Iranian nuke mastermind is killed
U.S. official says Israel ambushed scientist behind weapons program
Iran’s top nuclear scientist, who U.S. and Israeli intelligence long have charged was behind secret programs to design an atomic warhead, was shot and killed in an ambush Friday as he was traveling in a vehicle in northern Iran, the country’s state media reported.
The scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, believed to be 59, has been considered the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program for two decades and continued to work after the main part of the effort quietly was disbanded in the early 2000s, according to U.S. intelligence assessments and Iranian nuclear documents stolen by Israel.
One U.S. official — along with two other intelligence officials — said Israel was behind the attack on the scientist.
It was unclear how much the United States may have known about the operation in advance, but the two nations are the closest of allies and long have shared intelligence regarding Iran.
The White House and CIA declined to comment.
Gunmen waited along the road and attacked Fakhrizadeh as his car was driving through the countryside town of Absard, in the Damavand region, according to official Iranian media and state television.
The state media accounts said Fakhrizadeh was gravely wounded in the attack and that doctors tried to save him in the hospital but could not.
Iranian officials, who long have maintained their nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, not for weapons, called the attack an act of terror and vowed to take revenge.
“Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter. “This cowardice — with serious indications of Israeli role — shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators.”
Zarif, a U.S.-educated diplomat who’s one of Iran’s most recognizable figures, said in the post that the international community — and especially the European Union — should “end their shame
ful double standards & condemn this act of state terror.”
The Pentagon’s former top Middle East policy official, Michael Mulroy, said the death of Fakhrizadeh was “a setback to Iran’s nuclear program.”
“He was their senior-most nuclear scientist and was believed to be responsible for Iran’s covert nuclear program,” Mulroy said in an email. “He was also a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and that will magnify Iran’s desire to respond by force.”
The killing could complicate President-elect Joe Biden’s handling of the Iran nuclear deal.
Fakhrizadeh’s killing could have broad implications for the incoming Biden administration.
It’s bound to set off a sharp reaction in Iran, as did the U.S. attack Jan. 3 that killed Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who ran the elite Quds force of the Revolutionary Guard.
The attack also could complicate the effort by Biden to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, as he has pledged to do, if the Iranians agree to return to the limits detailed in the accord.
President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, unraveling the signature foreign policy achievement of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and isolating the United States from Western allies who tried to keep the agreement intact.
Trump then imposed stringent sanctions on Iran in an effort to force it back to the bargaining table, which Iran refused to do.
Israel long has opposed the nuclear deal, and if its agents were responsible for the killing of a man considered a national hero, there could be political pressure in Iran to move forward with its current effort to gradually rebuild the stockpile of nuclear fuel it gave up in 2015.
U.S. officials wouldn’t comment on the assassination Friday, saying they were seeking information.
But some U.S. officials argued the death of Fakhrizadeh, the latest in a string of such mysterious killings of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, would send a chilling message to the country’s other top scientists working on that program: If we can get him, we can get you, too
shadowy figure, Fakhrizadeh long had been the No. 1 target of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, which widely is believed to be behind a series of assassinations of scientists a decade ago that included some of Fakhrizadeh’s deputies.
Iran never agreed to demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, to let its inspectors question Fakhrizadeh, saying he was an academic who lectured at the Imam Hussein University in downtown Tehran.
Fakhrizadeh was an academic, but a series of classified reports — notably, a lengthy 2007 assessment done by the CIA for the George W. Bush administration — said the academic role was a cover story. In 2008, his name was added to a list of Iranian officials whose assets were ordered frozen by the United States.
That same year, his activities were disclosed in an unclassified briefing by the IAEA’s chief inspector
ater, it became clear that he ran what the Iranians called Projects 110 and 111 — an effort to tackle the most difficult problems bomb designers face as they try to make a warhead small enough to fit atop a missile and make it survive the rigors of re-entry into the atmosphere.
Iran always has denied it was seeking a nuclear weapon, insisting its production of nuclear material was purely for peaceful purposes. But an Israeli operation in early 2018 that stole a warehouse full of Iranian documents about “Project Amad,” what the Iranians called the nuclear weapons effort 20 years ago, included documents about Fakhrizadeh and his involvement.
Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel singled out Fakhrizadeh in a televised presentation when he described the secret Israeli operation to seize the archive.
Iran had lied about the purpose of its nuclear research, he charged, and he identified Fakhrizadeh as the leader of the Amad program.
Israeli officials, later backed up by U.S. intelligence officials who reviewed the archive, said the scientist had kept elements of the program alive even after it ostensibly was abandoned. It now was being run covertly, Netanyahu argued, by an organization within Iran’s defense ministry known as SPND.
He added, “You will not be surprised to hear that SPND is led by the same person who led Project Amad: Dr. Fakhrizadeh.”
“And also, not coincidentally,” Netanyahu added, showing a picture that appeared to be Fakhrizadeh “many of SPND’s key personnel worked under Fakhrizadeh on Project Amad.”