Category Archives: Cyber War

Obama’s Emails Hacked, Russia’s Cyberwar

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Russian Hackers Read Obama’s Unclassified Emails, Officials Say

WASHINGTON — Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation.

The hackers, who also got deeply into the State Department’s unclassified system, do not appear to have penetrated closely guarded servers that control the message traffic from Mr. Obama’s BlackBerry, which he or an aide carries constantly.

But they obtained access to the email archives of people inside the White House, and perhaps some outside, with whom Mr. Obama regularly communicated. From those accounts, they reached emails that the president had sent and received, according to officials briefed on the investigation.

White House officials said that no classified networks had been compromised, and that the hackers had collected no classified information. Many senior officials have two computers in their offices, one operating on a highly secure classified network and another connected to the outside world for unclassified communications.

But officials have conceded that the unclassified system routinely contains much information that is considered highly sensitive: schedules, email exchanges with ambassadors and diplomats, discussions of pending personnel moves and legislation, and, inevitably, some debate about policy.

Officials did not disclose the number of Mr. Obama’s emails that were harvested by hackers, nor the sensitivity of their content. The president’s email account itself does not appear to have been hacked. Aides say that most of Mr. Obama’s classified briefings — such as the morning Presidential Daily Brief — are delivered orally or on paper (sometimes supplemented by an iPad system connected to classified networks) and that they are usually confined to the Oval Office or the Situation Room.

Still, the fact that Mr. Obama’s communications were among those hit by the hackers — who are presumed to be linked to the Russian government, if not working for it — has been one of the most closely held findings of the inquiry. Senior White House officials have known for months about the depth of the intrusion.

“This has been one of the most sophisticated actors we’ve seen,” said one senior American official briefed on the investigation.

Others confirmed that the White House intrusion was viewed as so serious that officials met on a nearly daily basis for several weeks after it was discovered. “It’s the Russian angle to this that’s particularly worrisome,” another senior official said.

While Chinese hacking groups are known for sweeping up vast amounts of commercial and design information, the best Russian hackers tend to hide their tracks better and focus on specific, often political targets. And the hacking happened at a moment of renewed tension with Russia — over its annexation of Crimea, the presence of its forces in Ukraine and its renewed military patrols in Europe, reminiscent of the Cold War.

Inside the White House, the intrusion has raised a new debate about whether it is possible to protect a president’s electronic presence, especially when it reaches out from behind the presumably secure firewalls of the executive branch.

Mr. Obama is no stranger to computer-network attacks: His 2008 campaign was hit by Chinese hackers. Nonetheless, he has long been a frequent user of email, and publicly fought the Secret Service in 2009 to retain his BlackBerry, a topic he has joked about in public. He was issued a special smartphone, and the list of those he can exchange emails with is highly restricted.

When asked about the investigation’s findings, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, said, “We’ll decline to comment.” The White House has also declined to provide any explanations about how the breach was handled, though the State Department has been more candid about what kind of systems were hit and what it has done since to improve security. A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.

Officials who discussed the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the hacking. While the White House has refused to identify the nationality of the hackers, others familiar with the investigation said that in both the White House and State Department cases, all signs pointed to Russians.

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter revealed for the first time that Russian hackers had attacked the Pentagon’s unclassified systems, but said they had been identified and “kicked off.” Defense Department officials declined to say if the signatures of the attacks on the Pentagon appeared related to the White House and State Department attacks.

The discovery of the hacking in October led to a partial shutdown of the White House email system. The hackers appear to have been evicted from the White House systems by the end of October. But they continued to plague the State Department, whose system is much more far-flung. The disruptions were so severe that during the Iranian nuclear negotiations in Vienna in November, officials needed to distribute personal email accounts, to one another and to some reporters, to maintain contact.

Earlier this month, officials at the White House said that the hacking had not damaged its systems and that, while elements had been shut down to mitigate the effects of the attack, everything had been restored.

One of the curiosities of the White House and State Department attacks is that the administration, which recently has been looking to name and punish state and nonstate hackers in an effort to deter attacks, has refused to reveal its conclusions about who was responsible for this complex and artful intrusion into the government. That is in sharp contrast to Mr. Obama’s decision, after considerable internal debate in December, to name North Korea for ordering the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, and to the director of national intelligence’s decision to name Iranian hackers as the source of a destructive attack on the Sands Casino.

