Um alto funcionário do setor nuclear brasileiro revelou-me, no ano passado, o teor de suas respostas a consultas de um pesquisador brasileiro em relações internacionais, consultando-me sobre um ou outro ponto de seu interesse. Desconheço se suas respostas foram publicadas, onde o foram, se eventualmente o foram e quanto disso tornou-se público.
Como o assunto parece ter evoluído, e como o governo brasileiro atual parece ter assumido outras atitudes -- embora os envolvidos, do governo passado, ainda teimem em defender suas posições --, o funcionário em questão autorizou-me a publicar suas respostas, enviadas em confiança.
Creio que elas refletem um conhecimento mais técnico, mas também político, das implicações do envolvimento do governo anterior com o governo iraniano e permitem detectar certas contradições nas posições de analistas (jornalistas, acadêmicos), que continuam a manter ilusões sobre a natureza exata do chamado "acordo iraniano".
A questão do programa nuclear iraniano
Funcionário governamental brasileiro do setor nuclear
1) Quais são os pontos positivos do acordo assinado entre Brasil, Irã e Turquia? E os negativos?
Em primeiro lugar, é preciso que fique bem claro que não se trata de um acordo, como a imprensa vem falando (alguns até falaram de “tratado internacional”, numa incompreensão manifesta do que sejam acordos ou tratados internacionais). Formalmente, se trata de uma simples declaração, como aliás expressamente mencionado no ato assinado pelos três ministros das relações exteriores: “Tendo-se reunido em Teerã em 17 de maio, os mandatários abaixo assinados acordaram a seguinte Declaração”. É surpreendente, assim, que jornalistas e analistas políticos continuem a falar em acordo. Pela sua forma e, sobretudo, pelo seu teor trata-se, pura e simplesmente, de uma espécie de “nota trilateral unilateral”, entendendo-se por isso uma declaração que os três ministros oferecem ao mundo num gesto de boa vontade, que serve mais para enganar os incautos, e todos aqueles propensos a acreditar em tudo o que certos dirigentes proclamam, do que para resolver de fato a questão.
Como ponto positivo, não vejo absolutamente nenhum, pois para isso teria de ter havido progressos em relação aos entendimentos que os países 5+1 vinham mantendo desde muito tempo com o Irã, e até aqui sem qualquer resultado prático. A declaração – que diz claramente que se trata de um “ponto de partida”, mera peça de papel destinada a criar a “oportunidade de começar um processo prospectivo, que criará uma atmosfera positiva, construtiva, não-confrontacional” – representa, num certo sentido, um retrocesso, já que ela remete vagamente a novas etapas de consultas e negociações para o que é um processo já suficientemente mapeado em seus contornos básicos: a necessidade de o Irã submeter o seu programa nuclear, em sua integralidade, aos controles da AIEA. Ora, o pretenso “acordo”, de fato uma declaração puramente retórica, em nenhum momento toca nessa questão crucial.
A declaração apresenta, portanto, diversos pontos negativos; pode-se dizer que ela constitui uma completa e rotunda manifestação de fracasso: o Irã continua a tergiversar em torno de seu programa nuclear, e os dois países que desempenharam esse patético papel de patrocinadores de uma operação “engana-ingênuos” se prestaram a ser manipulados por um regime que vem se colocando, por suas próprias ações, à margem da comunidade internacional. O que é preciso acrescentar, também, é que jornalistas brasileiros não sabem ler declarações, e muito menos interpretá-las.
2) Como tal negociação se insere na política externa do governo Lula?
Falar de negociação seria dar muita relevância ao que constitui, tão simplesmente, mais uma operação de pirotecnia externa de um governo que tem uma necessidade obsessiva de buscar os holofotes da mídia mundial, tão somente para construir uma falsa imagem de líder internacional para o presidente Lula. Como no caso de outras operações do gênero, de tão triste registro nos anais da diplomacia brasileira, se trata de uma cortina de fumaça em torno do nada, pois nenhum resultado concreto foi obtido, a não ser a vaga promessa de troca de combustível por urânio enriquecido, a ser hipoteticamente detalhada em eventuais negociações ulteriores.
