Israel launches covert war to disrupt Iran’s nuke program

TEL AVIV: Israel has launched a covert war in an effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, a British daily ph quoted US intelligence sources as saying.

According to the article published on Tuesday, sabotage, front companies and double agents, as well as the assassination of top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations, were being used to interrupt the program.

“Disruption is designed to slow progress on the program, done in such a way that they don’t realize what’s happening. You are never going to stop it,” a former CIA officer on Iran told the newspaper.

“The goal is delay, delay, and delay until you can come up with some other solution or approach. We certainly don’t want the current Iranian government to have those weapons.

“It’s a good policy, short of taking them out militarily, which probably carries unacceptable risks.”

“With cooperation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear program and in sabotaging the Iranian nuclear supply chain,” she said. “As US-Israeli relations are bound to come under strain over the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran, and as the political atmosphere grows in complexity, an intensification of Israeli covert activity against Iran is likely to result.”

The paper went on to cite a report that the Mossad was responsible for the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, a top nuclear scientist at Iran’s Isfahan uranium plant, who reportedly died from gas poisoning in 2007. It also mentioned other recent deaths of figures connected to Iran’s nuclear program that have reportedly been the result of Israeli hits.

“Israel has shown no hesitation in assassinating weapons scientists for hostile regimes in the past,” the paper quoted an anonymous European intelligence official as saying. “They did it with Iraq and they will do it with Iran when they can.”

Mossad and Western intelligence operations have also infiltrated the Iranian nuclear program, “bought” information from prominent atomic scientists and leaked details to its allies, the media and United Nations atomic agency inspectors, the paper went on to say.

source : jang.com.pk