This month, after CNN reported that hackers had gained access to sensitive areas of the White House computer network, including sections that contained the president’s schedule, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said the administration had not publicly named who was behind the hack because federal investigators had concluded that “it’s not in our best interests.”

By contrast, in the North Korea case, he said, investigators concluded that “we’re more likely to be successful in terms of holding them accountable by naming them publicly.”

But the breach of the president’s emails appeared to be a major factor in the government secrecy. “All of this is very tightly held,” one senior American official said, adding that the content of what had been breached was being kept secret to avoid tipping off the Russians about what had been learned from the investigation.

Mr. Obama’s friends and associates say that he is a committed user of his BlackBerry, but that he is careful when emailing outside the White House system.

“The frequency has dropped off in the last six months or so,” one of his close associates said, though this person added that he did not know if the drop was related to the hacking.

Mr. Obama is known to send emails to aides late at night from his residence, providing them with his feedback on speeches or, at times, entirely new drafts. Others say he has emailed on topics as diverse as his golf game and the struggle with Congress over the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

George W. Bush gave up emailing for the course of his presidency and did not carry a smartphone. But after Mr. Bush left office, his sister’s email account was hacked, and several photos — including some of his paintings — were made public.

The White House is bombarded with cyberattacks daily, not only from Russia and China. Most are easily deflected.

The White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies put their most classified material into a system called Jwics, for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. That is where top-secret and “secret compartmentalized information” traverses within the government, to officials cleared for it — and it includes imagery, data and graphics. There is no evidence, senior officials said, that this hacking pierced it.

Clinton, General Electric, Algeria and Money

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As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton boast about being the most traveled of any U.S. diplomat, landing her plane in 112 countries. Hillary held 1700 meetings with world leaders and had 755 meetings at the White House. Her travels included dancing in none other than Columbia, Malawi and South Africa.

In October of 2012, Hillary traveled to Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Croatia and Algeria. Perhaps it was quite telling as of this writing, interesting deals were made in Algeria, a country full of corruption led by President Bouteflika.

It should be noted that on October 19 of 2012, meetings were held in Washington DC where the topics were bilateral and regional concerns as well as economic and security cooperation under the title of U.S.-Algeria Strategic Dialogue. There was also a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing West African States to perform a military intervention to remove the Islamist rebels from North Mali.

Two years earlier, The Clinton Foundation received $500,000 from Algeria without approval from the State Department ethic office or legal counsel. Algeria alleges the money was earmarked for the relief efforts in Haiti. At the same time, Hillary tells the public relations team her objectives with Algeria was to address human rights issues as well as to nurture the relationships between the United States and Algeria.

Of particular note, in 2010, Algeria also spent more than $400,000 in lobbying the U.S. government officials as specified by records under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, while sending representatives more than a dozen times to the United States to visit top political and diplomatic operatives.

Reports have been often published where the U.S. State Department have found that Algeria lacks any transparency, has a history of random killings and widespread corruption. Hillary even notes the facts of Algeria being a failed state in her book, “Hard Choices”.

Algerian security forces also benefit from U.S. cooperation programs. Obama Administration officials have stated a desire to deepen and broaden bilateral ties, including in the aftermath of a four-day terrorist hostage seizure at a natural gas compound in southeastern Algeria in January 2013, in which three Americans were killed. The attack highlighted the challenges the United States faces in advancing and protecting its interests in an increasingly volatile region.

The terrorist group that seized the hostages is a breakaway faction of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a regional network and U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with roots in Algeria’s 1990s civil conflict. Given Algeria’s large military and available financial resources, U.S. officials have expressed support for Algerian efforts to marshal a regional response to terrorist threats. Yet Algeria’s relations with neighboring states are complex and sometimes distrustful, at times hindering cooperation. Meanwhile, any U.S. unilateral action in response to regional security threats could present significant risks and opportunity costs. Algeria’s macroeconomic position is strong due to high global oil and gas prices, which have allowed it to amass large foreign reserves. Yet wealth has not necessarily trickled down, and the pressures of unemployment, high food prices, and housing shortages weigh on many families. Public unrest over political and economic grievances has at times been evident, though other factors may have dampened enthusiasm for dramatic political change.

