Iran and the U.S., Part Two: Rules of Engagement

Military confrontations, early-morning attacks, and digital warfare: the story of Iran and the U. S. from the 1979 Iranian revolution to the fraught moment we're in today. This episode originally ran as Rules of Engagement https://www.npr.org/2019/07/17/742712613/rules-of-engagement. You can find more of Throughline's coverage into the origins of the conflict in the Middle East here https://www.npr.org/series/1255058395/enter-title. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. The Gales of November in paperback wherever books are sold.

• 0:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hey, it's Rund. The tensions between the United States and Iran are still very much in the headlines. What's happening now is just the latest chapter in a long and nuanced history between the two countries. So today, we're bringing you an episode from our archives. Part one of this series took us to 1953 and the CIA-backed overthrow of Iran's democratically-elected prime minister. Today, we pick the story back up in 1979. The secular Shah the US put in place after the coup in 1953 was suddenly facing a major crisis, an Islamic revolution.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  For the last seven days, Tehran and other cities have seen violent clashes between troops and demonstrators demanding soldiers with rocks and homemade petrol bombs.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Inevitably, the result is massacre.

• 1:14Speaker 03

  The Shah was forced to flee Iran, and a new leader, a Muslim cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini,

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Ayatollah Khomeini,

• 1:21Speaker 03

  took power.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  returns to a country teetering on the brink of civil war.

• 1:24Speaker 04

  The crowd chanted, "Allahu Akbar! God is great!" and raced along with the motorcade trying to get a glimpse of the Ayatollah.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  And this began a new era in US-Iran relations.

• 1:35Speaker 04

  In an obvious reference to the United States, he said, "Foreign advisers have ruined our culture and have taken our oil."

• 1:42Speaker 05

  And so, in the course of months, Iran went from one of America's best allies to one of America's worst adversaries.

• 1:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Not long after the revolution, Iran did something that solidified its new place as an American adversary.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  The American embassy in Tehran is in the hands of Muslim students tonight. Spurred on by an anti-American speech by the Ayatollah Khomeini, they stormed the embassy, fought the Marine Guards for three hours, overpowered them, and took dozens of American hostages.

• 2:13Speaker 07

  Some 60 Americans, including our fellow citizen whom you just saw, bound and blindfolded, are now beginning their sixth day of captivity inside the US embassy in Tehran. It's Friday morning there now.

• 2:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Over the past 40-plus years, this ongoing antagonism between the two countries has led to violent, even deadly, results. In this 2019 episode from our archives, we explored the direct military confrontations, the covert battles, and the 21st century cyberwar between Iran and the United States and the contexts behind the moment we're in today.

• 3:08Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November", a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of "The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November, now in paperback." Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at selc.org. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Fall tastes better with better ingredients.

• 4:07Speaker 06

  From Whole Foods Market. No added growth hormones or antibiotics in their meat department means slow-braised short ribs are even more satisfying. All seafood is wild-caught, like their vibrant sockeye salmon, or verified responsibly farmed. And all sweets, including fall-themed cookies, are made without high-fructose corn syrup. Spice up fall at Whole Foods Market.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Iraq claims to have carried out more than 130 air raids yesterday and to have shot down two Iranian jets. Iraq's Saddam Hussein has been active in honoring his army's field commanders, whose string of recent military triumphs tilted the war decisively in Baghdad's favor. It was Saddam Hussein who declared, "Whoever climbs over our fence, we shall climb over his roof."

