''Israel was close to attacking Iran in 2010, 2011 and 2012

Barak, Netanyahu and the then chief od staff  Benny Gantz in 2012. (Foto Haaretz)

The former Israeli Prime minister and Defense minister, Ehud Barak, had revealed that Israel in 2010, 2011 and 2012 came very cloe to strike Iran. He also rvealed why it did not happen, despite his and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to do so, according to interview excerpts aired on Israeli television Friday night.

Barak said that he and Mr. Netanyahu were ready to attack Iran each year but that in 2010, the then military chief of staff, Gaby Ashkenazy,  said Israel lacked the “operational capability”. In 2011 yje mw chief of staff, Benny Gantz, did not object, but then two key ministers waffled at the last minute. And in 2012, the timing did not work out because of a joint United States-Israel military exercise and visit by the American defense secretary. He noted that the two ministers who balked in 2011, Moshe Yaalon and Yuval Steinitz, “are the most militant about attacking Iran” today.

Israeli navy intercepts ship in Red Sea ''with rockets for Gaza''

(Photo Office Israeli military spokesman)

The Israeli navy seized a ship in the Red Sea on Wednesday that was carrying dozens of advanced Iranian-supplied rockets made in Syria and intended for Palestinian guerrillas in the Gaza Strip, the military said.
The disclosure came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the United States to press his case for tougher international action against Iran over its disputed nuclear program and support for Islamist guerrilla groups.
The Panamanian-flagged cargo vessel Klos C was boarded in international waters without resistance from its 17-strong crew in a "complex, covert operation", military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner told reporters.

Rouhani: Iran wants full nuclear deal and seeks investments

(Reuters)
 Iran is determined to negotiate a comprehensive deal on its nuclear program with major powers so it can develop its battered economy, President Hassan Rouhani said on Thursday, inviting Western companies to seize opportunities now.
Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Rouhani said Tehran was negotiating with the United States as part of a "constructive engagement" with the world and wanted Washington to back up its words with actions. An interim deal with the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany (the P5+1) came into force this week. This granted Iran a limited easing of the sanctions in return for temporary constraints on its uranium enrichment and nuclear development. Most sanctions, including a severe squeeze on Iran's access to the international financial system, remain as yet in force and the United States has stressed Western companies should not regard Iran as "open for business".

The Six and Iran conclude interim deal, Israel is angry

(L - R) British Foreign Secretary William Hague, Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry,Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius (Reuters)

Iran and six world powers reached a breakthrough deal early on Sunday to curb Tehran's nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief, in what could be the first sign of an emerging rapprochement between the Islamic state and the West.
Aimed at ending a dangerous standoff, the agreement between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia was clinched after more than four days of tortuous negotiations in the Swiss city of Geneva.
 Halting Iran's most sensitive nuclear work, it was designed as a package of confidence-building steps to ease decades of tensions and confrontation and banish the specter of a Middle East war over Tehran's nuclear aspirations.
Israel denounced it as a "bad deal" and said it would not be bound by it.
"This is a bad agreement that gives Iran what it wanted: the partial lifting of sanctions while maintaining an essential part of its nuclear programme," said a statement issued by the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The specifics of the deal have yet to be released, but negotiators indicated the broad outlines:

Hand of the Mossad suspected behind murder in Iran

 
Mojtada Ahmadi's funeral. 

Has the Israeli secret service Mossad again been involved in murdering an Iranian? It seems likely if we look at the attention that Israeli newspapers pay at the killing of  Mojtaba Ahmadi, the head of the cyberwar program of Iran's Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) Corps:  

 Ahmadi was last seen leaving his home for work on Saturday. He was later found with two bullets in the heart, according to a report in London's Daily Telegraph, which cited a report on a website linked to the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“I could see two bullet wounds on his body and the extent of his injuries indicated that he had been assassinated from a close range with a pistol,” an eyewitness told the website.
The commander of the local police gave further credence to an assassination saying that two people on a motorbike had been involved in the assassination.
Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile program have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations.

Bibi Netanyahu at UN: Israel ready to act alone against Iran

As expected no big surprises in the speech Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gave on Tuesday to the General Assembly of the UN. Israel is ready to act alone to stop Iran making a nuclear bomb, he said, and he warned against rushing into deals with Tehran.
"Israel will not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone," Netanyahu told a UN summit, in an attack on overtures made by Iran's President Hassan Rohani.
Netanyahu linked Rohani, who held a landmark conversation by telephone with US President Barack Obama while in New York last week, to past attacks blamed on Iran.
"He fooled the world once. Now he thinks he can fool it again. You see, Rohani thinks he can have his yellow cake and eat it too," Netanyahu said. demanding sanctions pressure be maintained.