Assim ocorreu com outras proezas antecipadas por esse governo – ingresso do Brasil no Conselho de Segurança, integração da América do Sul e conclusão das negociações comerciais multilaterais – que da mesma forma redundaram no mais completo fracasso. É lamentável ver o Brasil democrático dar seu apoio a regimes autoritários na região, como o dos irmãos Castro (aliás, um dos últimos totalitarismos remanescentes no planeta), à ditadura nascente do bufão de Caracas, para nada dizer da inacreditável solidariedade com o personalismo caudilhista de Evo Morales, que expropria investimentos brasileiros na Bolívia e é pelo menos conivente com o envio de toneladas de coca de seu país ao Brasil; sem mencionar Sudão e Coréia do Norte.
De forma geral, este governo está pronto a dar sua aprovação a qualquer gesto gratuito de ofensa aos Estados Unidos por parte dos piores regimes do planeta, por que isto faz parte de sua natureza primária, de sua essência. Não se trata do antiamericanismo “normal” do Itamaraty, que sempre foi naturalmente antiamericano, mas moderadamente; se trata do antiamericanismo exacerbado do PT e de seus patéticos seguidores no Itamaraty. Tem sido assim na região, onde sistematicamente estão sendo criados organismos que excluem expressamente os EUA de qualquer papel significativo na cooperação regional; agora se pretende também estender as mesmas posições no plano universal, em iniciativas de tal dimensão megalomaníaca que não encontram paralelos na história precedente de nossa diplomacia.
3) Por que os EUA se mostraram insatisfeitos com tal acordo? Quais os interesses secundários por de trás?
Os Estados Unidos de Obama, depois de alguma ilusão com a retórica aparentemente amistosa do Itamaraty, se deram conta do verdadeiro sentido da ação diplomática do Brasil. Em primeiro lugar, não cabe falar de “acordo”, como já explicitado acima. A declaração de Teheran, imediatamente saudada pelos seus próprios promotores como uma vitória da diplomacia – e inacreditavelmente acolhida pela imprensa mundial como uma nova era nas relações mundiais de poder, como sendo a da emergência das potências médias – teve seu conteúdo corretamente avaliado pelas principais potências ocidentais, que focaram o que ficou obscurecido no pretenso “acordo”. O essencial do dossiê iraniano se refere ao programa nuclear desse país, que as principais potências garantidoras do TNP suspeitam de ter objetivos militares, questão ainda não suficientemente esclarecida. Mas o fato, corretamente percebido pelos EUA e demais países, é que o pretenso “acordo” de Teheran não toca absolutamente nesses aspectos, e não oferece nenhuma garantia quanto ao que essas potências garantidoras do TNP demandam desde o início: a supervisão integral das atividades de enriquecimento de urânio do Irã pela AIEA, de conformidade com as disposições aplicáveis em casos similares.
Se por “interesses secundários” se entende a preocupação dessas potências com a proliferação nuclear, pode-se dizer que, efetivamente, esses são os interesses por trás das pressões que são feitas desde muitos anos em relação às atividades nucleares do Irã. Conhecendo-se o perfil dos dirigentes políticos iranianos, pode-se dizer que esses interesses, primários, no caso, e essas preocupações são perfeitamente legítimos e justificados.
4) Não é legítimo o enriquecimento de urânio iraniana para fins pacíficos? Existem violações ao Tratado de Não-Proliferação Nuclear para tamanho receio dos EUA e outros países?
Há uma pressuposição ingênua – aliás comprada pelo seu valor face pelo Brasil e por grande parte da imprensa brasileira – de que o programa iraniano se destina a fins inteiramente pacíficos. Se este é o caso, por que então o país persa se empenha, desde longos anos, num jogo de gato e rato com a AIEA? A violações começam justamente pela indisponibilidade de submeter o conjunto de suas instalações, equipamentos e estoques de material aos controles da AIEA. Não por outra razão o Conselho de Segurança da ONU já aprovou resoluções tendentes a enquadrar o Irã no regime normal de não-proliferação, mas o país se recusa a colaborar com os procedimentos aplicáveis ao caso. Atividades de enriquecimento legítimo não precisam recorrer aos subterfúgios que caracterizam o Irã.