• 5:08Speaker 04

  The Iranian-Iraq war was one of the bloodiest wars of the second half of the

• 5:12Speaker 03

  20th century. When it was over after eight years, there was over a million casualties, Iranian and Iraqi casualties. Relations between Iran and Iraq worsened when the Ayatollahs took over. The Iraqis claimed that the Iranians were refusing to implement border agreements, and the first skirmishes broke out.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  Iraq invaded Iran on land, and they met with some initial success, especially in the southwest, which was the oil-producing region of Iran. But very quickly, the war effort bogged down, and by 1982, Iran had succeeded in expelling Iraqi forces out of Iran. And it looked like momentum was working against Iraq in the long term. Iran has a much larger population, larger territorial base, so there were fears on the Iraqi side that eventually, if the war dragged on, they would lose. So they tried to escalate and expand the war to include economic warfare. So they targeted Iran's oil industry.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Iran responded in kind and started attacking ships in the Gulf that were going to pick up oil from other Arab countries that were allied to Iran. to Iraq and providing financial and other help to Iraq as part of its war effort against Iran.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  For both countries, oil is the lifeblood of their economy. And so they're trying to sink one another's oil tankers to weaken one another economically.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  So they attacked using aircraft, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and they also attacked using small boats. The small boats very often would have machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, or small diameter rockets, 107-millimeter rockets.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  So they would pull up in front of a ship going through the Gulf. They would set up in a line in front of the ship's line of movement. And as the ship passed them, they would open fire and rake the hull. And sometimes they would shoot at the bridge where the crew was located. An oil tanker runs the gauntlet of air attacks in the Gulf War. Now, the ships, because they are very large tankers and were often double-hulled, the damage did not cause these ships to sink. And they were able to continue, you know, with their mission, but it imposed costs. It was dangerous for the crews.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  And that area where Iran and Iraq were fighting, the Strait of Hormuz, is an incredibly crucial geo-economic chokehold.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Once through the entrance, the Straits of Hormuz, the oil tankers face a problem regardless of their destination.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  On any given day, 20 to 40% of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. And at its narrowest point, it's about 20 miles wide.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  What's happening is that the war on land between Iran and Iraq is spilling over into the sea, with Western tankers being the sitting targets for both sides.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  The world cared about what was happening with these tanker wars because it was affecting the price of gasoline throughout the world. It was absolutely crucial to the fate of the global economy.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  In 1986, 1987, Iran intensified its attacks on Kuwaiti tankers in particular. Kuwait was playing an especially important role in the war as a country that was providing support to Iraq, financial and otherwise, providing loans.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  They had been asking the United States about the idea of perhaps providing escort for their tankers.

• 8:54Speaker 05

  So that they wouldn't be attacked. And at first, we didn't respond with enthusiasm. So the Kuwaitis went to the Russians. And the Russians responded almost immediately that they'd be willing to do so. When we heard about that, our response was, well, we're potentially yielding the playing field in the Gulf to the Russians. And within the context of great power competition during the Cold War, the relationship was seen as a zero-sum game, so. That's when the United States got itself involved.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  From ABC, this is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

• 9:33Speaker 07

  Good evening. That was an American flag on the back of that ship. And we begin this evening in what is surely the world's most dangerous body of water, the Persian Gulf.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  The United States actually put its own flag on Kuwaiti tankers as a way of kind of deterring Iran from continuing these attacks. So we were kind of, in effect, protecting our own ships at sea.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  Zero Lima India, this is warship 37. I have you on my radar. Please remain for the 3,000.

• 10:00Speaker 05

  We set up an arrangement whereby we would have a convoy system where we'd pick up Kuwaiti tankers outside the entrance to the Persian Gulf and escort them for about a day or two until they reached Kuwait, drop them off, and then we would kind of go back and, you know, escort more ships coming in.

• 10:18Speaker 07

  And so the United States embarks on a Mideast mission, which is haunted by one question: will the Iranians try to attack the Kuwaiti ships now that they are technically American?

• 10:27Speaker 05

  It wasn't commonly done, and in fact, it was very controversial. Members of Congress were openly questioning, why are we doing that? You know, why are we putting American flags on the vessels of other countries? You know, why are we kind of stretching ourselves so thin and potentially getting involved in a war between two countries which are essentially both adversaries of the United States, Iran and Iraq?

