Gunmen Assassinate Iran’s Top Nuclear Scientist
in Ambush, Provoking New Crisis
Iran expressed fury over the killing of Mohsen
Fakhrizadeh, blaming it on Israel and the United States. His death may
complicate President-elect Biden’s intention to restore the Iranian nuclear
deal.
By David E.
Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman
Published
Nov. 27, 2020
Updated
Nov. 28, 2020, 3:50 a.m. ET
Iran’s top
nuclear scientist, long identified by American and Israeli intelligence as the
guiding figure behind a covert effort to design an atomic warhead, was shot and
killed Friday in what the Iranian media called a roadside ambush as he and his
bodyguards traveled outside Tehran.
For two
decades, the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was the driving force behind what
American and Israeli officials describe as Iran’s secretive nuclear weapons
program. His work continued after Iran’s push to develop a bomb was formally disbanded
in 2003, according to American intelligence assessments and Iranian nuclear
documents stolen by Israel nearly three years ago.
One
American official — along with two other intelligence officials — said that
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 have long shared intelligence regarding
Iran, which Israel considers its most potent threat.
Iranian
officials, who have always maintained that their nuclear ambitions are for
peaceful purposes, not weapons, expressed fury and vowed revenge over the
assassination, calling it an act of terrorism and warmongering that they
quickly blamed on Israeli assassins and the United States.
The White
House, C.I.A. and Israeli officials declined to comment. But Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s
assassination — only 10 months after the United States killed the powerful
spymaster at the head of Iran’s security machinery in a drone attack in Iraq —
could greatly complicate President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s plans to
reactivate the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and six other nations,
which curtailed Iran’s nuclear activities.
Mr. Biden’s
transition team had no immediate comment on the assassination.
President
Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear accord 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. Since then, Iran has begun to increase its nuclear capacities once
again, arguing that it is not bound by the nuclear accord because the United
States reneged on its commitments.
The
assassination of Mr. Fakhrizadeh had the hallmarks of a precisely timed
operation. The Iranian state news media said that gunmen waited along the road
and attacked as his car was driving through the countryside town of Absard, an
area known as a bucolic escape with majestic mountains about 40 miles east of
Tehran.
Pictures
posted by state and social media of the attack aftermath showed the scientist’s
vehicle, a black S.U.V., with its windshield shattered from bullets and the
side windows blown out. Blood streaks and shards of glass and metal were
scattered on the road.
Protests
erupted outside government buildings in Tehran to demand revenge, much as they
did after the Jan. 3 attack that killed Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian major
general who ran the elite Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
“Terrorists
murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today,” Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad
Javad Zarif, wrote on Twitter. “This cowardice — with serious indications of
Israeli role — shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators.”
Mr. Zarif,
who negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and remains one of Iran’s most
recognizable figures, said in the post that the international community should
“end their shameful double standards & condemn this act of state terror.”
Brig. Gen.
Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff for Iran’s armed forces, said in a
statement that “we will not rest until we track down and take revenge on those
responsible for the assassination of martyr Fakhrizadeh.”
On Friday
night, Iran sent a letter to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres,
condemning what it called “a terrorist attack” and warning that the country
“reserves its rights to take all necessary measures to defend its people and
secure its interests.”
It is
difficult to predict the precise fallout from the killing. A weakened Iran,
having lost two of its most celebrated military and nuclear figures in the last
year alone, may be eager for new negotiations with the Biden administration.
Yet the
twin assassinations may have poisoned the well. Hard-liners in Iran may win the
argument that they cannot bend to outside pressure and should redouble their
efforts to resist the West in memory of Mr. Fakhrizadeh, who they declared had
been martyred.
John
Brennan, who was the C.I.A. director under Mr. Obama, called the killing “a
criminal act & highly reckless” in a tweet. “It risks lethal retaliation
& a new round of regional conflict,’’ he wrote, urging Iran to “wait for
the return of responsible American leadership” and resist temptations to strike
back.
The
Pentagon’s former top Middle East policy official, Michael P. Mulroy, said Mr.
Fakhrizadeh’s death was “a setback to Iran’s nuclear program.” He noted that
the scientist “was also a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
Corps, and that will magnify Iran’s desire to respond by force.”
It was
unclear whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one of the most vocal Iran
hawks in the administration, had been given any advance warning of Israel’s
plans when he visited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel last week.
