Meanwhile, back on the…ON THE IRANIAN FRONT...
Prev.Refs.:
Gen. William ODOM, one of the few true players to accurately predict the collapse of the Soviet Union (and on-the-record at that),* once argued to me, during the Fall of 1988, that even with the detritus of the Iran/contra scandal, the twenty-five years of stability proffered under the Shah’s dictatorial rule was worth it.
We are now entering our 34th year under Revolutionary Guard and Mullah RULE. At what price for the next twenty-five?
Just about every March, almost like clockwork (since 2006 – ck), sometime BKNT Member P-Sy HERSH has predicted/revealed SpecOPS, and tribal training, etc., in Iran. He was accurate on most of those occasions--some contemptuously confirmed by your herein affiant (US/1)--but the Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis and Russians apparently hadn’t signed off with the Israelis until late last year.
Go figure.
So, fasten your parachute fighter-straps; and sit on your helmut…](* - Hai, Fukuyama-san?)
BKNT--PLAYING With FIRE, Part - #2 --Fla. Rev. T. JONES TELCON w/CG John ALLEN, C/ISAF & USFOR-A : Let the QUORAN Burn Countdown Begin--LD-e/C
According the inimitable Eric Husher, a retired intelligence analyst who chased SCUDs during Desert Storm, ran itnelligence collections operations in the Balkans and is today prolific contributor on various online private intelligence discussion groups,
“Yes, the subject of Azerbaijan has come up in a previous discussion, based around a rumor that Azerbaijan would allow Israeli warplanes to use an airbase to conduct their strikes in Iran (which was assessed as a fairly ludicrous proposition). Yes, there is a lot of Israeli influence in Azerbaijan, and they are investing in a drone manufacturing plant there, but that isn't the same as allowing warplanes to use an airfield, and nobody in Azerbaijan wants to face off against a very angry Iranian Army...," Husher recently wrote.
"That said, 'ignoring' Israeli agents passing over the Azerbaijan border into Iran is quite conceivable, and it is certainly well known that the Iranians have any number of agents lurking in Azerbaijan, along with Russians, Americans, Turks, Georgians and who knows who else (from all the tales I have heard lately, Baku sounds a lot like Vienna during the Cold War). In such a circumstance, the likelihood of Israel pulling off anything so 'non-clandestine' as a warplane 'pit-stop' by a squadron or two in Azerbaijan and keeping it quiet approaches the zero-point..."
But if certain policy changes have been initiated secretly, as several BlackNET Members are reporting, then there can be little doubt the Law of intended consequences will likely set-in, counter-intuitively-wise?
According to intelligence and Special Forces sources, Azerbaijan has indeed agreed to provide a covert fighter landing base to the state of Israel, along with search and rescue helicopter support, despite all the public proclamations from officials in the U.S. Israel and Azerbaijan.
The key element in this unfolding operation, one source said, has not even been mentioned in even the most public of official denunciations and denials. "The Russians," this senior intelligence "consumer" said Friday. The have agreed to 'play neutral'--to remain neutral militarily."'
And the one country with the most to lose should the Law of unintended consequences go into effect? The Georgian Republic--practically the birth-place of unintended consequences in this Century.
Various break-away Georgian Provinces are the Russian Bear's expected quid-pro-quot for secretly signing off on the planned Israeli air-strikes, a second, though now retired, senior intelligence official source postulated Friday.
[The BlackNET will have much more upcoming later on this element of the still unfolding drama of "The Great Game--21st Century Version.2012"].
All which makes everything from President Obama's mellifluous microphone malfunction mistake with the Russian president this March on down to the anonymous, if irrelevant, erroneous finger-pointing over who leaked the Israeli-Azeri air basing agreement.
This coordinated campaign is simultaneously both sabre-rattling and a Persian-version of Miranda Rights (i.e.'FREEZE--CIA/JSOC, put down your nuclear weapons, or else!')
A virtual Wurlitzer of flying disinformation, flaming Cyber-Information-Operations and counter-intuitive Py-OPS? The case can equally be made, if one changes their rose-colored contact lenses.
