Covert war against Iran; blast seen as setback to Tehran’s missile program: reports

Many former U.S. intelligence officials and Iran experts believe last month’s explosion at a military base near Tehran was part of a covert effort by the U.S., Israel and other states to disable Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, The Los Angeles Times reported late Sunday.

The huge explosion ripped through the Revolutionary Guard Corps base on Nov. 12, leveling most of the buildings and killing 17 people, including a founder of Iran’s ballistic missile program, General Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam.

The newspaper said the goal of the covert effort is to derail Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapons capability and to stave off an Israeli or U.S. airstrike to eliminate or lessen the threat.

“It looks like the 21st century form of war,” the paper quotes Patrick Clawson, who directs the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as saying. “It does appear that there is a campaign of assassinations and cyber war, as well as the semi-acknowledged campaign of sabotage.”

Any such operation would be highly classified, and those who might know are not talking, the report said.

Iran’s military said on Sunday it had shot down a U.S. drone aircraft in eastern Iran.

"Our air defense and electronic warfare units managed to identify and shoot down an advanced unmanned spy aircraft − an RQ-170 − after it briefly violated the eastern border territory," Fars said, quoting an unnamed military source.

The Fars news agency, which has close ties to the Revolutionary Guards responsible for Iran’s air defense and ballistic missile systems, said the drone had made an incursion into Iran’s eastern airspace.

“The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the Iranian armed forces,” the source added.

Iran warned that shooting down U.S. drones, in response to U.S. violation of its airspace, would be carried out outside Iran’s borders, Fars reported.

For years, the United States and its allies have sought to hinder Iran’s weapons programs by secretly supplying faulty parts, plans or software, The Times said. No proof of sabotage has emerged, but Iran's nuclear program clearly has hit obstacles that thwarted progress in recent years.

“We definitely are doing that,” the report quotes Art Keller, a former CIA case officer who worked on Iran, as saying. “It’s pretty much the stated mission of the (CIA’s) counter-proliferation division to do what it takes to slow Iran’s weapons of mass destruction program.”

Many Western experts are convinced that American and Israeli engineers secretly fed the Stuxnet computer worm into Iran’s nuclear program in 2010, The Los Angeles Times pointed out.

The virus reportedly caused centrifuges used to enrich uranium to spin out of control and shatter, the paper said.

Neither the U.S. nor the Israeli government has acknowledged any role in the apparent cyber-attack, the report noted.

American and Israeli intelligence officials and missile technology experts believe that last month’s huge explosion was a major setback for Iran’s most advanced long-range missile program, according a report published by the New York Times on Sunday.

The current and former officials said surveillance photos showed that the Iranian base was a central testing center for advanced solid-fuel missiles. Such missiles can be launched almost instantly, making them useful to Iran as a potential deterrent against pre-emptive attacks by Israel or the United States, and they are also better suited than older liquid-fuel designs for carrying warheads long distances, according to the report.

Both American and Israeli officials, in discussing the explosion in recent days, showed little curiosity about its cause.

“Anything that buys us time and delays the day when the Iranians might be able to mount a nuclear weapon on an accurate missile is a small victory,” one Western intelligence official who has been deeply involved in countering the Iranian nuclear program was quoted by the New York Times as saying. “At this point, we’ll take whatever we can get, however it happens.”

The report mentioned that the missiles powered by solid fuels rather than liquids have no need for trucks to fill them with volatile fluids, and can be fired on short notice, making them hard for other nations to destroy before they are launched. That would add to Iran’s ability to protect its nuclear sites from an Israeli strike—a subject of renewed debate in Israel in recent weeks—because Iran could threaten to retaliate before many of its missiles were struck. Solid-fuel missiles are also easier to hide. For those reasons, modern militaries rely on solid fuels for their deadliest missiles.

In a recent report, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London called Iran’s shift to solid-fuel engines “a turning point” with “profound strategic implications” because the technology also brings Tehran closer to its goal of making long-range missiles.