• 10:55Speaker 04

  The American assumption had been, going into this, that the presence of US warships protecting reflagged ships and the presence of a US aircraft carrier in the region Would deter the Iranians. We had no prior military experience with the Iranians, except for the failed hostage rescue operation a number of years before. We had not had any sustained military interactions with Iranians, and therefore, we were kind of like a blank slate. We didn't really know what to expect, and we made a lot of assumptions which turned out not to be correct when put up against the test of reality. That took a new turn today when American warships shelled and destroyed two Iranian oil platforms and then raided another. Smoke could be seen for 10 miles,

• 11:38Speaker 04

  but the message was meant for Tehran, 690 miles away. We were engaged in a low-intensity conflict with Iran throughout this period, which occasionally spiked to involve direct military engagements. It was in retaliation for the weekend missile attack by Iran on an American-flagged tanker. Iran is believed to have fired the long-range missile, which last Friday struck the American-flagged tanker Sea Isle City, wounding many of her crew.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  And increasingly, what you see is this conflict zone in which everyone has their finger on the trigger. You know, it's a fog of war, you're at sea, and there's constant risk of miscalculation, there's lack of communication.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  The Islamic news agency said the US has become involved in a full-fledged war with Iran. The Iranian president, Ali Khamenei, is quoted as saying, "We will retaliate." The United States expanded its rules of engagement to allow US vessels at sea to come to the aid of ships from other countries that were not part of the reflagging operation but are being attacked by the Iranians. So we're being more proactive in the Gulf in terms of our activities. There was a newly arrived ship, the USS Vincennes, coming to the region. There was a new class of ship with a radar system that could see further out with

• 13:00Speaker 04

  greater resolution than the radar systems that were then used by the ships. Their role generally was to kind of hang back and provide a big picture of the air defense environment for the other ships that are operating in the region.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  So on July 3rd, 1988.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  What happened on July 3rd was a Pakistani tanker had come under attack. The Vincennes sent its helicopter to investigate. As it approached the area where the attack was occurring, Iranian ships fired warning shots at the helicopter for it to stay away. The helicopter thought they were under attack and reported it as such. The Vincennes then steamed to the aid of its helicopter as well as to join the fight. In doing so, they moved into Iranian territorial waters, which was a violation of U.S. rules of engagement. At the same time, while it's doing this and while it's pursuing the Iranian warships

• 14:04Speaker 04

  that were involved in the attack against the Pakistani tanker, an Iranian civilian aircraft takes off from the airport in the city of

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Bandar Abbas.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Which is an airfield and a

• 14:17Speaker 05

  Port city in the south of Iran.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  En route to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

• 14:21Speaker 05

  And what would usually be a 30-minute flight, very easy.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  And as it turns out, it was flying right over the area in which combat was going on, on the surface.

• 14:31Speaker 05

  And

• 14:32Speaker 04

  It takes off. The crew of the Vincennes thought that this civilian jet was actually an Iranian fighter aircraft that was at first gaining altitude, but then diving to attack.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  They mistook it for an Iranian military aircraft. And they were trying to communicate with it, but they were using military frequency to communicate with this Iranian plane. And they weren't getting any response because this Iranian plane was a civilian airliner, which wasn't on a military frequency. So after numerous attempts of trying to communicate with it.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  They shot two surface-to-air missiles. Which brought down the Iranian There has been a dramatic and sudden escalation of hostilities in the Persian Gulf involving US forces. There is the possibility that US Navy missiles may have accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, a civilian airliner carrying nearly 300 people.

• 15:46Speaker 05

  And so I think the fog of war coupled with both a miscalculation, itchy trigger fingers, and inability to communicate resulted in this terrible tragedy.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Throughout the morning, there have been very confused reports as to what actually happened.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  To this day, the Iranian government believes there was no way this was an accident.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Saying that it was doubtful that the plane that was shot down was an F-14 fighter.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Because the plane was clearly marked, its flight pattern was clearly civilian aircraft headed to Dubai. There's probably dozens of such flights every day between Bandar Abbas and Dubai. But what the US side talks about is the broader context. This US warship was actually receiving fire from what they thought were Iranian warships. There was constant attacks taking place during that time. And so the United States acknowledged it as a terrible mistake.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  President Ronald Reagan offered what is known as ex gratia payments, voluntary payments by the United States government to the families of the victims of Iran AR-655. And this settlement today.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  For Iran, these things are not mistakes. Even if America claimed it was a mistake, the message that was taken by the Iranian side was that this was an act of open hostility. One of the things you often hear today is that there's always a

