Iran and Israel’s shadow war is heating up

If timing is everything then it looks as if someone put it all into 04.00, Sunday 11 April. That’s when an explosion in Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility blew up the electricity supply to what is the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment centrepiece.

Fereydoun Abbasi, the head of Iran’s energy committee, said, “The enemy’s plot was very beautiful…. They thought about this and used their experts and planned the explosion so both the central power and the emergency power cable would be damaged.” The blast, condemned as “nuclear terrorism” by Tehran, occurred a few hours after Iran announced it had successfully installed advanced enrichment centrifuges.

The explosion, probably caused either by a device smuggled into the plant and detonated remotely, or by cyber-attack, is likely to have had a catastrophic effect. Centrifuges are thin, delicate machines which enrich uranium gas by spinning it at very high speed. The centrifuges are linked in a cascade system. A power cut would almost certainly have caused some to spin out of control crashing into others, which in turn smashed into yet more.

And who might be behind this beautiful plot and its timing? That morning US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is dead set against the Americans re-joining the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. In the afternoon US Special Envoy Robert Malley arrived in Vienna for the start of indirect talks with Iran about the deal.  

That’s the immediate timing, but there’s another (longer term) marker involved – assuming that this was indeed who we think it was. The Israelis did not exactly demur – Aviv Kochavi, the defence chief, said that “operations in the Middle East are not hidden from the eyes of the enemy”. The marker is the Iranian presidential election in June. The hardliners, opposed to returning to restrictions imposed by the nuclear deal, will have been strengthened by the Natanz attack. That suits the Israeli hardliners who want the deal to collapse.

They believe that Iran has been trying to build a nuclear weapon for decades. Periodically Israel announces, sonorously, “Tehran will be nuclear armed in two years”.  But it isn’t yet. So either the Iranians are not building the bomb and the Israelis are crying wolf, or they’re desperately trying to but have been prevented by a series of delaying operations by you know who.

The Israelis have previous. They destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 from the air, and Syria’s Deir al-Zor nuclear facility in 2007 in the same manner. In 2010 the Stuxnet cyber-attack on Natanz, widely accepted as a USA/Israel created virus, is thought to have damaged as many as one-fifth of its nuclear centrifuges.

There have also been the deaths of five Iranian nuclear scientists between 2007-2012, Israel is suspected of being behind them. Last year the father of the Iranian nuclear programme, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in a stunning operation involving a gun mounted on a truck and possibly fired remotely. It’s also suspected that fake companies have been set up to sell faulty equipment to the Iranians as they attempt to subvert sanctions.

The covert war between the two has recently become more open. In 2020 Israel finally acknowledged that it had been conducting hundreds of airstrikes inside Syria targeting Hezbollah (Iran’s proxy army) as it sought to smuggle Iranian guided missiles into Lebanon.

Iran is accused of being behind terror attacks against Israeli civilians in Georgia, India, and Bulgaria. In March an Israeli-owned cargo ship was hit by a missile in the Arabian Sea in a suspected Iranian attack. Last week it’s thought Israeli commandoes were behind a mine attack on an Iranian freighter in the Red Sea thought to be used as a command-and-control vessel to support Iran’s operations in the Yemen war. Two days later Israel hit a weapons depot near Damascus which houses units from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corp.

As for the talks – the Americans and Iranians are far apart. Tehran will insist on sanctions being revoked including those blocking oil sales. Washington wants verifiable proof that Tehran is in full compliance with the original deal including reversing all nuclear activities restarted in 2019 after the American withdrawal.  

In a few days’ time a top-level Israeli defence/intelligence team is expected in Washington to try and convince the Biden administration not to re-enter the deal. One thing they’ll focus on is time. In 2023 the constraints on Iran’s ballistic missile programme runs out, in 2024 limits on uranium enrichment begin to be relaxed.

The Israelis will argue that time is running out. Maybe. But what is sure is that one way or another Iran will find the time to seek revenge for the Natanz attack.