Another bold strike against Iran

The bullet-ridden car of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh after it was attacked Tehran. Picture: IRIB News Agency / AFP

Any American intelligence operative who’s worked on Iran has to tip his hat to Israel’s Mossad.

The assassination on Friday of Iran’s pre-eminent atomic-bomb scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and, even more impressively, the warehouse heist of the clerical regime’s nuclear archive in January 2018, shows a level of risk-taking and accomplishment that has no US parallel. In June there were large, damaging explosions at the Natanz uranium enrichment site, which probably weren’t caused by shoddy maintenance.

The CIA hasn’t been a particularly bold organisation in decades (the aggressive interrogation of al-Qa’ida members may be an exception). It isn’t only the timidity of the CIA’s senior management and Washington’s political class that enfeebles Langley; it’s the absence of a mission against a state-threatening foe that focuses the mind and attracts real talent. An Iran with nukes would threaten Israel’s existence, not America’s.

Israel has been lethally penetrating the Islamic Republic for at least a decade. Mossad now appears to have stationary surveillance and hit teams positioned in the country. Given the level of internal dissent, which has spread even among children of the original Iranian revolutionaries, it’s possible Israel has acquired valuable agents in Iran’s armed forces and security services.

Though the assassinations of Fakhrizadeh and others, such as Daryoush Rezainejad in 2011, may be the work of Iranian assets in Jerusalem’s employ — Kurds may be the most accessible and motivated — the archival theft is more likely an intrusion in which Israeli officers were on the ground in command.

By comparison, it’s doubtful that the CIA has ever deployed a single non-official-cover officer inside Iran to sustain either intelligence collection or covert action since the failed Operation Eagle Claw hostage rescue in 1980.

Fakhrizadeh had probably been an Israeli target for some time; the assassination’s timing might have been coincidental, dictated by a fortuitous intercept or piece of human intelligence that convinced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to go for it.

But the Israeli achievements, which have continued despite the Iranian regime’s repeated attempts to thwart them, mean that Jerusalem can play havoc with the Biden administration’s hoped-for nuclear diplomacy.

The signal to Democratic Washington is unmistakeable: Jerusalem has the means, even without a conventional air attack against Iran’s nuclear sites, to challenge the Supreme Leader and his Islamic Revolutionary Guards, where it hurts most.

If Israelis can kill Tehran’s most prized personnel and surreptitiously damage its guarded facilities, and Tehran can do little in response, then the clerical regime’s haybat, its unchallenge­able awe, is degraded for all to see. For a regime that knows the extent of popular anger against it, that is a perilous situation.

The Obama administration, with secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the lead, once spooked Israeli confidence about preventive military action against Iran’s nuclear program.

This time, Jerusalem doesn’t have to be so ambitious. American will to intervene in the Middle East is declining rapidly, and Israel’s position is significantly stronger than it was in 2012, when president Barack Obama began secret negotiations with Tehran in Oman.

Israel has Iran in a corner, and Ayatollah Khamenei is obviously scared to escalate.

Joe Biden’s people, who were Obama’s people, played down Israel’s concerns about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions and imperialism. Trying to get these officials to pay attention to the many unanswered questions about the regime’s militarisation of nuclear research and gaping holes in the verification procedures of Obama’s atomic accord was a hapless task.

American flirtations with “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif seemed to many Israelis a dance of naifs.

The evident huge increase in Mossad operations inside Iran isn’t only a by-product of President Donald Trump’s sympathy. It is an early sign of a new post-American order.

Biden and his officials may try to twist Jerusalem’s arm to go easier on Iran. Good luck. The president-elect’s looming defence cuts will be more telling.

The Middle East is all about power politics, and Mossad has begun to show what a committed First World intelligence service can do against a Third World Islamist state whose own security ­apparatus is increasingly decrepit.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

The Wall Street Journal