3 key moments that led to the U.S.-Iran war

On the latest all songs considered from in-peer music, we rank the nominees.

“I think Diane Warren should have won two Academy Awards.”

The problem is very often the lyrics are not much more insightful than you would find on the nearest

throw pillow. Here the in-peer music podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. Hey, it's Rund. The current war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has been decades in the making and through line has been covering the tension between the U.S. and Iran for years. So today we're bringing you an episode from a past series we made. Part one of the series took us inside the CIA backed over throw of Iran's democratically elected

Prime Minister in 1953. That episode is called Four Days in August and if you haven't heard it yet,

“check it out in our archives. Today we pick the story back up in 1979.”

The secular shot the U.S. put in place after the coup in 1953 was suddenly facing a major crisis and Islamic revolution. For the last seven days, Tehran and other cities have seen violent clashes between troops and demonstrators to attack on the soldiers with rocks and homemade petrol bombs. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets. Inevitably the result is massacre. The Shah was forced to flee Iran and a new leader

a Muslim cleric named Ayatollah Homeini took power. Returns to a country tutoring on the brink of civil war. And this began a new era in U.S. Iran relation.

“And an obvious reference to the United States, he said foreign advisors have ruined our”

culture and have taken our oil. And so in a course of months, the wrong went from one of America's best allies to one of America's worst adversaries. Not long after the revolution, Iran did something that solidified its new place as an American adversary. The American embassy in Tehran is in the hands of Muslim students tonight, spread on by an ally of American speech by the Ayatollah Homeini. They stormed the embassy

thought the Marine guards for three hours overpowered them and took dozens of American hostages. Some 60 Americans, including our fellow citizen whom you just saw, bound and blindfolded, are now beginning their sixth day of captivity inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. It's Friday morning there now. 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 cyber war between Iran and the United States, and the context behind the moment we're in today. Part one, do you copy? It was Saddam Hussein who declared, whoever climbs over our fence, we shall climb over his roof. The Iranian rock war was one of the bloodiest wars of the second half of the 20th century.

When it was over after eight years there was over a million casualties, Iranian and Iraqi casualties.

Relations between Iran and Iran worsened when the eye of tolerance took over. The Iraqis claimed that the Iranians were refusing to implement border agreements, and the first skirmishes broke out. Iraq invaded Iran on land, and they met with some initial success, especially in the southwest, which was the well-producing region of Iran. But very quickly the war effort bogged down, and by 1982 Iran had succeeded in

spelling Iraqi forces out of Iran. And it looked like momentum was working against Iraq in the

Iraqi side that eventually if the war grabbed on, they would lose. So they tried to escalate and

“expand the war to include economic warfare, so they targeted Iran's oil industry.”

Iran responded in a kind and started hacking ships in the Gulf that were going to pick up oil from other Arab countries that were allied to Iraq and providing financial in other help to Iraq as part of its war effort against Iran. For both countries oil is the life blood of their economy, and so they're trying to sink one another's oil tankers to weaken one another economically. So they attacked using aircraft, telecopters, 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. So they would pull up in front of a ship going through the Gulf. They would set up an line in front of the ship's line of movement, and as a ship passed them, they would open fire and rig the hole, and sometimes it 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-hole,

the damage did not cause these ships to sink, and they were able to continue with their mission, but in post-cost it was dangerous for the crews. And that area where Iran in Iraq were fighting

“the Strait of Hormuz is an incredibly crucial geoeconomic chokehold. Once through the entrance”

the Strait of Hormuz, the oil tankers face a problem, regardless of their destination. Many given day 20 to 40 percent of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and at its nearest point it's about 20 miles wide. What's happening is that the war on land between Iran and Iraq is fitting over into the sea, with western tankers being the sitting targets for both sides. The world cared about what was happening with these tank wars

because it was affecting the price of gasoline throughout the world. It was absolutely crucial to

the fate of the global economy. In 1986, 1987 Iran intensified its attacks on co-editankers in particular, co-weight was playing an especially important role in the war as a country that was providing support to Iraq, financial and otherwise providing loans. They had been asking the United States about the idea of perhaps providing escort for their tankers so that they wouldn't be attacked. At first we didn't respond with enthusiasm, so the co-edits 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 with scene is a zero-sum game, so that's when the United States got itself involved. From ABC, this is world news tonight with Peter Jennings. Good evening, that was an American flag on the back of that

ship and we begin this evening and what is surely the world's most dangerous body of water the Persian Gulf. Tonight it's actually, but it's own flag on co-editankers 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. You set up an arrangement whereby we would have a convoy system where we'd pick up co-editankers outside the entrance to the Persian Gulf and escort them for about a day or two until they reach

co-ed, drop them off and then we would kind of go back and escort more ships coming in. And so the United States embargoed on a mid-east mission which is haunted by one question,

“will the Iranians try to attack the Kuwaiti ships now that they are technically American?”

