1.Iran’s timeline for attaining a nuclear weapon has been drastically shortened from five-to- eight years to two, i.e. late 2009.The new estimate is based on of plans and components of the North Korean reactor and nuclear elements which Israeli soldiers carried off from their raid on the Syrian reactor on Sept. 6. After studying them and other related data, American nuclear and intelligence experts came to the following conclusion: If after four years of preparation, followed by 10 months of on-site construction, Syria came close to a capability for manufacturing radioactive materials from plutonium, it stands to reason that a similar installation is buried somewhere in the bowels of Iran’s clandestine nuclear program and already turning out dangerous radioactive substances. This would means that Iran already possesses the makings of “dirty bombs.”The experts’ second conclusion was that, since the North Koreans were employed earlier and more extensively in Iran than they were in Syria, Iran must be inferred to be capable of producing enough plutonium for a nuclear weapon of the type North Korea has made. Therefore, Iran should be taken to be much closer to a nuclear bomb than believed until very recently. It is even possible that late 2009 date is over-optimistic and Tehran will get there sooner.

2. Bush has made his mind up that, before resorting to military action against Iran’s nuclear installation, now is the right and possibly the last moment for extreme international pressure to compel Iran to dismantle its military program as did North Korea.

To swing this, Bush’s strategic planners agree that President Putin must be harnessed to the endeavor. Inducing Moscow to play along with the United States for the harshest possible sanctions against Tehran has a good chance of ultimately carrying Beijing along – just as China eventually joined up with Washington and Moscow to bring North Korea to heel.

3. The first step on the road to inducing Moscow to cooperate with Washington in an economic, financial and if necessary maritime siege on Iran would be to sweeten Washington-Moscow relations and reconstitute the personal friendship between the two presidents. 

Since the new estimate for Iran’s timeline to a nuclear weapon substantially shortens the leeway for action - and the end of the Bush presidency is around the corner – the process of rapprochement between Bush and Putin has been put well in hand. 

It entails a rewind of the Bush presidency to its early days when, after the shock of al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US, Putin stood by with an offer to share data on al Qaeda contained in Russian intelligence bases, which US undercover agencies lacked, as well as valuable updates on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Russian military support was also there for the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in Oct. 2001. The tank columns dashing into northern Afghanistan from Uzbekistan in the early days of the war carried mostly Uzbek special forces, but some were manned by Russian crews. Those Russian tanks spearheaded the race south from the northern town of Konduz and were first to enter Kabul and force the Taliban to flee. In those days, Bush talked about his personal chemistry with Putin and complete trust in the Russian president words in their private conversations. Their relations soured over the years - not because Bush suspended his trust but because Putin quickly became disenchanted. In the process of firming up his rule at the time, the Russian ruler had counted on US recognition for his support in the al Qaeda crisis by making his strategic Afghan pact with Bush the first step in Washington-Moscow collaboration over Europe and Asia, especially in Central Asia. But the Bush administration had other fish to fry. In the wake of the Afghan invasion, Putin found the Bush administration intent on going it alone to further America’s strategic interests in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The sparring between them accelerated prior to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Putin stood by Saddam Hussein with intelligence and strategic counsel. One piece of advice to the Iraqi dictator - to prepare for the US invasion with legions of guerrilla fighters and terrorists - Putin also relayed to Washington as a warning of what lay ahead.

As the United States pushed the boundaries of NATO influence up to Russia’s European borders, Moscow sold Iran and Syria nuclear technology and arms. While the Bushehr atomic reactor Russian built for Iran never impinged directly on its military program, Russian nuclear engineers’ answers to the questions put them by Iranian scientists represented technologically valuable guidance for the clandestine sections of their nuclear program.

Georgia’s Velvet Revolution (2003) and the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), were seen in Moscow as engineered by Washington to further alienate these former Soviet republics from Moscow and bring them under Western influence. Bush’s plan to deploy anti-missile interceptors and radio stations in Poland and the Czech Republic trod on these still-unhealed scars while also seen as posing a direct military threat to Russian ballistic missile deployments. The row over this step fueled headlines about the revival of the Cold War. The moment had come for Bush to make a U-turn in his relations with his erstwhile strategic partner, both because the animosity had gone too far and because it had ballooned dangerously into a major obstacle for dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.

