The assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist on the outskirts of Tehran raises the possibility that Israel has an array of operatives or agents, analysts say, available to target regime officials reduced to making implausible excuses for high-profile security failures.
“The gut reaction is to say that they would remove them after each operation to maintain security, but they may not be doing that,” said former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The decrepitude of the Iranian security services seems to be pretty advanced.”
Those breakdowns have been thrown into stark relief by the successful targeting of Iran’s Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a man known as “the father” of the regime’s nuclear weapons program. Iranian officials have released conflicting accounts of his killing Friday, including the suggestion that his attackers succeeded “by using electronic devices,” as the operation demonstrates severe vulnerabilities in Iran’s security and counterintelligence capabilities, analysts say.
“The recent reports about a remote-controlled assassination plot are designed to mask the Revolutionary Guard’s latest failure,” the Heritage Foundation’s Jim Phillips argued. “It would help explain why none of the perpetrators were caught and distract attention from the fact that Israel almost certainly had inside help from Iranians opposed to the regime and evidently has penetrated the regime’s security services.”
The question is, just how much inside help and which insiders? The nature of covert action makes it impossible to assess from the outside with certainty, but the string of recent defeats for Iranian security services suggests that Israel has established an “impressive” range of capabilities.
“I think it’s fair to say, given the actions that they in all probability [have] undertaken in the country, that they have done something quite impressive: And that is that they have, essentially, standing teams in the country,” Gerecht said, comprised either of undercover Israeli intelligence officers or Iranians who work for Mossad. “They may actually be keeping these folks in place. Now, if these teams are primarily Iranian agents, then you, of course, would leave them in place. You wouldn’t exfiltrate them.”
Iranian officials claim to have identified the suspects in the latest attack, which initial reports suggested was carried out as an ambush by gunmen. “After a clash between the terrorists and his bodyguards, Mr Fakhrizadeh was severely injured and rushed to hospital,” the Iranian defense ministry said last week. “After a clash between the terrorists and his bodyguards, Mr Fakhrizadeh was severely injured and rushed to hospital. Unfortunately, the medical team’s efforts to save him were unsuccessful and minutes ago he passed away.”
Tehran’s story shifted over the weekend. “Unfortunately, the operation was very complicated and was carried out by using electronic equipment and no one was present on the scene,” Iranian general Ali Shamkhani said this week, according to Iranian state media, before blaming the Israeli intelligence agency. “But some clues are available, and the identity and records of the designer of the operation has been discovered by us.”
The regime’s domestic unpopularity, paired with Israel’s long familiarity with Iran, creates the potential for an array of assets. “Iran was, at one point, an ally of Israel, it knows Israel in some ways on a more practical level … better than many of the other countries in the region. Israel knows Iran quite well; it still has operating synagogues,” said Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Anthony Cordesman, who was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran when the United States had diplomat relations with the government overthrown in the 1979 revolution. “So it’s a structure where, when you look at the assassination of a single individual, if you’re willing to pay the cost, it’s something you can do almost anywhere.”
Those synagogues are hardly the only theoretical vulnerability, however. Iranian Kurds stand out as a community that could furnish Israeli intelligence officers with agents, according to Gerecht. In any case, a regime that reportedly killed 1,500 protesters last November might struggle to gather the information necessary to identify these threats and prevent future attacks.
“They’re in a situation now where just using brute force isn’t going to be effective for this type of problem,” Gerecht said. “They need to have more people loyal to the system to rat out others … They just don’t have sufficient loyalty amongst the people to have a good drop of what’s going on all over the place.”
