Egypt and Saudi Arabia secretly carried out their first ever joint exercise this week with the participation of their special operations, marine, armored, missile, air and naval forces, debkafile's military sources reveal.  Exercise Tabuk-2 was programmed to repulse a potential Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia by taking the battle over to Islamic Republican territory. It took place in Egypt's northern desert abutting the Mediterranean Sea where conditions resemble the eastern Saudi Arabian Persian Gulf coast.

Battered from four directions - two by unidentified covert hands -Tehran is  feeling all the more  the pain  of sanctions that reach down to street level and the military pressure on its shores. The regime is beginning to show cracks.

Amid reports of a mysterious illness, Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei goes to Qom to campaign for his son Mojtaba as heir and his own elevation to "Imam." However, the grand ayatollahs of Qom have little respect for Khamenei and refuse to call him Ayatollah.

Russia appears ready to sell Venezuela the same five S-300PMU-1 air defense missile battalions it withheld from Iran because of international sanctions. debkafile's sources report Venezuela's ruler Hugo Chavez offered to buy them when he met Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow Thursday, Oct. 14.  Israel turned to Washington to try and block the transaction for its original client, Iran, to get hold of the sophisticated interceptors through its good friend Chavez.

A top-secret Iranian military installation was struck by a triple blast Tues. Oct. 12 the day before Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad landed in Lebanon. debkafile's sources report the site held most of the Shehab-3 medium-range missile launchers stocked for striking US forces in Iraq and Israel - some set to deliver triple warheads (tri-conic nosecones). The underground bunkers housing the launchers at the Revolutionary Guards Imam Ali mountain base in Lorestan were built to defy sabotage.

China has decided to throw its military support behind Iran and the radical Middle East camp it leads including Syria and Turkey. Beiijng likes the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's plan for reviving the Non-Aligned Movement established in the 1950s.

Iran is shopping around Russia's arms customers for S-300 missile technology hoping China will be forthcoming. Military chiefs have warned the regime that a US or Israeli attack is more probable than not and Iran's nuclear plants and Tehran are wide open without this advanced missile system.

The arrival of a new Middle East player has startled Washington and Jerusalem: debkafile's military sources disclose that when Turkish Prime Minister Tayyep Erdogan met Syrian president Bashar Assad in Damascus Monday, Oct. 11, they talked less about the Kurdish question and more about the role China is willing to play in the military-intelligence alliance binding Syria, Iran and Turkey. Chinese warplanes took part in Turkey's recent air maneuver after breaking their journey to refuel in Iran.

Information reaching the West indicates Iran has put to death atomic scientists and technicians suspected of helping plant the Stuxnet virus in its nuclear program. The admission by Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization, on Friday, Oct. 8 - the frankest yet by any Iranian official - that Western espionage had successfully penetrated its nuclear program is seen as bearing out those reports. The Iranian program is further slowed by extreme security.

Tehran can't be sure that sons of Stuxnet are not quietly sitting in the guidance- and flight-control systems of its missile delivery capability.

The Iranian and Syrian presidents agreed in Tehran Saturday, Oct. 2, to support  Hizballah's grab of Lebanon's power centers, including the capital Beirut, right after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ends his controversial two-day visit to the country on October 13-14. They also decided to harass the Saad Hariri government until it dissolves the UN tribunal probing the Hariri murder - or is overthrown.

The arrest warrants for 33 individuals issued by Damascus amounts to a declaration of war.

Tehran is bent on military action to settle scores with Israel and the US whom it suspects of planting the malignant Stuxnet cyber worm in the controls of its nuclear, military and strategic systems, debkafile reports. The timeline for action revolves around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Lebanon Oct. 13-14, during which he plans to tour the Israeli border. Preying on Tehran too are the personal sanctions Barack Obama has imposed on its top brass.

The Iranian president tells Syria's Bashar Assad that the cyber attack on his country is the second in three years after Israel struck the Syrian plutonium reactor. That is more than Tehran is willing to suffer.

Whereas Stuxnet has certainly damaged and created havoc in Iran's nuclear facilities and military industries, their undoubted slowdown may be partially explained by additional factors, such as grave technical glitches and a divided leadership in Tehran.

The peak of the cyber attack find Iran's top leaders at odds and incapable of getting to grips with the malworm's invasion.

Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer security experts in West and East Europe with offers of handsome fees for consultations on ways to exorcize the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc through the computer networks and administrative software of its most important industrial complexes and military command centers. debkafile's intelligence and Iranian sources report that local efforts backfired; the malworm became even more aggressive.

The debate over a missile, warplane or special forces strike against Iran's nuclear facilities is made redundant by an outside power proving able to partly cripple Iran's nuclear facilities by activating at will a malworm latent inside their control systems.  In it next issue out Friday, DEBKA-Net-Weekly offers first details on the scale of the physical damage suffered by Iran so far from the Stuxnet worm's expanding invasion and evaluates its potential steep decline in regional power stakes, along with its allies.

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Iranian official Hamid Alipour said Monday, Sept. 27, that the Stuxnet computer worm "is mutating and wreaking further havoc on computerized industrial equipment." Stuxnet was no normal worm, he said: "… new versions of this virus are spreading."

Revolutionary Guards deputy commander Hossein Salami declared his force had all the defensive structures for fighting a long-term war against "the biggest and most powerful enemies" with most advanced weapons. 

Mahmoud Alyaee, secretary-general of Iran's industrial computer servers, including its nuclear facilities control systems, confirmed Saturday, Sept. 25, that 30,000 computers belonging to classified industrial units had been infected and disabled by the malicious Stuxnet virus.
This followed debkafile's exclusive report of Thursday, Sept. 23, from its Washington and defense sources that a clandestine cyber war is being fought against Iran by the United States with elite cyber war units established by Israel.

A man of his word, the Iranian president sincerely believes he has a great mission to bring about the coming of the Mahdi and establish a new world Shiite empire. According to Ahmadinejad, America has never fought a real war - a hint at what he has in store.