Pretty despicable. But then again, what did you expect from Obama?
(Tablet Magazine) It was quite a week for cyberwarfare. First came the revelation that Iran was suffering from a virus called Flame—apparently the most powerful spyware ever created, turning computers into virtual double-agents—which has already infected at least 1,000 computers, nearly all of them in Iran, the Palestinian territories, Sudan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Two days later, the New York Times
published an explosive story by David Sanger detailing the collaboration
between Israel and the United States in its cyberwarfare campaign
against Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The program started under the
Bush Administration, but according to Sanger “Obama decided to
accelerate the attacks,” code-named Olympic Games, including the Stuxnet
worm that set back the Iranian nuclear program by as much as two years.
The story,
adapted from Sanger’s forthcoming book, is richly reported and heavily
sourced to “current and former American, European and Israeli officials
involved in the program.” The story reveals that both the Bush and Obama
Administrations have used cyberwarfare to wage campaigns—political and
strategic—on various fronts. Stuxnet, for example, was not intended
simply to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program. It was also meant to
convince the Israelis that Washington recognizes the urgency of the
problem and thus Israel need not attack Iran. The Times article is evidence of the Obama White House’s efforts in yet another campaign: the 2012 elections.
Given that this was the second such cyberwarfare story that the Obama Administration has fed the New York Times—the first
appeared in January 2011—it is obvious that this White House, like so
many others before it, is using journalists to shape its image. While a
number of analysts have criticized
the administration for jeopardizing U.S. national security by leaking
sensitive material to the press, the reality is that the story is not
really about the details of this ongoing intelligence operation. It’s a
political narrative, intended to shape public opinion about the
competence and muscularity of this White House.
The nature of the story is given away in a quote from Vice President
Joe Biden, exasperated after Stuxnet mistakenly appeared on the Web in
the summer of 2010, exposing the code. Biden laid the blame at the feet
of the administration’s ostensible partner. “It’s got to be the
Israelis,” said Biden, according to an unnamed source. “They went too
far.” In other words, the Obama White House wants it both ways—to claim
credit for the successes of the cyberwarfare campaign and to shift blame
on the Israelis in the event that things go wrong.
Biden’s quote dovetails with a theory that’s been circulating for a
few years among security experts that the Stuxnet virus was the product
of collaboration between first-rate professionals and rank amateurs. On this reading, the programming team was top-notch while the implementation team was less than capable.
Applying the Biden thesis, it would seem that the Israelis are the incompetent partners, responsible for the Stuxnet leak.
If the Israelis are in fact incompetent at waging cyberwar, then
that’s real news, since the Israelis have always been reputed to be the
best in the business. “If Israel is incompetent then why was Stuxnet
successful?” journalist Yossi Melman, co-author of the forthcoming book Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars,
responded when I asked him about Biden’s comment. “A thousand
centrifuges were disabled, which makes it a very successful campaign.”
Melman said that according to the Israeli officials he’s spoken with,
it was Israel that initiated the idea of utilizing computer viruses.
“They’ve been doing cyberwarfare slightly longer than the Americans.
Military Intelligence Unit 8200
[Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency in charge of
signals intelligence] has been exploring the potential for offensive as
well as defensive cyberwarfare capabilities for at least a decade.”
As some critics have noted,
a cyber-attack that spread to thousands of computers unrelated to
Iran’s nuclear program is at odds with the Obama Administration’s
“International Strategy for Cyberspace,” a policy laid out a year ago.
“The digital world,” reads the document, “is a place where the norms of
responsible, just and peaceful conduct among states and peoples have
begun to take hold.” So, perhaps the administration, and Biden in
particular, is eager to shift the blame to avoid charges of hypocrisy:
The Americans do the good stuff, it’s the Israelis who do the bad stuff.
This is the flip side of the political narrative. “It’s a
disinformation campaign to present Israel’s behavior as without
discretion, without patience,” a former Israeli intelligence official
told me. He recalls another New York Times story about a war game that starts with an Israeli strike against Iran in which thousands of Americans are killed.
“The idea,” said the official, “is to present Israel as gung-ho and
ready to go to war, and America has to stop it from doing something
disastrous.”
It’s hard to imagine that the two sides walked into the Stuxnet
campaign ignorant of each other’s abilities and limitations. “I don’t
believe for a moment that such ‘teams’—if they existed as ‘teams’—didn’t
have the chance to review or test each other’s code in some meaningful
fashion,” said Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s
Center for Digital Business. “I suppose it’s possible that complementary
teams worked independently and then released an uncoordinated worm into
the wild, but that’s a pretty poor way of trying to kill or disrupt or
gain intelligence around the most difficult nuclear challenge America
and Israel face. If I were an Israeli or American cyber-warrior, I would
want to know the other’s code and protocol or doctrine for attack.”
In other words, the chances that the White House was really blindsided by Israel, like Biden says, are virtually nil.
But Israelis, said Melman, understand that the point of this story
was to enhance the president’s image. “Israeli officials know that it’s
an election year,” says Melman. “They believe the information was leaked
to glorify the Obama Administration. Israeli officials are not going to
rock the boat and ruin the party.”
The Times story is part of a larger narrative being driven
by the Obama team, meant to enhance the president’s image in the middle
of an election campaign where, according to some polls,
the Republican candidate has pulled even with the incumbent. Forget the
fact that Syria is burning, that the Russians have been emboldened by
American impotence in the Middle East, or that the Iranians are
tip-toeing across the finish line to get a nuclear weapon while American
diplomats sit helplessly at a negotiating table. Focus rather on the
image of a cool superhero commander in chief ordering clandestine
attacks.
“Obama’s problem,” says the former Israeli intelligence official, “is
that on one hand the administration has to show that they are doing
something about Iran. But on the other hand, they can’t abandon their
left-wing base. So, it’s better to shift blame to Israel. No Israeli
government is going to be criticized for releasing a virus. We know we
are at war, and America does not know it’s at war.”