5) Existem de fato duas linhas de política externa diferentes postas em contraposição? A do dá ou desce e a da negociação?
Os termos usados pelo presidente são tão vulgares, e chulos, que não merecem qualquer comentário. A única coisa que poderia ser dita, justamente, é que as potências garantidoras do TNP vêm tentando a via da negociação, até agora sem sucesso, desde o início desse processo. O entendimento primário que o presidente mantém sobre procedimentos de política externa o fazem interpretar o mundo com essa visão maniqueísta, que na verdade apenas revela o antiamericanismo elementar que caracteriza toda a sua diplomacia.
6) A imagem do Estado brasileiro realmente se desgastou com o episódio? A ONU não sinalizou que aprova a iniciativa trilateral?
Não propriamente a do Estado brasileiro, mas certamente a da diplomacia de Lula, crescentemente identificada com o apoio insensato a regimes pouco palatáveis em diversas regiões do globo. O ridículo ativismo bolivariano no caso patético de Honduras – onde rompemos diversas tradições de nossa diplomacia, a começar pelo princípio da não-intervenção – e a inaceitável solidariedade com a ditadura castrista – em face das flagrantes violações aos direitos humanos que ocorrem num dos dois últimos totalitarismos comunistas ainda remanescentes no mundo – são apenas dois exemplos de uma diplomacia deplorável para os padrões profissionais a que estávamos acostumados no Itamaraty. Isso é o resultado do seqüestro do Itamaraty pelos interesses partidários do PT e seus instintos primários, em nítida contradição com os interesses permanentes do Brasil.
Quanto à ONU, ela ainda não se pronunciou formalmente sobre o pretenso “acordo” de Teheran. O que ocorreu foi um apoio inicial do Secretário Geral da ONU, Ban Ki Moon, provavelmente mal assessorado, ao princípio das negociações com o Irã, o que aliás os países vem conduzindo desde o início, contra a manifesta má vontade do regime iraniano.
7) Não se está dando mais importância para os agentes envolvidos do que para o próprio teor do acordo? No que se refere ao conteúdo do documento: ele é eficiente tendo em vista que apenas uma quantidade limitada de urânio será enriquecida na Turquia? E o resto que continua no território iraniano?
Esse é um ponto importante, mas os observadores ainda não parecem ter se dado conta desse aspecto: está sendo mais importância à ação diplomática do Brasil e da Turquia – que são meros intermediários para uma determinada finalidade – do que o conteúdo mesmo do assunto em causa: o programa nuclear do Irã, que resta largamente obscurecido pelas suas manobras diversionistas e obstrucionistas. É inacreditável que a diplomacia brasileira tenha se prestado ao papel de linha auxiliar de um regime que já demonstrou seu nítido desprezo pelos direitos humanos, pelas liberdades democráticas e pelo cumprimento de suas obrigações internacionais.
Quanto à operação em si, é claro que desde a oferta feita em outubro de 2009, o Irã acumulou uma quantidade superior de material nuclear do que aquela que seria supostamente colocada sob a responsabilidade da Turquia, segundo modalidades pouco claras, aliás, o que permitiria ao Irã retroceder nos supostos compromissos assumidos ao abrigo de uma declaração vaga e desprovida de qualquer mecanismo de verificação. Toda a operação, aliás, revela um amadorismo diplomático que não combina absolutamente com as tradições diplomáticas do Brasil.
8) Quais são as perspectivas futuras desta questão geopolítica?
Difícil dizer, nesta fase, mas é evidente que o Irã construiu, para si mesmo, um difícil contencioso com a comunidade internacional que pode ter desdobramentos imprevisíveis nos meses à frente. De imediato, o Irã está encaminhando o Oriente Médio em direção de uma competição nuclear que é notoriamente prejudicial aos objetivos de paz e de segurança internacionais, que devem ser defendidos por todos os países comprometidos com princípios basilares da Carta da ONU. É lamentável que a diplomacia brasileira não esteja atentando para esses aspectos potencialmente desestabilizadores da aventura nuclear iraniana, e que ela continue a emprestar seu apoio a um regime problemático desse ponto de vista.
