If the US and Israeli are counting on swarms of drones to carry out an attack on Iranian nuclear sites, they had better think again.

IRGC spokesman Brig. Gen. Ramezan Sharif’s claim Wednesday, Oct. 30, that the Iranian drone which encroached on Israeli airspace on Oct. 6 “obtained the images of many areas that are important for us,” came to counter IDF Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, Northern Command chief, who said no photos were taken because "I don't think there was a camera there." Tehran now suspects the UAV was not shot down but recovered intact and wants to find out what Israeli intelligence has learned from its equipment.

Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi warned Sunday, Oct. 28: “The drone was definitely not the latest Iranian technology.” He was talking about the drone sent by Iran and Hizballah over Israel on Oct. 6 and implying it was not the last word in their armory - or even the last to reach Israel. debkafile: In mid-September, Tehran secretly shipped to Lebanon a batch of its most advanced Ababil-T UAVs for new missions, after developing a new stealth attack series with a range of 2,000 kilometers.

Sudan’s President Omar Bashir said Saturday, Oct. 27 that “Israeli interests are now legitimate targets.” He spoke after Iranian generals secretly examined the rubble left by an air attack on Oct. 24 of the Shehab ballistic missile factory in Khartoum.  While Israel has not commented on the attack, Sudan’s Information Minister said “military experts” had determined it was destroyed by Israel-made missiles. debkafile: The high rank of the Iranian investigating team attests to the consternation in Tehran over the Yarmouk factory's loss.

Iran has located its global cyber war-room at Hizballah’s secret internal security apparatus headquarters in South Beirut, under the direction of Hassan Nasrallah’s brother-in-law Wafiq Safa ,debkafile’s exclusive intelligence and counterterrorism sources reveal. The hackers and cyber experts who recently attacked American banks and guided an Iranian stealth drone into Israeli airspace on Oct. 6, operated from this facility and its secret bunkers. No US or Israel action has been taken as yet against this threat to their national security.

An Iranian cyber offensive has hit US banks, Israeli military defenses, Saudi oil and Qatari gas websites. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the US will retaliate for a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” The Wall Street Journal reports 100 Iranian hackers are conducting the offensive. debkafile: Tehran is telling Washington that US-led sanctions will continue to be punished and further pressure on Syria’s Bashar Assad will be met with assaults on Israel’s military or even nuclear sites. Without a response, Iran will keep going.

Not all is dandy in the cyber war collaboration between the US and Israel. Since Stuxnet, Iran has made strides in its cyber war capabilities and attained a level largely unknown to Western intelligence.

Israel used the Gaza missile war to test and improve three new systems. The brief campaign occasioned the most extensive cyber war Israel has ever conducted, as well giving a new intelligence command and control system its first field test and marking out the many gaps in the big cities' defenses against ...

The case of the adviser to three US presidents who dabbled in cyber war, like the death of the British biological weapons experts eight years earlier, has not been satisfactorily explained. No cause of death has been established for Wheeler while Dr. Kelly death was "whitewashed."

In its coming issue out next Friday, DEBKA-Net-Weekly looks behind the unsolved murder of former high-ranking US White House official John Wheeler, especially at the suspicion that its motive may have been tied to the active interest he was showing in cyber warfare - or even Iran's reprisal for Stuxnet and its murdered nuclear scientists.
Like the Wheeler case, the death of the British biological warfare expert Dr. David Kelly in the UK in 2003 five months after the US-British invasion of Iraq, remains unsolved.
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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.

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.

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.

As the UN General Assembly opens with speeches by US President Barack Obama and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, US media carry a plethora of leaks maintaining that the United States has embarked on a clandestine cyber war against Iran and that Israel has established elite cyber war units for this purpose.

Stuxnet, rated as the most advanced and dangerous virus ever devised, is said to have crippled 3,000 enrichment centrifuges.