Obama makes history and phones Rohani

 
The Iranian press showed an Obama calling Rohani.

 President Barack Obama and President Hassan Rohani of Iran spoke by telephone on Friday as a sign that they are serious about reaching a pact on Tehran's nuclear program. The phone call was arranged by Obama's staff, after Rohani had signalled that he was willing to talk top Obama on the phone, Reuters reports. A source close to Rohani said the United States had reached out after positive talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif a day earlier, according to Reuters. The conversation between Obama and Rohani was the first direct contact between American and Iranian heads of state since the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979.
 
President Obama afterwards gave the following - remarkably positive - statement:  

Just now, I spoke on the phone with President Rouhani of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program.  I reiterated to President Rouhani what I said in New York — while there will surely be important obstacles to moving forward, and success is by no means guaranteed, I believe we can reach a comprehensive solution.

Further overtures by Obama and Rohani at UN-Assemblee

Rohani at the UN (Photo AP)

President Barack Obama on Tuesday cautiously embraced overtures from Iran's president Rohani as the basis for a possible nuclear deal. A meeting between the two, however, did not take place.
In a speech to the United Nations, Obama said he was determined to test President Hassan Rouhani's recent diplomatic gestures and challenged him to take concrete steps toward resolving Iran's long-running nuclear dispute with the West.
Hours later, Rohani used his debut at the world body to pledge Iran's willingness to engage immediately in "time-bound" talks on the nuclear issue.Rohani stressed Iran's right to enrich uranium, but again asserted that
the Iranian nuclear program serves only peaceful purposes:

Iran’s nuclear program – and for that matter, that of all other countries – must pursue exclusively peaceful purposes. I declare here, openly and unambiguously, that, notwithstanding the positions of others, this has been, and will always be, the objective of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nuclear weapon and other weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran’s security and defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical convictions. Our national interests make it imperative that we remove any and all reasonable concerns about Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

The second objective, that is, acceptance of and respect for the implementation of the right to enrichment inside Iran and enjoyment of other related nuclear rights, provides the only path towards achieving the first objective. Nuclear knowledge in Iran has been domesticated now and the nuclear technology, inclusive of enrichment, has already reached industrial scale. It is, therefore, an illusion, and extremely unrealistic, to presume that the peaceful nature of the nuclear program of Iran could be ensured through impeding the program via illegitimate pressures.

Israel goes to the polls in two or three months

 

Israel will go to the polls early. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Tuesday in a televised statement, that they will be held in two or three months instead of the end of next year. As his coalition government would not be able to agree on a national budget for 2013, he had "decided, for the benefit of Israel, to hold elections now and as quickly as possible," the Prime Minister said.

"In a few months, the tenure of the most stable government in decades will come to an end," Netanyahu said. "This stability has helped us achieve the two main objectives we promised the citizens of Israel – to strengthen security at a time when a dangerous upheaval is gripping the Middle East, and [to fortify] the economy during…a  financial turmoil."
"We must maintain a responsible economic and defense policy," Netanyahu added, "to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear bomb." He said that early elections are a "national interest," and thanked the citizens of Israel for the privilege they have granted him.

 The prospect of early elections arose after minister Yishai (Interior) said his party, Shas, would not support wide-ranging budget cuts, particularly cuts to benefits for the elderly, single-parent families and the poor.
Observers agree that it is unlikely that Israel will attack Iran in the meantime. In fact Netayahu indicated already that much in his recent speech or the United Nations, when he positioned his 'red line' in the spring of just before the beginning of the summer. 