9) Israel atacou uma embarcação com fins humanitários em alto mar. Como isto se encaixa à discussão? Fala-se que Israel possuem diversas bombas atômicas. Por que também não passa pelas mesmas pressões que o Irã? Caso seja por que não assinou o Tratado de Não-Proliferação, o que ocorreria caso o Irã denunciasse este mesmo Tratado?
O infeliz episódio do ataque israelense a barcos de uma pretensa “flotilha da liberdade” – na verdade, de militantes pró-Hamas, ou manipulados por esse movimento terrorista – não tem nada a ver com o dossiê nuclear iraniano, a não ser muito indiretamente e circunstancialmente. Israel possui, obviamente, uma capacidade nuclear, ainda que seus contornos exatos permaneçam indefinidos. Não foi Israel, contudo, que prometeu obliterar do mapa do Oriente Médio um outro Estado e sim o regime iraniano. A capacitação nuclear israelense tem, nitidamente, propósitos dissuasivos e defensivos, e Israel jamais ameaçou qualquer país vizinho com uma guerra nuclear; apenas alertou que se defenderia por todos os meios disponíveis de um ataque que colocaria em risco sua existência como Estado independente e pacífico. Não sendo signatário do TNP, Israel não tem, formalmente, de cumprir com suas obrigações, às quais se obrigou o Irã (e não vem cumprindo).
O Irã, como qualquer outro Estado soberano da comunidade internacional, tem todo o direito de denunciar e de retirar-se de qualquer tratado a que tenha aposto sua assinatura, inclusive o TNP e seu estatuto de membro da AIEA. A Coréia do Norte fez justamente isso, e se transformou em pária da comunidade internacional. Com o Irã ocorreria provavelmente o mesmo, com o elemento adicional disso servir para deslanchar uma provável corrida armamentista na região, com possíveis desdobramentos nucleares (legais e ilegais), que não contribuiriam em nada para os objetivos de estabilidade e de paz na região e de segurança estratégica, num contexto mais amplo. Todos os Estados responsáveis e os países amantes da paz deveriam estar conscientes desse fato. É lamentável que a atual diplomacia partidária do Brasil não atente para esse lado da questão: ou é muita ingenuidade, ou é má-fé; em ambos os casos, é deplorável do ponto de vista de nossas tradições diplomáticas. Como diplomata profissional, tenho vergonha de nossa atual diplomacia; acho que ela vai deixar uma herança muito negativa nos anos à frente. Será muito difícil reconstruir a confiança nas características impecáveis de nossa diplomacia antes desse governo. Na prática, o PT, com a conivência de alguns chefes do Itamaraty, a colocou ao duplo serviço de seus obscuros interesses partidários e aos de uma ideologia anacrônica.
3 de junho de 2010.
Mostrando postagens com marcador programa nuclear iraniano. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador programa nuclear iraniano. Mostrar todas as postagens
sábado, 23 de abril de 2011
domingo, 6 de março de 2011
Novas formas da guerra: sabotagem informatica
O artigo abaixo apenas confirma o que já se sabia: israelenses e americanos fizeram um ataque direto ao programa nuclear iraniano, mas usando simplesmente um virus de computador programado para desorganizar o processo de enriquecimento de urânio nas centrais iranianas. Parece que foi tão eficiente quanto um ataque aéreo com mísseis...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
US and Israel were behind Stuxnet claims researcher
BBC News Technology, 4 March 2011
Iran's Bushehr reactor is believed to have been on of the intended targets for Stuxnet.
Israel and the United States created the Stuxnet worm to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme, a leading security expert has claimed.
Ralph Langner told a conference in California that the malicious software was designed to cripple systems that could help build an Iranian bomb.
Mr Langner was one of the first researchers to show how Stuxnet could take control of industrial equipment.
It is widely believed that its target was machinery used to enrich uranium.
Speaking at the TED conference in Long Beach, California, Mr Langner said: "My opinion is that Mossad [Israel's intelligence agency] is involved."
However he speculated that Israel was not the main driver behind the creation of Stuxnet.
"There is only one leading source, and that is the United States," said Mr Langner.
