Iran's march to the bombThe real battle over Iran's nuclear weapons program takes place in courts, intelligence centers

The shadow war between the U.S. and Iran was briefly visible last week at an extradition hearing in a Paris courtroom, where an Iranian engineer was answering U.S. charges that he had illegally shipped U.S. technology to Iran.

French authorities detained Majid Kakavand, 37, at the request of the United States, as he stepped off a plane last year. Last Wednesday he got a big boost when a French state prosecutor unexpectedly argued that the technology he allegedly shipped through his global procurement network had no military application.

Warren P. Strobel writes in the Miami Herald that whether France extradites Kakavand or does not, as now seems more likely, this was the latest round in an escalating contest over what U.S. officials say is Tehran’s voracious appetite for technology to feed its nuclear, missile, and other military programs.

“While diplomats dither about imposing new UN sanctions on Tehran because of its suspected nuclear weapons program, the real struggle over Iran’s capabilities is taking place in courtrooms and intelligence centers, via sting operations, front companies, and falsified shipping documents,” Strobel writes.

In the last year alone, U.S. law enforcement and customs officials have uncovered at least sixteen cases in which Iranians or their agents allegedly tried to buy night vision equipment, military aircraft parts, vacuum pumps with nuclear uses, and much more.

Strobel notes that the U.S. counterattack has gone well beyond U.S. borders, provoking controversy and complications. Suspects have been arrested and extradited from the country of Georgia and, just three weeks ago, from Hong Kong. A former Iranian ambassador to Jordan, nabbed in a U.S. sting operation, is fighting extradition from the United Kingdom.

Iran is fighting back. In December, state media released a list of eleven Iranians it said were being improperly detained, either in the United States or in other countries at U.S. request.

Kakavand was on the list, as was Nasrollah Tajik, the former ambassador to Jordan. Also listed was Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist who disappeared in Saudi Arabia last year and was reported by ABC News to have defected to the United States.

U.S. officials say Iran has also responded by trying better to cover its tracks. Proliferation networks “are becoming increasingly more sophisticated — laying out a smoke trail, really,” special agent Clark Settles, the chief of counter-proliferation investigations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told Strobel. “They’ve added more middlemen” to hide the true destinations of shipments of