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 Iran. The American assumption had been going into this that the presence of U.S. warships

the Iranians. We had no prior military experience with the Iranians except for the failed hostage

“rescue operation in a number of years before. We had not had any sustained military interactions”

with the 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 showed and destroyed two Iranian oil platforms and then raided another. Locally seen pretend miles, but the message was meant for Tehran 690 miles away. We were 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 flag tanker. Iran is believed to have fired the long-range missile which last Friday struck the American flag tanker's sea aisle city,

“wounding many of her crew. And the racing of what you see is this conflict zone in which everyone”

has their finger on the trigger. It's a fog of war, your at sea, and this constant risk of miscalculation, this lack of communication. The Islamic news agency said the U.S. has become involved in a full fledged war with Iran. The Iranian president, Ali Kamaydi, is reported as saying we will retaliate. The United States expanded its rules of engagement to allow U.S. vessels that 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 USS Vincent's coming to the region. That was a new class of ship with a radar system that could see further out with greater resolution than the radar systems that were then used by the ships. Their role generally was to kind of hang back and provide big picture of the air defense environment for the other ships that were operating in the region.

So on July 3rd, 1988, what happened on July 3rd was a Pakistani tanker head commander attack. The Vincent's sent its helicopter to investigate. As it approached the area where the attack was occurring, Iranian ships fired warning shots at the helicopter for to stay away. The helicopters thought they were under attack and reported it as such. The Vincent's 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 that were involved in the attack against the Pakistani tanker, Iranian civilian aircraft takes off from the airport in the city of Vandarapas, which is an airfield in the south of Iran, in route to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. And what would usually be a 30 minute flight very easy? And as it turns out, it was flying right

over the area in which U.S. combat was going on on the surface. And it takes off. The crew of the Vincent's thought that this civilian jet was actually in Iranian

fighter aircraft that was first gaining altitude but then diving to attack. They mistook it for

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 the Iranian plane was a civilian airliner which was on the military frequency. And so after numerous attempts of trying to communicate with it, they shot two surface terror missiles, which brought down the Iranian airliner killing 290 civilians aboard.

There's been a dramatic and sudden escalation of possibilities in the Persian Gulf involving U.S. forces. There is the possibility that U.S. Navy missiles may have accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airliner. It's a civilian airliner carrying nearly 300 people.

“And so I think the fog of war coupled with both the miscalculation,”

itchitrigger fingers, and inability to communicate, resulted in this terrible tragedy.

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

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

Because the plane was clearly marked. It's flight pattern was clearly civilian aircraft headed to Dubai. There's probably dozens of such flights every day between Bandit Abbas and Dubai. But what the U.S. side talks about is the broader context, you know, this U.S. war ship was actually receiving fire from what they thought were Iranian warships. There was constant attack taking place during that time.

And so the United States acknowledged it as a terrible mistake. President Ronald Reagan offered to what is known as excraschia payments, voluntary payments by the United States government

“to the families of the victims of the Iranian air 655, and this settlement today.”

For Iran these things are on our mistakes. Even if America claimed it was in the state, 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 worry about in this calculation

in dealing with the Iranians, that there's always the potential for in its written escalation as a result of a tragic mistake. On the other hand that would point out that one of the lessons of this conflict and during the latter phases of the Iran 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 to become an even larger war

and they largely succeeded in that regard. Several months later Iran actually signed a peace treaty to end the Iranian rock war. So the shooting down flight 655, Iran 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 Iranian rock 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. The revolutionary Islam and the

humanness ideology that was born out 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 eclipse communism has kind of challenged a threat number one for the United States. And I think similarly one of Iran's takeaways from the Iranian rock war and its interactions with the US military is that the US military's budget is more than 50 times

that of Iran's. And so in a head to head conventional military matchup Iran cannot compete with the United States. How it can compete is using essentially a symmetric warfare whether that's the use of proxies whether that's the use of mines 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.

[MUSIC] That was Karim Sajadpur, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Michael Eisenstatt director of the Washington Institute's military and security studies program. Coming up the story of the Shadow War. [MUSIC]

Hello, hello, hi, my name is Kelly, P.C. Sherry. We are calling from Michigan, and we love to realize the next year's better teacher. A better person, a better, thank you for what you do, bye, bye. Part two, hidden in plain sight.