• 17:30Speaker 04

  worry about miscalculation in dealing with Iranians. That there's always the potential for inadvertent escalation as a result of a tragic mistake. On the other hand, I would point out that one of the lessons of this conflict during the latter phases of the Iran-Iraq war is that actually both sides were pretty good at keeping the level of conflict within a certain kind of relatively narrow band. That neither side wanted the conflict to spiral out of control and become an even larger war, and they largely succeeded in that regard.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  Several months later, Iran actually signed the peace treaty to end the Iran-Iraq war. So the shooting down of Flight 655, Iranian Air Flight 655, was a terrible tragedy in which civilians were killed. If you look back, though, at the history, it may have been that the Iran-Iraq war might have lasted longer had that terrible incident not taken place. I think one thing the United States realized by the late 1980s was that the Iranian revolution was not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. You know, that the revolutionary Islam and the Khomeneist ideology that was born out

• 18:46Speaker 05

  of the 1979 revolution was going to be an enduring concern. And shortly thereafter, when the Soviet Union collapsed, I think Iran and the threat of radical Islam eclipsed communism as kind of challenge or threat number one for the United States. And I think similarly, one of Iran's takeaways from the Iran-Iraq war and its interactions with the US military is that, you know, the US military's budget is more than 50 times that of Iran's.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  And so in a head-to-head conventional military matchup, Iran cannot compete with the United States.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  How it can compete is using essentially asymmetric warfare, whether that's the use of proxies, whether that's the use of mines, you know, in some cases, taking hostages, having plausible deniability. Iran needed to figure out low-cost, high-impact ways to challenge the United States. And it's really honed that ability over the last four decades.

• 20:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  That was Kareem Sajadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Washington Institute's Military and Security Studies Program. Coming up, the story of the shadow war.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on,

• 21:24Speaker 00

  just as they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.

• 21:35Speaker 06

  This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Fall tastes better with better ingredients from Whole Foods Market. No added growth hormones or antibiotics in their meat department means slow-braised short ribs are even more satisfying. All seafood is wild-caught, like their vibrant sockeye salmon, or verified responsibly farmed. And all sweets, including fall-themed cookies, are made without high-fructose corn syrup. Spice up fall at Whole Foods Market.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  I blame myself for what happened. I was the sergeant of the guard. I was ultimately responsible for the security of that BLT that morning.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  It was 6:30 on a Sunday morning.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Beirut, Lebanon. Everybody was asleep.

• 22:20Speaker 07

  We have a bulletin from the Pentagon on the explosion in Beirut at the US Marines barracks.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Then I heard the rev of an engine behind me.

• 22:28Speaker 07

  A truck loaded with explosives broke through a gate into the lobby of a building in Beirut occupied by Marines.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  I saw the truck come to a stop, dead center of that lobby. Dead silence in the lobby. You could hear a pin drop.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  And then the next thing I saw was a bright orange flash.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  A speeding pickup truck crashed through barriers and exploded in the lobby of the headquarters building where Marines were sleeping. The first thing I said was, "Son of a bitch, he did it." Causing the four-story structure to collapse.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Chunks of concrete and spears of broken glass were hurled hundreds of yards, wounding other Marines. Some of those wounded helped pull their colleagues from the rubble.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  I remember looking over my shoulder. There was one Marine back here.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Moaning, "Help me, help me, God, help me, somebody please help me."

• 23:28Speaker 07

  The Pentagon now estimates that 120, possibly more, have been killed.

• 23:38Speaker 07

  Forty-five of the more critically wounded have been evacuated. Others remain to be evacuated later. Been pretty hectic, trying to just sort things out, see what what the total effect of this tragedy is going to be.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  So in 1983, a truck bombing destroys US military marine barracks in Beirut, which was, I think, the deadliest single-day attack on the US Marines since Iwo Jima. Almost 250 Marines were killed. It was unclear to people who was behind this attack because it was a truck bombing. And, you know, now we've become accustomed to suicide bombings. We read about suicide bombings often in the news. But at that time, that was really a novel attack. It was, I think, widely assumed that Iran was responsible. But Iran shrewdly operated via proxy.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  They tried not to leave fingerprints. And, you know, the attack was blamed on a group called Islamic Jihad, which is widely thought to be essentially the precursor to Lebanese Hezbollah.

