BEIRUT, Lebanon – In less than nine months, an assassin on a motorcycle fatally shot an Al Qaeda commander hiding in Tehran, the chief nuclear scientist of Iran was shot with a machine on a country road, and two separate, mysterious explosions have blown up an important Iranian core. in the desert, which is at the heart of the country’s efforts to enrich uranium.
The constant drumming of attacks, carried out by Israel according to intelligence officials, the apparent ease with which Israeli intelligence was able to get deep within the borders of Iran and repeatedly achieve its most guarded targets, often with the help of Iranians.
The attacks, the latest wave in more than two decades of sabotage and assassinations, have exposed an embarrassment of security breaches and made Iranian leaders look over their shoulders as they negotiate with the Biden government, which aims to end the 2015 to restore core agreement.
The accusations are biting.
The head of parliament’s strategic center said Iran had become a “refuge for spies”. The former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has called for an overhaul of the country’s security and intelligence apparatus. Lawmakers have demanded the resignation of top security and intelligence officials.
The most worrying thing for Iran, Iranian officials and analysts said, was that the attacks revealed that Israel had an effective network of collaborators in Iran and that Iran’s intelligence services could not find the mole.
“The fact that the Israelis are effectively capable of defeating Iran in such a foolish way is very embarrassing and shows a weakness that I believe is playing poorly within Iran,” said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East. and North Africa program at Chatham House, said.
The attacks also cast a cloud of paranoia over a country that now sees strange plots in every accident.
Iranian state television over the weekend flashed a photo of a man who was Reza Karimi, 43, accusing him of being the ‘offender of sabotage’ during an explosion at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant last month. But it was unclear who he was, whether he acted alone and whether it was even his real name. In any case, he fled the country before the blast, Iran’s intelligence ministry said.
Monday, after the Iranian state news media reported that Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hosseinzadeh Hejazi, the deputy commander of the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards, died of heart disease, and there was immediate suspicion of foul play.
General Hejazi has long been a target of Israeli espionage, and the son of another leading Quds Force commander insisted on Twitter that Hejazi’s death was “not heart related.”
A spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards could not clear the air with a statement that the general had died from the combined effects of ‘extremely difficult missions’, a recent infection of Covid-19 and exposure to chemical weapons during the war between Iran and Iraq.
The general would have been the third high-ranking Iranian military official killed in the past 15 months. The United States assassinated Major General Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force, in January last year. Israel assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist and a brigadier general in the Revolutionary Guards, in November.
Even if General Hejazi died of natural causes, the cumulative loss of three top generals was a significant blow.
The attacks are an increase in a protracted campaign by the intelligence services of Israel and the United States to undermine what they see as Iran’s threatening activities.
Most important among them is a nuclear program that urges Iran to be peaceful, the investment of Iran in proxy militias across the Arab world and its development with precision-guided missiles for Hezbollah, the militant movement in Lebanon.
An Israeli military intelligence document in 2019 states that General Hejazi has been a leading figure in the last two, as the commander of the Lebanese corps of Quds Force and the leader of the guided missile project. Revolutionary Guards spokesman Ramezan Sharif said Israel wanted to kill him.
Israel has been working since its inception to derail Iran’s nuclear program, which it considers a life-threatening one. It is believed that Israel began killing key figures in the program in 2007, when a nuclear scientist died at a uranium plant in Isfahan in a mysterious gas leak.
In the years that followed, six other scientists and military officials said they were critical of Iran’s nuclear killings. A seventh was wounded.
Another top commander of the Quds Force, Rostam Ghasemi, recently said that during a visit to Lebanon in March, he meticulously escaped an Israeli assassination attempt.
But assassination is just one tool in a campaign that operates on multiple levels and fronts.
In 2018, Israel carried out a daring raid to steal half a ton of secret archives of Iran’s nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran.
Israel has also reached out to the world and found equipment in other countries that need to destroy Iran, hide transponders in its packaging or install explosive devices to explode after the equipment is installed inside Iran. rankings of U.S. intelligence officials.
