[DEBATE] : U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site

[Miles Teg]

U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site By DAVID E. 
SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last 
year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on 
Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized 
new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to 
develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign 
officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had 
decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, 
or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the 
White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But 
the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request 
to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where 
the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, 
and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the 
tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up 
intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new 
American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a 
major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to 
President-elect Barack Obama.

This account of the expanded American covert program and the Bush 
administration’s efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on 
Iran emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and 
former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear 
inspectors and European and Israeli officials. None would speak on the 
record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence 
developed on Iran.

Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this 
account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and 
administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.

The interviews also suggest that while Mr. Bush was extensively briefed 
on options for an overt American attack on Iran’s facilities, he never 
instructed the Pentagon to move beyond contingency planning, even during 
the final year of his presidency, contrary to what some critics have 
suggested.

The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top 
administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that 
any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the 
expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran’s nuclear effort 
further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the 
possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in 
which America’s 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved.

Instead, Mr. Bush embraced more intensive covert operations actions 
aimed at Iran, the interviews show, having concluded that the sanctions 
imposed by the United States and its allies were failing to slow the 
uranium enrichment efforts. Those covert operations, and the question of 
whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack 
on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Mr. Obama.

The covert American program, started in early 2008, includes renewed 
American efforts to penetrate Iran’s nuclear supply chain abroad, along 
with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine electrical 
systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies. It is 
aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel 
and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon.

Knowledge of the program has been closely held, yet inside the Bush 
administration some officials are skeptical about its chances of 
success, arguing that past efforts to undermine Iran’s nuclear program 
have been detected by the Iranians and have only delayed, not derailed, 
their drive to unlock the secrets of uranium enrichment.

Late last year, international inspectors estimated that Iran had 3,800 
centrifuges spinning, but American intelligence officials now estimate 
that the figure is 4,000 to 5,000, enough to produce about one weapon’s 
worth of uranium every eight months or so.

While declining to be specific, one American official dismissed the 
latest covert operations against Iran as “science experiments.” One 
senior intelligence official argued that as Mr. Bush prepared to leave 
office, the Iranians were already so close to achieving a weapons 
capacity that they were unlikely to be stopped.

Others disagreed, making the point that the Israelis would not have been 
dissuaded from conducting an attack if they believed that the American 
effort was unlikely to prove effective.

Since his election on Nov. 4, Mr. Obama has been extensively briefed on 
the American actions in Iran, though his transition aides have refused 
to comment on the issue.

Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama must decide whether the covert 
actions begun by Mr. Bush are worth the risks of disrupting what he has 
pledged will be a more active diplomatic effort to engage with Iran.

Either course could carry risks for Mr. Obama. An inherited intelligence 
or military mission that went wrong could backfire, as happened to 
President Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. But a decision 
to pull back on operations aimed at Iran could leave Mr. Obama 
vulnerable to charges that he is allowing Iran to speed ahead toward a 
nuclear capacity, one that could change the contours of power in the 
Middle East.

An Intelligence Conflict

Israel’s effort to obtain the weapons, refueling capacity and permission 
to fly over Iraq for an attack on Iran grew out of its disbelief and 
anger at an American intelligence assessment completed in late 2007 that 
concluded that Iran had effectively suspended its development of nuclear 
weapons four years earlier.

That conclusion also stunned Mr. Bush’s national security team — and Mr. 
Bush himself, who was deeply suspicious of the conclusion, according to 
officials who discussed it with him.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate, was based on a trove 
of Iranian reports obtained by penetrating Iran’s computer networks.

Those reports indicated that Iranian engineers had been ordered to halt 
development of a nuclear warhead in 2003, even while they continued to 
speed ahead in enriching uranium, the most difficult obstacle to 
building a weapon.

The “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate, which were 
publicly released, emphasized the suspension of the weapons work.

The public version made only glancing reference to evidence described at 
great length in the 140-page classified version of the assessment: the 
suspicion that Iran had 10 or 15 other nuclear-related facilities, never 
opened to international inspectors, where enrichment activity, weapons 
work or the manufacturing of centrifuges might be taking place.

The Israelis responded angrily and rebutted the American report, 
providing American intelligence officials and Adm. Mike Mullen, the 
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with evidence that they said 
indicated that the Iranians were still working on a weapon.

While the Americans were not convinced that the Iranian weapons 
development was continuing, the Israelis were not the only ones highly 
critical of the United States report. Secretary Gates, a former director 
of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the report had presented the 
evidence poorly, underemphasizing the importance of Iran’s enrichment 
activity and overemphasizing the suspension of a weapons-design effort 
that could easily be turned back on.

In an interview, Mr. Gates said that in his whole career he had never 
seen “an N.I.E. that had such an impact on U.S. diplomacy,” because 
“people figured, well, the military option is now off the table.”

Prime Minister Olmert came to the same conclusion. He had previously 
expected, according to several Americans and Israeli officials, that Mr. 
Bush would deal with Iran’s nuclear program before he left office. 
“Now,” said one American official who bore the brunt of Israel’s 
reaction, “they didn’t believe he would.”

Attack Planning

Early in 2008, the Israeli government signaled that it might be 
preparing to take matters into its own hands. In a series of meetings, 
Israeli officials asked Washington for a new generation of powerful 
bunker-busters, far more capable of blowing up a deep underground plant 
than anything in Israel’s arsenal of conventional weapons. They asked 
for refueling equipment that would allow their aircraft to reach Iran 
and return to Israel. And they asked for the right to fly over Iraq.