Algeria’s foreign policy has often conflicted with that of the United States. Strains in ties with neighboring Morocco continue, due to the unresolved status of the Western Sahara and a rivalry for regional influence. The legacy of Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle contributes to Algerian leaders’ desire to prevent direct foreign intervention, their residual skepticism of French and NATO intentions, and their positions on regional affairs, including a non-interventionist stance toward the uprising in Syria and an ambivalent approach to external military intervention in neighboring Mali.

 

When it comes to Algeria’s economic status, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have assumed unusual positive forecasts on Algeria. The U.S, State Department in 2012 declared that Algeria has stabilized and all efforts were underway to enhanced the U.S./Algeria Trade Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA). This bring to light a company called Sonatrach, which exploits hydrocarbons for global consumption under research and development.

From the State Department’s website, Algeria concluded commercial agreements with several U.S. companies including Northrup Grumman and General Electric. The number of foreign trade missions to Algeria reportedly grew from 30 in 2010 to 60 in 2012, illustrating the increased focus and competition in the local market. In 2012, Algeria concluded commercial agreements with several Arab and European nations. U.S. firms, such as Northrop Grumman and General Electric won multi-million dollar tenders. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika appointed former Minister of Water Resources, Abdelmalek Sellal, as the new Prime Minister. Sellal is trusted by the political elite and viewed as a pragmatic politician who seeks new economic partnerships to tackle long-standing issues, such as housing shortages and unemployment. Algerian leadership remains focused on building domestic production capacity and reducing imports and seeks U.S. expertise and partnership. Minister of Commerce Mustapha Benbada visited the United States in December 2012 for discussions with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative related to Algeria’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession and cooperation under the U.S.-Algeria Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA).

 

General Electric continues to court Algeria in partnerships and joint ventures in 2015. Sonatrach is a company rocked by constant scandal including fraud suspicions and prison terms, in fact the country itself is ranked 105th out of 176 in fraud.  The national hydrocarbon group Sonatrach and the American company General Electric (GE) signed Thursday in Algiers a memorandum of understanding on the creation of a joint company for the manufacturing of equipment used in oil and gas industry. This new unit, of which Sonatrach will hold 51% stake through the oil services holding (SPP) while 49% will be held by GE, will be set up in the form of a joint stock company. This unit will manufacture and develop, among others, equipment of drilling and production, equipment for measurement and supervision as well as provision for services and trainings relating to oil fields.

General Electric CEO, Jeffrey Immelt stated on April 22, 2015, he refused to turn over emails between himself and Hillary Clinton or those exchanged with the State Department. Immelt was also brought into the Obama administration as the ‘Job Czar’ and tendered his support for Obamacare while transferring his GE X-ray division to China to avoid the Obamacare taxes applied to medical devices. Immelt does need to provide evidence of the collusion especially when he authorized GE to contribute up to $1.0 million dollars to the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

Numerous sources, including the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker, have recently reported that, while Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton lobbied foreign governments on behalf of companies including General Electric at a time when those companies were making donations to the Clinton Foundation. In late 2012, for example, Clinton urged the Algerian government to award a power plant contract to GE. GE contributed to the Clinton Foundation. Then in 2013, Algeria awarded the power plant contract to GE.

By donating to the Clinton Foundation while receiving a huge favor from the Secretary of State, did we not expose our company to the risk of being charged with honest services fraud? I am not accusing the company of any wrongdoing. But you have to admit that the optics suggest a quid pro quo could have occurred, and a public official pushing a foreign government to buy a company’s products while that company makes a generous donation to that public official’s family- run foundation appears to fit even the more limited definitions.

Since Mrs. Clinton had control of her business emails during this time and has said she deleted many of them, GE presumably is the only entity with evidence that everything was above board. To prevent the company from being the focus of any media or public investigation, would you consider making public all the Company’s written communications with the State Department during the relevant period?

It is Iran Stupid…

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A partial list of where Iran has their proxies: Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan…..there is more. Armed tribes and there is no dispute, Iran has a financial network in the United States giving validation to the notion that Iran is the country where the global terror banking system resides.