“There are Israeli's with brains ....“ wrote one recently retired European analyst and information operations officer with tours in Afghanistan and Sudan, and an active private intelligence discussion group participant. He immediately pointed to UNPRECEDENTED PUBLIC statements from two recently retired Israeli intelligence chiefs look less becoming in such a light:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/world/middleeast/yuval-diskin-criticizes-israel-government-on-iran-nuclear-threat.html ....
“I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” said Yuval Diskin, who stepped down last May after six years running the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the F.B.I.
“I have observed them from up close,” Mr. Diskin added. “I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.” Echoing Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, Mr. Diskin also said that the government was “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
“Where they turn to the — pardon the phrase — ignorant public and say that if Israel acts, there won’t be a nuclear bomb — that is the wrong part of the sentence, a mirage,” Mr. Diskin said at a community forum in Kfar Saba, a central Israeli city of 80,000. “A lot of experts have long been saying that one of the results of an Israeli attack on Iran could be a dramatic acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program. What the Iranians prefer to do today slowly and quietly, they would have the legitimacy to do quickly and in a much shorter time.”
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The prolific Pierluigi Paganini, a leading cyber-security expert and writer based in Italy, points to the little-known precedents to intensifying US - Iran cyber-battles:
"Let’s also consider that in the past malware have been already used for sabotage purpose and intelligence purposes, in the 1980s, the United States had considerable success installing viruses inside Soviet military-industrial structure, a process still continuing with China.
“'We put in bugs inside the Soviet computers to feedback satellite information that had been ‘leeched’ off hard drives, in the Soviet Defense Ministry and others,' said a former U.S. intelligence official.
"Also during Desert Storm, the CIA and the British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) have used malware agents to attack Iraq’s computers deploying a Command & Control server in the enemy infrastructures. CIA operatives, working in Jordan, infiltrated bugs into hardware smuggled across the border and into Baghdad. In that occasion the compromised devices weren’t used due the beginning US air strikes that destroyed Saddam’s command and control network, including the buildings where the infected computer hardware was deployed.
[The Russian Republic has another plan, apparently, (mitigating manufactured microphone malfunctions not withstanding)—which proves the key point new Member Piefluigi makes above, if counter-intuitively--in the ‘Great Game’ of what Comrade STALIN used to call NORTH IRAN, currently named AZERBAIJAN. MUCH More To COME on this POINT. –US/1]
Richard Clarke, the former NSC counter-terrorism tzar under two presidents, and one of the earliest advocates of cyber-security at the White House level, recently told Smithsonian magazine, that he too believes the US is already at war, Cyber-WAR, with the Islamic Republic of Iran:
“I think it’s pretty clear that the United States government did the Stuxnet attack,” he said calmly.
This is a fairly astonishing statement from someone in his position.
“Alone or with Israel?” I asked.
“I think there was some minor Israeli role in it. Israel might have provided a test bed, for example. But I think that the U.S. government did the attack and I think that the attack proved what I was saying in the book [which came out before the attack was known], which is that you can cause real devices—real hardware in the world, in real space, not cyberspace—to blow up.”
As Italian cyber-security expert Paganini put it rather somberly last week, "the war is begun..."
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Cyber Attacks on Iran's ministry of science network
Posted on 29. Apr, 2012 by siavash
Sharg newspaper in Iran has reported that hackers have attacked the computers of Iran's ministry of science.
It is possible that the sites were hacked due to the fact that the ministry has joint projects with the defense ministry and that the "hackers intended to hack into the main servers to get information and cause damage, said an informed source at the Ministry of Science.
Last week Iran has confirmed that a cyber-attack hit its Oil Ministry data systems. It claims there was no damage, but its website is inaccessible.
Iranian officials last month said the country is strengthening its cyber power through a newly-formed Supreme Council of Cyberspace following the Stuxnet attack on its nuclear facilities last year, widely attributed to Israel and the United States.
Iran has been able to identify the source of a recently reported cyber-attack on its oil industry, an official at the Islamic Republic's Oil Ministry said on Saturday, adding that a computer virus attempted to "steal and damage data."(FNA)
Iran’s Deputy Oil Minister Hamdollah Mohammadnejad says the target of and the perpetrators behind the recent cyber attack on the ministry have been identified.
