Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
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The other was a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant being built near an old highway that linked the town of Natanz to the town of Kashan. It was a joint operation of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI) and its Supreme National Security Council. To hide the plant’s true purpose, however, front companies had been established to secretly procure materials and technology for it. One of these was a company called Kala Electric (also known as Kalaye Electric Company), which would later factor into Stuxnet as one of the companies believed to have been infected by the digital weapon.4
Construction on the Natanz complex, which Jafarzadeh said covered 100,000 square meters of land and had cost $300 million already, began in 2000 and was expected to be completed in three months, at which point workers would begin to install equipment. The cover story for the plant was that it was a desert-eradication project. But if this was true, then it was an extremely important desert-eradication project, because a former prime minister of Iran had toured the site earlier that month as a representative of the Supreme National Security Council, and the head of the AEOI made monthly visits to nearby Kashan just to keep tabs on the project. Workers at the plant also were not allowed to discuss the project with local officials. A major argument had in fact recently broken out between the AEOI and the Kashan Governor’s Office because the AEOI would not discuss information about the site with the office, Jafarzadeh said. And when the deputy governor general of the province tried to visit the construction site at Natanz, he was turned away.
As Jafarzadeh rattled off details about the site and pointed to poster boards at the front of the room showing the network of front companies and individuals who were running the project, Hinderstein scribbled away in her notebook. With the general location of facilities cited, as well as the names and addresses of front companies revealed, it was the first solid evidence ISIS had received about Iran’s illicit nuclear program that might be independently verified.
The timing of the revelations wasn’t lost on Hinderstein. Iran was a signatory to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and under its safeguards agreement with the IAEA it was obligated to disclose the existence of any new nuclear facility 180 days before introducing nuclear material to the site so that inspectors could begin monitoring it. If the Natanz plant was indeed ninety days away from completion, then Jafarzadeh’s group had exposed it just in time for IAEA inspectors to demand access to it before it opened.
All of this raised obvious questions about how the NCRI got their hands on top-secret intelligence that had seemingly eluded the world’s top spy agencies for years. Jafarzadeh insisted that his group obtained the information from people inside Iran who were directly associated with the program, as well as through extensive research and investigation by his group. But more likely it had come from US or Israeli intelligence agencies.5 Israel had a history of leaking intelligence by proxy in order to sway public opinion without tainting the intelligence with its own political agenda. Israel was naturally the country with the most to fear from a nuclear-armed Iran, but it had obvious integrity issues when it came to calling out the nuclear activities of other nations, since it had long maintained its own covert nuclear weapons program, which it has never publicly acknowledged.6 For this and other reasons, it conducted its political machinations behind the scenes by feeding intelligence to Western governments, the IAEA, and groups like Jafarzadeh’s.
If the information did come from the United States or Israel, Jafarzadeh’s group was an odd choice to leak it. The NCRI was the political arm of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group once known for its anti-Israel and anti-US stance. It was accused of killing six Americans in Iran in the 1970s as well as setting off bombs in Iran in 1981 that killed more than 70 people, including the Iranian president and prime minister. The group had been on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations since 1997 but had been trying to rehabilitate its image to get off the list ever since. Helping to expose secret nuclear facilities in Iran would no doubt earn it support in Congress to achieve that aim.7
The NCRI had made provocative claims about Iran’s nuclear program in the past, but some of them had proved to be false. There were questions about the accuracy of this new information as well. Jafarzadeh had identified the Natanz facility as a fuel-manufacturing plant, but this didn’t make sense to Hinderstein and her colleagues at ISIS. Iran was already planning to build a fuel-manufacturing plant not far from Natanz, so it didn’t seem logical to build a second one so close. Nonetheless, they were willing for now to accept the revelations as true. To help verify them, however, Hinderstein decided to seek out satellite images to see if she could spot evidence of construction that matched Jafarzadeh’s description.
Hinderstein had been with ISIS for six years—she’d come to the job straight out of college—and over time had become its resident expert on satellite imagery, an emerging tool that only recently had become available to groups like hers. For decades, satellite imagery, particularly high-resolution images, had been the sole domain of governments and intelligence agencies. The only time anyone else could see pictures from space was if a government agency or research institute decided to release them, which rarely occurred. Images only became available for the public to buy in the mid-1990s, but these weren’t very sharp. It wasn’t until several years later that images at 1.6-meter resolution—the resolution at which you could actually see details clearly—became available.
ISIS was one of the first nongovernmental organizations to invest in the expensive software needed to analyze the images, recognizing early on the important role they could play in nonproliferation work. Hinderstein’s first experience analyzing satellite images came in 1998, after Pakistan conducted six underground nuclear tests in response to underground atomic detonations made by India. Working with a satellite imagery expert, she learned how to identify pixelated objects in the images and interpret shadows and gradations in order to decipher depth in the two-dimensional pictures.