• 24:52Speaker 06

  Hezbollah was created to fight Israel, whose army invaded and occupied the country.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  The emergence of a group called Hezbollah, the Party of God, was essentially a byproduct of two momentous events. One was the 1979 Iranian revolution, and the other was the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. And so as a result of these two things, all of a sudden, the Shia community in Lebanon had an enormous, very wealthy external patron.

• 25:22Speaker 06

  It is a secretive militant movement of the Shia sect of Islam, largely funded and armed by Iran.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  Iran, after the revolution, defined itself in opposition to the United States and in opposition to Israel. And so you started to see an emergence of Shia radicalism in Lebanon, which Iran was harnessing. And, you know, Lebanon is a country which, in which America doesn't have enormous strategic assets. It's a very small country on the Mediterranean, but it doesn't have oil resources like Saudi Arabia. So the major reason for America's presence in Lebanon to do peacekeeping and be there as a buffer for our key regional ally, which is Israel. There are no words to properly express our outrage.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  And I think the outrage of all Americans.

• 26:18Speaker 05

  After the bombings of the marine barracks, I think it caused a real debate within the Reagan administration. Some wanted to pin the blame on Iran. You know, others said there was no clear proof. And I think others also realized that if America were to blame Iran directly, then it would warrant action. You know, if you're going to blame Iran for a massive attack on the US Marines, you can't just sit on your hands afterwards. You have to do something about it. And so I think for that reason, there was actually a reluctance within the Reagan administration to too aggressively blame Iran because America didn't really want to to fight that war.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  And in hindsight, the historians who actually criticized the Reagan administration, because they say by not responding to that massive attack by Iran against the US Marines, it essentially emboldened Iran. Iran realized that actually suicide bombings can be quite effective. Truck bombings can be quite effective. And eventually it led to America's pullout from Lebanon.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Ambassadors Habib and Draper, who were presidentally in Beirut, will continue to press in negotiations for the earliest possible total withdrawal of all external forces.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Because, you know, Americans, looking at their television, said, said, "Why are our sons and daughters dying in Beirut, Lebanon? What are we doing there? What are our interests?"

• 27:52Speaker 05

  And so I think this is a tactic which Iran has used quite effectively, essentially testing the resolve of the United States and in some ways, conducting acts of radicalism and terror, which will bring in the American public. And the American public, you know, calling for further restraint or a pullout from the Middle East.

• 28:33Speaker 07

  My fellow citizens. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders...

• 28:48Speaker 05

  When the Iraq War was launched in 2003, one of the Bush administration's underlying goals for the Iraq War was to create Shiite democracy in Baghdad, which could then spread to Tehran and undermine the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. And so for that reason, Iran had every incentive to try to sabotage America's efforts in Iraq if they believed that the Iraq War was intended to eventually overthrow the Iranian government. And so for that reason, from the beginning of the Iraq War, Iran was somewhat cautious

• 29:31Speaker 05

  the first year or so, but then you started to see Iran ramping up attacks on American troops, using proxies, using their Shia militia proxies in Iraq.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  Iran has essentially tried to franchise the Hezbollah model. You know, I call it the McDonaldization of Hezbollah, taking that Shia militia franchise in Lebanon and using it in other contexts, whether that's to help fight for your ally Bashar Assad in Syria, Iraqi Shia militias to fight against ISIS and project Iranian power in Iraq, and now in Yemen.

• 30:21Speaker 07

  A second day of airstrikes inside Yemen by Saudi jets, bombing Iranian-backed Houthis Shia militias which have taken control of the country.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  And when we're talking about countries in the region which are experiencing either civil wars or power vacuums, Iran is able to fill those voids much more effectively with these Shia proxies on the ground.

• 30:48Speaker 07

  The top US commander for the Middle East worries about what could be Tehran's bid for superpower status.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  So I think a major asymmetric advantage that Iran has over both the United States and US allies like Saudi Arabia, for example, is that almost all Shia radicals in the region, let's say from India to Lebanon, are willing to go out and kill, if not die, for the Islamic Republic of Iran, whereas almost all Sunni radicals in the Middle East are deathly opposed to the United States and they want to actually overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia. Groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni radicals which are not Saudi Arabia's proxy, they're actually Saudi Arabia's adversary.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  And so despite the fact that Shia are outnumbered by Sunni by four, five to one in the region, Iran has a monopoly over Shia radicalism. And increasingly, not only does Iran operate via proxy, but its proxies also have plausible deniability because they're not necessarily doing the fighting themselves, they're using IEDs, they're using drones, they're using mines. So it gives Iran two layers of deniability.

