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Iran: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid (#5 in a series)

Jul 17, 2020 10:00 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Iran’s intelligence forces have broken down in the face of a series of devastating explosions.

The story is here:

What the world is witnessing right now is someone hitting Iranian nuclear and conventional weapons and IRGC facilities practically at will.

Iran is facing a total intelligence breakdown.

With another explosion on Thursday night, reportedly at an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility, the question is not only how anyone has pulled up to seven attacks off in around two weeks, but how has the Islamic Republic repeatedly failed to stop them….

In general, Iranian counterintelligence is known as performing at a much higher level than most Israeli adversaries. Sometimes they falsely announce arrests of Mossad agents who are just political opposition members, but sometimes they can flush out spies at a professional level closer to the world’s top powers.

Until Israel’s January 2018 operation seizing Iran’s nuclear secrets, Iranian territory was thought of as much harder to penetrate than Syrian territory, where Israel has admitted to thousands of intelligence and airstrike operations.

In the days of Meir Dagan, a score of attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists were attributed to the Mossad….

To the extent that these are cyber-attacks, it might be more understandable that Tehran has caught no one and stopped nothing. Explosions perpetrated through a cyber-attack could have been pre-planted months or even years ago to be set off now.

But even in the cyber arena, US and Israeli officials have been warning that after the 2010 Stuxnet attack, the regime heavily improved as a cyber power.

However, what we appear to be witnessing are the limits of a second-tier counterintelligence force. Up against a premier intelligence or cyber power, Iran is apparently near defenseless…

Iran has been unable even to conclude which of the attacks on its facilities were the result of cyberattacks and which were caused by bombs placed inside military targets. It continues to insist that it does not know, a full two weeks after the most important attack, at Natanz, whether it was a Stuxnet-like cyberattack, as many Western experts now believe (or as they now say, it “was bigger than Stuxnet”), or a huge bomb placed near a gas pipe in the building by Iranian agents of Israel. Nor have the Iranians been able to satisfactorily explain the other six attacks that came in rapid and frightening succession. In every case they have at first minimized the attack’s destructive force, misidentified the source of the explosion (lots of gas tanks were supposedly leaking), and misstated, or passed over in silence, the method used – that is, a kinetic or a cyber attack.

The Israelis are running rings around Iran’s counterintelligence. Imagine the agents they must have deep within Iran’s counterintelligence, to have known just how most devastatingly to attack the new centrifuge plant at Natanz, and the ballistic missile factory at Khojir, where top-secret work was going on which included the preparation of nuclear warheads for intermediate-range ballistic missiles. And who helped the Israelis identify the other, seemingly innocuous civilian sites, some of which may in fact have been military facilities, that Israel struck with such devastating effect?

Think, too, of Iran’s intelligence donnybrook when it failed to protect the records of its nuclear program. Iranian agents had to have identified for Mossad the nondescript warehouse where the records of Iran’s nuclear project were hidden, information that led to the Israelis seizing 55,000 documents and 183 CDs detailing Iran’s nuclear program, in the middle of the night, in the middle of Tehran, working furiously to open dozens of safes with blowtorches, knowing they had to be well out of there before 7 a.m., when Iranian employees arrived. Iran still has not figured out how the Israelis managed to carry off all that top secret cargo, or how they got themselves, and that enormous cache of material, safely out of Iran and back to Israel. But Iranian agents working with Israel– possibly anti-regime Iranians — were certainly involved. And not one has yet been caught.

Israel’s spectacular cyberwarriors have proven themselves to be among the best in the business, fully the equal of those in the U.S., Russia, and China. Were I advising the Iranians, I would tell them to take their licks, not even think of trying to retaliate, and be afraid, very afraid.

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Filed Under: Featured, Hugh Fitzgerald, Iran, Israel Tagged With: Natanz


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Comments

  1. andrew mckendrick says

    Jul 17, 2020 at 10:30 am

    From bellicose to lachrymose!

  2. Charlie in NY says

    Jul 17, 2020 at 11:51 am

    There’s a strange symmetry going on. All Iran needs to do to rejoin the world community is to renounce violence for good and live peacefully in the region – something it refuses to do. All Palestinians need to do to have the state (they pretend to) want is to renounce violence – something they too cannot bring themselves to do.

    Both look to the West to allow them to carry on their self-defeating policies. Recently, I came across this worrying article. Sadly, it has the ring of truth.

    https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/iran-lawfare-europe/

    • mortimer says

      Jul 17, 2020 at 1:54 pm

      Islam cannot renounce violence. 64% of the Koran is about the need to fight and subjugate the dirty kufaar.

      • ronald says

        Jul 18, 2020 at 2:55 am

        Right

  3. mortimer says

    Jul 17, 2020 at 1:58 pm

    During the time when everyone is wearing a mask, it is opportune to plant bombs all over Iran. A reign of sabotage throughout Iran could force the army to take over and end the mullahocracy.

  4. gravenimage says

    Jul 17, 2020 at 10:13 pm

    Iran: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid (#5 in a series)
    …………

    Their nuclear program sounds as though it is literally imploding..or exploding…

    • James Lincoln says

      Jul 18, 2020 at 9:01 am

      GREAT!

  5. OLD GUY says

    Jul 18, 2020 at 1:34 pm

    Islam can not renounce violence, it is the “religion” of violence, hate, murder and rape. The men and women that are pulling this off are truly heroic, god bless them and keep them safe.

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