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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.
It is all part of one of the most fascinating — and complex — beats at The Times: the intersection of technology, geopolitics and the weapons that nations employ to threaten or attack one another. I’ve been covering that volatile mix, from nuclear weapons to cyberweapons and now artificial intelligence, at The Times for the better part of four decades, and it has rarely been more challenging than it has been in the past few months.
My fascination with the topic has roots in North Korea. As a reporter in my late 20s, I was stationed in Tokyo. I became curious about Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear complex. There, one of the world’s most sealed-off countries was building nuclear reactors for no apparent energy-producing purpose. It led me to write some of the first big pieces about Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder, and his nuclear ambitions.
That coverage included a tense week in the summer of 1994 when President Bill Clinton considered a plan to bomb North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites. But Mr. Clinton hesitated and ultimately rejected the plan. (This was also my chance to meet former President Jimmy Carter, who made a trip to the North to ease tensions. He told me he was convinced that the United States had persuaded the North to give up its weapons projects.)
As I returned to Washington, the coverage moved with me. There was the evening in 2006 when North Korea set off its first of many nuclear tests and it became apparent that the approach Washington had taken with North Korea was one of the great foreign policy failures of modern times. Today, the country has at least 60 nuclear weapons.
I carried those lessons with me as we reported on the Iranian nuclear program. It required expertise from across The Times, including nuclear experts like William Broad; Iran experts like Farnaz Fassihi; Israeli intelligence experts like Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti; and our Visual Investigations unit, with its ability to delve deep into satellite photography.
It’s a reminder that a great news organization, like a great university, has to draw on expertise from many departments and bureaus around the world to put together a picture that captures both the technological and political complexity of the moment.
That was the challenge I faced when piecing together the Stuxnet story. First came the technological clues: I traveled to Germany just after Christmas in 2010 to interview an expert who had dissected the Stuxnet code, which had accidentally escaped the Natanz facility.
He pointed out an oddity: The code switched into attack mode only when it detected clusters of 164 machines. From years of reporting on Iran’s program, I knew 164 was the magic number: The 5,000 centrifuges underground at Natanz were clustered into groups of 164. From that moment, the classified story began to unravel, leading me to the secret partnership between the National Security Agency, the Mossad and Israel’s cyberoffense unit.
Ultimately, that trail led back to the White House, and to the decision to employ a cyberweapon rather than send in saboteurs or bombers. After that came the story of how a brilliant operation spun out of control.
Eventually, Stuxnet did help force diplomacy, and for two years my colleagues and I covered the painfully slow negotiations with Tehran to limit its program, resulting in a deal in 2015. Again, the technical details mattered. But what we learned about Iran’s infrastructure also set us up to write about Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from that deal in 2018, his resumption of negotiations in April and, when that bogged down, his decision to attack the nuclear program last month. It also put The Times in the right position to evaluate his statement that the program had been “obliterated.”
I’ve had a variety of titles at The Times, including White House correspondent and chief Washington correspondent. They don’t mean much to readers. It’s beat reporting — the slow accumulation of sources and expertise — that really leaves a mark.
I’ve learned that in this world, where so much is hidden in classified compartments, the government will use the secret nature of operations and the threat of leak investigations to discourage reporters from digging too deeply. I’ve also learned that most administrations think they have struck on a lasting solution to emerging nuclear threats, from diplomatic accords to bombing runs, only to discover that the ambitions for national power run deep.
And mostly, I’ve relearned a lesson from my first days at The Times, in 1982: The best way to break news is to own the beat.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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