I blame myself for what happened.

“I was a certain of the guard. I was ultimately responsible for the security of that BLT that morning.”

[MUSIC] There was 630 in Sunday morning, bear with Lebanon. Everybody was asleep. We have a bulletin from the Pentagon on the explosion in Beirut at the U.S. Marines Barracks. Then he heard the relevant engine behind me.

A truck loaded with explosives broke through a gate into the lobby of a building in Beirut occupied by Marines. So the truck come to a stop, dead center, that lobby, dead silence in the lobby. You could hear a fin drop. [MUSIC] And the next thing I saw was a bright orange flash.

[MUSIC] Speeding took up truck crash through barriers, and it exploded in the lobby of the headquarters building reverbering, which weeping.

The first thing I said was, son of a bitch, he did it.

Carving the first door he stood through the collapse. [MUSIC] Trunks of concrete and spears of broken glass were her own hundreds of yards, wounding other Marines. Some of those who did help for their colleagues from the rubble. We're looking on my shoulder and there was one Marine back here.

[MUSIC] Loaning, help me, help me, God help me, somebody please help me. [MUSIC] But trying to get on now, estimate that 120 to be hotly more. The truck has been built, the list of survivors dead and wounded is still being compiled.

Forty-five of the more critically wounded have been evacuated. Others remain to be evacuated later. [MUSIC]

I'm pretty, pretty hectic, trying to just sort things out and see what.

[MUSIC] But the total effect of this tragedy is going to be. [MUSIC] 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 Marine since Ivojima.”

Almost 250 Marines were killed. It was unclear to people who was behind this attack because it was a truck bombing. And now we 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 strictly operated via proxy, 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. [MUSIC]

Hezbollah was created to fight Israel. [MUSIC] Who's army invaded an opportunity? The emergence of a group called Hezbollah, the party of God, was essentially a by-product 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 sheer community in Lebanon had an enormous, very wealthy external patron. It is a secretive militant movement of the Shi'a sect of Islam, largely funded,

and armed by Iran. To the Iran and many of its allies. 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 shi'a radicalism in Lebanon, which Iran was harnessing.

And 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.

“And I think the outrage of all Americans.”

After the bombing of the Marine barracks, I think it caused a real debate within the Reagan administration. Someone 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 mass of 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 to aggressively blame Iran because America didn't really want to fight that war.

because they say by not responding to that massive attack by Iran against the US

Marines, essentially emboldened Iran. Iran realized that actually suicide bombings can be quite effective. Truck bombings can be quite effective. And eventually led to America's pull out from Lebanon. Ambassadors have even Draper were presentedly in Beirut.

We'll continue to press negotiations for the earliest possible. Total withdrawal of all external forces. Because the Americans committed looking at the television said,

“"Why are sons and daughters dying in Beirut Lebanon?”

What are we doing there? What are our interests?" 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 pull out from the Middle East. "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. When the Iraq war was launched in 2003, one of the Bush administrations underlying goals for the Iraq war was to create a 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 believe 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 the first year or so.

But then you started to see Iran ramping up attacks on American troops, using proxies, using their Shiite militia proxies in Iraq. You know what I'm saying? Let it go, I'm at it, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let

- Let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go, let it

to fight against ISIS and Project Iranian power in Iraq, and now in Yemen.

A second day of air strikes inside Yemen by Saudi jets, bombing Iranian-backed Hootishia militias,

which have taken control of the country. 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 shea proxies on the ground. The top US commander for the Middle East worried about what could be Tehran's bid for superpowers status.

“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 shea 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 definitely opposed to the United States, and they want to actually overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia, you know, groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni radicals, which are not Saudi Arabia's proxies, they're actually Saudi Arabia's adversary. And so despite the fact that shea are outnumbered by Sunni, by 45 to 1 in the region, Iran has a monopoly over sheeraticalism,

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 mine,

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

“This is Jizal from Portland, Oregon, and you're listening to True Line on NPR.”

And we recently discovered the show, but it has quickly become my favorite podcast. I need difficult political times, I'm just so grateful for this show, and the context that it gives to really complex contemporaries issues. It's a good reminder that nothing exists in the vacuum. So thanks. Part three, a digital weapon.

And Iranian facility has been targeted for cyber attack.

The second time it's happened in less than a year, worst cyber attack in history.

The race between Iranian officials trying to build their nuclear program,

“and 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 U.S. started to contemplate the development of offensive cyber capabilities. And right around that time, Iran obtained a batch of elicit uranium hexaflory gas from China. And so that sort of, what we can sort of trace the beginnings of the Iranian elicit 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 long time 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 on the facility at Natans, U.S. intelligence wasn't 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 our monitors nuclear programs around the world.

