Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Israel 'waging covert war on Iran'


Updated January 17, 2012 13:16:28
A report released this week claims agents from Israel's spy agency Mossad posed as CIA officers in 2008 in order to recruit people to carry out attacks and assassinations against Iranian officials.
Iran says it has arrested several suspects over the death of a leading nuclear scientist who was killed when assassins on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his car as it drove through Tehran's rush hour traffic last week.
It was the fifth such attack targeting Iran's scientists in the past two years.
Now analyst Mark Perry, writing in Foreign Policy Magazine, says it is clear Israel is waging a covert war against Iran.
Mr Perry says while he does not have confirmation Israel is behind the attacks, he is sure it is responsible.
"There's no question that it's accurate. I wouldn't have published it otherwise," he told AM.
"I have two requirements for publishing an article of this kind, which took me 18 months to nail down. And the first requirement is that it be right, and the second that it not damage my country. And not necessarily in that order."
He says while Iran has many enemies in the region, the sophistication of the attacks excludes the majority of them.
"If you take a look at these assassinations of Iranian scientists, they're very sophisticated operations," he said.
"And it seems unlikely that those kinds of sophisticated operations, using magnetic bombs and not IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) for instance, whether that's within the capabilities of Iranian dissident groups.
"It's not. This smacks of a much larger expertise and sophistication that only a few intelligence agencies would have."
He also says it is unlikely the US was directly involved in any of the attacks.
"The information that I've gotten directly is that the United States does not assassinate foreign officials of a foreign government," he said.
"That there's no evidence that we [the US] are behind this... We're co-operating on information gathering operations, I don't think there's any question on that, and Israel's a strategic ally, but it's a violation of the law for us to do assassinations."
He says targeting civilians is beyond what the US is willing to do in its war on terrorism.
"Now people will say, 'Well of course you do, take a look at the drone program'," he said.
"And I've asked that question of my sources, and I said, 'What about the drone program?' And they said, 'Listen Mark, we're conducting a war on terrorism - but to target Iranian officials and nuclear scientists, it's beyond the pale. We don't do it'."

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