Book says Israeli spies sent to kill scientists

WASHINGTON — A new book claims Israel’s spy agency dispatched assassins into Iran as part of a campaign to sabotage the country’s disputed nuclear program.

Israeli operatives have killed at least four Iranian nuclear scientists, including targeting them with operatives on motorcycles, an assassination technique used by the Israeli spy service, the Mossad, according to authors Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman in their book to be published July 9, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.

The Mossad agents “excel at accurate shooting at any speed and staying steady to shoot and to place exquisitely shaped sticky bombs” and consider it their hallmark, Raviv said Friday during an interview with both authors.

The hits are part of a series of regular missions deep inside Iran, intended to keep Tehran from developing weapons and following through with threats by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map. U.S. officials have said in the past that they were not involved, and they don’t know who did it.

The U.S. and Israel accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

Iran has long blamed the scientists’ killings on Israel, which has remained silent on the matter, but media reports speculated Israel had contracted killers to do the job.

“They don’t farm out a mission that is that sensitive,” so sensitive that Israel’s prime minister has to sign off on it personally, Raviv said. “They might use dissidents for assistance or logistics but not the hit itself.

“The methodology and training and use of motorcycles is all out of the Mossad playbook. They wouldn’t trust anybody else to do it.”

The Mossad operatives enter and exit Iran through a “multitude” of routes, using a series of safe houses once inside the country that predate the 1979 Islamic revolution, the authors said.

In Friday’s interview, coauthor Melman said Israel believes the campaign successfully disrupted Iran’s nuclear program not only by taking out key scientists but also dissuading other upand-coming scholars from joining the program.

Raviv is a CBS News correspondent, and Melman is a well-known Israeli reporter and commentator.