U.S. revives secret program to disrupt Iran
Campaign seeks to derail missile testing, economy
WARSAW, Poland — The Trump White House has accelerated a secret American program to sabotage Iran’s missiles and rockets, according to current and former administration officials, who described it as part of an expanding campaign by the United States to undercut Tehran’s military and isolate its economy.
Officials said it was impossible to measure precisely the success of the classified program, which has never been publicly acknowledged. But in the past month alone, two Iranian attempts to launch satellites have failed within minutes.
Those two rocket failures — one Iran announced Jan. 15 and the other, an unacknowledged attempt, Feb. 5 — were part of a pattern over the past 11 years. In that time, 67 percent of Iranian orbital launches have failed, an astonishingly high number compared to a 5 percent failure rate worldwide for similar space launches.
The setbacks have not deterred Iran. This week, President Hassan Rouhani singled out Tehran’s missile fleets as he vowed to “continue our path and our military power.”
The Trump administration maintains that Iran’s space program is merely a cover for its attempts to develop a ballistic missile powerful enough to send nuclear warheads flying between continents.
Hours after the Jan. 15 attempt, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted Iran’s satellite launchers have technologies “virtually identical and interchangeable with those used in ballistic missiles.”
Pompeo is in Warsaw this week with Vice President Mike Pence to lead a meeting of 65 nations on encouraging stability in the Middle East, including by expanding economic sanctions against Iran. It is largely an appeal to European allies who, while continuing to oppose President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, agree the missile tests must stop.
The launch failures prompted the New York Times to seek out more than half a dozen current and former government officials who have worked on the U.S. sabotage program over the past dozen years.
They spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The officials described a far-reaching effort, created under President George W. Bush, to slip faulty parts and materials into Iran’s aerospace supply chains.
The program was active early in the Obama administration, but had eased by 2017, when Pompeo took over as the director of the CIA and injected it with new resources.
Tehran has become suspicious.
Even before Trump withdrew last May from the nuclear accord, Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of Iran’s missile program, accused U.S. and allied intelligence agencies of turning their campaigns of “infiltration and sabotage” to Iran’s missile complex from its atomic infrastructure.
“They want to repeat their nuclear sabotage in the missile area,” he told Iranian state television in 2016, vowing the program will never stop “under any circumstances.”
The CIA declined to comment on the sabotage efforts. Government officials asked the Times to withhold some details of its reporting, mostly involving the identities of specific suppliers to the Iranian program, because the effort is continuing.
In Warsaw, Pompeo is expected to repeat his warnings about the danger of Tehran’s missile program and to press European and Arab states to expand sanctions and missile defenses aimed at Iran.