“In general, the attack was in the form of a virus that aimed to steal and damage data,” the official said, adding that those who designed the malware “pursued certain objectives.”
He said after the malware attack was discovered the ministry’s cyber team immediately established an expert committee and disconnected the internal structure’s access to internet.
http://www.cyberwarzone.com/cyberwarfare/cyber-attacks-irans-ministry-science-network?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&goback=.gmp_4217323.gde_4217323_member_111376720
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New US Stealth Fighters Now at Iran's Back Door
America's most sophisticated stealth jet fighters have been quietly deployed to an allied base less than 200 miles from Iran's mainland, according to an industry report, but the Air Force adamantly denied the jets' presence is a threat to the Middle East nation.
Multiple stealth F-22 Raptors, which have never been combat-tested, are in hangars at the United Arab Emirates' Al Dafra Air Base, just a short hop over the Persian Gulf from Iran's southern border, the trade publication Aviation Week reported.
Air Force spokesperson Lt. Col. John Dorrian would not confirm the exact location of the F-22s, but told ABC News they had been deployed to a base in Southwest Asia -- a region that includes the UAE. Dorrian also stressed that the F-22s were simply taking part in a scheduled deployment and are "not a threat to Iran."
"This is a very normal deployment to strengthen military relationships, promote sovereign and regional security, improve combined tactical air operations and enhance interoperability of forces," Dorrian said.
The F-22 has only been in the UAE once before for training missions in 2009 with "coalition partners."
Dorrian declined to say what the Raptors' mission was in the region this time around or how many planes had been deployed, citing operational security. However, Dorrian said that because of the F-22's next-generation capabilities, any number of planes deployed to the region is "significant."
Though the F-22 has been officially combat operational since December 2005, no planes from the Air Force fleet -- which are made by defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin and cost an estimated $79 billion -- have seen combat. The plane was not used in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the U.S.-led no-fly mission over Libya. The Air Force has said the sophisticated jets simply haven't been needed yet.
But Jeff Babione, Lockheed Martin's vice president for the F-22 program, told ABC News last year that the plane was "absolutely" suited for taking on more sophisticated adversaries and could be used in deep penetration strike missions in well-defended combat zones inside places like North Korea or Iran.
Air Force: F-22s Ready for War, Despite Mystery Problem
The new deployment comes in the midst of the Air Forces' continuing battle with a rare but sustained oxygen problem plaguing the F-22. Since 2008, nearly two dozen pilots have reported experiencing "hypoxia-like symptoms" in mid-air. The problem got so bad that the Air Force grounded the planes for nearly five months last year in hopes of fixing the problem but never could.
But despite the ongoing issues, the Air Force says the F-22 is ready for war, should it be called.
"If our nation needs a capability to enter contested air space, to deal with air forces that are trying to deny our forces the ability to maneuver without prejudice on the ground, it will be the F-22 that takes on that mission," Air Force Maj. Gen. Noel Jones, Director of Operational Capability Requirements, said at a special briefing at the Pentagon in March. "It can do that right now and is able to do that without hesitation."
The Al Dafra base is approximately 800 miles from the Iranian capital of Tehran, well within the range of the F-22, which can "supercruise" at one and a half times the speed of sound.
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- Sunday, April 29, 2012
Are Israeli politicians and intelligence professionals playing ‘good cop, bad cop’ with the mullahs of Iran?
By Ira Sharkansky
JERUSALEM — The continued variety of comments about Iran from the governing summit of Israel says something about this country and its society.The problem: one cannot be sure what it says.
Last month, the former chief of Mossad spoke publicly on Amrican media.
Meir Dagan has been described as “hard-charging” and “stops at nothing.” For more than eight years, Dagan made full use of those qualities as chief of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, where he focused on keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. When that job ended, Dagan did something unheard of for an ex-Mossad chief: he spoke out publicly, voicing opposition to Israel launching preemptive airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities anytime soon.
Dagan believes the Iranian regime is a rational one and even its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who has called for Israel to be annihilated – acts in a somewhat rational way when it comes to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”
Last week, we heard from the senior commander of the IDF, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz: “Israel’s military chief said he does not believe Iranwill decide to build an atomic bomb and called its leaders “very rational“.”