In a recent report on Stuxnet, the security firm Symantec said that it would have taken a team of between five and 10 developers, six months to create the worm.
Mr Langner said that the project would have required "inside information", so detailed that "they probably knew the shoe size of the operator."
Stuxnet first came to light in July 2010. Nearly 60% of reported infections were inside Iran.
Damaging centrifuges
The worm targets industrial control systems, known as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), made by Siemens.
While PLCs are used to control a wide variety of automated systems, it is believed that it was those inside Iran's nuclear facilities that were the intended target.
Analysts who have examined the Stuxnet code say it could have been used to damage centrifuges which play a crucial role in the process of enriching uranium for both nuclear power and weapons.
The United States and Israel have led an international campaign to halt Iran's nuclear programme, however there is no hard evidence to link either country to the creation of Stuxnet.
Earlier in the week Iran's Interior Ministry denied that Stuxnet had been responsible for a shutdown at the country's Bushehr nuclear reactor.
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency showed that Russian engineers working at the plant had removed 163 fuel rods.
Iranian sources said that the action was taken as a result of problems with the rods, rather than Stuxnet.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
US and Israel were behind Stuxnet claims researcher
BBC News Technology, 4 March 2011
Iran's Bushehr reactor is believed to have been on of the intended targets for Stuxnet.
Israel and the United States created the Stuxnet worm to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme, a leading security expert has claimed.
Ralph Langner told a conference in California that the malicious software was designed to cripple systems that could help build an Iranian bomb.
Mr Langner was one of the first researchers to show how Stuxnet could take control of industrial equipment.
It is widely believed that its target was machinery used to enrich uranium.
Speaking at the TED conference in Long Beach, California, Mr Langner said: "My opinion is that Mossad [Israel's intelligence agency] is involved."
However he speculated that Israel was not the main driver behind the creation of Stuxnet.
"There is only one leading source, and that is the United States," said Mr Langner.
In a recent report on Stuxnet, the security firm Symantec said that it would have taken a team of between five and 10 developers, six months to create the worm.
Mr Langner said that the project would have required "inside information", so detailed that "they probably knew the shoe size of the operator."
Stuxnet first came to light in July 2010. Nearly 60% of reported infections were inside Iran.
Damaging centrifuges
The worm targets industrial control systems, known as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), made by Siemens.
While PLCs are used to control a wide variety of automated systems, it is believed that it was those inside Iran's nuclear facilities that were the intended target.
Analysts who have examined the Stuxnet code say it could have been used to damage centrifuges which play a crucial role in the process of enriching uranium for both nuclear power and weapons.
The United States and Israel have led an international campaign to halt Iran's nuclear programme, however there is no hard evidence to link either country to the creation of Stuxnet.
Earlier in the week Iran's Interior Ministry denied that Stuxnet had been responsible for a shutdown at the country's Bushehr nuclear reactor.
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency showed that Russian engineers working at the plant had removed 163 fuel rods.
Iranian sources said that the action was taken as a result of problems with the rods, rather than Stuxnet.
segunda-feira, 17 de janeiro de 2011
Israel-Iran: um virus programado como um ataque aereo
Provavelmente mais efetivo do que um ataque aéreo...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay
William J. Broad, John Markoff and David E. Sanger.
The New York Times, January 15, 2011
The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.
Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.
Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.
“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”
Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.
In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran’s ability to buy components and do business around the world.
The gruff Mr. Dagan, whose organization has been accused by Iran of being behind the deaths of several Iranian scientists, told the Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the cusp of success.
The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.
In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.
Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.
In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.
Seimens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.
The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.
The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.
“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.
Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it.
But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects. Mr. Obama’s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction, Gary Samore, sidestepped a Stuxnet question at a recent conference about Iran, but added with a smile: “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.”
In recent days, American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity have said in interviews that they believe Iran’s setbacks have been underreported. That may explain why Mrs. Clinton provided her public assessment while traveling in the Middle East last week.
By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.
The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.
Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.
Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.
For years, Washington’s approach to Tehran’s program has been one of attempting “to put time on the clock,” a senior administration official said, even while refusing to discuss Stuxnet. “And now, we have a bit more.”