Army failure allows Iranian drone to overfly more than half of Israel

Richard Silverstein blogs:

Israeli jets down the drone

The IDF displayed yet another embarrassing failure in defending the homeland yesterday regarding the Iranian drone launched under the auspices of Hezbollah from Lebanon.  Yediot’s Alex Fishman, one of the few forthright Israeli defense reporters notes (print only) that the aerial vehicle was allowed to fly over Israeli airspace for 20 minutes before it was downed.  If you take into account IDF spokesperson Avital Leibovich’s claim that the army was tracking the drone for 20 minutes, that means it hadn’t a clue about the drone until it crossed into Israeli airspace.  Imagine the most advanced army in the Middle East cannot track a slow-moving drone launched from Lebanon and flown for a long distance over the Mediterranean.  Among the Israeli sites it overflew were population centers and military bases.  It was only 18 miles (he calls it “spitting distance”) from Dimona when it was felled.  Several years ago, a Hezbollah balloon flew directly over Dimona before it too was shot down.  Note that this is supposed to be restricted airspace.
Fishman, whose IDF sources are excellent, reports that the drone was manufactured by the Iranian aviation industry and used Iranian technology.

The secret Iranian bomb

h/t Angry Arab 

Khamenei repeats: 'Iran is not after nuclear weapons'

 
 Ayatollah Khamenei during his speech at the opening of the summit of the Non Aligned Movement in Tehran. (Xinhua).

has no interest in nuclear weapons but will keep pursuing peaceful nuclear energy, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in the 16th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit opened in Tehran on Thursday.
Khamenei said that "The Islamic republic is not after nuclear weapons" and will never slacken off its right to the "peaceful" use of nuclear energy, adding that Iran's slogan is "Nuclear energy for all, nuclear weapons for none."
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, attending the Tehran summit, urged Khamenei late on Wednesday to take concrete steps to prove Iran's nuclear work is peaceful.
It was not the first time ayatollah Khamenei said that Iran will not try to obtain a nuclear bomb. He said on several occasions that having a nuclear bomb is a sin according to islamic jurisprudence. 

Iran executes killer of nuclear scientist

 

 Iran on Tuesday hanged a man who had been convicted in August 2011 of playing a key role in the 2010 murder of a top nuclear scientist and of spying for Israel, the official IRNA news agency reported quoting Tehran prosecution office. "Majid Jamali Fashi, the Mossad spy and the person who assassinated Masoud Ali Mohammadi, our nation's nuclear scientist was hanged Tuesday morning," IRNA said.

However at the time that professor Mohammadi was killed, there were some doubts as to whether he was in reality a nuclear scientist and a supporter of the regime. 

Consequently it remains also questionable whether the man that was hanged today was really working for the Mossad. (On the photo policemen lead Fashi to his process - AFP Photo)

Ex-chief Israeli security service lost confidence in Netanyahu and Barak

The former chief of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, has lost all confidence in the Israeli leaders Netanyahu and Barak, and the way they are handling the 'case against Iran'. In a speech in Kfar Saba he said:

"Believe me, I have observed them from up close... They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off. These are not people who I would want to have holding the wheel in such an event," 

Diskin

"They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won't have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race," said the former security chief.  

Former chief of the spy agency Meir Dagan has been critical of Israel's attitude towards the Iranian nuclear project as well. In March he said on CBS's 60 minutes that an Israeli strike on Iran would lead to a missile attack on Israel that would have a "devastating impact" on the country.  Also he doubted whether an Israeli attack on Iran would effectively halt Iran's program. It would rather delay it, he said. Both Diskin and Dagan  were the subject of an investigation in November, ordered by Netanyahu, as it was believed that they had been leaking the news that Netanyahu and Barak were trying to obtain a majority in the Israeli cabinet for an attack on Iran.  

In his speech Diskin was also pessimistic about the political climate in Israel:

"Over the past 10-15 years Israel has become more and more racist. All of the studies point to this. This is racism toward Arabs and toward foreigners, and we are also become a more belligerent society."

Diskin also said he believed another political assassination, like that of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a Jewish extremist, could occur in the future. "Today there are extremist Jews, not just in the territories but also inside the Green Line, dozens of them who, in a situation in which settlements are evacuated… would be willing to take up arms against their Jewish brothers."

Iranian missiles could do a lot of harm in case Israel would attack

 On 24 March 2012 some 1000 Israeli's demonstrated in Tel Aviv against a possible Israeli attack on Iran (Photo Dahlia Scheindlin, +972 Mag)

The Lobelog, the blog of Jim Lobe of IPS, is one of those places that one should keep an eye on in order to be well informed.  On 29 March it carried an article by Gareth Porter, a journalist who specializes in U.S. National security, based on an interview with on of Israel's leading experts on Iranian missiles and the head of its missile defence programme for nearly a decade. He contradicts the optimistic scenario as portrayed by the Israeli government that says Iran is to weak to effectively react to an attack. On the contrary,  Iranian missiles are capable of doing significant damage to Israeli targets.

