by Eli Leon and Israel Hayom Staff
Program reportedly seeks to slip faulty parts and materials into Iran's aerospace supply chains.
Over the past 11 years. 67% of Iranian orbital launches have reportedly failed
Photo: AP
The
Trump White House has accelerated a secret program to sabotage Iran's
ballistic missile and rocket projects, the New York Times reported
Wednesday, quoting current and former administration officials.
The officials said the operation was part
of an expanding campaign by the United States to weaken the Iranian
military and isolate its economy.
Officials told the New York Times it was
impossible to precisely quantify the success of the classified program,
but that in the past month alone, two Iranian attempts to launch
satellites failed within minutes.
Those two rocket launch failures – on Jan. 15 and another unacknowledged attempt on Feb. 5
– were part of a pattern over the past 11 years. In that time, 67% of
Iranian orbital launches have failed, an exceedingly high number
compared to the 5% failure rate worldwide for similar space launches.
Hours after the Jan. 15 attempt, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Iran's satellite launchers had technologies "virtually identical and interchangeable with those used in ballistic missiles."
The setbacks have not deterred the
ayatollah regime, however, and earlier this week Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani vowed to "continue our path and our military power."
The Trump administration, similar to
Israel, maintains that Iran's space program is a cover for its efforts
to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying
nuclear warheads.
The American officials who spoke to the New
York Times described a far-reaching effort, created under former
President George W. Bush, to slip faulty parts and materials into Iran's
aerospace supply chains. The program was active early in the Obama
administration but was reinvogorated in 2017, when Pompeo took over as
the director of the CIA and provided it with new resources.
Tehran had grown suspicious even before
U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew last May from the 2015 nuclear
accord. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of Iran's missile
program, accused American and allied intelligence agencies of turning
their campaigns of "infiltration and sabotage" to Iran's missile complex
from its atomic infrastructure.
"They want to repeat their nuclear sabotage
in the missile area," he told Iranian state television in 2016, vowing
the program will never stop "under any circumstance."
The CIA declined to comment on the report,
while administration officials asked the New York Times to withhold some
details of its reporting, mostly involving the identities of specific
suppliers to the Iranian program, because the effort is ongoing.
Eli Leon and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/2019/02/14/report-secret-us-program-sabotages-iranian-missiles-and-rockets/
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