Finding Weaknesses
Paranoia helped, as it turns out.
Years before the worm hit Iran, Washington had become deeply worried about the vulnerability of the millions of computers that run everything in the United States from bank transactions to the power grid.
Computers known as controllers run all kinds of industrial machinery. By early 2008, the Department of Homeland Security had teamed up with the Idaho National Laboratory to study a widely used Siemens controller known as P.C.S.-7, for Process Control System 7. Its complex software, called Step 7, can run whole symphonies of industrial instruments, sensors and machines.
The vulnerability of the controller to cyberattack was an open secret. In July 2008, the Idaho lab and Siemens teamed up on a PowerPoint presentation on the controller’s vulnerabilities that was made to a conference in Chicago at Navy Pier, a top tourist attraction.
“Goal is for attacker to gain control,” the July paper said in describing the many kinds of maneuvers that could exploit system holes. The paper was 62 pages long, including pictures of the controllers as they were examined and tested in Idaho.
In a statement on Friday, the Idaho National Laboratory confirmed that it formed a partnership with Siemens but said it was one of many with manufacturers to identify cybervulnerabilities. It argued that the report did not detail specific flaws that attackers could exploit. But it also said it could not comment on the laboratory’s classified missions, leaving unanswered the question of whether it passed what it learned about the Siemens systems to other parts of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
The presentation at the Chicago conference, which recently disappeared from a Siemens Web site, never discussed specific places where the machines were used.
But Washington knew. The controllers were critical to operations at Natanz, a sprawling enrichment site in the desert. “If you look for the weak links in the system,” said one former American official, “this one jumps out.”
Controllers, and the electrical regulators they run, became a focus of sanctions efforts. The trove of State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks describes urgent efforts in April 2009 to stop a shipment of Siemens controllers, contained in 111 boxes at the port of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They were headed for Iran, one cable said, and were meant to control “uranium enrichment cascades” — the term for groups of spinning centrifuges.
Subsequent cables showed that the United Arab Emirates blocked the transfer of the Siemens computers across the Strait of Hormuz to Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port.
Only months later, in June, Stuxnet began to pop up around the globe. The Symantec Corporation, a maker of computer security software and services based in Silicon Valley, snared it in a global malware collection system. The worm hit primarily inside Iran, Symantec reported, but also in time appeared in India, Indonesia and other countries.
But unlike most malware, it seemed to be doing little harm. It did not slow computer networks or wreak general havoc.
That deepened the mystery.
A ‘Dual Warhead’
No one was more intrigued than Mr. Langner, a former psychologist who runs a small computer security company in a suburb of Hamburg. Eager to design protective software for his clients, he had his five employees focus on picking apart the code and running it on the series of Siemens controllers neatly stacked in racks, their lights blinking.
He quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”
For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.
Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.
But as Mr. Langner kept peeling back the layers, he found more — what he calls the “dual warhead.” One part of the program is designed to lie dormant for long periods, then speed up the machines so that the spinning rotors in the centrifuges wobble and then destroy themselves. Another part, called a “man in the middle” in the computer world, sends out those false sensor signals to make the system believe everything is running smoothly. That prevents a safety system from kicking in, which would shut down the plant before it could self-destruct.
“Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept,” Mr. Langner later wrote. “It is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”
This was not the work of hackers, he quickly concluded. It had to be the work of someone who knew his way around the specific quirks of the Siemens controllers and had an intimate understanding of exactly how the Iranians had designed their enrichment operations.
In fact, the Americans and the Israelis had a pretty good idea.
Testing the Worm
Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to make sure the malicious software did its intended job.
The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.
The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.
How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.
“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.”
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay
William J. Broad, John Markoff and David E. Sanger.
The New York Times, January 15, 2011
The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.
Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.
Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.
“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”
Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.
In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran’s ability to buy components and do business around the world.
The gruff Mr. Dagan, whose organization has been accused by Iran of being behind the deaths of several Iranian scientists, told the Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the cusp of success.
The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.
In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.
Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.
In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.
Seimens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.
The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.
The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.
“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.
Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it.
But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects. Mr. Obama’s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction, Gary Samore, sidestepped a Stuxnet question at a recent conference about Iran, but added with a smile: “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.”
