations.
Sweden’s foreign ministry confirmed on Thursday it had agreed to perform the same role for Britain in Iran.
Indicted
A federal grand jury has indicted two men, one from Iran and the other from China, on charges of conspiring to send materials from the United States to Iran for the purpose of enriching uranium, the US Justice Department said on Friday.
Using a Chinese company as a go-between to avoid trade sanctions, the men tried for three years to obtain US materials, such as high-strength steel, that could be used in an Iranian nuclear program, the department said.
Iranian citizen Parviz Khaki was arrested in May in the Philippines, while the other man, Zongcheng Yi of China, remains at large, the department said.
The two men succeeded in illegally exporting lathes and nickel-alloy wire from the United States to China and then to Iran around June 2009, according to the indictment filed by the Justice Department.
It said the men purchased the materials from US companies without divulging the ultimate destination. They also did not have export licenses required for shipments to countries such as Iran that are under US sanctions.
Other attempts to obtain materials failed, the indictment says.
Khaki allegedly began talking with an undercover US federal agent in 2009, including in e-mails in which he tried to acquire radioactive source material. The e-mails continued into 2011, the indictment says.
Lisa Monaco, assistant attorney general for national security, said the indictment “sheds light on the reach of Iran’s illegal procurement networks and the importance of keeping US nuclear-related materials from being exploited by Iran.”
“Iranian procurement networks continue to target US and Western companies for technology acquisition by using fraud, front companies and middlemen in nations around the globe,” Monaco said in a statement.
The 24-page indictment was handed up by a grand jury in Washington on Thursday and released on Friday. It does not name the US companies that Khaki and Yi allegedly approached.