 

The White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the U.S. Treasury, the FBI and ODNI as well as the CIA all have tangible proof of the machinations of Iran, yet still the diplomatic process continues with impunity.

Iran’s increasingly active involvement in the region’s proxy wars increases domestic separatist terrorism risk

Key Points

  • Although protests by Ahwazi Arabs are fairly routine, the participation of sympathisers from other Arab states indicates the potential for ethnic and religiously motivated unrest and insurgency to evolve.
  • Ahwazi Arab militants in Khuzestan and Jaish al-Adl militants in Sistan-Baluchistan province have increasingly positioned their separatist narratives in the context of the regional Iran-Saudi conflict, indicating their receptiveness to external support, potentially from Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia.
  • Although IHS has no evidence of current Saudi involvement, Saudi support for these groups is a likely retaliatory option, in the event of perceived Iranian dominance in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, but this would likely be limited to funding and non-attributable low-capability weaponry. A sustained and high capability insurgency is unlikely in the one-year outlook.

EVENT

Hundreds of Ahwazi Arabs, along with Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni sympathisers, gathered on 17 April outside the European Parliament in Brussels to protest Iran’s “occupation of al-Ahwaz” in the country’s Khuzestan province.

Iran’s perceived successes in the Sunni-Shia regional conflict make it more likely that Iranian-backed groups will challenge Saudi Arabia’s regional authority, and increase the pressure on the Kingdom to confront Iran more directly. However, regardless of whether Saudi Arabia is backing insurgent groups in Iran, any such attack or protest by regional-based groups are likely to be attributed by Iran’s government to Saudi Arabia, not least as a way of deflecting relevance from domestic opposition.

Ahwazi Arabs

Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of supporting Ahwazi Arab militants based in the oil-rich Khuzestan province, southwest Iran, although this claim has not been substantiated, and nor has Iran specified the extent of such support. The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA) has carried out a series of successful attacks on Iran’s oil and gas pipelines using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Khuzestan, with the most recent wave of such attacks occurring in 2012 and 2013. Although the long remote stretches of pipelines are potential targets for further IEDs, Iran has since enhanced pipeline security and there have been no successful attacks reported since 2013. The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) foiled a bomb plot on the Abadan-Mahashahr oil pipeline in November 2013, which the IRGC later claimed was by the ASMLA.

The ASMLA is likely to be receptive to external support from Iran’s opponents, principally Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the presence of Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Yemeni sympathisers at the 17 April Ahwazi protest rally held in Brussels indicates the group’s increasing alignment with those disaffected by Iran’s influence in those countries’ internal conflicts. Although Ahwazi Arabs are overwhelmingly Shia, the ASMLA dedicated the August 2013 attack on a gas pipeline to their Syrian ‘brothers-in-arms’, positioning the group’s agenda against Iran as part of the larger regional conflict. Moreover, the head of the ASMLA met with Mohammad Riad al-Shaqfeh, head of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, in September 2012, indicating their potential co-operation. Nevertheless, the extent of Ahwazi Arab support for the ASMLA and militancy is unclear. Despite having economic grievances, Ahwazi Arabs sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).

Jaish al-Adl

IHS monitoring of Jaish al-Adl’s social media accounts shows that the group is increasingly reaching out to an Arabic-speaking audience, probably to secure funding from Gulf donors. It released a video purportedly showing the 6 April attack in Negur, Sistan-Baluchistan province, in which eight Iranian border guards were killed. The video included Arabic subtitles. Publishing videos of successful attacks is used by some Syrian militant groups to secure donor funding. Jaish al-Adl’s social media accounts also increasingly report on regional conflicts, particularly Yemen, marking a shift in its rhetoric from an exclusively Baluchi nationalist one to one that positions itself within the regional Sunni-Shia conflict.

Although there is no evidence to prove existing Saudi support for Jaish al-Adl, if this did occur it would most likely be through Pakistan, where the group’s core leadership is based and which has a history of support for the group. The Iran-Pakistan border is porous and the group can move across the border with relative ease. For its part, Pakistan’s unwillingness or inability to supply weaponry or forces to the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen might well create pressure on Pakistan to facilitate Saudi support for Jaish al-Adl in Iran, however even this might well prove problematic, given Pakistan’s interest in securing gas from Iran via a planned pipeline.

