As one seasoned intelligence officer said, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan, “The scalability is the message,” meaning that the use of advanced technology in itself created a completely new reality.
Loc 8717
Ultimately, the CIA legal advisers came up with a solution whereby it would be legal to strike Mughniyeh in Syria, based on the principle of self-defense, since Mughniyeh was sending his men from Syria to Iraq to spur the Shiite militias to carry out terror attacks against American personnel.
Loc 10309
In the largest and most important joint operation by the Americans and the Israelis against Iran, dubbed “Olympic Games,” computer viruses, one of which became known as Stuxnet, caused severe damage to the nuclear project’s uranium enrichment machinery.
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These targeted killings were effective. Information reaching the Mossad indicated that they brought about “white defection”—meaning that the Iranian scientists were so frightened that many requested to be transferred to civilian projects. “There’s a limit to an organization’s ability to coerce a scientist to work on a project when he does not want to,” Dagan said. In order to intensify the fears of the scientists, the Mossad looked for targets that were not necessarily very high up in the nuclear program, but whose elimination would cause as much apprehension as possible among the greatest numbers of their colleagues at the same level.
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The Mossad does not maintain any relations with the media. Efforts to secure the cooperation of its special operations division, Caesarea, also failed. Responding to my request for an interview, the unit’s historian, Y., told me, “Even if I were the last person in the intelligence establishment who has not yet made the pilgrimage to you, I would by no means cooperate with you. I despise whoever it was who gave you my phone number, just as I despise you.” (Exchange of text messages with Y., August 15, 2015.)