A former Israeli intelligence operative said that to compromise with such equipment, she and another officer would drive to the factory and undertake a crisis, such as a car accident or a heart attack, and the woman would guards asking for help. This would give her enough access to the facility to identify the security system so that another team could break in and eliminate it, she said on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss covert operations.
In an interview on Iranian state television last week, Iran’s former nuclear chief revealed the origins of an explosion at the Natanz nuclear plant in July. The explosives were sealed in a heavy desk that had been placed in the plant months earlier, said Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
The blast tore through a factory producing a new generation of centrifuges, which put Iran’s nuclear enrichment program back months, officials said.
Alireza Zakani, head of parliament’s research center, said on Tuesday that in another case, machinery from a nuclear site had been sent abroad for repairs and returned with £ 500 explosives in Iran.
Little is known about the more recent explosion in Natanz this month, other than that it destroyed the plant’s independent power system, which in turn destroyed thousands of centrifuges.
It would have been difficult for Israel to carry out these operations without the help of Iranians, and that is perhaps what Iran arranges best.
Security officials in Iran have prosecuted several Iranian citizens over the past decade, accusing them of complicity in Israeli sabotage and assassination operations. The punishment is execution.
But the infiltrations also tarnished the reputation of the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guards, which is responsible for protecting nuclear sites and scientists.
A former commander of the Guards has demanded a “cleansing” of the intelligence service, and Iran’s Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri has said that the unit responsible for security at Natanz “should be held accountable for its failures. “
The deputy head of parliament, Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, told Iranian news media on Monday that it was no longer enough to blame Israel and the United States for such attacks; Iran had to clean its own house.
As one Guardian publication, Mashregh News, put it last week: “Why is the safety of the nuclear facility acting so irresponsibly that it is being hit twice from the same hole?”
But the Revolutionary Guards respond only to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and so far there has been no sign of a conversion from above.
After each attack, Iran struggled to respond and sometimes claimed that they only identified those responsible after they left the country or said they remained at large. Iranian officials also insist they have destroyed other attacks.
Calls for retaliation get louder after each attack. Conservatives have accused the government of President Hassan Rouhani of weakness or of subjecting the country’s security to the core talks in the hope that it would lead to easing US sanctions.
Indeed, Iranian officials have shifted to what they called “strategic patience” in the last year of the Trump administration, calculating that Israel has tried to lead them into an open conflict over the possibility of negotiations with a new Democrat government would eliminate.
Both mr. Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said they did not allow the attacks to derail negotiations because lifting sanctions was a priority.
It is also possible that Iran tried to retaliate, but failed.
Iran has been blamed for a bomb blast near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi in January, and 15 militants linked to Iran were arrested in Ethiopia last month for plotting to assassinate Israeli, US and Emirati soldiers. to attack targets.
But any overt retaliation could venture an overwhelming Israeli response.
“They are in no hurry to start a war,” said Talal Atrissi, a political science professor at Lebanese University in Beirut. “Retaliation means war.”
Conversely, the timing of Israel’s latest attack on Natanz suggested that Israel should try to break off the negotiations, at least to weaken Iran’s bargaining power. Israel opposes the 2015 nuclear deal and opposes its resurrection.
The United States, which wants to negotiate with Iran in Vienna, said it was not involved in the attack, but also did not publicly criticize it.
And if a national paranoia resulted in the repeated Israeli attacks, an intelligence official said it was a fringe benefit for Israel. The additional steps Iran has taken to search buildings for security devices and plumbing backgrounds to eradicate potential spies have delayed enrichment work, the official said.
The conventional wisdom is that neither party wants a war and reckons that the others will not increase. But at the same time, the secret, regional shadow war between Israel and Iran intensified with Israeli airstrikes on Iranian-backed militants in Syria and a significant attack on ships.
But as Iran faces a struggling economy, rampant Covid-19 infections and other problems with weak governance, there is pressure to reach a new agreement soon to lift economic sanctions, Ms. Vakil of Chatham House said.
“These low-level, gray zone attacks show that the Islamic Republic urgently needs to get the JCPOA back in a box” to free up resources to address its other problems, citing the nuclear deal, which formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan is called. of action.
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.