....Uzi Rubin, who was in charge of Israel's missile defence from 1991 to 1999 and presided over the development of the Arrow anti- missile system, has a much more sombre view of Iran's capabilities.
The "bad news" for Israel, Rubin told IPS in an interview, is that the primary factor affecting Iran's capability to retaliate is the rapidly declining cost of increased precision in ballistic missiles. Within a very short time, Iran has already improved the accuracy of its missiles from a few kilometres from the target to just a few metres, according to Rubin.
That improvement would give Iran the ability to hit key Israeli economic infrastructure and administrative targets, he said. "I'm asking my military friends how they feel about waging war without electricity," said Rubin.
The consequences of Iranian missile strikes on administrative targets could be even more serious, Rubin believes. "If the civilian government collapses," he said, "the military will find it difficult to wage a war."
Rubin is even worried that, if the accuracy of Iranian missiles improves further, which he believes is "bound to happen", Iran will be able to carry out pinpoint attacks on Israel's air bases, which are concentrated in just a few places.

Some Israeli analysts have suggested that Israel could hit Iranian missiles in a preemptive strike, but Rubin said Israel can no longer count on being able to hit Iranian missiles before they are launched.
Iran's longer-range missiles have always been displayed on mobile transporter erector launchers (TELs), as Rubin pointed out in an article in Arms Control Today earlier this year. "The message was clear," Rubin wrote. "Iran's missile force is fully mobile, hence, not pre-emptable."
Rubin, who has argued for more resources to be devoted to the Arrow anti-missile system, acknowledged that it can only limit the number of missiles that get through. In an e-mail to IPS, he cited the Arrow system's record of more than 80 percent success in various tests over the years, but also noted that such a record "does not assure an identical success rate in real combat". 

 and 

Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, then IDF chief of staff, told a visiting Congressional delegation in November 2009 that Iran already had 300 missiles capable of hitting Israeli targets, according to a U.S. State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.
Those reports suggest that Iran now has roughly 450 missiles that can reach Israel, half of which are improved models with much greater precision. Even if only one-fifth of those missiles get through Israel's missile defences, Israeli cities could be hit by at least 100, most of which are able to hit targets with relative accuracy. 

The whole article can be found here

Israel can make use of airfields in Azerbaijan near the border of Iran

Haaretz reports:
 Israel has been granted access to air bases in Azerbaijan on Iran's northern border, Foreign Policy reported Wednesday, quoting senior U.S. diplomats and military intelligence officials.

"The Israelis have bought an airfield," a senior U.S. administration official told Foreign Policy's Mark Perry, "and the airfield is called Azerbaijan." 

 "We're watching what Iran does closely," said a U.S. intelligence officer involved in assessing the consequences of a potential Israeli strike on Iran. "But we're now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we're not happy about it."

In February, Israel signed a $1.6 billion arms deal with Azerbaijan, committing to sell drones and anti-aircraft missile defense systems to Baku. According to a retired U.S. diplomat, the deal left Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan "sputtering in rage," since Israel had previously canceled a contract to develop drones with the Turkish military.

The report said that the Azeri military has four abandoned, Soviet-era airfields that could be available to Israel and four air bases for their own aircraft, quoting the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Military Balance 2011.

U.S. officials told Foreign Policy that they believe Israel has been granted access to these air bases through a "series of quiet political and military understandings."

"I doubt that there's actually anything in writing," said a former U.S. diplomat who spent his career in the region. "But I don't think there's any doubt - if Israeli jets want to land in Azerbaijan after an attack, they'd probably be allowed to do so. Israel is deeply embedded in Azerbaijan, and has been for the last two decades."

Diehard supporters of Israel campaign to lift terrorist status of Iranian Mujaheddin e Khalq

Several people from the ranks of the diehard supporters of Israel in the USA have lend their voice to a bid to remove the Mujaheddin e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that fought with Iraq against Iran in the past, from the list of terrorist organisations of the State Department.
Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) names attorney Alan Dershowitz, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as three prominents who recently campaigned in favour of MEK.

