A Reporter's Trail From a Bush-Era Cyberattack to Trump's Strike on Iran
Sixteen years before President Trump sent B-2 bombers armed with 30,000-pound bunker-busting weapons to blast into Fordo and Natanz, Iran's two major uranium enrichment centers, there was another American and Israeli assault with the same goal: Destroy Tehran's ability to produce nuclear fuel.
But that attack, which started at the end of the Bush administration and spilled into the Obama era, wasn't the subject of wall-to-wall news coverage, or of public fears about triggering another war in the Middle East. It was a covert program, launched from the White House Situation Room where the two presidents reviewed diagrams of the enrichment site at Natanz and weighed the risks of releasing a sophisticated cyberweapon to speed up and slow down the centrifuges spinning deep underground, sending them out of control.
The cyberweapon was given a name, Stuxnet, and the operation had a code name inside America's intelligence agencies: Olympic Games. It was designed as an alternative to blowing up the enrichment operations the old-fashioned way and risking a war. For years, it looked like a success — until the code was inadvertently made public and the Iranians, angry about the sabotage, began enriching uranium on a scale that was bigger than ever before.
Uncovering the details, from President Bush's first orders to the days the code broke loose, plunged The New York Times into 15 years of even deeper reporting on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
Ultimately, it helped position The Times to cover the military gamble that President Trump took last month and its aftermath.
The United States has never formally acknowledged Olympic Games; even today, most of the participants are barred from talking about it. But through our reporting from 2010 to 2012, readers learned details of the operation. And those revelations triggered new waves of coverage, as well as arguments over how long, and how effectively, Stuxnet had set the Iranians back.
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