Bush now, on the recommendation of his advisers, is ready to admit to blunders committed with regard to Moscow and President Putin during six years. He is willing to turn the clock back to their early alliance and easy personal ties for the sake of restoring their strategic collaboration and working together for a single overriding cause: to strip Iran of its nuclear weapons capacity.

It is in this context also that President George W. Bush and his advisers also made the snap decision to send Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to Moscow last month to ask Russian president Vladimir Putin straight out, in a face-to-face encounter, if he is willing to embrace rapprochement with the US president and join forces for concerted action against Iran’s drive for a nuclear bomb.

Olmert was chosen for a number reasons:1. Secrecy was assured. No one would suspect the Israeli prime minister of having been chosen by the US president to act as his intermediary for a high-powered, high-profile mission, when so many better qualified candidates were available.

2. Living in Israel are at least two ex-Russian Jewish billionaires who are close Putin. One is Lev Levayev, 51, a diamond tycoon and international real estate magnate with excellent connections in the Russian business communities of Ukraine and the Caucasus.

Levayev is reputed to talk often on the phone to Putin whose door is open to him. Another of Putin’s close Israeli friends is Arcadi Gaydamak, 53, who since coming to Israel has bought a newspaper and a soccer team, made his mark as a philanthropist and is now running for mayor of Jerusalem. Gaydamak’s business base is in Moscow and other parts of Russia. The two billionaires are believed to compete for access to the Kremlin. 

3. The White House was keen on an Israeli emissary. Israel is avowedly in most immediate peril from Iran’s nuclear program. President Bush has accepted a moral and personal obligation to Israel and a list of Arab rulers, including the Saudi king and the Gulf emirs, not to walk away and leave Iran nuclear-armed when he leaves the White House. Olmert fitted the bill in line with the US-Israel strategic treaty and in keeping with such domestic considerations as the Jewish vote in the 2008 presidential election as well as the pro-Israeli lobby and its political usefulness to the prime minister.

4. Very few people know that Israel’s air defense system, including its Arrow anti-missile missile deployment, has been integrated in the American anti-missile network facing Iran. This close partnership was relevant to the Israeli leader’s selection for the Moscow mission.

5. So too were the deep intelligence-sharing arrangements between the US and Israeli services on the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs. The administration was favorably impressed by the discretion with which Olmert handled Israel’s Sept. 6 attack on the North Korean plutonium reactor under construction in northern Syria. Despite heavy battering by the media, he managed to keep the lid on the true nature of the Israeli attack and keep it secret up until now.

6. US intelligence officials commended to the administration the deftness of Israeli intelligence negotiators in delicate matters. After the event, they reported that in the way he presented his proposals to the Russian president, Olmert more or less followed the lines of an obscure Israeli Mossad excursion into mediation in 1991 over North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons ventures. The high-ranking Mossad intelligence delegation went to Pyongyang, without the knowledge of President Bill Clinton, and offered North Korea a deal. For abandoning its missile and nuclear programs, Israel and the United States would develop its economy and natural resources including gold. Nothing came of this initiative.

7. The mission offered the Israeli prime minister a much-needed prestige boost, recommended also by the Israeli intelligence community, at a time when he is entangled in criminal investigations and faces in December a lethal report from the panel investigating the mismanagement of the 2006 Lebanon War.

Washington figured a high-prestige international mission would be a lifesaver, for which the Israeli prime minister would be grateful enough to help the White House achieve an objective which has defeated every US president since Harry Truman – a solution, even a partial one, for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Before his one-day round trip to Moscow, Olmert was thoroughly briefed by the US administration officials who maintain the regular channels linking the White House and the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem. He was told to take advantage of the Russian president’s trip to Tehran on Oct. 16 ending in a washout, following which Russian engineers and technicians were pulled out of the Bushehr nuclear reactor.

Under the impact of that experience, Putin should be receptive to an accommodation with Washington. When he returned from Moscow on October 21, Olmert wrote a long confidential personal letter to President Bush. He reported in detail on his three-hour conversation with the Russian leader together with the three-part proposal he put before him: 

Russia would halt Russian assistance and deliveries for Iran’s nuclear program including fuel.

Russia would lean hard on Iran to abandon the military section of its nuclear operation.