IAN Specters make their first visit to Natans.

And now we return to Iran, where today you and inspectors have visited a site you. 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 Natans. They had some centrifuges there that they were beginning to assemble. They had said that they hadn't enriched any batch of Iranian hexaflorid 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 Iranian hexaflorid gas to build a bomb. And 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 could obtain more information. So there was a lot of pressure put on Iran to stop everything. The head of the United Nations nuclear watched dog the IAEA in talks with Iranian officials in Tehran.

And the breakthrough. Iran, surprisingly actually agreed. Through out 2003, 2004. And then something changed in 2005. Mahmud 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 Iranian hexaflorid gas.

And so you can imagine the panic in Israel when that happens. Jump forward about six months on January, February 2006, Iran announced that they have enriched their first batch of Iranian hexaflorid gas in that pilot plant and the tons. 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.

They'd come to the U.S. for permission from President Bush to launch a strike against the Natans facility. And the U.S. denied that permission.

“And instead had this alternative plan that they wanted to do.”

So between February 2006 and February 2007, the U.S. 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 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.

So you've got this Natans facility that has critical computers that are air-gupped from the internet.

And also the facility itself is physically protected. Three out of perimeter security walls. Anti-aircraft guns. Earth and Burms entirely hide the facility from view. 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 mold.

They probably had close access inside the tons. So 2007 they unleashed that first version of Stuxnet. It was a partnership between the US and Israel. 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 in its uranium gas to have a bomb.

Iran had a limited supply of uranium hexaflory 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.”

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. And so they wouldn't have seen the sabotage happening. What they would have seen, however, is they would have seen that they were losing gas. They would have seen eventually 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 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. Thank you. Dapper.

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.

we are losing the sitting president.

“And in January 2009 Obama 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 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 this sabotage externally. But we don't know what it is.

“The international atomic energy agency is sending inspectors to Lenton'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. 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.

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 is given up.

They don't know what's going on. They are checking the equipment, they're checking everything.

“And yet stuck stuck continues to operate.”

And it continues to engage in sabotage. And it's not until June 2010. Stuckstead has unleashed in another round. In March and April 2010, and the March version is what got it caught. The March version had multiple spreading mechanisms attached to it,

including that worm, and it spread wildly out of control. It started spreading two 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 the tons. 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 anti-virus software company in Belarus called Virus Block ADA. 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 believe was causing the machines to reboot crash and reboot. And so they found this code and they started taking a part.

They immediately discovered that it was malware and that it was designed to spread to any windows machine. So they contacted Microsoft because it was using a vulnerability in the window 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 Semantic 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, but this was conducting espionage.

Experts say Stuxnet is an exceptionally sophisticated computer worm that attacks the software used to control automated systems. So if you can imagine from November 2007, all the way to November 2010, Stuxnet continued to operate unimpeded. Mahledokwedeena John 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 digital attack like that.

It is says that you can take action to halt an attack that's current. But that 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 cyber attacks on America's biggest banks, slowing down their websites, even forcing some to shut down temporarily, costing the money.

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.

“Senator Joe Lieberman and 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." 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 semantic reverse engineer did 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.

But digital warfare erases that distance. Now the front line is on businesses and critical infrastructure here. It's brought the war home. That was Kim Zetter. She's a writer for Wired Magazine, an author of the book, Countdown to Zero Day. Stuxnet and Milanch, the world's first digital weapon.

“If you want to learn more about the US in Iran, check out our episode four days in August.”

Which is about the CIA backed coup that first brought the shot to power in 1953.

And next week on through line, we're turning our attention to Cuba, its revolution, and where the US could intervene next. I don't know if the regime is going to fall. But what I'm really sure is that in 2006, thumbs in is going to happen with the regime. That's it for this week's show. I'm Rontina Ablui.

I'm Rontina Ablui. I'm Rontina Ablui. I'm Rontina Ablui. I'm Rontina Ablui.

“This show was produced by me and me and Jamie York.”

I'm a very anti-hocament. Lawrence Wu. Lane Captain Levinson. Today's my thing is somewhere. My jury eating.

Music for this episode was composed by Rontina in his band, Drop Electric, which includes Ania, Mizani. Naveed Marvi, show Fujiwara. Thanks also to Ida Polesad. Ananya Grunman, and to Andazita, Sarah Wyman, and Amber Chi.

If you like something you heard or you have an idea, please write us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.