Kurds

Kurdish separatists have traditionally been active in their homeland of Iran’s northwestern provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan, but there has been little recent activity by its main group, Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (Partiya Jiyana Azada Kurdistane: PJAK). However, at least one faction of PJAK is likely to have been radicalised after Iran ignored the group’s call for negotiations in May 2014. A possible indication of such radicalisation was an alleged plot by ‘Islamist extremists’ to blow up a mosque in January 2015 in Mahabad, West Azerbaijan province, which Iranian authorities claimed to have foiled. The Iranian deputy interior minister Hossein Zolfaqari also claimed in March 2015 that Iran’s security forces have also dismantled several Islamic State-affiliated cells in the past year. The Islamic State has separately claimed to have Iranian Kurds among its recruits, although IHS has no evidence to substantiate this claim. Even if there is an appeal for Islamic State-inspired militancy in these provinces, Iran’s pervasive intelligence network is likely to mitigate risks of successful attacks. Meanwhile, as with Jaish al-Adl, it is quite probable that Iran will attribute alleged Islamist militancy amongst Iranian Kurds to external, principally Saudi, involvement, particularly in the event of fatalities amongst Iranian security forces or civilians.

FORECAST

Although Saudi Arabia has some incentive to provide limited support to opposition or insurgent/militant groups in Iran in the context of its regional proxy war with Iran, such support is likely to be confined to funding and non-attributable light weaponry. Even if this option were adopted, Iran’s transit routes are heavily guarded by the IRGC, and arms shipments through the Iraqi border or the Gulf coast would very likely be intercepted. Transfers of weaponry would be easier across the porous Pakistan border, but even then, Jaish al-Adl has not demonstrated the capability to move beyond the border area, much less transfer weaponry to Khuzestan. However, regardless of whether Saudi support is forthcoming, Iran would probably attribute blame to Saudi or other Gulf actors in the event of an increase in the frequency or capability of attacks in its peripheral provinces, which would also exacerbate the state of hostility between the two countries.

Obama Giving Allies Away, Putin Winning Them

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In Eastern Europe:

Hungary, a NATO member whose prime minister recently named Putin’s Russia as a political model to be emulated. Or NATO member Slovakia, whose leftist prime minister likened the possible deployment of NATO troops in his country to the Soviet invasion of 1968. Or NATO member Czech Republic, where the defense minister made a similar comparison and where the government joined Slovakia and Hungary in fighting the European Union’s sanctions against Russia. Or Serbia, a member of NATO’s “partnership for peace” that has invited Putin to visit Belgrade this month for a military parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s “liberation” of the city. Then there is Poland, which until recently was leading the effort within NATO and the European Union to support Ukraine’s beleaguered pro-Western government and punish Putin’s aggression. This month its new prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, ordered her new foreign minister to urgently revise its policy.

Russia recruits U.S. allies in Eastern Europe by raising doubts about security commitment

Russia is trying to slowly strip away U.S. allies in Eastern Europe by playing up fears that Washington will not come to their aid, as promised nearly a decade ago, because of a lack of foreign strategy and commitment to the region, analysts say.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has authorized a string of provocative moves from the Arctic to the Black Sea in recent months in an attempt to intimidate NATO allies along the border for the old Soviet Union, including Hungary, Romania and Latvia, and boost allies of Moscow living in those countries.

Last year, a Russian-friendly party won the largest number of votes in Latvia’s parliamentary elections amid reports that a mayor of a city in eastern Latvia voiced concerns that activists were engaged in door-to-door campaigning in support of the communities’ secession from Latvia to join Russia.

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who helped engineer his country’s successful application for membership in NATO in 1999, now seems to be cozying up to Russia by making large deals with Moscow and criticizing Western sanctions.

In November, Hungary authorized construction of the South Stream pipeline, a Russian-backed project that will bypass Ukraine to funnel natural gas exports to Europe and elsewhere, to the dismay of the European Union. Ukraine is engaged in a fierce political and military standoff with Russian-based separatists.