• 32:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, how one computer virus started a cyber arms race.

• 32:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November, now in paperback." Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate

• 33:29Speaker 00

  aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.

• 33:35Speaker 07

  This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Fall tastes better with better ingredients from Whole Foods Market. No added growth hormones or antibiotics in their meat department means slow-braised short ribs are even more satisfying. All seafood is wild-caught, like their vibrant sockeye salmon, or verified responsibly farmed. And all sweets, including fall-themed cookies, are made without high-fructose corn syrup. Spice up fall at Whole Foods Market.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  An Iranian facility has been targeted for cyberattack, the second time it's happened in less than a year. The worst cyberattack in history. The race between Iranian officials trying to build their nuclear program and

• 34:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  outside forces trying to stop it is getting more intense. This new era of warfare has already begun. We have to go all the way back to around 1996, mid-'90s, is when the US started to contemplate the development of offensive cyber capabilities.

• 34:34Speaker 07

  And right around that time, Iran obtained a batch of illicit uranium hexafluoride gas from China. And so that's sort of what we can sort of trace the beginnings of the Iranian illicit nuclear program. They, of course, had been watching Iraq prior to that and seeing that Iraq was looking at nuclear capabilities. And of course, Iran and Iraq were longtime enemies. And so Iran's view was if Iraq is looking at obtaining nuclear weapons capability, then we should also be engaging in that as well. So around 2000, Iran broke ground

• 35:18Speaker 07

  on the facility at Natanz. US intelligence wasn't, you know, 100% positive about what that facility was going to be, but they were watching it. So, February 2003, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the agency that oversees or monitors nuclear programs around the world, IAEA inspectors make their first visit to Natanz.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  And now we return to Iran, where today, UN inspectors have visited a site used-

• 35:48Speaker 07

  And they discovered that Iran is actually much farther along in the program than anyone suspected. They already had a pilot plant set up at Natanz. They had some centrifuges there that they were beginning to assemble. They had said that they hadn't enriched any batch of uranium hexafluoride gas yet, but that turned out to be incorrect. This first process of enriching that first batch was really the beginning step of having enough uranium hexafluoride gas to build a bomb. This is the initial step of getting them to that bomb. And there was a lot of panic at that point to halt the program until IAEA inspectors

• 36:32Speaker 07

  could obtain more information. So there was a lot of pressure put on Iran to stop everything.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, in talks with Iranian officials in Tehran.

• 36:43Speaker 07

  And-

• 36:44Speaker 04

  The breakthrough.

• 36:45Speaker 07

  Iran surprisingly actually agreed. Throughout 2003, 2004, and then something changed in 2005.

• 36:58Speaker 07

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran. And shortly after that, Iran announced that it was done with the cessation agreement, and it was no longer going to remain at this stasis position. And it was going to go forward with enriching its first batch of uranium hexafluoride gas. And so you can imagine the panic in Israel when that happens. Jump forward about six months. On January, February 2006 now, Iran announces that they have enriched their first batch

• 37:40Speaker 07

  of uranium hexafluoride gas in that pilot plant at Natanz. And then they announced that they had perfected the enrichment process, and they were going to begin installing the first centrifuges in the actual enrichment plants. Israel, of course, was focused on trying to bomb the facility. They had come to the US for permission from President Bush to launch a strike against the Natanz facility, and the US denied that permission and instead had this alternative plan that they wanted to do.

• 38:18Speaker 07

  So between February 2006 and February 2007, the US is developing and testing Stuxnet. Stuxnet was what we call a worm. Part of it was a virus, part of it was a worm. A worm is malware that will travel from machine to machine without any human interaction. So the initial release, of course, is done by a human. But once a worm finds a vulnerable system, it will infect that system, and then it will search automatically for any other system connected to that system on an internal network or over the internet, and travel to that system and infect that as well.

