US had rejected Israeli request to attack Iran's N-facilities

US president George Bush last year rejected a secret Israeli request for specialized bunker- busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran's main nuclear complex and told them that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran's suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, a media report said on Sunday.
    
White House officials, the New York Times said, never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the US protested, or whether Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Bush left office.
   
But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran's major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country's only known uranium enrichment plant is located, the paper said.
    
The White House, the Times reported quoting American officials, denied that request outright. The Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily, it added.
    
But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran's nuclear infrastructure, a major covert programme that Bush is about to hand off to president-elect Barack Obama.
    
This account of the expanded US covert programme and the Bush administration's efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on Iran, the Times said, emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear inspectors and European and Israeli officials.
    
Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations, the paper said.

The interviews suggest that while Bush was extensively briefed on options for an overt US attack on Iran's facilities, he never instructed the Pentagon to move beyond contingency planning, even during the final year of his presidency, contrary to what some critics have suggested.
    
The interviews, the Times said, also indicate that Bush was convinced by top administration officials, led by defense secretary Robert M Gates, that any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran's nuclear effort further out of view.
    
Bush and his aides also discussed the possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in which
140,000 US troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved, it added.
    
Instead, Bush embraced more intensive covert operations actions aimed at Iran, the Times said, having concluded that the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies were failing to slow the uranium enrichment efforts.
    
Those covert operations, and the question of whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Obama, the paper said.
    
The covert American programme, started in early 2008, includes renewed US efforts to penetrate Iran's nuclear supply chain abroad, along with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies, the report said, adding that it is aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon.
    
Early in his presidency, Obama must decide whether the covert actions begun by Bush are worth the risks of disrupting what he has pledged will be a more active diplomatic effort to engage with Iran.

Either course, the Times said, could carry risks for Obama. An inherited intelligence or military mission that went wrong could backfire, as happened to president Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba.
    
But a decision to pull back on operations aimed at Iran could leave Obama vulnerable to charges that he is allowing Iran to speed ahead toward a nuclear capacity, one that could change the contours of power in the Middle East.
    
Israel's effort to obtain the weapons, refueling capacity and permission to fly over Iraq for an attack on Iran grew out of its disbelief and anger at the US intelligence assessment completed in late 2007 that concluded Iran had effectively suspended its development of nuclear weapons four years ago.
    
That conclusion also stunned Bush's national security team  and Bush himself, who was deeply suspicious of the conclusion, the paper said, citing officials who discussed it with him.
    
The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate, was based on a trove of Iranian reports obtained by penetrating Iran's computer networks.
    
Those reports indicated that Iranian engineers had been ordered to halt development of a nuclear warhead in 2003, even while they continued to speed ahead in enriching uranium, the most difficult obstacle to building a weapon, the paper added.
    
Throughout 2008, the Bush administration insisted that it had a plan to deal with the Iranians: applying overwhelming financial pressure that would persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear programme, as foreign enterprises like the French company Total pulled out of Iranian oil projects, European banks cut financing, and trade credits were squeezed, the report said.
    
But the Iranians were making uranium faster than the sanctions were making progress. As Bush realized that the sanctions he had pressed for were inadequate and his military options untenable, he turned to the CIA.