Trump Authorized CIA To Wage Cyberwar On Iran And Others

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The West has a long history of criminal meddling in Iran, a story the US media won't touch. In billboard, Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated by US-Israeli backed MEK terrorists in Iran

Recently there have been a number of incidents in Iran where unexplained fires or explosion have destroyed some infrastructure:

Since June, fires or explosions have erupted at six factories and other facilities, two of them military in nature—the Parchin missile-production plant and the Natanz nuclear site.

There was an explosion of a gas tank near a missile assembly facility in Khojir, some trouble at a transformer station near Tehran and some other incidents. Most remarkably was an explosion and fire at the centrifuge assembly facility in Iran's nuclear complex in Natanz.

While the incident in Natanz certainly smells of active sabotage the other incidents, like a recent explosion of gas cylinders at a hospital, look more like plain old accidents.

Someone is amplifying a number of rather normal accidents that occur in any large industrialized country in an attempt to sow fear and uncertainty in Iran.

Today a fire broke out on a shipyard in Bushehr. Some Twitterati immediately speculated that it was part of the incident chain and related it to Iran's nuclear reactor near that city.

Such speculation is nonsense. Fires on shipyards break out all the time. Just ask the U.S. Navy who's USS Bonhomme Richard has now been burning for three days after a fire broke out during yard maintenance. That fire turned a one billion dollar ship into 40,000 tons of feedstock for a blast furnace. Today's yard fire in Iran slightly damaged seven laid up dhows (vid), small civilian freight ships build from wood and used for coastal traffic in the Persian Gulf.

Israel has indirectly claimed responsibility for the Natanz incident:

[A] Middle Eastern intelligence official with knowledge of the episode said Israel was responsible for the attack on the Natanz nuclear complex, using a powerful bomb. A member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who was briefed on the matter also said that an explosive was used.

I have my doubts about such self serving Israeli claims. It is more likely that the CIA has its fingers in these games.

There is a rather intense CIA program being run against Iran. Trump has not only appointed the aggressive Michael D'Andrea, the 'Prince of Darkness', to head the CIA's Iran Mission Center but he gave the CIA wide ranging new powers to run cyber attacks against the country:

The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter.

The secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets, undoing many restrictions that had been in place under prior administrations. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House.
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The “very aggressive” finding “gave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,” said a former U.S. government official. These countries include Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — which are mentioned directly in the document — but the finding potentially applies to others as well, according to another former official. “The White House wanted a vehicle to strike back,” said the second former official. “And this was the way to do it.”

This was another stupid step taken by the current administration. Letting the CIA run an unsupervised war against the basic infrastructure of other countries will likely come back to haunt it:

The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants, and to engage in the kind of hack-and-dump operations that Russian hackers and WikiLeaks popularized, in which tranches of stolen documents or data are leaked to journalists or posted on the internet. It has also freed the agency to conduct disruptive operations against organizations that were largely off limits previously, such as banks and other financial institutions.

Another key change with the finding is it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations,according to former officials.
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The CIA has wasted no time in exercising the new freedoms won under Trump. Since the finding was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list, according to this former official. “This has been a combination of destructive things — stuff is on fire and exploding — and also public dissemination of data: leaking or things that look like leaking.”

Such loose definition of allowed targets will inevitably lead to operations that should be out of bounce.

The big danger here is that all sides can play such games. The U.S. does not have a monopoly or even a large advantage in waging cyberwars. It is in fact more vulnerable than others. Edward Snowden provided proof that the NSA is unable to protect its own secrets. Wikileaks published Vault 7, the CIA's own secret cyber attack tool collection. If even the NSA and the CIA cannot protect their systems one can only imagine how bad the security situation is in private institutions like U.S. banks, media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses.

If the CIA targets such institutions in other countries counter attacks on similar U.S. entities become legitimate.

The CIA's operations like the Natanz explosion only increase instability. Iran has more facilities where it can assemble its centrifuges. The attack will not hinder its progress in enrichment technologies. But the explosion created suspicion in Iran that the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who visit these facilities, are U.S. directed spies. In consequence Iran may limit their access to its nuclear sites. That again would decrease the knowledge about what Iran is or is not doing in its nuclear facilities.

That should not be in anyone's interest.

Posted by b on July 15, 2020 at 17:17 UTC | Permalink

SELECT COMMENTS

I thought D'Andrea was dead?

Posted by: C | Jul 15 2020 17:29 utc | 1

My opinion is Iran will continue to suffer setbacks as long as they keep tip-toeing for Western clemency that will never come.

Posted by: J W | Jul 15 2020 17:43 utc | 2

Yeah, sure the US and Israel are running operations against Iran. They don't dare do an open attack, so it depends on who they can persuade secretly.

If they have more success, it might suggest there's more discontentment in Iran.

