As the author states, forget about Israel being able to successfully bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities. However with the use of computer virus, assassinations and other shadowy enterprises, they might be able to slow down the progress until a new and saner regime comes to power in Tehran.
by Michael Burleigh
The two assassins arrived from nowhere as their victim was driving home with his wife. Trapped inside his car, he was hopelessly vulnerable as their motorcycles pulled alongside.
He would just have had time to notice their blacked-out visors before they opened fire, emptying round after round into his chest.
Nuclear scientist Darioush Rezaei died immediately. His wife was critically wounded and still in hospital days after the attack in north eastern Iran.
The hitmen? They vanished into the traffic fumes of the night.
This is a story of ruthless men playing for the highest stakes imaginable. Of secret agents from Israel’s intelligence service Mossad who will stop at nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Should Iran succeed, Israel would be desperately vulnerable to attack — not least because Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to erase the ‘Zionist entity’ from the map.
There’s also the danger of nuclear proliferation among Israel’s Arab neighbours. If Ahmadinejad gets hold of a nuclear weapon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others would immediately seek to do so as well, to prevent Iran from bullying them with its new-found power.
Israel’s response to the threat has been deadly.
Rezaei was assassinated because he was an expert on neutron transport, one of the key processes in making nuclear weapons. He joins a long list of Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers who are being systematically targeted by killers apparently dispatched by the Israeli intelligence agency.
While it is unlikely Mossad would send its own assassins into such a high-risk environment, they will have recruited locals and given them intensive training.
Last November, two senior Iranian scientists were attacked in different parts of the capital. Both victims were driving to work when men on motorbikes attached magnetised bombs to their cars as they were stuck in traffic.
These small explosives are known as ‘shaped charges’, designed to focus the blast at its target as a stream of molten metal travelling at 29,000 miles per hour. One bomb killed nuclear engineer Majid Shahriari, while missing his wife in the passenger seat
In another part of town, nuclear engineer Dr Fereydoon Abbasi narrowly survived an identical attack. Dr Abbasi is an expert in the separation of isotopes, a crucial process in the manufacture of enriched uranium fuel, which has uses in both nuclear reactors and weapons.In January, it was the turn of 50-year-old Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, who was killed near his north Tehran home by a remotely detonated bomb built into a motorcycle parked on the route
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This cyber-warfare, capable of disabling any number of computer operating systems controlling utilities, food distribution, air traffic and so on, is how major wars will be fought in future.
Experts say only one nation is capable of developing such a sophisticated weapon: the U.S., although the Russians recently paralysed Estonia through a computer-borne attack.
So far, the combination of assassination and sabotage has enabled Meir Degan, the outgoing head of Mossad, and several of his predecessors, to take a more relaxed view of when Iran will achieve nuclear weapons capability.
Ultimately, they know that if all else fails, they can try to bomb the Iranian nuclear sites — with or without American help.
Israel has undertaken such daring air raids before, but because of the deep underground nature of the nuclear sites and the huge distances between them, the operation would be fraught with risk.
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