Zero Days Page #5

and annihilation of our people.

If Iran will get

nuclear weapons,

now or in the future...

It means that for the first time

in human history

islamic zealots,

religious zealots,

will get their hand on

the most dangerous,

devastating weapons,

and the world should

prevent this.

Samore:
The Israelis believe

that the iranian leadership

has already made the decision

to build nuclear weapons

when they think

they can get away with it.

The view in the U.S.

is that the iranians

haven't made that

final decision yet.

To me, that doesn't make

any difference.

I mean, it really doesn't make

any difference,

and it's probably unknowable,

unless you can put, you know,

supreme leader khamenei

on the couch and interview him.

I think, you know,

from our standpoint,

stopping Iran from getting

the threshold capacity

is, you know,

the primary policy objective.

Once they have

the fissile material,

once they have the capacity to

produce nuclear weapons,

then the game is lost.

Hayden:
President bush once said

to me, he said,

"Mike, I don't want any

president ever to be faced

with only two options,

bombing or the bomb."

Right?

He... he wanted options that...

That made it...

Made it far less likely

he or his successor

or successors

would ever get to that point

where that's...

That's all you've got.

We wanted to be energetic enough

in pursuing this problem

that... that the Israelis would

certainly believe,

"yeah, we get it."

The intelligence cooperation

between Israel

and the United States

is very, very good.

And therefore, the Israelis

went to the Americans

and said, "okay, guys,

you don't want us to bomb Iran.

Okay, let's do it differently."

And then the American

intelligence community started

rolling in joint forces

with the Israeli

intelligence community.

One day a group of intelligence

and military officials showed up

in president bush's office

and said,

"sir, we have an idea.

It's a big risk.

It might not work,

but here it is."

Langner:
Moving forward in

my analysis of the codes,

I took a closer look

at the photographs

that had been published

by the iranians themselves

in a press tour from 2008

of ahmadinejad

and the shiny centrifuges.

Sanger:
Well, photographs

of ahmadinejad

going through

the centrifuges at natanz

had provided some

very important clues.

There was a huge amount

to be learned.

First of all,

those photographs showed

many of the individuals

who were guiding ahmadinejad

through the program.

And there's one very famous

photograph that shows

ahmadinejad being shown

something.

You see his face, you can't see

what's on the computer.

And one of the scientists

who was behind him

was assassinated

a few months later.

Langner:
In one of

those photographs,

you could see parts

of a computer screen.

We... we refer to that

as a scada screen.

The scada system is basically

a piece of software

running on a computer.

It enables the operators

to monitor the processes.

What you could see

when you look close enough

was a more detailed view

of the configuration

there were these six groups

of centrifuges

and each group

had 164 entries.

And guess what?

That was a perfect match

to what we saw

in the attack code.

It was absolutely clear

that this piece of code

was attacking an array

of six different groups

of, let's just say,

thingies, physical objects,

and in those six groups,

there were 164 elements.

Gibney:
Were you able to do

any actual physical tests?

Or it was all just

code analysis?

Yeah, so, you know,

we obviously

couldn't set up our own sort

of nuclear enrichment facility.

So... but what we did was

we did obtain some plcs,

the exact models.

We then ordered an air pump,

and that's what we used

sort of as our sort of

proof of concept.

O'murchu:
We needed

a visual demonstration

to show people

what we discovered.

So we thought of different

things that we could do,

and we... we settled

on blowing up a balloon.

We were able to write a program

that would inflate a balloon,

and it was set to stop

after five seconds.

So it would inflate the balloon

to a certain size

but it wouldn't

burst the balloon

and it was all safe.

And we showed everybody,

this is the code

that's on the plc.

And the timer says,

"stop after five seconds."

We know that's

what's going to happen.

And then we would infect

the computer with stuxnet,

and we would

run the test again.

Here is

a piece of software

that should only exist

in a cyber realm

and it is able to affect

physical equipment

in a plant or factory

and cause physical damage.

Real-world

physical destruction.

At that time, things became

very scary to us.

Here you had malware

potentially killing people

and that was something that was

always Hollywood-esque to us

that we'd always laugh at

when people made

that kind of assertion.

Gibney:
At this point, you had

to have started developing

theories as to

who had built stuxnet.

It wasn't

lost on us that

there were probably

only a few countries

in the world that would want

and have the motivation

to sabotage

Iran's nuclear enrichment

facility.

The U.S. government

would be up there.

Israeli government certainly

would be... would be up there.

You know, maybe u.K.,

France, Germany,

those sorts of countries,

but we never found any

information that

would tie it back 100 percent

to... to those countries.

There are no telltale signs.

You know, the attackers don't

leave a message inside

saying, you know,

"it was me."

And even if they did,

all of that stuff can be faked.

So it's very, very difficult

to do attribution

when looking at

computer code.

Gibney:
Subsequent work

that's been done

leads us to believe that

this was the work of

a collaboration between Israel

and the United States.

Yeah, yeah.

Gibney:
Did you have

any evidence

in terms of your analysis

that would lead you

to believe that

that's correct also?

Nothing that I could

talk about on camera.

Gibney:

Well, can I ask why?

No.

Well, you can,

but I won't answer.

Gibney:
But even in the case

of nation-states,

I mean, one of

the concerns is...

Gibney:
This was beginning

to really piss me off.

Even civilians with an interest

in telling the stuxnet story

were refusing to address

the role of Tel Aviv

and Washington.

But luckily for me,

while D.C.

is a city of secrets,

it is also a city of leaks.

They're as regular as

a heartbeat

and just as hard to stop.

That's what I was counting on.

Finally, after speaking to a

number of people on background,

I did find a way of confirming,

on the record,

the American role in stuxnet.

In exchange for details

of the operation,

I had to agree to find a way

to disguise the source

of the information.

- Gibney:
We're good?

- Man:
We're on.

Gibney:
So the first question

I have to ask you

is about secrecy.

I mean, at this point,

everyone knows about stuxnet.

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