U.S. intensifies covert campaign against Iran's nuclear weapons program

to gain by abandoning rogue nuclear activity than by acquiring a bomb. Ackerman also notes that Iran has sought a nuclear weapon since the Shah was in power, and it just has not been able to clear that threshold. “Until new and less reckless leadership comes to Teheran — insh’allah — the CIA and the Mossad are going to keep trying to ensure that some awesome new shipments just so happen to find their way into the stockyards of IRGC dummy corporations,” he writes.

Here is a brief list of Israeli covert actions to prevent neigh boring countries from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them:

• In 1960 President Gamal Abed el-Nasser of Egypt began to recruit German (or “West German,” as they were called at the time) scientists — many of them with Nazi past and sympathies — to build a missile fleet and crude nuclear devices, called radiation bombs. The Mossad, Israel’s secret service, began a three-year campaign of intimidation and threats — and more — against these scientists after Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s chancellor, refused to ban their employment in Egypt’s weapon industry (in any event, soon other European scientists joined the initial group of Germans). The Mossad campaign ranged from “friendly” visits to the scientists and their families to pressure them to leave Egypt, to letter bombs which killed some of the scientists (and, in a few cases, the local office staff), to more direct assassinations. The campaign was exposed in mid-1963 when two Mossad agents were captured in a Swiss hotel, where they were holding the family of a Swiss missile scientist, threatening to kill the wife and kids unless the scientist returned from Egypt. Israel went to extremes to achieve its goal. For example, it employed Otto Skorzeni, a decorated officer of the special commando units of the Nazi Waffen SS, to obtain information about Germans doing work in Egypt. Skorzeni, who led the Fallschirmjäger unit which rescued Benito Mussolini from Italian anti-Fascist fighters on 12 September 1943, was entnazifiziert (denazified) in absentia in 1952 by the West German government. Still, before agreeing to cooperate with the Mossad, Skorzeni insisted on a written agreement hat he would not be kidnapped and brought to trial in Israel as was the case with Adolph Eichmann, who was captured by Mossad operatives