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The raid alone was quite cheeky. A team of Israeli commandos equipped with high powered torches made their way into a vault of a heavily guarded warehouse deep in Iran and fled before dawn with 5,000 pages of top secret documents on the country’s nuclear program.
Then in a television show a few weeks later, in April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the contents of the stolen documents and timidly alluded to equally daring operations that were already planned.
“Remember that name,” he said, designating scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the captain of Iran’s covert attempts to assemble a nuclear weapon.
Today, Mr. Fakhrizadeh has become the latest victim in a growing campaign of daring covert attacks, apparently designed to torment Iranian leaders by reminding them of their weakness. The operations face Tehran with a distressing choice between accepting extremists’ demands for swift retaliation, or attempting to make a fresh start with the less relentlessly hostile administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Driving a carefully diverted route to his in-laws’ home in a town outside Tehran, Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s car was stopped on Friday by a car bomb in a Nissan so loaded with explosives it destroyed a power line, according to Iranian media. and testimonials. A squad of gunmen then jumped out of a black SUV, overpowered their bodyguards and unleashed a barrage of gunfire before escaping as Mr. Fakhrizadeh was dying in the street.
Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s murder was the latest in a decade of mysterious poisonings, car bombings, shootings, thefts and sabotage that plagued the Islamic Republic. Most have struck largely anonymous scientists or secret facilities suspected of being linked to its nuclear program, and nearly all have been attributed by US and Iranian officials to Tehran’s great enemy, Israel, whose officials have almost openly said jubilee of the repeated success of their espionage without formally acknowledging that the Israeli agents were behind.
Never, however, has the Islamic Republic suffered a series of covert attacks like in 2020. In January, a US drone strike killed the revered General Qassim Suleimani while he was in a car leaving the airport in Baghdad (an attack facilitated by Israeli intelligence, officials say). And Iran was humiliated in August by the deadly shooting of an Israeli team against a top al Qaeda leader in the streets of Tehran (this time at the behest of the United States, its officials said).
Rarely has a country demonstrated a similar ability to strike with apparent impunity inside the territory of its fiercest enemy, said Bruce Reidel, a researcher at the Brookings Institution and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency with experience. in Israel.
“It’s unprecedented,” he said. “And it shows no sign of being effectively countered by the Iranians.”
With the murder of its top nuclear scientists on Friday, the Iranians are now grappling with a new sense of vulnerability, demands to purge suspected collaborators and a nagging debate over how to respond at a delicate time.
Iran has endured four years of devastating economic sanctions as part of President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, and many Iranian leaders are desperate for some relief from a Biden administration. The president-elect pledged to seek to revive a stale deal that lifted sanctions against Iran in exchange for stopping nuclear research that could produce a weapon.
For pragmatic Iranians, this desire for a fresh start means that Mr. Trump’s final months in office is not the time for the country to strike back and risk a new round of hostilities.
But at the same time, some Iranians openly recognize that their enemies in the United States and Israel can use the current moment to attack Tehran further, squeezing its rulers between demands for national revenge and a pragmatic desire for better relations.
“From today until Trump leaves the White House, this is the most dangerous time for Iran,” wrote Mohammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official in the Ministry of Culture and the Guidance, in a message on Twitter.
Retaliation against Israel or Mr. Netanyahu’s main ally, the United States, would play into the hands of Iran’s enemies in the region, who seek “to create a difficult situation” so that Mr. Biden cannot revive this nuclear deal, Mr. Khoshvaght added.
Some hardliners have argued that Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s murder shows that Tehran must forgo a fresh start with Mr. Biden, if only because restraint encouraged its enemies.
“If you don’t respond to that level of terrorism, they can repeat it because now they know Iran won’t respond,” conservative political analyst Foad Izadi said in an interview in Tehran.
“There is obviously a problem when you see this kind of thing happening again.”
Underlining Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s stature despite his previous anonymity in Iran, his authorities announced on Saturday their intention to give him the burial of a national hero in one of the country’s most sacred shrines.
