One day in 2006, Gen. Ali-Reza Asgari was called to a personal meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The president was troubled by a dream he had, which convinced him there was a Western spy working among those involved in Iran’s nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad was right. But the joke was on the dictator; we now know that Asgari himself was most likely that spy. And after he walked out of his Istanbul hotel on March 1, 2007–seemingly into thin air–Asgari made his way to his family, in a safe house in Britain, as Gordon Thomas writes in Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6.
There were any number of reasons for Asgari to defect, but one of the most convincing is Israel’s history of targeted assassinations of those working for Israel’s enemies. As Ronen Bergman recounts in a story this week, from the German scientists working on Egypt’s early missile program to Canadian engineers working for Saddam Hussein, Israel picks its targets and then picks them off with the same precision. As if to illustrate the point–though we don’t know whether Israel was behind it–an Iranian nuclear scientist was killed on Nov. 29, and another wounded in an identical attack.
This is, in effect, a form of sabotage–a word that almost always announces itself with either a wry smile or an exclamation point, and which the furious Stuxnet virus has reintroduced into the public discussion of Iran’s nuclear program and the debate over how to stop it.
The goal of the effort to set back the Iranian program, as John Noonan put it in an email to Big Peace this week, is to get the Iranian leadership to say, “we can’t afford to start over, we give up.” It may sound anti-climactic, but that’s the end game in antiproliferation efforts. As Noonan, a policy advisor with the Foreign Policy Initiative, explained:
“Building a nuclear device is hard enough when your machines are firing on all cylinders. Sabotage can really gum up the process. If properly tailored, disrupting attacks on both enrichment facilities and the industry that supports the program could set back bomb development by years. That would give sanctions more time to bite. But the problem is, even heavy industrial sabotage isn’t a permanent setback.”
But is sabotage the most effective weapon–outside of bombing the facilities (the “military option”)–the West currently has in its arsenal? Much of the debate has thus far been between proponents of sanctions and supporters of the military option. Stuxnet, the computer worm that has been messing with the equipment at the Iranian centrifuges for much of the last year–has immediately changed the conversation.
The obvious question that arises when you debate which tactic should get primacy–sanctions or sabotage–is: Why are they even in competition if we can do both? The best answer to that question is another question: What happens if the Treasury Department catches an entity funneling money through American banks to the Iranian project? Should Treasury announce it, open an investigation, and blacklist the company? Or should the government assume plugging that particular leak wouldn’t be worth letting Iran know that we know–and perhaps there is an opportunity for sabotage?
Noonan seems to favor the former:
“If we’re serious about enforcing economic sanctions, then we should act like we’re serious. How to accomplish that would vary on a case by case basis (dealing with a German bank would differ from a Chinese one, for example). Economic sanctions are designed to suffocate governments into compliance. It would seem obvious that for this strategy to work, you’d have to cut off as much of their oxygen supply as possible.”
In this way, however, sanctions can be a double-edged sword. Yet so can a worm like Stuxnet. “The code is out there now, for Stuxnet,” Thomas Joscelyn, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), said. “People can see the code, you can go get the code, you can investigate it. That type of thing can then be used against us and our facilities very easily, potentially.”
Joscelyn made the comments to Big Peace after joining Rodney Joffe, Michael Ledeen, and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) on a panel Dec. 10. Joffe is a cybersecurity expert with NeuStar, Ledeen is freedom scholar at FDD, and Hoekstra is the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel was organized by FDD as part of this year’s Washington Forum.
Referring to comments Joffe made during the panel indicating that the bevy of current cyberthreats are only beginning to be taken seriously, Joscelyn suggested that we would be vulnerable if something like Stuxnet were turned back on us. He added:
“It doesn’t mean you don’t do it. You just have to be aware of the downsides. But I think that the greater point that Rodney Joffe was making is that our infrastructure right now is not set up to really counter any of this stuff. We’re really counting on playing defense, with our government bureaucracy. So to the extent that they can foresee this stuff, we’re OK. But to the extent that they can’t, then we’re obviously not OK.”
Joffe did, however, also display confidence in America’s ability fight fire with fire, on the cyberfront. “I’m quite encouraged by the level of knowledge I’ve discovered,” Joffe said.
We do not know the source of Stuxnet, but as Jonathan Last explains in The Weekly Standard, it could not be the work of amateurs, which should be a heartening sign.
The administration is, however, attempting to signal its comprehension of the cyberwarfare landscape–if not with its dismissive reaction to the WikiLeaks scandal than with its acceptance of the idea that the best defense is a good offense. Here is the key paragraph along those lines from Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn’s recent Foreign Affairs essay:
“In cyberspace, the offense has the upper hand. The Internet was designed to be collaborative and rapidly expandable and to have low barriers to technological innovation; security and identity management were lower priorities. For these structural reasons, the U.S. government’s ability to defend its networks always lags behind its adversaries’ ability to exploit U.S. networks’ weaknesses. Adept programmers will find vulnerabilities and overcome security measures put in place to prevent intrusions. In an offense-dominant environment, a fortress mentality will not work. The United States cannot retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls or it will risk being overrun.”
Another form of sabotage would be to help Iran’s homegrown pro-democracy Green Movement. President Obama was criticized widely for not publicly supporting the Green Movement’s wave of protests after the 2009 presidential election. But Ledeen said that the movement has been around for decades–and our record of lending them meaningful support is dismal.
“Revolutions are not acts of despair,” Ledeen said. “Revolution is an act of hope.” Therefore, what will help the “Greens” is not more misery but rather public and private support that gives them confidence.
Noonan agreed. He said that when it comes to undermining the Iranian leadership, the Obama administration should cast a wide net. Sanctions and sabotage can both buy time, but neither is a silver bullet. He continued:
“Iranian revolutionaries need a Berlin airlift style influx of techno tools, mostly communications centered. That means encrypted laptops, satellite phones, burst transmitters, and radio broadcast equipment that can punch into the rural areas, where the government enjoys the most support. Authoritarian regimes rely on media control and manipulation to survive. We have the power to help the Green Movement break free from that stranglehold. Regime change is the only surefire way to kill the nuclear program.”
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