Dershowitz

Others who support the bid are, according to JTA, former government officials who used to be at the side of Israel, like former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge. Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney who served in various posts in the Reagan administration, wrote a column this week in the Huffington Post about the subject.He and a number of other lawyers filed a request to a federal appeals court in Washington this week on behalf of the MEK, asking for the group to be removed from the terrorist list.
The attempts to do something for the MEK comes on the heels of various reports that Israel cooperates with the Mujaheddin in its 'covert war' against the Iranian atomic bomb. A blast in November at a base of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards near Tehran, that was a storage facility for long range missiles and that killed one of Iran's most outstanding missile experts, Major General Hassan Moghaddam, was reported to be executed by the MEK in cooperation with the Israeli Mossad. An earlier explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base near Khorramabad in October 2010 was also suspected to have been the work of the MEK. And operations whereby at least three experts who were linked in one way or other to Iran's nuclear program were killed by motorists who attached a magnetic bomb to their cars, are also believed to have been the work of MEK-members, trained or instructed by Israel.
The MEK has maintained a presence in Iraq since 1986. From its border encampment, Camp Ashraf, it conducted military operations against its fellow Iranians, sometimes deep inland, a fact that caused it to be one of the most hated groups in Iran  (as the writer of this blog found out during trips to Iran in the eighties and nineties). After the 2003 American invasion that removed Saddam, Camp Ashraf was disarmed. Now, in the wake of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, Ashraf’s 3,400 residents feel vulnerable to a regime that is seeking close ties with Iran. According to the Associated Press, an Iraqi army raid last year left 34 camp residents dead. The United Nations wants to move the residents to a former U.S. Army base, Camp Liberty, but the MEK and its advocates say the site is equally insecure. Advocates of de-listing the MEK say it would facilitate the removal of the Ashraf residents to other countries, including the United States.
Opponents of de-listing point to MEK’s bloody past. After the Islamic Revolution, it was  behind several massive bomb attacks, among them an attack that killed the leader of the Party of the Islamic Republic, ayatollah Beheshti and 70 members of the party. The group has also been described as a 'totalitarian cult' that keeps people in its ranks against their will. Elizabeth Rubin, a New York Times Magazine contributor, who last year reported from Camp Ashraf, was one of them.The writer of this blog came to the same conclusion in the early eighties, after he visited the headquarters of the group which at the time was near Paris in France, ad interviewed its leader Massoud Rajavi.

Wikileaks: Israel obtained codes for Iranian air defense in horse trading deal with Russia

 Interesting stuff in the Wikileaks cables of Stratfor. It tells us a something about the way Israel, by wheeling and dealing, collected information about Iranian air defense systems. Useful information for a country that is weighing the possibilities of an attack on Iranian installations.
Between the lines it is also telling information about the lack of scruples countries apparently have, if their agencies feel that the national interest might be at stake. This goes as far as betraying military clients and delivering strategic secrets to the enemy..
 The document I'm referring to is an email from a Stratfor source who spoke with a Mexican friend/colleague who apparently was in the business of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles -drones) and was an adviser to the Mexican military. He reveals that Mexico, which has its own firm capable of manufacturing UAVs, was contacted by Georgia during the crisis between Georgia and Russia in 2008. At least one of Georgia's UAVs had been downed and it urgently requested to buy Mexican UAVs, as it feared that its Israeli UAVs had been tampered with.  this source was an adviser of the Mexican military.
The author  of the email asked one of his Mexican military contacts about it:       

 ''I inquired more about the compromised Israeli UAVs. What he explained was
that Israel and Russia made a swap -- Israel gave Russia the 'data link'
code for those specific UAVs; in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for
Iran's Tor-M1s.''

 So Israel revealed the codes of the software that guided the Georgian UAVs - which would permit the Russians to down them whenever they saw fit - and as a trade off got the codes of the highly sophisticated Russian Tor M1 aerial defense system, that Moscow delivered to the Iranians. A system that is jamming proof, is able to trace aircraft and missiles from far away and to intercept both. Nice. Neither country apparently did respect the rights of their military clients for one second, as soon as their own national interest entered the picture. So much for morality in that kind of  business.

The Russian Tor M1

But apparently it was not the only example of horse trading in this industry. Because the same source had more interesting news:  

Besides, he said... Israel and Turkey have been collaborating very closely on the
S-300s. He explain (sic) how about 8 years ago when Russia sold S-300s to Greece
to base in Crete (which were supposed to protect Cyprus), Russia delivered
those with a carrier so that Turkey wouldn't try to sink them. (things got
a bit noisy so i may have misheard some of this). The gist of what he said
is that Turkey has been cracking the S-300 since the Crete sale and has
been sharing intel on the S-300 with the Israelis to ensure that they
retain an advantage over Iran should Iran get them from the Russians.

