“They’ve long been an important part of the
complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The
Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the
Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the
Monterey Institute of International Studies. He
added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired
senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian
issue, and that some apparently came from the
enrichment program.
“I have no specific knowledge,” Dr. Cohen said of
Israel and the Stuxnet worm. “But I see a strong
Israeli signature and think that the centrifuge
knowledge was critical. ”
Another clue involves the United States. It
obtained a cache of P-1 ’s after Libya gave up its
nuclear program in late 2003, and the machines
were sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee, another arm of the Energy
Department.
By early 2004, a variety of federal and private
nuclear experts assembled by the Central
Intelligence Agency were calling for the United
States to build a secret plant where scientists
could set up the P-1 ’s and study their
vulnerabilities. “The notion of a test bed was really
pushed,” a participant at the C.I.A. meeting
recalled.
The resulting plant, nuclear experts said last week,
may also have played a role in Stuxnet testing.
But the United States and its allies ran into the
same problem the Iranians have grappled with:
the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When
the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its
P-1 ’s to England, in hopes of working with the
British on a program of general P-1 testing, they
stumbled, according to nuclear experts.
“They failed hopelessly,” one recalled, saying that
the machines proved too crude and
temperamental to spin properly.
Dr. Cohen said his sources told him that Israel
succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering
the centrifuge technology. And the American
expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used
machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness
of Stuxnet.
The expert added that Israel worked in
collaboration with the United States in targeting
Iran, but that Washington was eager for
“ plausible deniability.”
In November, the Iranian president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, broke the country’s silence about
the worm’s impact on its enrichment program,
saying a cyberattack had caused “minor
problems with some of our centrifuges.”
Fortunately, he added, “our experts discovered
it.”
The most detailed portrait of the damage comes
from the Institute for Science and International
Security, a private group in Washington. Last
month, it issued a lengthy Stuxnet report that said
Iran ’s P-1 machines at Natanz suffered a series of
failures in mid- to late 2009 that culminated in
technicians taking 984 machines out of action.
The report called the failures “a major problem”
and identified Stuxnet as the likely culprit.
Stuxnet is not the only blow to Iran. Sanctions
have hurt its effort to build more advanced (and
less temperamental) centrifuges. And last
January, and again in November, two scientists
who were believed to be central to the nuclear
program were killed in Tehran.
The man widely believed to be responsible for
much of Iran ’s program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a
college professor, has been hidden away by the
Iranians, who know he is high on the target list.
Publicly, Israeli officials make no explicit ties
between Stuxnet and Iran ’s problems. But in
recent weeks, they have given revised and
surprisingly upbeat assessments of Tehran’s
nuclear status.
“A number of technological challenges and
difficulties” have beset Iran’s program, Moshe
Yaalon, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, told
Israeli public radio late last month.
The troubles, he added, “have postponed the
timetable.”
Source: Http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1
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