More recently, the former head of the Shin Bet intelligence organization, Yuval Diskin, expressed himself. ”Referring to the leaders as ‘our two messiahs,’ a likely reference to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Diskin said ‘they are not fit to hold the steering-wheel of power. I have no faith in the current leadership in Israel and its ability to conduct a war.’”
Regarding their handling of the Iranian nuclear issue, Diskin said the leadership “presents a false view to the public on the Iranian bomb, as though acting against Iran would prevent a nuclear bomb. But attacking Iran will encourage them to develop a bomb all the faster.”"
What we see here is the current head of the military and the recent heads of the two other major security arms of the Israeli state speaking out in direct contrast to the two political figures–the Prime Minister and Minister of Defense–who hold the power to decide about an attack on Iran. Netanyahu and Barak have threatened to attack if sanctions do not curb Iran’s nuclear program..
From the Defense Minister in an independence Day speech: “The chances that, at this pressure level, Iran will respond to international demands to irreversibly stop its program seem low. I would be happy to be proven wrong.”
One of Netanyahu’s recent remarks: “(Sanctions) better work soon. (They) are certainly taking a bite out of the Iranian economy, (but) they haven’t rolled back the Iranian program — or even stopped it — by one iota . . .I hope that changes, but so far, I can tell you, the centrifuges are spinning . . . they were spinning before the talks began recently with Iran, they were spinning during the talks, they’re spinning as we speak.”
Aides to Gantz, Netanyahu and Barak have sought to soften the differences between them. Israeli security personnel have, for some time now, expressed their reservations about an attack on Iran. A former head of military intelligence has said, “you hear different music from the political level and the professional level.”
The US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, said about Gantz’s statement that he views Iran as rational and unlikely to construct a nuclear weapon, “I would hope he’s correct and he knows something more than I do.”
Comments were sharpest with respect to Diskin. Sources close to Netanyahu and Barak accused Diskin of operating from personal and political motives, and expressing his frustration at not being appointed to head the Mossad after retiring from the Shin Bet. One of the ministers in Netanyahu’s government said that his comments were “crude and inappropriate.” Another minister said that Diskin’s comments could damage the country’s standing. A Likud back bencher said that the Knesset should consider a law to silence former senior officials, “who are as quiet as fish when in office, and immediately upon retirement speak nonsense.”
Confusion? Disinformation? Or the reality of Israel’s unfettered society, where the most senior professional soldier and recently retired heads of super secret security organizations feel free to speak out against political leaders on one of the country’s most sensitive policy matters, and do so in a way that–in Diskin’s case–goes beyond the boundaries of ridicule?
Democracy, governmental chaos, or just Israel’s style of democracy?
Could it all be an orchestrated campaign, in cooperation with the United States?
In one fanciful hypothesis, Netanyahu and Barak are playing the bad cops, making threats to keep up the pressure on Iran to give up the nuclear option in the face of existing sanctions and the threat of military action. Dagan, Gantz, and Diskin are playing the good cops, expressing calm rationality in order to give Iranians reasons for avoiding their own “go to hell” option of building a weapon insofar as the views at the Israeli summit represented by Dagan, Gantz, and Diskin suggest that Israel will not attack.
By this view, the bad copy/good cop scenario is meant to both pressure Iran, and to convince its government to surrender their nuclear weapon ambitions to sanctions, without the need for an attack.
In contrast is is a less complex assessment that the comments from Dagan, Gantz, and Diskin are poorly timed, lessen Israel’s threat, and may encourage Iranians to feel that they can continue with their program to develop nuclear weapons without risking an attack on their country.
Certainty is not part of this analysis.
We may be dealing with Israeli creativity.
Or Israeli madness.
Or Israeli chaos.
*
Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University. He may be contacted at ira.sharkansky@sdjewishworld.com
Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University. He may be contacted at ira.sharkansky@sdjewishworld.com
[ed.note: 21st Century Miranda-zade (Farsi for son-of) rights have been rendered, for what remains of the dignity, if not soveignty, of the Persopolian/Persian Empire. Anybody miss the Shah?
As noted in an earlier missive, Sic Semper Iranis…?