US Can Kill Iran's Agents In Iraq: Report

The White House has reportedly given its approval for the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives in Iraq.

The Washington Post reports it's part of an aggressive new effort to reduce Tehran's influence in the region and get it to give up its nuclear program.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have been catching Iranian agents, interviewing them and letting them go. The Post says the administration is now convinced that was ineffective because Iran paid no penalty for its mischief.

As one senior administration official told the Post, "There were no costs for the Iranians. They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back."

It is unknown whether U.S. forces have killed any Iranian operatives to date. Officials told the newspaper that about 150 Iranian intelligence officers, along with members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, are active inside Iraq, though there is no evidence that these Iranian operatives have directly attacked U.S. forces in Iraq, the officials said.

In a recent Senate hearing, CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden noted that for the past three years, Iran has offered Shiite militias weapons and intelligence training and said there was a "striking" amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops.

"Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," Hayden said.

In addition to the stated goal of reducing violence in Iraq, the kill-or-capture order is aimed at reducing Iran's influence with Hamas and Hezbollah and among Shiites in western Afghanistan.

One senior official also told the Post that the Bush administration's plans contain five "theaters of interest" designed to target Iranian interests across the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the United States and Europe are showing concern over reports that Iran is on the verge of launching it's most powerful missile into space attached with a satellite.

In the latest edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology, an Iranian-built space launcher has been built and "will liftoff soon" with a satellite, according to Alaoddin Boroujerdi, the chairman of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission.

The U.S. believes Iran is using some derivation of its Shahab 3 missile, which, in its current form, can hit Israel, Saudi Arabia and southern Turkey from central Iran.

However, fears are that future upgrades in weapons technology will give Iran an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that features a range of approximately 2,500 miles.

The magazine reports that Iran's latest missile has strong resemblances to North Korea's missile program and experts fear Iran will eventually build a clone of North Korea's Taepodong 2C/3, which was tested last July.

In November, an Israeli intelligence officer said in a report delivered to Congress that North Korea has shipped Iran 18 ballistic missiles with nuclear capabilities.

The report's author, Kenneth Katzman, wrote, "Largely with foreign help, Iran is becoming self-sufficient in the production of ballistic missiles."

The news of Iran's alleged attempt to launch a missile comes as U.N. officials said Friday that Iran plans to start installing thousands of centrifuges in an underground facility next month.

The move would pave the way to large-scale uranium enrichment, a potential way of making nuclear weapons.

The officials, who demanded anonymity because the information was confidential, emphasized that Iranian officials had not officially said the country would embark on the assembly of what will initially be 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz. But they said senior officials have informally told the International Atomic Energy Agency the work would start next month.

"Iran is becoming more confrontational each day despite divisions back in Tehran on this approach," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, "and the reaction to several of the new developments, including the purchase and testing of new missiles and defiance of the nuclear inspections program, has been for the U.S. to send aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf, leading U.N. officials to fear a military strike."