“Industrial sabotage is a way to stop the program, without military action, without fingerprints on the operation, and really, it is ideal, if it works,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation and now Senior Fellow in Non-Proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.<\/p>\n
Sources in several countries involved told CBS News<\/strong> that the intelligence operatives involved include former Russian nuclear scientists and Iranians living abroad. Operatives have sold Iran components with flaws that are difficult to detect, making them unstable or unusable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u00a0One of the good upshots of the war on terror, reputedly, is the CIA’s resurgent ability to actually do things <\/em>on the ground.\u00a0 They apparently may<\/strike> still stink at drawing high-level conclusions, but as long as the nuts ‘n bolts get done, it’s a start…<\/p>\n“One way to sabotage a program is to make minor modifications in some of the components Iran obtains on the black market, and because it’s a black market \u2026 you don’t know exactly who you are dealing with,” Fitzpatrick says.<\/p>\n
Senior government representatives, who spoke to CBS News<\/strong> on condition that neither they nor their country be identified, pointed to the case of the exploding power supplies. Installed at the pilot enrichment facility at Natanz in April 2006 as Iran was first attempting to enrich uranium, the power supplies, used to regulate voltaage current, blew up, destroying 50 centrifuges. The head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency, Vice-President Gholamreza Aghazadeh said in January of this year that the equipment had been “manipulated.”<\/p>\nThere is other evidence, CBS News<\/strong> was told, that some of the technical difficulties Iran is having in consistently running its centrifuges are the results of a concerted effort at industrial sabotage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI’m going to watch for the first lefty to condemn this American interference.\u00a0 I fully expect at least one leftyblogger to call it a civil liberties issue.\u00a0 I may even take up a pool as to which one.<\/p>\n
I don’t think I’ll have to wait long, in any case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US, say some commentators, might be engaged in a black-bag operation to sabotage the Iranian nuke program. “Industrial sabotage is a way to stop the program, without military action, without fingerprints on the operation, and really, it is ideal, if it works,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}