About two months after the press conference, armed with the details from Jafarzadeh and extensive additional research, Hinderstein logged into their account at Digital Globe, one of two commercial providers of satellite images in the United States, to scour the archive for available images.8 Today, satellites have imaged nearly every part of the Earth, with most pictures available to anyone via Google Earth. But in 2002, the only way to find images in Digital Globe’s archive was if someone had already commissioned the company to photograph a site, or if Digital Globe had taken images of a location on its own initiative, such as Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon—images the company knew would sell well. To commission an image that wasn’t in the archive cost about $10,000, but once an image existed, it became available for others to purchase at one-third the price.
The Digital Globe interface that Hinderstein used looked like Google Maps, with small gray boxes that popped up on-screen wherever satellite images were available. But clicking on a gray box produced only a browsing image—a rough image of 16-meter resolution, which meant that every pixel showed 16 meters of ground. To see more detail, you had to buy the 1.6-meter version.
Hinderstein couldn’t believe her luck when she found images for both Arak and Natanz available in the archive. Jafarzadeh hadn’t provided exact coordinates for either of the two sites, so Hinderstein had to first locate Arak on the Digital Globe map, then move slowly outward from the town, searching in concentric circles until a gray box popped up. When she clicked on the image, it was clear this was a heavy-water production plant as Jafarzadeh described. ISIS had identified such a plant in Pakistan a couple of years earlier, and the site near Arak looked very similar.
When she searched the region of Natanz, however, she found two possible locations in the middle of the desert where images were available. At each of the sites, three gray boxes stacked on top of each other popped up, indicating multiple images were available for both sites. It was as if someone had left a giant arrow directing her to them
. The dates on the images indicated they had all been snapped September 16 and 26—weeks after Jafarzadeh’s press conference. It was clear that someone else had been seeking the same information that she was seeking. Hinderstein suspected it was the IAEA. The IAEA had established a satellite imagery analysis lab of its own the previous year, and it would have made sense for the agency to commission images after Jafarzadeh’s revelations.9
Hinderstein clicked on the gray boxes at one of the sites and quickly eliminated it as the nuclear facility. It was nowhere near the 100,000 square meters Jafarzadeh described and looked more like a water-purification or sewage plant than anything to do with nuclear fuel. The other site, however, was more suspect. It was much larger than the first and showed obvious signs of massive, ongoing excavation. Despite the blurry 16-meter image, Hinderstein could make out what looked to be a collection of buildings and large mounds of churned earth inside two layers of security fences. She also noted a single road leading out to the site, suggesting the area had restricted access.
After she purchased and loaded the 1.6-meter image into their viewing tool, she could see numerous pipes laid out on the ground as well as large piles of gravel for mixing concrete. There was also a traffic roundabout that had already been partially paved. But as she studied the image more closely, she noticed something odd. Jafarzadeh had said the site was a fuel-manufacturing plant, but fuel-manufacturing was a very industrial process and tended to involve aboveground facilities with large smokestacks. There were no smokestacks at the Natanz site, however, and what’s more, there were three large buildings that were being built deep underground, with a tunnel connecting them. The buildings were in the final stage of construction. She could also make out what appeared to be a series of circles around the perimeter of the site, suggesting the future location of anti-aircraft guns.
The images had been captured at just the right time to catch Iranian workers still in the process of covering the rooftops of the underground buildings with several alternating layers of earth and cement. A few weeks later and they would have been completely obscured from above, yielding no obvious sign of their existence. Someone had carefully planned the outing of Natanz at just the right moment to capture the evidence.
Two of the underground buildings were each about the size of half a dozen football fields and were heavily reinforced with concrete walls about six to eight feet thick. The Iranians were obviously fortifying them against a possible air strike. The tunnel leading down to the buildings was also built in the shape of a U instead of a straight line—a common tactic to prevent missiles sent into the mouth of a tunnel from having direct aim at a target on the other end.
Hinderstein showed the images to her boss, David Albright, a physicist and former weapons inspector in Iraq who founded ISIS. The two were certain now that this wasn’t a fuel-manufacturing plant. Iran would have no reason to build such a plant underground, since there would be little interest in bombing it. The only logical conclusion, they reasoned—one that would explain the underground construction and the evidential plans for antiaircraft guns—was that this was the elusive uranium enrichment plant they had been seeking.
IT WAS A quiet day in Vienna when news from Jafarzadeh’s press conference filtered back to Olli Heinonen in the IAEA’s headquarters overlooking the Danube River. During August, most of Europe was on holiday, and Vienna was no exception. Heinonen’s boss, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA’s director general, was on vacation in Egypt, and much of the organization’s other staff members were out of town as well. So Heinonen, a Finn in his early fifties with wire-framed glasses and a boyish mop of reddish-brown hair, was alone in his office when he read the news. Heinonen was head of Division B of the IAEA’s Safeguards Department and had only three months before he was taken on the IAEA’s Iran portfolio after having been the agency’s chief inspector of North Korea and other parts of Asia for several years. It was a return to familiar territory for him, since he’d managed the IAEA’s Iran portfolio before from 1992 to 1995. A Persian rug marking the period still decorated the floor of his office.
