Middle East and Africa | A killing in Absard

The father of Iran’s nuclear programme is assassinated

The slaying of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh will complicate efforts by Joe Biden to rebuild a crumbling nuclear deal

|BEIRUT, JERUSALEM AND LONDON

FEW KILLINGS arouse Iran’s feelings of victimhood and outrage like the assassination of its nuclear scientists. To get a sense of their prominence, head to the Holy Defence Museum, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ monument to its martyrs, perched on the heights overlooking the capital, Tehran. Between the rubbish bins stencilled with Stars of David, as an insult to Israel, and the railings made out of mortars stand the cars in which four of Iran’s nuclear scientists were killed between 2010 and 2012. Each is riddled with bullets and coated with red tulips, an Iranian symbol of mourning. Plaques shaped like tears tell visitors their death was the doing of “global arrogance headed by the US and Israel”. Now there will be a fifth.

On November 27th Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabada was shot dead while driving in Absard, a city 80km (50 miles) east of Tehran, by what Iran’s defence ministry called “armed terrorists”. Mr Fakhrizadeh was notionally a physics professor, teaching at the Imam Hossein University in Tehran, an institution linked to the armed forces. In fact, he had been at the heart of Iran’s clandestine nuclear ambitions for decades.

Mr Fakhrizadeh led a series of innocuous-sounding institutes and projects—the Physics Research Centre from 1989, the AMAD Plan in the 2000s and later the Modern Defensive Readiness and Technology Center in Tehran—that had, in the euphemistic language of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), “possible military dimensions”. Though the IAEA says that there was no “co-ordinated effort” to produce a bomb after 2003, Israeli officials claimed that Mr Fakhrizadeh’s work had continued in a different guise. The IAEA was never allowed to interview him.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, tweeted that there were “serious indications of [an] Israeli role”. That is a reasonable supposition. On the day of Mr Fakhrizadeh’s death, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, boasting of a “list of things I’ve done this week”, added, coyly: “It’s a partial list because I can’t tell you everything.” Two years ago, during a public presentation of a trove of documents and other evidence that Israeli spies had stolen from Tehran, Mr Netanyahu displayed a photograph of a nondescript man in spectacles. “Remember that name,” he warned: “Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.” Western officials widely acknowledge that the assassination of scientists during 2010-12 was conducted by Israel.

The significance of the latest killing is contested. “It no doubt undermines morale and might temporarily disrupt whatever projects Fakhrizadeh might have been working on,” says Eric Brewer of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, and a former director for counter-proliferation on America’s National Security Council. Mr Fakhrizadeh was probably the single most important repository of Iran’s nuclear-weapons knowledge. Indeed, this was a frequent American and Israeli complaint about a multinational nuclear deal agreed between Iran and six world powers in 2015: that it left Iran with the infrastructure and institutional know-how to restart its nuclear programme at short notice.

However, says Mr Brewer, because “as of 2019 the US believed Iran had not restarted its former weapons programme...the impact of the assassination is likely more symbolic”. The aim, he suggests, was probably to deter or disrupt any future efforts than to halt current activity. Mohammad Marandi, an academic with close ties to the Guards, says that the assassination “would have had a much bigger scientific impact” a decade ago because “there are now many competent scientists”.

If Israel was responsible, it would have had one eye on America’s political calendar. Former Israeli intelligence officials believe that there has been pressure in recent weeks to escalate the continuing secret war against the Iranian nuclear programme. The president-elect, Joe Biden, has said that he would seek to rejoin the nuclear deal, called the JCPOA, that was signed by Barack Obama in 2015 and abandoned by Donald Trump in 2018. Mr Trump has tightened sanctions on Iran. It, in turn, has responded by piling up enriched uranium and testing advanced centrifuges in violation of the deal’s provisions.

Iran-hawks in the outgoing Trump administration are keen to tie Mr Biden’s hands before his inauguration on January 20th. Israeli officials may have seen a closing window of opportunity for American acquiescence or even assistance. On November 27th Mr Trump unsubtly retweeted a news story attributing the assassination to Israel. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, says that “the question arises” whether the attack is linked to a recent meeting between Mike Pompeo, America’s secretary of state, and Mr Netanyahu (the two men are also reported to have met Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader).

In recent months there have been other signs of a covert war against Iran. In the summer the country was buffeted by a series of unexplained explosions. At least two of them destroyed buildings related to nuclear research and production. On August 7th Abu Muhammad al-Masri, an al-Qaeda leader, was shot dead in Tehran by Israeli operatives, according to the New York Times. That Iran's enemies seem to be able to spy, sabotage and kill with impunity in the heart of Iran, wiping out buildings and scientists alike, over more than a decade, is something of an embarrassment for the country's draconian security forces. Israel is also reported to have helped America track Qassem Suleimani, a top general, who was killed by a drone strike in Iraq in January.

Iranian leaders fumed at Mr Fakhrizadeh’s killing. Mr Zarif said that it was an act of “desperate warmongering” by terrorists. Hossein Salami, the Guards’ head, said that the assassination of scientists was “the most violent confrontation to prevent us from reaching modern science”. In the past Iran has not taken such killings lying down. After the murders of 2010-12 there was a series of attempted attacks on Israeli diplomats in Georgia, India and Thailand, as well as an attack on a bus full of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.

Many of those attacks were linked to Hizbullah, a Lebanese militant group with close ties to Iran. Coincidentally, Saeid Moradi, an Iranian who blew off his own legs in a botched attack on Israeli diplomats in Thailand in 2012, was released from prison on November 25th in a swap that saw Iran free Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian academic held for two years on bogus charges. More recently, after Suleimani’s killing, Iran lobbed more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two Iraqi air bases housing American troops. Hours before that barrage, an Iranian anti-aircraft battery mistakenly shot down a passenger jet, killing 176 people, many of them Iranian citizens.

John Brennan, head of the CIA in 2013-17, says that Mr Fakhrizadeh’s assassination was a “criminal...act of state-sponsored terrorism” which would risk “lethal retaliation and a new round of regional conflict”. Yet if the outcome of America’s election contributed to the latest assassination, it will also make any Iranian response a delicate matter. Mr Biden’s election had given Iran’s beleaguered reformists a new lease of life. Officials close to President Hassan Rouhani had anticipated an easing of American sanctions, particularly on oil sales, and an end to Mr Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure”. They will not want to blow up the chance of rapprochement with Mr Biden before he even takes office. Iran’s budget, which was unveiled this month, predicted that oil sales would rise.

Mr Rouhani’s influence, however, is waning: term limits will force him out of office after an election in June next year. The Guards had long operated outside his writ and their generals routinely defy his policies. Now these hardline opponents are in the ascendant, having trounced reformists in parliamentary elections this year. Many will seize on the attack as vindication of their worldview of an implacably hostile West manipulated by Israel. Recrimination, revenge and confrontation, not diplomacy, are likely to be their response.

Discover more

After pushing its economy to the brink, Egypt gets a bail-out

But a record-setting investment from the UAE will not fix its chronic problems

Gaza is on the brink of a man-made famine

Israel and Hamas reject a ceasefire even as people starve


Senegal proves the doomsayers wrong

Bassirou Diomaye Faye’s win is a triumph for the country’s democracy