By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie

Co-author and Haaretz correspondent Yossi Melman (Image credit: IPI/Anna Blau)

The fact that Israel is in one way or another involved with the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists is hardly debatable now that U.S. officials have confirmed it, Israeli leaders have hinted at it, Israeli leaders have openly supported it and even relatively well known Americans have openly supported terrorism targeting the imaginary Iranian nuclear program.

In a new book released today, June 9, 2012, called Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, by CBS News correspondent Dan Raviv and Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman, a somewhat different version was laid out which contradicts the anonymous statements of U.S. officials mentioned above.

According to Raviv and Melman, the operations were not carried out by Mossad-trained MEK terrorists as was previously asserted.

Instead, they claim that the operations are far too sensitive and thus are restricted solely to Israeli operatives.

“They [the Israelis] don’t farm out a mission that is that sensitive,” Raviv said. Raviv alleges that these operations are so sensitive that they actually require the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to personally sign off on them.

“They might use dissidents for assistance or logistics but not the hit itself. The methodology and training and use of motorcycles is all out of the Mossad playbook. They wouldn’t trust anybody else to do it,” he added in an interview with Fox News.

When studying the attacks on various Iranian individuals, it quickly becomes apparent that the use of motorcycles crop up in almost every instance.

Raviv said that the skilled use of motorcycles is considered their hallmark and that Mossad agents “excel at accurate shooting at any speed and staying steady to shoot and to place exquisitely shaped sticky bombs.”

In the book Raviv and Melman also state that the cyberwarfare campaign (which one must assume includes the wide range of attacks including Stuxnet, the malware known as Duqu which apparently was a derivative of Stuxnet and the recently discovered, incredibly complex and powerful Flame) against the Iranian nuclear program was not, in fact, an American invention as some have claimed, but instead hat it was a purely Israeli innovation.

They allege that the program was created by the Israeli military intelligence agency AMAN and the Israeli equivalent of the U.S.’s National Security Agency (NSA) called Unit 8200. The authors say that the program was then endorsed by the White House at Israel’s request.

According to Melman, the Israeli covert warfare program in Iran has been successful in disrupting the Iranian nuclear program.

He states that Israel believes that they are encouraging people from avoiding the field of nuclear science by taking out the key Iranian scholars in the field.

However, Iranian officials claim that the Israeli killing of Iranian scientists only serves to encourage more students to pursue the field. According to a report from January of this year, the Iranian Minister of Science Research and Technology, Kamran Daneshjo, over one thousand students changed their majors in order to study nuclear physics and engineering after one of the country’s top scientists was killed.

The evidence for Israel’s confidence in this matter is unclear.

The authors also point out that this is far from an innovative strategy for Israel. Indeed, Israel has engaged in terrorism – or what they might call “covert killing of scientists” – for quite a while now.

Operations similar to the current ones in Iran occurred in Egypt during the early sixties targeting German scientists who were allegedly trying to help then-president Gamal Abed al-Nasser to build nuclear weapons as well as Iraq in the 1980s.

Of course, Israel has also engaged in overt, unilateral military campaigns like the one against Syria in 2007 – known as Operation Orchard – which targeted an alleged nuclear reactor (which some researchers have concluded was actually a textile factory).

However, it appears that this campaign spans much more ground than previous ones since it also involves an incredibly advanced – some might say peerless – cyberwarfare effort targeting the Iranian nuclear program as well.

While previously they have engaged in both overt and covert warfare in an attempt to stop their perceived foes, they are now engaging in similar tactics while also engaging in cyberwarfare as well.

Interestingly, Melman claims that the Flame program was built first by the Israelis working with the NSA. Melman said that Flame was designed to “suck information about the (uranium-enriching) centrifuges and how they operate,” although that is precisely what Duqu was designed to do as well.

Melman claimed that after the U.S. and Israeli experts obtained information via Flame they were able to build Stuxnet. One problem inherent in this reasoning is the fact that Flame is still (or was recently) present in Iranian systems.

If it was just a precursor to Stuxnet, why would they leave Flame on any of the systems?

For those interested in a new take on Israel’s program I think this book might be an exciting read. These are the same authors behind another well known work on Israeli intelligence, Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit hard to say just how accurate the reporting of Raviv and Melman really is since it is contradicted by other reports from anonymous officials. I suggest my readers consume all the information they can get their hands on while maintaining a healthy degree of skepticism when assessing any and all potential sources.

Did I forget anything or miss any errors? Would you like to make me aware of a story or subject to cover? Or perhaps you want to bring your writing to a wider audience? Feel free to contact me at [email protected] with your concerns, tips, questions, original writings, insults or just about anything that may strike your fancy.

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