In return, Israel would use its influence with Washington - and on Capitol Hill in particular - to promote the Russian position against the deployment of an American missile shield in East Europe and NATO’s eastward expansion in Europe, the Caucasian and the Caspian Sea regions.

The impression the Israeli leader gained from talking to Putin was, if the US satisfied Moscow on the questions of the missile shield and NATO, Moscow would reciprocate by joining the effort to force Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, including supporting diplomatic action and harsh sanctions through the UN Security Council.

US officials familiar with the contents of the Olmert letter (and from where the above exclusive information came) said that he strongly recommended that Bush take the deal with Putin forward, because if the Iranian rulers found themselves up against a solid American-Russian wall, the pragmatists led by supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former president HashemRafsanjani and the sacked nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, would prevail in Tehran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have to back away from his radical positions and the US would be saved having to embark on military action against Iran.

Bush advisers, after analyzing the Olmert letter, came to the following conclusions:

First, there is no guarantee that the Russian president seriously meant what he said to the Israeli prime minister, or that he accepted any a deal.

Second, even if a US-Russian deal did take off, it would not ensure Iran abandoning its nuclear weapon plans.

Third, even after exerting every bit of its leverage against Iran, Moscow can go only so far; Russia, which only worked on the Bushehr reactor which is largely irrelevant to the military program, has been supplanted by China and North Korea, whose technological input goes straight to the heart of Iran’s weapons projects.

Fourth, if events indeed follow the script charted by Olmert, the most that can be expected is a gloves-off contest between Moscow and Beijing for influence in Iran and Muslim world. This would be good for American objectives in the Middle East and Israel, but contribute nothing to halting Iran’s nuclear plans.

Fifth, a US-Russian rapprochement may bolster Russian positions in Central Asia and the Caucasian, but also weaken American positions in Europe.

Notwithstanding these lukewarm assessments of the pros and cons of an accommodation between the two presidents, American intelligence analysts are by and large in favor of Bush going for it.

The United States, the Gulf and Middle East rulers are compelled by this reappraisal of Iran’s directions and timetable to revamp their military plans. Israel’s armed forces must take into account the possible danger of a “dirty bomb” or toxic radioactive attack, whether by Iran itself or a third party, such as one of its terrorist proxies arrayed on Israel’s borders and entrusted with the weapon.

Therefore, as a result of the findings in Syria and corollary with regard to Iran, US military planners tend to scrap their more ambitious plans for knocking out Iran’s nuclear weapons installations. Their first campaign plan, was to send wave upon wave of heavy bombers and missiles against the 1,200 sites scattered across Iran and reported to be elements of its nuclear program. This plan was then expanded to encompass ground forces who would blow up secret nuclear locations and withdraw. It was revised again with the addition of targets for destruction, including Iran’s military and strategic infrastructure.

In the summer of 2007, the list of targets was narrowed to Revolutionary Guards headquarters and bases, singling out the al Qods Brigades, which run Iran’s external terrorist groups and orchestrate their operations.

·The parameters have changed unrecognizably.

·America’s military leaders, led by the president, have switched and tightened their focus in accordance with the thesis that Iran is now pushing for a bomb on the plutonium track. The challenge has been reduced to two targets: the secret plutonium reactor and the Arak plant which supplies it with heavy water. By destroying them, Washington would present the clerical rulers in Tehran with an ultimatum: Give up the plutonium track for developing a weapon, or confine yourselves to uranium enrichment.

·Either option would throw back Iran’s timeline for attaining a weapon capacity by three to five years – from the present estimate of late 2008 to 2012 or even 2014.

·This postponement would adjourn the dangerous time zone and take it past the US presidential transition until Bush’s successor is well installed in the White House.

·That was one of the factors behind the new military thinking in progress in Washington. Another was Syria’s low-key reaction to the Israeli attack deep inside its territory and, even more eloquently, Tehran’s failure to invoke its mutual defense treaty with Syria and send air and crack troops to the aid of an ally in distress.

·Some US military planners deduce from Iran’s inaction in the case of Syria that its rulers may swallow hard if subjected to a limited attack, but are likely to avoid a major dustup if the attack is confined to its Arak plant and plutonium facility, whose existence is known to very few people in Iran.

·In the light of this prediction, the Bush administration sees no advantage in a large-scale military offensive against Iran. Certainly a long, expensive war with heavy casualties is to be avoided if at all possible.

