Every once in a while, the New York Times comes out with a stunning, game-changing piece of journalism.

On January 15, they ran a front-page story about Mossad and CIA efforts to subvert Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran has constantly and consistently claimed that they have no intention of developing nuclear weapons. I heard them personally when I visited Iran in 2008. The mullahs I met cited a 2003 fatwa against making nuclear weapons by the Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the revolution and then the Supreme Leader, which made him as infallible as the pope on a good day. They quoted Koranic verses about not poisoning the Earth, which the explosion of a nuclear device would surely do. Admittedly, the way they phrased it left the impression that if Israel could be surgically detached from the Palestinian population it would be perfectly fine, but as that can’t be done, the Prophet’s injunction seemed to be applicable and binding.
As with any religious command to stay one’s hand, hold back from force, turn the other cheek, there are always other leaders to quote other verses. It appears that, yes, Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. They come smiling, affable, and reasonable to the bargaining table, but they are merely testing to see how far their opponents will push, while they continue to pursue their goals. It’s a very Persian thing to do, like merchants bargaining in the bazaar, and I expect they take great delight in it.

Iran has made very strident statements that call for the elimination of Israel. There are arguments over how precisely accurate the translations of those statements are, it’s hard to tell how sincere they are, and, in reality, if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons the retaliation from Israel, which is much better equipped, and the United States, and some of the rest of the world, would devastate their country.

The other Arab countries also hate the idea (“Possibility of a Nuclear-Armed Iran Alarms Arabs,” New York Times 10/30/09, and Wikileaks’ release of US diplomatic cables, November 2010).

The January Times story is a remarkable saga of successful sub-rosa warfare.
Centrifuges are required to make usable nuclear material. Iran’s uses a machine called the P-1, designed in the 1970s in the Netherlands. A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, stole the plans and took them to Pakistan where they were manufactured. Khan went on to become the world’s No. 1 nuclear black marketer and sold them to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.