Obama order sped up wave of cyberattacks against Iran
Internal Obama administration estimates say sabotage program
slowed Iran's progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear
weapons by 18 months to 2 years
Iranian Presidential Website
/
Reuters, file
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility on April 8, 2008 file photo.
updated
6/1/2012 3:55:50 AM ET
WASHINGTON — From
his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered
increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run
Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding
America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants
in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush
administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of
the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a
programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and
sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who
began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States
and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of
the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and
the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E.
Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the
progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to
members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.
MAY 30, 2012
In this exclusive interview Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke with NBC’s Richard Engel about Iran and their determination to become a military power with a nuclear weapon.
Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and
offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that
the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz
plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another
after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after
Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000
of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify
uranium.
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili,
offers an exclusive glimpse of a nuclear program he says is under covert
attack. NBC's Richard Engel reports
This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the
Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months
with current and former American, European and Israeli officials
involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None
would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly
classified, and parts of it continue to this day.
These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the
sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the
ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration
estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but
some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical,
noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the
country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional
enrichment.
Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in
dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes
that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003,
though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.
Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by
Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year,
the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and
Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense
Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our
enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant
evidence that it has begun to strike back.
The United States government only recently acknowledged developing
cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been
reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members
of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run
air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya
last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and
sophistication.
MAY 26, 2012
United Nations weapons inspectors have reportedly discovered traces of radio activity inside a nuclear bunker in Iran. Former U.S. ambassador Mark Ginsberg joins MSNBC to talk about the situation.
It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used
cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving,
with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by
bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code
itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey
Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that
have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in
April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the
code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about
who was responsible.
A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of
another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have
attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information
from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five
years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic
Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was
responsible for the Flame attack.
Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room
meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he
was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his
predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of
intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade.
He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that
it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited
circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to
justify their own attacks.
“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said.
Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a
“grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still
discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping
Iran, the United States had no other choice.
If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for
sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a
conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread
throughout the region.
A Bush Initiative
The impetus for Olympic Games dates from 2006, when
President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At
the time, America’s European allies were divided about the cost that
imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having
falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in
Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another
nation’s nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his
vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching
uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been
exposed just three years before.
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of
the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000
centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose
fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian
nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials. They
feared that the fuel could be used in another way besides providing
power: to create a stockpile that could later be enriched to bomb-grade
material if the Iranians made a political decision to do so.
Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney
urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear
facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon.
Several times, the administration reviewed military options and
concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war,
and would have uncertain results.
For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into
Iran’s systems — even tinkering with imported power supplies so that
they would blow up — but the sabotage had had relatively little effect.
General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation
inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for
many of America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in
presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security
team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United
States had designed before.
The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer
controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz
plant off from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically
separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would
invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges.
Diplomatic talks aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions have ended with no major breakthrough. NBC’s Ali Arouzi reports.
The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code
called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were
made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map
their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical
blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control
the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The
connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood,
efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.
Eventually the beacon would have to “phone home” — literally send a
message back to the headquarters of the National Security Agency that
would describe the structure and daily rhythms of the enrichment plant.
Expectations for the plan were low; one participant said the goal was
simply to “throw a little sand in the gears” and buy some time. Mr. Bush
was skeptical, but lacking other options, he authorized the effort.
Breakthrough, Aided by Israel
It took months for the beacons to do their work and report
home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the
controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected
to the centrifuges deep underground.
Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American
intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the
enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from
within.
The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two
imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical
expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep
intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making
the cyberattack a success. But American officials had another interest,
to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own pre-emptive strike
against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would
have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working. The only
way to convince them, several officials said in interviews, was to have
them deeply involved in every aspect of the program.
Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the
Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under
enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s
P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling
fuel-making technology on the black market. Fortunately for the United
States, it already owned some P-1s, thanks to the Libyan dictator, Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi.
When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he
turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear
ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in
Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic
Games borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,”
essentially building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test
over several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep
even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot.
Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug
invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending
instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their
delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After
several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bush’s
term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table
in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon.
The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s
underground enrichment plant.
“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,”
Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to
describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is
the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to
effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or
hack into it to steal data.
“Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” he said.
Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United
States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers
and others — both spies and unwitting accomplices — with physical access
to the plant. “That was our holy grail,” one of the architects of the
plan said. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t
think much about the thumb drive in their hand.”
In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the
first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods
were developed to deliver the malicious code.
The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning
out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause,
according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The
thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad
engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early
attack said.
The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly
alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks,
recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the
Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating
normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one
American official said.
Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy
Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown
so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to
sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.
“The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were
stupid, which is what happened,” the participant in the attacks said.
When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole
“stands” that linked 164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all
of them. “They overreacted,” one official said. “We soon discovered they
fired people.”
MAY 24, 2012
Sanctions have taken a toll on the Iranian economy. The government is reluctant to admit it. Inflation is high. The number of young unemployed is a growing concern. NBC’s Ali Arouzi reports.
Imagery recovered by nuclear inspectors from cameras at Natanz —
which the nuclear agency uses to keep track of what happens between
visits — showed the results. There was some evidence of wreckage, but it
was clear that the Iranians had also carted away centrifuges that had
previously appeared to be working well.
But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had
been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before
his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified
programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama
took Mr. Bush’s advice.
The Stuxnet Surprise
Mr. Obama came to office with an interest in cyberissues,
but he had discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats
to personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical
grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study
on how to improve America’s defenses and announced it with great fanfare
in the East Room.
What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of
cyberwar. The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the
Situation Room, often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant
foldout schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr.
Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks —
certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the
next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had
been tried previously.
“From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in
slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major
decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say
that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception
to that rule.”
But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a
new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that
the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had
broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell
to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General
Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael
J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr.
Obama and Mr. Biden.
An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an
engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the
engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the
American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment
had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly,
the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to
ordinary computer users.
“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the
briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that
activity.”
Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of
questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The
answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the
Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”
In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a
particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss,
they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is
unclear who introduced the programming error.
The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games
was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself
“in the wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure
out its purpose.
“I don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group
that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered
that the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting
the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite
harder and reduced Iran’s oil revenues.
Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges.
Olympic Games was still on.
A Weapon’s Uncertain Future
American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the
focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been
overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will
remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same
techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea.
Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on
the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the
world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead
with,” one former intelligence official said.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using
— and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s
infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more
vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a
matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of
the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against
Iran.
This article is adapted from “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s
Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” to be published by
Crown on Tuesday.
Andrew Kaczynski 
McKay Coppins 
