Brazen slayings leave Iran exposed
Vulnerabilities on display as country struggles to respond
The raid alone was brazen enough.
A team of Israeli commandos with high-powered torches blasted itswayinto a vault of a heavily guarded warehouse deep in Iran and made off before dawn with 5,000 pages of top secret papers on the country’s nuclear program.
Then in a television broadcast a fewweeks later, in April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the contents of the pilfered documents and coyly hinted at equally bold operations still to come.
“Remember that name,” hesaid, singling out scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the captain of Iran’s covert attempts to assemble a nuclearweapon.
NowFakhrizadeh has become the latest casualty in a campaign of covert attacks seemingly designed to torment Iranian leaders with reminders of their weakness. The operations are confronting Iran with an agonizing choice between embracing the demands of hard-liners for swift retaliation, or attempting to make a fresh start with the less implacably hostile administration of President-elect Joe Biden.
Trailed by a carload of bodyguards, Fakhrizadeh on Friday was driving a circuitous route to thehome of his in-laws in the city of Absard, Iran, according to witnesses and the Iranian news media.
An empty Nissan parked at a roundabout exploded, knocking down a power line.
Gunmen leaped from a parked Hyundai, others arrived on motorcycles, and waiting snipers filled out a
hit team of 12 assassins, according to a detailed account posted online by JavadMogouyi, a documentary filmmaker for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Fakhrizadeh, hit with at least three bullets, tumbled from his car and fell bleeding on the ground.
The nearest medical clinic had lost electrical power. Roadside cameras were disabled. All 12 assassins escaped unharmed, and Fakhrizadeh was pronounced dead by the time a rescue helicopter could transport him to a hospital.
“It was like a Hollywood action movie,” Mogouyi wrote in his account.
On Monday, however, a top Iranian security official drastically changed the story of Fakhrizadeh’s killing, accusing Israel of using “electronicdevices” to remotely kill the scientist.
Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, madethecomment
at Fakhrizadeh’ funeral.
Israel, long suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists over the last decade, has repeatedly declined to comment on the attack.
State TV’s English-language broadcaster Press TV reported earlier Monday that a weapon recovered from the scene of the attack bore “the logo and specifications of the Israeli military industry.” State TV’sArabiclanguage channel, Al-Alam, claimed the weapons used were “controlled by satellite,” a claim also made Sunday by the semiofficial Fars news agency.
None of the outlets immediately offered evidence supporting their claims, which also could give authorities a way to explain why no one was reportedly arrested at the scene.
The attack was the latest in a decadelong pattern of mysterious poisonings, car bombings, shootings, thefts and sabotage that has afflicted the Islamic Republic.
Most have hit largely anonymous scientists or secretive facilities believed to be linked to its nuclear program, and almost all have been attributed by both U.S. and Iranian officials to Tehran’s great nemesis, Israel, whose officials — without formally acknowledging responsibility — have all but openly gloated over the repeated success of their spies.
Never, however, has the Islamic Republic endured a spate of covert attacks quite like in 2020.
In January, a U.S. drone strike killed the revered Gen. Qasem Soleimani as he was in a car leaving the Baghdad airport (an attack facilitated by Israel’s intelligence, officials say). And Iran was humiliated in August by an Israeli hit team’s fatal shooting of a senior al- Qaida leader on the streets of Tehran (this time at the behest of the U.S., its officials have said).
Seldom has any country
demonstrated a similar ability to strike with apparent impunity inside the territory of its fiercest enemy, said Bruce Riedel, a researcher at the Brookings Institution and a former CIAofficial with experience in Israel.
“It’s unprecedented,” he said. “And it shows no sign of being effectively countered by the Iranians.”
With the killing of their top nuclear scientist aswell, Iranians are now grappling with anewsense of vulnerability and demands to purge suspected collaborators.
Most of all, they are debating how to respond at a delicate moment.
Iran has endured years of devastating economic sanctions under a campaign of “maximum pressure” from President Donald Trump, and many Iranian leaders are desperately hoping for some measure of relief.
Biden has pledged to seek to revive a lapsed agreement that lifted sanctions in exchange for a halt to nuclear research that might produce aweapon.
To pragmatic Iranians, that possibility makes Trump’s last months in office no time to lash back and risk renewed hostilities.
But Iranians also know that their enemies in the United States and Israel may take advantage of this period to attack Tehran further. It is a chance to squeeze its leaders between domestic demands for revenge and a pragmatic desire for better relations.
“From today until Trump leaves the White House is the most dangerous period for Iran,” Mohammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official at the Ministry of Culture and Guidance, wrote on Twitter.
Retaliation against Israel or Netanyahu’s main ally, the United States, would play into the hands of Iran’s enemies in the region, Khoshvaght argued. They are seeking “to create a difficult situation,” so the new administration cannot revive that nuclear agreement, he added.
Israel has developed a singularly successful track record in part by concentrating the considerable resources of its spy agencies mainly on Iran, its greatest nemesis, said Riedel of the Brookings Institution.
Israel, he said, has also cultivated ties within countries neighboring Iran as “platforms” for surveillance and recruitment — most notably in Baku, Azerbaijan. Its recent conflict with Armenia has called attention to drones and other weaponry that Israel has furnished to Azerbaijan as part of that relationship.
Israel recruits native Farsi speakers from among Iranian immigrants to make contacts or analyze intercepted communications, he added, and Israel has managed to enlist a stream of Iranian collaborators.