IRAN RATTLED AS ISRAEL REPEATEDLY HITS KEY TARGETS
Attacks reveal Israel has collaborators in Iran and intelligence services had failed to find the moles
In less than nine months, an assassin on a motorbike fatally shot an Al Qaida commander given refuge in Tehran, Iran’s chief nuclear scientist was machine-gunned on a country road, and two separate, mysterious explosions rocked a key Iranian nuclear facility in the desert, striking the heart of the country’s efforts to enrich uranium.
The steady drumbeat of attacks, which intelligence officials said were carried out by Israel, highlighted the seeming ease with which Israeli intelligence was able to reach deep inside Iran’s borders and repeatedly strike its most heavily guarded targets, often with the help of turncoat Iranians.
The attacks, the latest wave in more than two decades of sabotage and assassinations, have exposed embarrassing security lapses and left Iran’s leaders looking over their shoulders as they pursue negotiations with the Biden administration aimed at restoring the 2015 nuclear agreement.
The recriminations have been caustic. The head of parliament’s strategic centre said Iran had turned into a “haven for spies.” The former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard called for an overhaul of the country’s security and intelligence apparatus.
Cloud of paranoia
Most alarming for Iran, Iranian officials and analysts said, was that the attacks revealed that Israel had an effective network of collaborators inside Iran and that Iran’s intelligence services had failed to find the moles.
The attacks have cast a cloud of paranoia over a country that now sees foreign plots in every mishap. Over the weekend, Iranian state television flashed a photograph of a man said to be Reza Karimi, 43, and accused him of being the “perpetrator of sabotage” in an explosion at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant last month.
The attacks represent an uptick in a long-running campaign by the intelligence services of Israel and the United States to subvert what they consider to be Iran’s threatening activities.
Hejazi led missile project
Chief among them are a nuclear programme that Iran insists is peaceful, Iran’s investment in proxy militias across the Arab world, and its development of precisionguided missiles for Hezbollah, the militant movement in Lebanon.
An Israeli military intelligence document in 2019 said that Brigadier General Mohammad Hosseinzadeh Hejazi, who deid on Monday, was a leading figure in the last two, as the commander of the Lebanese corps of the Quds Force and the leader of the guided missile project. Revolutionary Guard spokesman Ramezan Sharif said that Israel wanted to assassinate Hejazi. Israel has been working to derail Iran’s nuclear programme,
That the Israelis are effectively able to hit Iran inside in such a brazen way is hugely embarrassing and demonstrates a weakness that I think plays poorly inside Iran.”
Sanam Vakil | deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House
which it considers a mortal threat, since it began. Israel is believed to have started assassinating key figures in the program in 2007, when a nuclear scientist at a uranium plant in Isfahan died in a mysterious gas leak.
In the years since, six other scientists and military officials said to be critical to Iran’s nuclear efforts have been assassinated. Another top Quds Force commander, Rostam Ghasemi, said recently that he had narrowly escaped an Israeli assassination attempt during a visit to Lebanon in March.
The deputy head of parliament, Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, told the Iranian news media on Monday that it was no longer enough to blame Israel and the United States for such attacks. Iran needed to clean its own house.
Calls for retaliation grow louder after each attack. But any overt retaliation risks an overwhelming Israeli response. “They are not in a hurry to start a war,” said Talal Atrissi, a political science professor at the Lebanese University in Beirut. “Retaliation means war.”