• 39:02Speaker 07

  So you've got this Natanz facility that has critical computers that are ergot from the internet, and also the facility itself is physically protected.

• 39:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  They had Three outer perimeter security walls.

• 39:13Speaker 07

  Anti-aircraft guns.

• 39:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Earthen berms entirely hide the facility from view.

• 39:19Speaker 07

  Around the facility, they had fences, they had guards, armed guards, all of that. So the only way that you could get Stuxnet into where you needed to go was to have someone walk it in, deliver it, either wittingly or unwittingly. And we know that the first version of Stuxnet could only be spread via USB sticks. It's quite possible that the first version of Stuxnet, because it didn't have a lot of spreading capabilities in it, was spread by an inside mole. They probably had close access inside Natanz. So 2007, they unleashed that first version of Stuxnet. It was a partnership between the US and Israel.

• 40:03Speaker 07

  Their aim wasn't to, it wasn't catastrophic damage. They didn't want to destroy all of the centrifuges. They wanted to simply stop Iran from obtaining enough enriched uranium gas to have a bomb. Iran had a limited supply of uranium hexafluoride gas that it had purchased from China, and they had a limited supply of materials that they could use to manufacture new centrifuges. And so the goal with Stuxnet was to destroy some of the gas and some of the centrifuges in order to buy time for diplomacy and sanctions to catch up.

• 40:38Speaker 07

  When Stuxnet first gets on to that S7-417 PLC, it doesn't cause its sabotage right away. It sits there for a period of time, recording the normal operation of those centrifuges and storing that information. And it just keeps storing and storing for days. And when the sabotage kicks in, it takes that information about the normal operations that it stored, and it now feeds that back to the monitoring stations. So while the valves are closed and the pressure is increasing inside the centrifuges, the engineers at the monitoring stations are seeing that everything is normal. All the valves are open, pressure is normal, heat is normal, nothing is wrong.

• 41:24Speaker 07

  And so they wouldn't have seen the sabotages happening. What they would have, what they would have seen, however, is they would have seen that they were losing gas. They would have seen eventually the, the end result is that the centrifuges start breaking down. But they wouldn't have known if the problem was the machinery itself. Maybe the centrifuges were faulty, the equipment was faulty. That would have been their first focus. And Stuxnet did one other thing. In addition to feeding that false information to the monitoring stations, Stuxnet froze the safety mechanism on the system. So these automated safety mechanisms were designed to detect if the pressure inside

• 42:04Speaker 07

  the centrifuges increases, if the heat increases, if they start spinning out of control. And if it sees that a system is getting out of a safe condition, it's supposed to automatically shut down those centrifuges to prevent them from being destroyed or ruined. But Stuxnet stopped the safety mechanism from working. So Iran was confused. They didn't know what was happening.

• 42:38Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 42:41Speaker 07

  Tapper.

• 42:46Speaker 07

  We have been through a lot together. This is a covert operation, and a covert operation has to be authorized by the sitting president. And the sitting president was leaving. We had an election in 2008, and we see in the code that Stuxnet is designed to halt during this temporary phase of when we, we are losing the sitting president. And in January 2009, Obama's coming into office, and he meets with President Bush. And during this period, Bush explains to him this covert operation, which we now know is called Olympic Games. And he explains what's happening and what it's designed to do, and tells him that it's

• 43:26Speaker 07

  not, it hasn't achieved its full purpose yet, and encourages Obama to reauthorize the Olympic Games program. And Obama does. And we already see in January, the attackers are getting prepared to unleash the second version of their assault. And throughout 2009, it's causing its sabotage. And we actually see signs of the sabotage externally, but we don't know what it is. The International Atomic Energy Agency is sending inspectors to the Natan's facility, on average, about twice a month. And they're sending back reports to their headquarters in Vienna. And those reports are saying that Iran is having problems with its centrifuges.

