Outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s recent assessment that Iran won’t be able to build a bomb until 2015 appears to be further evidence that the sabotage campaign against the Iranian nuclear facilities is working beautifully. At the Washington Post, David Ignatius has the same impression:
What’s increasingly clear is that low-key weapons — covert sabotage and economic sanctions — are accomplishing many of the benefits of military action, without the costs. It’s a devious approach — all the more so because it’s accompanied by near-constant U.S. proposals of diplomatic dialogue — but in that sense, it matches Iran’s own operating style of pursuing multiple options at once.
Officials won’t discuss the clandestine program of cyberattack and other sabotage being waged against the Iranian nuclear program. Yet we see the effects – in crashing centrifuges and reduced operations of the Iranian enrichment facility at Natanz — but don’t understand the causes. That’s the way covert action is supposed to work.
Sabotage operations include the widely publicized Stuxnet virus, which has wreaked havoc on Iran’s facilities. But there have also been other less-reported operations that have helped slow the nuclear process. Over the summer, the New Republic’s Eli Lake reported that several Western countries had launched an extensive clandestine program aimed at undermining Iranian nuclear efforts:
Michael Adler, an expert on Iran’s nuclear program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, put it this way: “It seems to be clear that there is an active and imaginative sabotage program from several Western nations as well as Israel involving booby-trapping equipment which the Iranians are procuring, tricking black-market smugglers, cyber-operations, and recruiting scientists.” Three current U.S. government officials confirmed that sabotage operations have been a key part of American plans to slow down the Iranian program—and that they are continuing under Obama.
Of course, so far these operations have been able only to delay, not prevent, Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And while they help buy the U.S. more time to consider whether to take military action, obviously the decision can’t be put off forever.