But some
American officials argued that Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s death, the latest in a string
of such killings of Iran’s top nuclear scientists that date back a dozen years,
amplifies the chilling message to the country’s other top scientists working on
that program: If the well-guarded head cannot be protected, neither can anyone
else.
It also
remains unclear how much the killing will set back the Iranian program. Mr.
Fakhrizadeh had the background and oversight to understand the challenges of
physics and politics the Iran nuclear program faced. But Iran recovered from
the assassinations of lower-level scientists, and from the cyberattacks from
2007 to 2010 on the nuclear fuel production site at Natanz, a joint
Israeli-American operation code-named “Olympic Games.” That operation set Iran
back by a year or so.
The killing
of Mr. Fakhrizadeh comes just two weeks after intelligence officials confirmed
that Al Qaeda’s second-highest leader was gunned down on the streets of Tehran
by Israeli assassins on a motorcycle on Aug. 7, at the behest of the United
States.
The Qaeda
figure, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad
al-Masri and was accused of being one of the masterminds of the deadly 1998
attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa. He was killed along with his
daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza bin Laden.
But the
Qaeda official was a foreigner; Mr. Fakhrizadeh was a national hero, a figure
of resistance to the West and its insistence that Iran could not have its own
nuclear technology.
Iran never
agreed to demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United
Nations’ nuclear monitor, to let U.N. inspectors question Mr. Fakhrizadeh,
saying he was an academic who lectured at the Imam Hussein University in
Tehran.
Mr.
Fakhrizadeh was an academic, but a series of classified reports, notably a
lengthy 2007 assessment done by the C.I.A. 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
I.A.E.A.’s chief inspector. Later, 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 in creating a warhead small enough to fit atop a missile
and make it survive the rigors of re-entry into the atmosphere.
He stayed
out of sight for years. 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 Mr.
Fakhrizadeh, and at least one handwritten by him, the Israelis contended.
Shortly
thereafter, Mr. Netanyahu singled out Mr. 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 Mr. Fakhrizadeh as the leader of the Amad program.
Iran said
Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation was fiction.
Israeli
officials, later backed up by American intelligence officials who reviewed the
archive, said the scientist had kept elements of the program alive even after
it was ostensibly abandoned. It was now being run covertly, Mr. Netanyahu
argued, by an organization within Iran’s defense ministry known as S.P.N.D. He
added: “You will not be surprised to hear that S.P.N.D. is led by the same
person who led Project Amad, Dr. Fakhrizadeh.”
The
assassination comes at a time of greatly heightened tensions between Iran and
the Trump administration. Mr. Trump was dissuaded from striking Iran just two
weeks ago, after his aides warned that it could escalate into a broader
conflict during his last weeks in office.
Mr. Trump
had asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 12 whether he had
options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site at Natanz in the coming
weeks. Days later, Mr. Pompeo visited Israel on what could be his last trip
there in office.
Such a
strike on the eve of a new administration could poison relations with Tehran to
such an extent that negotiating a restoration of the nuclear deal, or
toughening its terms, could be impossible.
Since Mr.
Trump dismissed the secretary of defense, Mark T. Esper, and other top Pentagon
aides this month, Defense Department and other national security officials have
privately expressed worries that the president might initiate operations, overt
or secret, against Iran or other adversaries at the end of his term. Others
have said that Mr. Netanyahu, who at various moments has been on the edge of
attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, might seek to act while Mr. Trump is still
in office.
While Mr.
Trump’s top advisers — including Mr. Pompeo and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — argued against a military strike
against Iran, top American officials and commanders still warn of what they
call Iran’s malign activities.
In Iran, some
officials and commentators acknowledged that Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s loss had created
a significant void in the country’s pursuit of nuclear science, but vowed that
it would not be halted. Others also voiced concern over what apparently was a
yawning security hole that they said had allowed Israeli operatives to
infiltrate Iran.
“Israel has
camped out here in a bad way. The recent events of this year make this clear,”
a former vice president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, said on Twitter. “Iran’s security
strategy should be to find Mossad’s spies and informants.”
David E.
Sanger is a national security correspondent. In a 36-year reporting career for
The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most
recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect
Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook
Eric
Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and
national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the
Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT
Farnaz
Fassihi is a freelance reporter with the International Desk based in New York.
Before contracting with the Times, she was a senior writer and war
correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years based in the Middle
East. @farnazfassihi
Ronen
Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.
His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s
Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House.
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