In recent days, American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity have said in interviews that they believe Iran’s setbacks have been underreported. That may explain why Mrs. Clinton provided her public assessment while traveling in the Middle East last week.
By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.
The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.
Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.
Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.
For years, Washington’s approach to Tehran’s program has been one of attempting “to put time on the clock,” a senior administration official said, even while refusing to discuss Stuxnet. “And now, we have a bit more.”
Finding Weaknesses
Paranoia helped, as it turns out.
Years before the worm hit Iran, Washington had become deeply worried about the vulnerability of the millions of computers that run everything in the United States from bank transactions to the power grid.
Computers known as controllers run all kinds of industrial machinery. By early 2008, the Department of Homeland Security had teamed up with the Idaho National Laboratory to study a widely used Siemens controller known as P.C.S.-7, for Process Control System 7. Its complex software, called Step 7, can run whole symphonies of industrial instruments, sensors and machines.
The vulnerability of the controller to cyberattack was an open secret. In July 2008, the Idaho lab and Siemens teamed up on a PowerPoint presentation on the controller’s vulnerabilities that was made to a conference in Chicago at Navy Pier, a top tourist attraction.
“Goal is for attacker to gain control,” the July paper said in describing the many kinds of maneuvers that could exploit system holes. The paper was 62 pages long, including pictures of the controllers as they were examined and tested in Idaho.
In a statement on Friday, the Idaho National Laboratory confirmed that it formed a partnership with Siemens but said it was one of many with manufacturers to identify cybervulnerabilities. It argued that the report did not detail specific flaws that attackers could exploit. But it also said it could not comment on the laboratory’s classified missions, leaving unanswered the question of whether it passed what it learned about the Siemens systems to other parts of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
The presentation at the Chicago conference, which recently disappeared from a Siemens Web site, never discussed specific places where the machines were used.
But Washington knew. The controllers were critical to operations at Natanz, a sprawling enrichment site in the desert. “If you look for the weak links in the system,” said one former American official, “this one jumps out.”
Controllers, and the electrical regulators they run, became a focus of sanctions efforts. The trove of State Department cables made public by WikiLeaks describes urgent efforts in April 2009 to stop a shipment of Siemens controllers, contained in 111 boxes at the port of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They were headed for Iran, one cable said, and were meant to control “uranium enrichment cascades” — the term for groups of spinning centrifuges.
Subsequent cables showed that the United Arab Emirates blocked the transfer of the Siemens computers across the Strait of Hormuz to Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port.
Only months later, in June, Stuxnet began to pop up around the globe. The Symantec Corporation, a maker of computer security software and services based in Silicon Valley, snared it in a global malware collection system. The worm hit primarily inside Iran, Symantec reported, but also in time appeared in India, Indonesia and other countries.
But unlike most malware, it seemed to be doing little harm. It did not slow computer networks or wreak general havoc.
That deepened the mystery.
A ‘Dual Warhead’
No one was more intrigued than Mr. Langner, a former psychologist who runs a small computer security company in a suburb of Hamburg. Eager to design protective software for his clients, he had his five employees focus on picking apart the code and running it on the series of Siemens controllers neatly stacked in racks, their lights blinking.
He quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”
For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.
Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.
But as Mr. Langner kept peeling back the layers, he found more — what he calls the “dual warhead.” One part of the program is designed to lie dormant for long periods, then speed up the machines so that the spinning rotors in the centrifuges wobble and then destroy themselves. Another part, called a “man in the middle” in the computer world, sends out those false sensor signals to make the system believe everything is running smoothly. That prevents a safety system from kicking in, which would shut down the plant before it could self-destruct.
“Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept,” Mr. Langner later wrote. “It is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”
This was not the work of hackers, he quickly concluded. It had to be the work of someone who knew his way around the specific quirks of the Siemens controllers and had an intimate understanding of exactly how the Iranians had designed their enrichment operations.
In fact, the Americans and the Israelis had a pretty good idea.
Testing the Worm
Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to make sure the malicious software did its intended job.
The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.
The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.
How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.
“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.”
Assinar:
Postagens (Atom)