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Prologue

The Case of the Centrifuges


It was January 2010 when officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
the United Nations body charged with monitoring Irans nuclear program, first began to notice
something unusual happening at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran.
Inside the facilitys large centrifuge hall, buried like a bunker more than fifty feet beneath
the desert surface, thousands of gleaming aluminum centrifuges were spinning at supersonic
speed, enriching uranium hexafluoride gas as they had been for nearly two years. But over the
last weeks, workers at the plant had been removing batches of centrifuges and replacing them with
new ones. And they were doing so at a startling rate.
At Natanz each centrifuge, known as an IR-1, has a life expectancy of about ten years. But the
devices are fragile and prone to break easily. Even under normal conditions, Iran has to replace up
to 10 percent of the centrifuges each year due to material defects, maintenance issues, and worker
accidents.
In November 2009, Iran had about 8,700 centrifuges installed at Natanz, so it would have
been perfectly normal to see technicians decommission about 800 of them over the course of the year
as the devices failed for one reason or another. But as IAEA officials added up the centrifuges
removed over several weeks in December 2009 and early January, they realized that Iran was
plowing through them at an unusual rate.
Inspectors with the IAEAs Department of Safeguards visited Natanz an average of twice a
monthsometimes by appointment, sometimes unannouncedto track Irans enrichment
activity and progress. Anytime workers at the plant decommissioned damaged or otherwise
unusable centrifuges, they were required to line them up in a control area just inside the door of
the centrifuge rooms until IAEA inspectors arrived at their next visit to examine them. The
inspectors would run a handheld gamma spectrometer around each centrifuge to ensure that no
nuclear material was being smuggled out in them, then approve the centrifuges for removal,
making note in reports sent back to IAEA headquarters in Vienna of the number that were
decommissioned each time.
IAEA digital surveillance cameras, installed outside the door of each centrifuge room to
monitor Irans enrichment activity, captured the technicians scurrying about in their white lab
coats, blue plastic booties on their feet, as they trotted out the shiny cylinders one by one, each
about six feet long and about half a foot in diameter. The workers, by agreement with the IAEA,
had to cradle the delicate devices in their arms, wrapped in plastic sleeves or in open boxes, so the
cameras could register each item as it was removed from the room.
The surveillance cameras, which werent allowed inside the centrifuge rooms, stored the
images for later perusal. Each time inspectors visited Natanz, they examined the recorded
images to ensure that Iran hadnt removed additional centrifuges or done anything else
prohibited during their absence. But as weeks passed and the inspectors sent their reports back

to Vienna, officials there realized that the number of centrifuges being removed far exceeded
what was normal.
Officially, the IAEA wont say how many centrifuges Iran replaced during this period. But
news reports quoting European diplomats put the number at 900 to 1,000. A former top IAEA
official, however, thinks the actual number was much higher. My educated guess is that 2,000
were damaged, says Olli Heinonen, who was deputy director of the Safeguards Division until he
resigned in October 2010.
Whatever the number, it was clear that something was wrong with the devices. Unfortunately,
Iran wasnt required to tell inspectors why they had replaced them, and, officially, the IAEA
inspectors had no right to ask. The agencys mandate was to monitor what happened to uranium
at the enrichment plant, not keep track of failed equipment.
What the inspectors didnt know was that the answer to their question was right beneath
their noses, buried in the bits and memory of the computers in Natanzs industrial control
room. Months earlier, in June 2009, someone had quietly unleashed a destructive digital
warhead on computers in Iran, where it had silently slithered its way into critical systems at
Natanz, all with a single goal in mindto sabotage Irans uranium enrichment program and
prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear bomb.
The answer was there at Natanz, but it would be nearly a year before the inspectors would
obtain it, and even then it would come only after more than a dozen computer security experts
around the world spent months deconstructing what would ultimately become known as one of
the most sophisticated viruses ever discovereda piece of software so unique it would make
history as the worlds first digital weapon and the first shot across the bow announcing the age of
digital warfare.

Reprinted from Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the Worlds First Digital
Weapon Copyright 2014 by Kim Zetter. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of
Random House LLC.

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