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.

debkafile's intelligence sources report from Iran that dozens of Russian nuclear engineers, technicians and contractors are hurriedly departing Iran for home since local intelligence authorities began rounding up their compatriots as suspects of planting the Stuxnet malworm into their nuclear program.
Among them are Russian personnel who built Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr which Tehran admits has been damaged by the virus.

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.

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.

Stuxnet has wrought as much strategic damage to Iran's nuclear and military systems as a conventional military strike. The malworm also raided its computers for a massive heist of the Islamic Republic's intelligence secrets.

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.