This was, of course, before the Israeli-Turkish relations cooled off considerably because of the Mavi Marmara (Free Gaza Flotilla) affair. So also the S-300 system the Iranians have does not have too many secrets for Israel anymore.
It is noteworthy, however, that the Iranians themselves sometimes show some initiatives a well. Not long ago they ware capable of downing an American spy plane that was flying over their territory. The Americans professed that the engine had been shot down,  but it is much more probable that the Iranians succeeded in cracking the codes of the UAV, so that they could it guide to a safe landing place and take it apart in order to inspect it. So, the might have been able to apply some changes to their Russian obtained systems in the meantime as well. Israel had better be careful.

Israeli Mossad posed as American CIA in recruiting Iranian dissidents who executed terror attacks

The leader of Jundallah, Abdolmalek Rigi, was arrested in February 2010 by Iranian commandos after the plane on which he was traveling from Karachi to Kyrgyzstan had been forces to land in the Caspian region of Iran.    

Mark Perry of Foreign Policy reports that Israeli Mossad agents posing as CIA operatives recruited Iranian Sunni dissidents affiliated with the organisation Jundallah in Iranian Baluchistan to engage in acts of terror inside Iran.
The Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.
 It is a new amazing revelation concerning theft of identity, but not the first of its kind as far as the Mossad is concerned.In an operation that was widely publicized  a squad of Mossad operatives killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, an official of the Hamas movement in charge of buying weapons in a hotel in Dubai in January 2010. It turned out that the Mossad agents used false pasports belonging to citizens from the UK, Ireland, Germany, France and Austria.
Perry's revelation is based on conversations with several former and active CIA operatives. The recruiting of the Jundallah members by the Mossad occurred in 2007 and 2008. It is not known if Israel is still using contacts with Jundallah. One of them said: "It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with. Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."

The fact that the Israelis were posing as CIA-agents led to several Iranian accusations vis à vis the USA and the CIA that it was backing terrorist operations by Jundallah. Jundallah carried out a string of high-profile attacks in Sistan-Baluchistan in 2008-2009, including a suicide bombing near the Pakistani border that killed 42 people, including six senior Revolutionary Guards commanders, and a bombing in a Shia mosque in Zahedan that killed 25 people.
The leader of Jundallah, Abdolmalek Rigi, was captured by the Iranians in february 2010 after Iran had been tipped by Pakistan that he was on a flight from Karachi to Kyrgyzstan. The plane was forced to land in Iran and Rigi was taken. He was hanged in June 2010. One month earlier his younger brother Abdolhamid, who had been extradited to Iran by Pakistan, was also hanged. The younger Rigi told his interrogators that his brother had had several meetings in Islamabad and Karachi and even in Europe with American agents.

Perry writes in Foreign Policy that the Iranian accusations led to a number of memos in which CIA involvement was denied and the blame was put on the Mossad. Perry's sources reveal that president Bush, the then American president, was enraged about the reports. "The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," one  intelligence officer told Perry. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians." However, in the end nothing was done, although Perry's source tells him that there were clearly two camps in the administration as to what to do about it. Probably it is not too far fethched to assume that the conservative pro-Israeli camp within Bush's troops (Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and others) was simply too strong...
 According to Perry Israel's relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel's activities jeopardized the administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.
 The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers.
 

Again nuclear scientist killed in Tehran

 The damaged car of Ahmadi Roshan

An Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist was killed in a bomb attack in a Northern neighborhood in Tehran on Wednesday morning, the Iranian Fars News Agency reports. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, supervised a department at Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Isfahan province.
The magnetic bomb which was planted by an unknown motorcyclist to the side of the car of Ahmadi Roshan, a professor at Tehran's technical university, also wounded two other Iranian nationals in Seyed Khandan neighborhood in Northern Tehran.
The blast took place exactly one year after Majid Shahriari, a well-known Iranian nuclear scientist, was killed on January 11, 2010. On that day the same method of attaching magnetic bombs to the side of their cars was used against Shahriari and his colleague, the then university professor, Fereidoun Abbassi Davani. Davani survived and is now the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization. Another Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010. The attacks are widely blamed on Israel, possibly in cooperation with agents of the Iranian opposition group Mujaheddin e Khalq.