The fact that some countries along the tense border with Russia may be tempted to switch sides suggests a broader problem of a lack of trust in the U.S. commitment to protect them if they are attacked, said Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“Why don’t they feel that deterrent effect of America’s commitment to defend them?” he said. “They clearly don’t think that we are committed to that commitment. That’s really where the problem is. They’re doubting the American security commitment.”

NATO’s famous Article 5 declares that an attack against any of the 28 countries in the alliance will be considered an attack against all. As a result, countries that have signed the treaty must come to the defense of others that are threatened or attacked.

Mr. Rojansky likened the U.S. commitment to these countries to life insurance: A 25-year-old healthy person generally has no trouble getting a life insurance policy because the company knows it likely won’t have to pay up soon. A 67-year-old with a history of heart disease, however, could have trouble obtaining a policy and face high premiums.

Seven countries — including Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — became NATO members in 2004. Because the threat of a Russian attack wasn’t a serious consideration at that time, there was no lengthy debate on the wisdom of letting these Baltic states join, Mr. Rojansky said.

Now that Russia under Mr. Putin has taken a far more aggressive stance in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere, the situation has changed, he said.

“We’ve given them the policy coverage, but we gave it to them in a totally different circumstance, and that’s creating doubts on their part about if we’ll honor the policy,” Mr. Rojansky said.

Saber-rattling

Both sides have engaged in saber-rattling in recent weeks, leading to talks on both sides of the European divide of a potential new cold war.

Russian fighter jets have grown increasingly brazen in challenging U.S. and allied surveillance flights, and Sweden this fall scrambled ships and helicopters to track a Russian submarine that was believed to have surreptitiously entered Swedish waters. Planes from Russia’s Northern Fleet this week have begun anti-ship exercises in the Barents Sea.

Pentagon officials said Thursday that they were asking Russia to investigate an incident in early April in which a Russian fighter jet intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane in international airspace north of Russia and conducted multiple “unprofessional and reckless and foolish” maneuvers in proximity to the American plane.

Analysts in Moscow say the West has been just as provocative, with the U.S. holding joint exercises with Ukraine’s military, accelerating talks with Poland on a state-of-the-art missile defense system, staging a high-profile military convoy trip through six Eastern European nations, and deploying 12 A-10 Warthog planes to Romania as part of a theater-security effort to counter Russian moves in the region.

“The unit will conduct training alongside our NATO allies to strengthen interoperability and demonstrate U.S. commitment to the security and stability of Europe,” Pentagon spokesman James Brindle said this month in a statement about the action to Military.com.

Pentagon officials told the website that the deployment of the A-10s was part of NATO’s Operation Atlantic Resolve. The mission objective is, in part, to send a message to Russia about the U.S. commitment to NATO allies.

“Operation Atlantic Resolve will remain in place as long as the need exists to reassure our allies and deter Russia from regional hegemony,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. James Brindle said.

Pentagon officials strongly contested criticism that the Obama administration was having second thoughts about fulfilling the U.S. commitment to its allies in Eastern Europe now that Russia poses a significant threat.

“The U.S. thoroughly considered all aspects associated with establishing and joining NATO,” the official said. “The principles contained in opening paragraphs of the Washington Treaty remain as relevant today as they were 66 years ago.”

The U.S. needs to do more to reassure NATO allies of its commitment, including permanently basing troops in Eastern Europe, as well as more frequent and larger-scale deployments, said Boris Zilberman, deputy director of congressional relations at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The ultimate goal, he said, is to ensure that countries that have been allies remain on the side of the U.S.

At the same time, the U.S. must walk a fine line by increasing its presence enough to reassert its commitment to allies but not so much so as to give Mr. Putin political ammunition to escalate Russian aggression, Mr. Zilberman said.

“How much do we want to mirror image what they’re doing and give Putin a reason to keep doing it?” he said.

The U.S. is deploying small groups of service members to conduct drills in Baltic partner countries and has imposed sanctions on Russia, a policy that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said is working.

“My observation is that this is having a real effect on the Russian economy and at some point the Russian people are going to ask themselves whether these kinds of adventures are worth the price,” Mr. Carter told reporters in a briefing Thursday.