·There are counter-arguments to this proposition: One is that a surgical operation depends entirely on US or Israeli intelligence locating the plutonium reactor’s hiding place. Both are working hard to turn up leads.

·This is the point at which Putin’s assistance as a purveyor of intelligence to locate the target would be invaluable - in the same way as it was for the US-led Afghanistan invasion of 2001. (See the first article in this issue on Bush’s effort to achieve a rapprochement with Putin). The Russian ruler would also be more likely to offer passive compliance in the face of an American military operation if it was minimalist in scale.

·Putin might also be helpful for the second mission confronting US and Israeli intelligence: to find out if Iran has built up stocks of radioactive bombs, devices or “dirty” warheads for missiles, locate them and destroy them.

·After weighing the pros and cons, the final decision will fall in the Oval Office in the light of the new intelligence in hand and the understandings reached with the Kremlin.

·Although there is no outward sign that the US and Russian presidents, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, have reached an accommodation. First ripples have started to brake the surface.

·Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili imposed a 15-day state of emergency to quell violent clashes which he accused the Russians of fomenting as a coup attempt.

·All of a sudden, Georgia’s opposition leader Davit Usupashvili told his supporters to calm down and call off their protests.

·The crisis was defused by two outside actions, a source in Moscow mentioned to us. Russian intelligence agents in contact with the Georgian opposition told them to pipe down, while, according to our Washington sources, Dan Fried of the State Department called President Saakashvili and demanded that he desist from force against the protesters and tone down his allegations against Moscow.

·Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, was treated to a case of renewed Russian-US collaboration.

·It was not the first. American officials have quietly informed the Azerbaijan ruler Ilkham Aliyev that they have withdrawn their opposition to Russia’s role in the new pipeline for carrying Azeri oil and gas to Europe and the Middle East.

·Neither will Washington demur if Aliyev decides to purchases arms in Moscow for modernizing his army and, building up a ground and naval elite force for defending the region of the Caspian port of Baku.

·President Bush’s new policy experiment faces its first big test very soon over Iran. Sanctions were at the forefront of talks with, French president Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday and today.Plus next week it will be the turn of  German chancellor Angela Merkel.

·American and French intelligence teams, most of them experts on Iran’s nuclear program, spent hours this week compiling a list of Iran’s secret sites to put before the International Atomic Energy director Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei.

·Their purpose: To prove to him that, just as his watchdogs failed to detect the Syrian nuclear project, so too they have fallen down on getting to the bottom of Iran’s nuclear misdemeanors. In fact, the inspectors are accused of being so fixated on Iran’s overt nuclear operations that they have not found a word to say about the military installations which are hidden underground and which they have missed.

·The IAEA chief’s only reference to the clandestine weapons project of the Iranian program is that he has seen no proof of its existence.

·The mixed American-French teams also dwelt on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assertion Wednesday, Nov. 7, that Iran has completed 3,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

·Both intelligence agencies have information that Iran is operating more than double that number, 7,000 to 8,000, which can produce enough enriched uranium for two or three bombs a year. They now face a dilemma: How to convey the locations of the clandestine sites to the nuclear watchdog without giving away double agents, who are their undercover sources.

·US intelligence teams will work next week with German agents arriving in Washington with the Chancellor. And for the first time since the Bush administration fell out with ElBaradei four years ago over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Washington, followed by Paris and Berlin, is offering to release intelligence data on Iran’s nuclear program, to prove that the chief inspector is either mistaken or deliberately throwing sand in Western eyes as Israel claims.

·This openness is directed at paving the way for the UN Security Council’s third round of sanctions against Iran.

·The question now being asked in the corridors of the White House is this: Will Putin follow Sarkozy and Merkel in ordering his intelligence services to collaborate with their American opposite numbers and share information on Iran’s secret nuclear sites and the operations concealed there?

·The Americans do not expect Russian intelligence to part with everything they have, but they do hope for an important contribution that would give substance to the improved relations between the US and Russian presidencies.

·If Putin lives up to this expectation, the way will be open for Russia to vote in favor of tough sanctions against Iran, leading to broader horizons of Russian-US cooperation on other issues.

·For the Russian president, the top priority would be Washington’s revision of its plan to deploy missile interceptor systems in East Europe.

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