• 44:07Speaker 07

  Those inspectors start noticing, not just that Iran is having problems, but they're actually removing centrifuges now. So it's not just that they've stopped spinning centrifuges, that they've taken gas out of centrifuges, they're actually removing centrifuges from the cascades. And they're sending this back in the report, and that's the first sign that Iran has given up. They don't know what's going on. They're checking the equipment, they're checking everything, and yet Stuxnet continues to operate, and it continues to engage in sabotage. And it's not until June 2010, Stuxnet has unleashed in another round in March and April 2010, and the March version is what got it caught.

• 44:50Speaker 07

  The March version had multiple spreading mechanisms attached to it, including that worm, and it spread wildly out of control. It started spreading to machines that weren't the targeted machines, spreading to any Windows machine that it can find, initially just in Iran. And it started causing problems on machines in Iran outside of Natan's. Someone in Iran who had systems that were, kept crashing and rebooting and crashing and rebooting, and they couldn't figure out what was going on. So they contacted their maker of their antivirus software, a company in Belarus called Virus Block Ada.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  And Virus Block Ada obtained remote access to some of those systems in Iran that were having problems. And they discovered some suspicious code that they believed was causing the machines to reboot, to crash and reboot. And so they found this code, and they started taking it apart. They immediately discovered that it was malware, and that it was designed to spread to any Windows machine.

• 45:58Speaker 07

  So they contacted Microsoft because it was using a vulnerability in the Windows software. They contacted Microsoft to have that vulnerability patched. And then they had other files that were dropped onto the machine when it was infected, but those files were encrypted and they couldn't decrypt them. And they didn't have a lot of experience taking malware apart. So they made those files available to the rest of the security community. And that's when a company called Symantec stepped in and started reverse engineering that code. They were able to decrypt it and they knew that it was designed for sabotage. Until then, everyone had assumed that this was spyware, that this was conducting espionage.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Experts say Stuxnet is an exceptionally sophisticated computer worm that attacks the software used to control automated systems. It's now been found in thousands of

• 46:51Speaker 07

  So if you can imagine, from November 2007 all the way to November 2010, Stuxnet continued to operate unimpeded. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the Israelis and the US, but Iran didn't do what we expected them to do. They didn't go to the United Nations and complain, and they didn't retaliate, which they would have been in position to do legally. International law sort of limits what a nation can do when it's under a digital attack like that. It says that you can, you can take action to halt an attack that's current, but that

• 47:29Speaker 07

  any sort of retaliation that you do has to be proportional to the attack itself. And so Iran was pretty limited, and also going to the United Nations, Iran is not very powerful in the United Nations. So it knew that it wasn't going to get the support or backing that it needed to punish the US or Israel. They've never seen anything like it, a massive onslaught of cyberattacks on America's biggest bank.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Slowing down their websites, even forcing some to shut down temporarily, costing them money.

• 48:00Speaker 07

  Stuxnet was proof of concept for any nation to see that digital capabilities like this are a viable alternative. And so what that has done is it's opened up this new kind of warfare where it's lowered the bar of the actors who can engage in it.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Senator Joe Lieberman, then chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said, "I think this was done by Iran. It's likely retaliation for previous cyber attacks on Iran and for other things."

• 48:27Speaker 07

  When you drop a conventional weapon, your victim can't pick up those pieces of the weapon and reconstitute it and send it back at you. The difference with a digital weapon is when you're launching a digital weapon, it's fully contained and all the code is there. And so you're sending the blueprint for the weapon to your victim. And all the victim has to do is reverse engineer that weapon in the way that Symantec reverse engineered it and study it and design it in a way that they can send it back to you. And so what we did was we threw stones from a glass house. In the US, we've always had this advantage of geography. We have this distance from our adversaries.

• 49:11Speaker 07

  But digital warfare erases that distance. Now the front line is on businesses and critical infrastructure here. It's brought the war home.

• 49:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  That was Kim Zetter. She's a cybersecurity reporter and author of the book Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 49:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdelfatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  This show was produced by me.

• 50:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  And me, and...

• 50:04Speaker 06

  Jamie York. Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Okay, smizing somber. Nidjri Eaton.

• 50:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Original music was produced for this episode by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Thanks also to Aida Porasad.

• 50:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Anya Grundmann. And to Entezira, Sarah Wyman, and Amber Chi. If you like something you heard or you have an idea, please write us at [email protected].

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Thanks for listening.

• 50:54Speaker 00

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