 

 

 

 

Iran’s Nuke Program Clone in Oak Ridge

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We know with near precision the current phase of all Iran’s nuclear program progress stands. How you ask? We have better scientists than Iran does and have been advancing these technologies for far longer. In fact, the United States has a clone operation located in Oak Ridge. This makes the P5+1 negotiations with John Kerry in the lead all the more…well stupid and frankly…reckless.

Primer:

ORNL plays an important role in national and global security by virtue of its expertise in advanced materials, nuclear science, supercomputing and other scientific specialties. Discovery and innovation in these areas are essential for protecting US citizens and advancing national and global security priorities. ORNL supports these missions by using its signature strengths to meet complex national security challenges in a number of areas.

Nuclear Nonproliferation – The laboratory’s expertise and experience covers the spectrum of nuclear nonproliferation work, from basic R&D to “boots-on-the-ground” implementation. This work ranges from uranium fuel cycle research to detection technologies and nuclear forensics. ORNL’s non-proliferation activities include developing, coordinating and helping to implement policies designed to reduce threats from a variety of sources, including nuclear weapons and “dirty bombs.”

National Defense – ORNL works with the US Department of Defense to respond to global challenges by developing and delivering advanced technologies in areas such as special materials; information management, synthesis and analysis; advanced sensor technology; energy efficiency technologies; early warning systems for chemical and biological threats; and unmanned air, ground and sea systems.

Then there is Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago where scientists have been at the forefront of nuclear reactor technology since the lab’s founding in 1946 as the home of the world’s first reactors. Groundbreaking research performed at the lab over the following decades led to the creation of the current generation of American nuclear reactors.

Checks and Balances for negotiations:

In Atomic Labs Across U.S., a Race to Stop Iran

WASHINGTON — When diplomats at the Iran talks in Switzerland pummeled Department of Energy scientists with difficult technical questions — like how to keep Iran’s nuclear plants open but ensure that the country was still a year away from building a bomb — the scientists at times turned to a secret replica of Iran’s nuclear facilities built deep in the forests of Tennessee.

There inside a gleaming plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation were giant centrifuges — some surrendered more than a decade ago by Libya, others built since — that helped the scientists come up with what they told President Obama were the “best reasonable” estimates of Iran’s real-life ability to race for a weapon under different scenarios.

“We know a lot more about Iranian centrifuges than we would otherwise,” said a senior nuclear specialist familiar with the forested site and its covert operations.

The classified replica is but one part of an extensive crash program within the nation’s nine atomic laboratories — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore among them — to block Iran’s nuclear progress. As the next round of talks begins on Wednesday in Vienna, the secretive effort remains a technological obsession for thousands of lab employees living the Manhattan Project in reverse. Instead of building a bomb, as their predecessors did in a race to end World War II, they are trying to stop one.

Ernest J. Moniz, the nuclear scientist and secretary of energy, who oversees the atomic labs, said in an interview that as the Obama administration sought technical solutions at the talks, diplomats would have been stumbling in the dark “if we didn’t have this capability nurtured over many decades.” Although Mr. Moniz would not discuss the secret plant at Oak Ridge, parts of which date to the American and Israeli program to launch cyberattacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, he said more generally that the atomic labs give the United States “the capacity to carry through” in one of the most complex arms-control efforts in history.

It has also changed the labs. In the bomb-making days, the scientists largely kept to their well-guarded posts. But anyone traveling to the Iran talks over the past year and a half in Vienna and Lausanne, Switzerland, saw the Energy Department experts working hard as the negotiations proceeded, and heading out to dinner after long days of talks.

It was over one of those dinners in Vienna last summer that several of the experts began wondering how they might find a face-saving way for Iran to convert its deep-underground enrichment plant at Fordo, a covert site exposed by the United States five years ago, into a research center. That would enable Iran to say the site was still open, and the United States could declare it was no longer a threat.

“The question was what kind of experiment you can do deep underground,” recalled a participant in the dinner. By the time coffee came around, the kernel of an idea had developed, and it subsequently became a central part of the understanding with Iran that Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Moniz announced this month. Under the preliminary accord, Fordo would become a research center, but not for any element that could potentially be used in nuclear weapons.