A veteran nuclear inspector, Heinonen had come to the IAEA in 1983 from a nuclear research center in Finland. With a PhD in radiochemistry from the University of Helsinki, he had a higher level of subject expertise than early generations of IAEA inspectors, who tended to have little scientific training. He also had a reputation for quiet confidence and steadfast determination that made it clear to the nations he inspected that he had little patience for duplicity.
As he took in the news from Jafarzadeh, he was struck by the level of detail it revealed. Heinonen had been waiting for information like this for a while. Like his counterparts at ISIS, he immediately suspected the Natanz facility wasn’t a fuel-manufacturing plant at all but a uranium enrichment plant. Two years earlier, government sources had told the IAEA that Iran tried to secretly purchase parts from Europe in the 1980s to manufacture centrifuges for uranium enrichment.10 Based on this, Heinonen had suspected that Iran had an illicit centrifuge plant hidden somewhere within its borders, but he never knew its location, and the IAEA couldn’t confront the Iranians without exposing the source of the intelligence. The IAEA had also been wary of acting on information received from government sources, ever since an intelligence agency had told the IAEA in 1992 that Iran was secretly procuring prohibited nuclear equipment but hadn’t provided any details. When the IAEA confronted Iran about the claims, officials denied the accusations and invited inspectors to visit their nuclear sites to see for themselves. But the inspectors found nothing to support the claims and ended up leaving Iran embarrassed.11
The revelations this time, however, were different. They had been publicly disclosed, so Heinonen didn’t have to hide the source of the information, and they included precise and specific details, naming actual facilities and locations. This meant the IAEA could independently verify their existence and demand that Iran open them to inspection.12
Heinonen picked up the phone and called his boss in Egypt, who agreed that he should send a letter immediately to Ali Akhbar Salehi, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, demanding an explanation about what Iran was doing at Natanz. Salehi was outraged by the letter’s accusatory tone, saying the IAEA had no business questioning Iran about unverified claims, especially ones that came from a known terrorist group. Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, Iran’s vice president and head of its Atomic Energy Organization, told the IAEA that Iran had not been hiding Natanz, but had simply planned to disclose its existence to the IAEA at a later date.13 If the IAEA was patient, all would soon be revealed, he said. For now he would only say that Iran planned to build several nuclear power plants over the next twenty years and needed nuclear fuel to operate them. He didn’t say if Natanz was a uranium enrichment plant being built to help produce such fuel, but this appeared to be the implication.
The IAEA pressed Iran to open Natanz immediately to its inspectors, and after a bit of back and forth Iranian officials reluctantly agreed to a date in October. But just as the IAEA was preparing for the trip, Iran canceled the visit, saying the date would not work. A second visit was scheduled for December, but that too got canceled. Heinonen suspected Iran was trying to buy time to move incriminating evidence out of Natanz.
When ISIS founder David Albright learned that Iran was stalling, he decided to take the satellite images to the media to pressure Iran into opening Natanz to inspectors. It was one thing for Iran to rebuff claims made by an opposition group with a political agenda. It was another to respond to stark images of secret sites broadcast worldwide on CNN. So on December 12, CNN ran a story, along with the satellite images provided by ISIS, saying that Iran was believed to be building a secret enrichment plant at Natanz that might be used to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations denied that Iran had a nuclear weapons program and told CNN that “any satellite photographs of any facility that you may have” were for a peaceful nuclear energy program, not a weapons program.14
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br /> The images had the desired effect, however: after the CNN story ran, Iranian officials committed to an inspection date in February.
ALTHOUGH THE NATANZ facility was new, Iran’s nuclear activities actually went back more than forty years. They had their roots in the regime of the former shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, during a time when the United States and other Western nations fully supported Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
Iran launched its public and approved nuclear program in 1957, more than a decade after the United States detonated the first atomic bombs over Japan. It was during a time when other nations were clamoring to join the exclusive nuclear club the United States had founded. In an effort to redirect the nuclear ambitions of these nations, the Eisenhower administration promoted what it called the Atoms for Peace program, whereby countries would receive help to develop nuclear technology as long as they used it for peaceful purposes only. As part of the program, Iran signed an agreement with the United States to receive help to build a light-water nuclear research reactor at Tehran University. The United States also agreed to supply enriched uranium to fuel it.15
But despite US efforts to limit the development of nuclear weapons, four other nations pushed their way into the elite nuclear club after the war—the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China. To curb the proliferation madness, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons was developed in the 1960s to prevent more countries from following suit and to work on reducing the weapons that nuclear-armed nations already possessed.16
Under the treaty, which divided the world into nuclear haves and have-nots, the nonweapons nations would be given aid to develop civilian nuclear programs as long as they agreed to foreswear building nuclear weapons and similarly agreed to regular inspections by the IAEA to ensure that materials and equipment intended for the civilian programs were not diverted for nuclear weapons development. The problem with this arrangement, however, was that many of the components and facilities for civilian nuclear programs were dual-use and could also be used for a nuclear weapons program, making it difficult to police a country’s operations. As Hannes Alfvén, a Swedish Nobel laureate in physics once said, “Atoms for peace and atoms for war are Siamese twins.”