An Iraqi I know, with connections to their embassy, told me yesterday that there's been a lightening of Iranian interventions in Iraq, because of the economic problem in Iran, the catastrophic fall in the value of the currency (i.e. sanctions). I have yet to validate this story, or see how it really is. We'll see what happens.

Posted by: Laguerre | Jul 15 2020 17:43 utc | 3

Since Iran now executes US spies rather than keeping them for diplomatic swaps it's clear than the time for talk is finished. It appears that the US is getting desperate, and panicked, when one assess the entire arena. Deagle, a forecast outfit, now predicts US population to drop to 54 million by 2025...tinyurl [dot] com/ycftu6os

Posted by: Walter | Jul 15 2020 17:48 utc | 4

There were rumors last Jan after Solomani was murdered, that Michael D'Andrea that had been killed while visiting Afghanistan when his plane crashed. It was never confirmed by the CIA but I haven't seen or heard anything about him since then (not that he was a publicity hound, but people would talk about him), since Jan though, nothing except rumors of his death, so either he died or he went quiet so he could work on his Iran terror campaign with his death being a cover story.

Posted by: Kadath | Jul 15 2020 18:01 utc | 5

After the US/Israel Stuxnet attack on Iran its young people eagerly studied hacking techniques and joined associations to defend Iran against the West.

This is blow back on a US that is more vulnerable than Iran. Russia, China, and Iran are more than capable of bringing down major infrastructure in a US that doesn't yet realize it has met its match.

If the US doesn't stop increasing its threats then it will come to a war that the US cannot win. It doesn't have to go nuclear. The US will grind to a halt from cyber attacks. The US/Israel have taught how to do it.

Posted by: AriusArmenian | Jul 15 2020 18:05 utc | 6

Is this the Trump that some commenters here think is fighting the Deep State that the CIA is part of?

It seems to me that the US/empire is executing an undeclared war by any and all means....and they are losing it because the curtain has been torn back from the puppets of empire showing craven inhumanity and religious exceptionalism only lead to MAD or mouth-foaming capitulation.

What is the next overreach of empire that will turn even more countries against it? The Covid bad example seems to not be enough to reach the tipping point.

Serious finance/trade war is on the horizon but it is unclear how the sides will form up and if there will be cross axis trade at all.

Very interesting times indeed.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Jul 15 2020 18:29 utc | 7

thanks b... nothing like having the cia provide service for israel and wall st.... there doesn't seem to be an american politician who can see the short sightedness in this either! great... now when these countries respond in kind, how is the usa going to feel?? jesus fucking christ, but the usa is fucking stupid...

Posted by: james | Jul 15 2020 18:32 utc | 8

At this point i doubt we can separate CIA and Mossad especially in regard to Iran. What happened could be attributed to both agency or even including other from five eyes country in the mix such as French and UK.

Someone has said this before but IRGC need to put the movement of those IAEA staff that come into their country under control or at least under close watch. This is the same game that they play in Syria during those ceasefires and Foreign aids, which also the very same game they played in Lebanon back then.

Posted by: Lucci | Jul 15 2020 18:37 utc | 9

hey b: your thoughts on the China-Iran deal and Iran's (rumored) stepped up activity in Syria? Is this amplified and part of Israeli self-serving nonsense? And is the propaganda preparing us for something?

Things seem to be moving quickly so I'm also wondering about your thinking on:

- Will Netanyahu annex West Bank before or after Trump's re-election?

- Will Trump freeze Chinese US-based assets (pending 'China virus' lawsuits) before or after the election?

- Will Erdogan try to take Sirte (prompting Egypt's entry into Libya) before or after the election?

- Will Germany refuse Nordstream II gas from Russia before or after the election?

- Will Trump interdict Iranian oil tankers? In international waters or Venezuelan waters? (I'm thinking Venezeulan)

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jul 15 2020 18:37 utc | 10

A number of years back I used to contribute patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel and stayed up to date on day to day submissions. One thing that surprised me back then was how many were coming from Iran. Iran was one of the top ten countries where fixes and new features for Linux were coming from.

After the CIA's Stuxnet attack on Iran back in 2010, Iran began to transition away from using Windows operating system towards using Linux. This is because it was clear that Microsoft played a part in distributing the Stuxnet code to computers in Iran embedded within otherwise normal OS updates.

Presumably the version of Linux authorized for use in Iran by the military and in strategic infrastructure is a custom distribution that has be heavily audited for security. Iran certainly has the domestic talent to accomplish this so I have no doubt that the rumors of it are true. This dramatically increases the difficulty the CIA faces in launching their cyber attacks. Most of the CIA's tools use backdoors that software vendors design into their products just for that purpose, but since you can build Linux from source code it is difficult to hide backdoors that competent programmers cannot find in that source code.

Basically, the biggest impact of letting the CIA go wild like this is that it will encourage more people, institutions, and countries to ditch Microsoft products. That is a very good thing.

Posted by: William Gruff | Jul 15 2020 18:39 utc | 11

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