Sometimes, during negotiations in Switzerland, a member of the scientific team would dump a bowl of chocolates on the table and rearrange them to show the Iranians how a proposed site rearrangement might work. “It was a visual way,” an official said, “to get past the language barrier.”

But much of the work was done back at the labs, where specialists who had become accustomed to more 9-to-5 days found themselves on call seven days a week, around the clock, answering questions from negotiators and, at times, backing up the answers with calculations and computer modeling.

A senior official of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Kevin Veal, who has been along for every negotiating session, would send questions back to the laboratories, hoping to separate good ideas from bad. “It’s what our people love to do,” said Thom Mason, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It can be very rewarding.”

Given the stakes in the sensitive negotiations, the labs would check and recheck one another, making sure the answers held up. The natural rivalries among the labs sometimes worked to the negotiators’ advantage: Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the mountains of New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, was happy to find flaws in calculations done elsewhere, and vice versa.

“A lot of what we did was behind the scenes,” said Charles F. McMillan, the Los Alamos director.

A prime target of the effort was redesigning Iran’s still-under-construction nuclear reactor at Arak, a sprawling complex ringed by antiaircraft guns. The question was how to prevent the reactor from producing weapons-grade plutonium, a main fuel of atom bombs. Iran insisted the reactor was being built to produce medical isotopes for disease therapy.

Last year, when the Iranians proposed a way to redesign Arak, the job of assessing the plans fell to Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, one of the world’s most experienced developers of nuclear reactors.

The lab refined the Iranian idea, making sure Arak’s new fuel core would produce no pure bomb-grade plutonium. Eventually, the Iranians signed on. It is one of the few elements of the provisional nuclear deal between Iran, the United States and five other world powers that looks like a permanent fix because in order to produce weapons fuel, the whole reactor would have to undergo an obvious overhaul.

In lauding the deal announced early this month, Mr. Moniz put the redesign of Arak at the top of the achievements list, saying it “shuts down the plutonium pathway.”

At other times, scientists were on tight deadlines to come up with solutions.

Late last year, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was traveling by train to visit his children when a call came in that his team had to immediately reassess Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment plant. There in a vast underground bunker mazes of centrifuges spin around the clock to purify uranium, another bomb fuel.

The question was whether a proposed design of Natanz that allowed more than 6,000 centrifuges to spin would still accomplish the administration’s goal of keeping Iran at least a year away from acquiring enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. The answer was yes.

William H. Goldstein, the director of the Livermore lab, said the required turnaround for answers “was hours in some cases.”

Fordo, the most troubling of Iran’s many nuclear sites, was another major challenge. The enrichment complex there is buried so far under a mountain that Israel fears it could not wipe out the site and its nearly 3,000 centrifuges with airstrikes. The United States has only one bunker-busting weapon that might accomplish the job.

Over the dinner last summer in Vienna, the scientists and American negotiators discussed how to turn the mountain fortress into a peaceful research center.

The answer lay in the deep-underground nature of the site, which made it excellent for an observatory to track invisible rays from cosmic explosions, opening a new window onto the universe. (The rocky strata of the site would filter out extraneous signals.) Another idea was to use the installed centrifuges for purifying rare forms of elements used in medicine rather than for uranium.

In early March, Oak Ridge in Tennessee got a call from the negotiators. They needed to learn more about the idea of purifying elements, to make sure that it was possible and that the equipment left in the mountain could not be easily turned to producing nuclear fuel.

An Oak Ridge team went into action, working Friday night into Saturday. That afternoon, Mr. Mason, the Oak Ridge director, was able to send a report to Washington, which was then delivered to Mr. Moniz.

“The answer was ‘yes,’ ” Mr. Mason said. “It was feasible.”

In the interview, Mr. Moniz said he spoke to his lab directors last week and asked them to think hard about other uses for the Fordo complex, an issue that will be on the table when negotiators resume their talks this week.

The world of science, Mr. Moniz said, has lots of peaceful projects that would help move the mountainous fortress off the pathway to atomic bombs.

“We’re going to be thinking,” he said, “about other directions.” The question is whether, in the last weeks of the negotiations, the Iranians will go along.