Mr. Bush deflected the first two requests, pushing the issue off, but 
“we said ‘hell no’ to the overflights,” one of his top aides said. At 
the White House and the Pentagon, there was widespread concern that a 
political uproar in Iraq about the use of its American-controlled 
airspace could result in the expulsion of American forces from the country.

The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor, declined 
several requests over the past four weeks to be interviewed about 
Israel’s efforts to obtain the weapons from Washington, saying through 
aides that he was too busy.

Last June, the Israelis conducted an exercise over the Mediterranean Sea 
that appeared to be a dry run for an attack on the enrichment plant at 
Natanz. When the exercise was analyzed at the Pentagon, officials 
concluded that the distances flown almost exactly equaled the distance 
between Israel and the Iranian nuclear site.

“This really spooked a lot of people,” one White House official said. 
White House officials discussed the possibility that the Israelis would 
fly over Iraq without American permission. In that case, would the 
American military be ordered to shoot them down? If the United States 
did not interfere to stop an Israeli attack, would the Bush 
administration be accused of being complicit in it?

Admiral Mullen, traveling to Israel in early July on a previously 
scheduled trip, questioned Israeli officials about their intentions. His 
Israeli counterpart, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, argued that an aerial 
attack could set Iran’s program back by two or three years, according to 
officials familiar with the exchange. The American estimates at the time 
were far more conservative.

Yet by the time Admiral Mullen made his visit, Israeli officials appear 
to have concluded that without American help, they were not yet capable 
of hitting the site effectively enough to strike a decisive blow against 
the Iranian program.

The United States did give Israel one item on its shopping list: 
high-powered radar, called the X-Band, to detect any Iranian missile 
launchings. It was the only element in the Israeli request that could be 
used solely for defense, not offense.

Mr. Gates’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said last week that Mr. Gates — 
whom Mr. Obama is retaining as defense secretary — believed that “a 
potential strike on the Iranian facilities is not something that we or 
anyone else should be pursuing at this time.”

A New Covert Push

Throughout 2008, the Bush administration insisted that it had a plan to 
deal with the Iranians: applying overwhelming financial pressure that 
would persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear program, as foreign 
enterprises like the French company Total pulled out of Iranian oil 
projects, European banks cut financing, and trade credits were squeezed.

But the Iranians were making uranium faster than the sanctions were 
making progress. As Mr. Bush realized that the sanctions he had pressed 
for were inadequate and his military options untenable, he turned to the 
C.I.A. His hope, several people involved in the program said, was to 
create some leverage against the Iranians, by setting back their nuclear 
program while sanctions continued and, more recently, oil prices dropped 
precipitously.

There were two specific objectives: to slow progress at Natanz and other 
known and suspected nuclear facilities, and keep the pressure on a 
little-known Iranian professor named Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a scientist 
described in classified portions of American intelligence reports as 
deeply involved in an effort to design a nuclear warhead for Iran.

Past American-led efforts aimed at Natanz had yielded little result. 
Several years ago, foreign intelligence services tinkered with 
individual power units that Iran bought in Turkey to drive its 
centrifuges, the floor-to-ceiling silvery tubes that spin at the speed 
of sound, enriching uranium for use in power stations or, with 
additional enrichment, nuclear weapons.

A number of centrifuges blew up, prompting public declarations of 
sabotage by Iranian officials. An engineer in Switzerland, who worked 
with the Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer Abdul Qadeer Khan, had been 
“turned” by American intelligence officials and helped them slip faulty 
technology into parts bought by the Iranians.

What Mr. Bush authorized, and informed a narrow group of Congressional 
leaders about, was a far broader effort, aimed at the entire industrial 
infrastructure that supports the Iranian nuclear program. Some of the 
efforts focused on ways to destabilize the centrifuges. The details are 
closely held, for obvious reasons, by American officials. One official, 
however, said, “It was not until the last year that they got really 
imaginative about what one could do to screw up the system.”

Then, he cautioned, “none of these are game-changers,” meaning that the 
efforts would not necessarily cripple the Iranian program. Others in the 
administration strongly disagree.

In the end, success or failure may come down to how much pressure can be 
brought to bear on Mr. Fakrizadeh, whom the 2007 National Intelligence 
Estimate identifies, in its classified sections, as the manager of 
Project 110 and Project 111. According to a presentation by the chief 
inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency, those were the 
names for two Iranian efforts that appeared to be dedicated to designing 
a warhead and making it work with an Iranian missile. Iranian officials 
say the projects are a fiction, made up by the United States.

While the international agency readily concedes that the evidence about 
the two projects remains murky, one of the documents it briefly 
displayed at a meeting of the agency’s member countries in Vienna last 
year, from Mr. Fakrizadeh’s projects, showed the chronology of a missile 
launching, ending with a warhead exploding about 650 yards above ground 
— approximately the altitude from which the bomb dropped on Hiroshima 
was detonated.

The exact status of Mr. Fakrizadeh’s projects today is unclear. While 
the National Intelligence Estimate reported that activity on Projects 
110 and 111 had been halted, the fear among intelligence agencies is 
that if the weapons design projects are turned back on, will they know?

David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York 
Times. Reporting for this article was developed in the course of 
research for “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the 
Challenges to American Power,” to be published Tuesday by Harmony Books.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Compan

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