Killing bears Mossad fingerprints
The shooting of a key scientist suggests Israel is as determined as ever to keep its regional enemy’s ambitions in check, Louise Callaghan and Anshel Pfeffer write.
About 2pm on Friday, Iran time, a convoy of three cars drove down a tree-lined road outside the Iranian town of Absard, a popular weekend getaway near the mountains 80km east of Tehran. In one of them, a black SUV, was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a bearish figure with grey hair and wirerimmed glasses.
It was his last journey. In a spectacular and cacophonous roadside ambush, Iran’s nuclear mastermind was assassinated by a team of killers who struck out of nowhere and then vanished.
Iran blamed Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. And for once nobody doubted it.
For decades, Mossad has emerged suddenly from the shadows to eradicate Israel’s enemies. Fakhrizadeh’s demise had all its hallmarks: the ruthless and meticulously planned killing – in broad daylight on his home turf – of aman whose brutal death has a significance beyond Iran’s, or Israel’s, borders.
But why would Mossad – with its reputation for daring assassinations of Israel’s enemies – carry out what John Brennan, Barack Obama’s former CIA chief, has condemned as a ‘‘criminal’’ and ‘‘highly reckless’’ act that risks inflaming conflict in the region?
If Israel is behind the assassination, one of Mossad’s Kidon teams was almost certainly responsible.
Kidon is directed by the Caesarea operations branch, which is kept separate from the usual business of intelligencegathering. Most of its members, who are called lochamim – warriors – in Mossad parlance, have been seconded from commando units in the Israeli army and are already trained in operating deep behind enemy lines. Their assassinations have to be signed off by Israel’s primeminister.
Kidon’s existence dates from
Israel’s battles against Palestinian terrorism. When 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team were murdered at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 by Black September, a cell in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the prime minister, Golda Meir, ordered Mossad to hunt down those responsible. Mike Harari, an operations chief, was tasked with forming a new unit, which was named Kidon after the Hebrew for bayonet.
At first, there were some major failures, most spectacularly the killing in 1973 of a Moroccan waiter in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer, who had been mistaken for the Black September operations chief. But Mossad found and eliminated most of the Black September leaders in their bases in the Middle East and in Europe.
As the level of professionalism rose, more murders of prominent figures in radical Palestinian organisations and in the upper echelons of countries such as Syria and Iran occurred without leaving a trace of the perpetrators’ identity.
A range of tactics have been used in recent years: drive-by shootings (as in the cases of Palestinian Islamic Jihad chief Fathi Shikaki in 1992 in Malta and of four Iranian scientists murdered in Tehran between 2010-2012); relatively small quantities of explosives hidden in critical locations (used by Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, in 1996 to blow up the mobile phone of Hamas master bombmaker Yihya Ayash when he answered it); sniper shots from great distance in the middle of the night (the chief of Syria’s nuclear programme who was killed in 2008 while at his coastal villa); and poisons injected in a crowd.
A botched attempt to poison Hamas chief Khaled Mashal in Amman in 1997 – leading to a
swap of the captured operatives for a poison antidote and the release from prison of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin – was another rare operational failure. But for decades there have been hundreds of flawlessly executed assassinations.
Friday’s operation was against another extraordinarily highvalue target –a national hero credited with masterminding Iran’s nuclear programme.
According to the Iranian government, Fakhrizadeh was a physics professor at Imam Hossein University in Tehran and a high-ranking scientific official at the Iranian defence ministry. Israeli and western intelligence agencies, however, say this was no more than a flimsy cover story. Fakhrizadeh, they said, was Iran’s most senior nuclear scientist. Yet, he was not just a leading nuclear scientist, but a brigadier-general in the Revolutionary Guards who had overseen the development of the country’s nuclear arsenal for two decades.
Israel sees Iran’s potential nuclear rivalry as an existential threat. Although Tehran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful, the radicals of the Islamic regime are committed to Israel’s destruction.
For more than a decade, since at least five of his academic colleagues were shot on the streets of Tehran, Fakhrizadeh was one of the most heavily protected people in Iran.
He was the man holding together all the different strands of Iran’s nuclear programme – the above-board research projects, along with the people in charge of the crucial components of a nuclear weapon, the missiles and guidance systems, and the miniaturisation necessary to squeeze a nuclear device in a warhead.
That was why, for years, the International Atomic Energy Agency had been asking the Iranian government for permission to interview him, to no avail. And why in May 2018, when the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, presented in Tel Aviv the contents of an Iranian nuclear archive that Mossad had purloined from a warehouse in Tehran, he fingered Fakhrizadeh as Iran’s secret nuclear boss. ‘‘Mohsen Fakhrizadeh,’’ said Netanyahu. ‘‘Remember the name.’’
Yet Fakhrizadeh had evaded the assassins for years until Friday when a Nissan pick-up truck loaded with an explosive device blew up in front of his convoy. It blocked the route and took down an overhead power line, cutting the electricity supply to the town. Waiting gunmen then roared up to the convoy, firing through the windscreen of Fakhrizadeh’s car.
According to the semi-official Fars news agency, one of the scientist’s security guards was killed while trying to shield him with his body. It was not enough. Fakhrizadeh was critically injured, and – despite being picked up by helicopter within half an hour of the attack – he died in hospital.
The Iranian security establishment faces questions as to how it allowed the man regarded as the father of their nuclear programme to be exposed and how the assassins had such detailed knowledge of his travel plans.
The attack follows a series of disastrous intelligence failures for a country that prides itself on its counter-espionage abilities. Locals and foreigners in Iran with only the vaguest links to perceived enemies are under constant suspicion. Yet somehow, within this ultra-paranoid environment, assassins seem to be able to kill at will before melting away.
Officials in Israel have commented on the killing. not