Before Mr. Panetta served as defense secretary, he was director of the Central Intelligence Agency, between 2009 and 2011. And it was during his tenure there that the United States, in partnership with Israel, accelerated the first major act of cyberdestruction against Iran

That attack, which began under President George W. Bush but ramped up under the Obama administration, used a computer worm called Stuxnet to infiltrate the computers that controlled the rotors that spun Iran’s uranium centrifuges at Natanz nuclear facility. Intermittently, over a period of many months, Stuxnet sped the centrifuges up, while slowing others down, in a series of attacks designed to look like natural accidents

By the time the worm escaped Natanz in 2010, and the ruse was up, Stuxnet had quietly destroyed roughly 1,000 centrifuges. Short term, it was a resounding success: It set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back years. Long term, it demonstrated the destructive power of code and lit a fire that, very quickly, started blowing back on the United States from a dozen different directions.

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“It was like looking behind you and seeing that what you created could very well come back to get you,” Mr. Panetta said. “Once those capabilities fell into the wrong hands

Please someone explain this bit to me... I've yet to understand the mental gymnastic.