Videos circulated of a senior cleric who heads the judiciary praying with the scientist’s family over his body wrapped in an Iranian flag and his face uncovered – an extraordinary and unexplained departure from the Islamic tradition of enveloping the dead of the head to toe in a white fabric.
Israel has for decades adopted a strategy of targeted assassinations in an attempt to slow down potential progress towards nuclear weapon development among its hostile neighbors. Israeli intelligence agencies have been linked to the murders of scientists working for Egypt in the 1960s and for Iraq in the 1970s for the same reason, historians say.
Iran initially accused Israel of killing one of its scientists when he fell dead in its laboratory after poisoning in 2007, and a series of more violent attacks against Iranian scientists between 2010 and 2012 have also largely attributed to Israel.
In one, a bomb in a parked motorcycle detonated a particle physicist as he lowered a garage door at his home in Tehran. In three others, motorcyclists overtaking the moving cars of three other scientists slapped magnetic bombs on their car doors, killing two people and injuring a third. And in a fifth attack, gunmen on motorcycles sprayed a scientist with bullets as his car stopped at a traffic light with his wife sitting next to him.
Israel has developed a singularly successful roadmap against Iran, in part by focusing the considerable resources of its spy agencies primarily on its greatest enemy, said Mr. Riedel of the Brookings Institution.
Israel, he said, has also carefully maintained ties with Iran’s neighboring countries as “platforms” for surveillance and recruitment – notably in Baku, Azerbaijan. Its recent conflict with Armenia has drawn attention to the drones and other weapons that Israel has provided to Azerbaijan as part of this relationship.
Israel has made a habit of recruiting native Farsi speakers from among Iranian immigrants to Israel to establish contacts or analyze intercepted communications, he added, and Israel has also managed to enlist a range of Iranian collaborators.
Now, argued Mr. Riedel, the attack on Mr. Fakhrizadeh may indicate that Israel intends to exploit this network again for similar missions. After an eight-year ‘hiatus’ from the 2010-2012 murder spree, he said, “I think this is a signal that the game is on or coming.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the covert operations, a senior Israeli official involved for years in tracking down Mr. Fakhrizadeh for Israel said he would continue to act against Iran’s nuclear program if necessary. Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations, promoted by Fakhrizadeh, posed such a threat that the world should thank Israel, the official insisted.
In Iran, the murder has already sparked new demands to root out these spies, including from the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In his first public response to the murder, Mr. Khamenei said the first priority was “to investigate this crime and definitively punish its perpetrators”.
Extremists blamed the administration of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani – a pragmatist who had bet heavily on negotiations with Washington – for the security failures that allowed the attack.
“The night is long and we are awake,” said Hossein Dehghan, a recently announced candidate for next year’s presidential election who is a senior Revolutionary Guard commander and Khamenei’s defense adviser. .
“We will descend like thunder on the heads of those responsible for the murder of this martyr and make them regret it”, he continued in a message on Twitter.
Mr Rouhani, for his part, suggested in a televised speech that Iran would continue what he called a policy of “strategic patience”, or what his critics call waiting for Mr Biden.
“We will respond at the right time,” said Rouhani. “All enemies must know that the great Iranian people are more courageous and honorable not to respond to this criminal act.”
But within Iranian politics, analysts say, it is the extremists who would gain the most politically from the attack. Any renewed conflict with Israel strengthens their argument against negotiating with its Western allies, Sanam Vakil said at Chatham House in London.
Since Mr Biden won the November election, hard-line supporters have started to pressure Mr Rouhani to postpone any negotiations with the new US administration for as long as possible, Ms Vakil said because the conflict with Washington strengthens their appeal and weakens them further. pragmatic factions in the Iranian elections next year.
“So an event like this is in the hands of the extremists,” she said, “because they can push the negotiations until the end of the Iranian elections – and that’s what they are looking for. “
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