57. Why Israel Attacked Iran

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Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey, and I'm Goulden Carrera.

And this is not an episode about Osama bin Laden.

So for all of you who have scampered here looking for that, that series is fully out now.

This week we released our episodes on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the raid that killed him.

But I guess, Gordon, I'd say we wanted to do a little bit of a Rest is Classified take on what is going on right now between Israel and Iran.

We should say we are recording this right now on the 17th of June, and this is very much a very fluid and dynamic situation.

But we wanted to, I guess, have a little bit of a conversation about what's going on right now in Israel-Iran and put it in this kind of rest is classified take on the shadow war between these two countries.

And we should say that this episode is really a re-release of an episode that we did a couple months ago on an Israeli operation to assassinate the head of Iran's nuclear program, which took place in 2020, and which I think we both agree says something

about the conflict that's going on right now between Israel and Iran.

Yeah, that's right.

We're kind of re-upping the previous episodes on Mohsin Fakhizadeh and the assassination because we think it is relevant.

And for those who maybe didn't hear it first time around, it's a chance to hear it again.

But also just for us, before we get into that, to provide maybe a little bit of context to it in the light of what's happened just in the last week really since Israel struck Iran and went after its nuclear programme.

Well that's right.

I mean we're in a situation where there is essentially an Israeli air campaign over Iran attempting to target sites associated with its nuclear program, targeting I mean as was the case with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh targeting very senior Iranian officials, military officers, and nuclear scientists, just like Fakhrizadeh.

I mean, part of this campaign that we're seeing right now has been to essentially attempt to decapitate the Iranian leadership of the nuclear program.

And I think, I mean, Gordon hanging over this is a big question.

Why now?

I mean, why have the Israelis chosen to do this now?

We're kind of seeing this, this shadow war that we had talked about in the Fakhrizadeh episodes erupting into the open.

It's a really big and interesting question because I think there's no doubt that Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has wanted to go after Iran for years and the Iranian nuclear program.

And I think it's fair to say he is obsessed with it.

And so for years since really 2002 when Iran's enrichment program was first revealed, he has wanted

and at various points come close to taking military action, but often has held back from it because of the risks, sometimes because of American diplomacy.

And yet that clearly changed.

Now, the Israelis are saying that they had intelligence about moves towards weaponization by Iran.

Western governments seem to not be aware of that and to have, I'm not sure if they're skeptical, but they don't feel they've seen that same intelligence, that there might have been some small moves, but not necessarily the dramatic steps that meant Iran was racing towards a bomb.

So there is one question there, which is, was there some intelligence that pushed the Israelis towards feeling they had to take action now?

As I said, I think there's some skepticism about that.

I think there's also this question about whether Netanyahu felt there was a kind of closing window of opportunity.

There were talks going on.

I don't think he wanted a deal, frankly.

You know, I think he wanted to strike and he's pushed towards carrying out a strike.

And he might have felt, well, this is the window that I have to go after the Iranian program.

And that window may close if there is a diplomatic deal.

So you might have almost be preempting a deal.

And it's certainly true that in the last few years you can see Israel having done damage to Iran's ability to respond.

So they took out Hezbollah of those famous pager attacks on Hezbollah operatives and some of the Hezbollah leadership, which would have been one means of Iran deterring or responding to attack.

You know, and they've also took out Iranian air defenses.

The one last spring, right?

Yeah, so you can see Israel almost preparing the way for something that they've always wanted to do, and Netanyahu going, at this moment, we're just going to do it.

And I think for whatever reason, the Trump administration either wasn't able to or didn't want to stop them doing that in a way that might have been possible in the past.

I think what's also fascinating, Gordon, about the scope, I guess you could say, of the Israeli attack right now is

what they're essentially doing is very overtly going after targets that that have already been targeted in more covert ways throughout this 20-plus year shadow war between the two sides.

And we talk about this in the episode on Mohsen Fakhriza Day, which is starting in 2007, the Israelis began assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers.

on the streets of Tehran using assets.

So that started in 2007.

That program continued in sort of fits and starts, the assassination program, up until the very point in 2020 where the Israelis killed Mosa Fakrizadeh with a robotic, potentially AI-assisted satellite-linked machine gun.

Now we're seeing these kind of overt targetings and airstrikes and using drones of Iranian nuclear scientists.

So same targets, right?

It's just we've gone from doing it in a kind of semi-deniable, more quiet way to just openly hitting them.

But then it's interesting as well because there have been other ways in which both the US and Israel have been trying to slow the program.

And obviously diplomacy was one way of trying to slow the program to kind of defer this moment when you might reach crisis point.

And I think, you know, one of the other interesting ones is the use of cyber attacks and Stuxnet, which is this famous computer virus which was unleashed.

into the Iranian centrifuge program at Natans.

And that is one of the sites which has been bombed now.

And And so previously, if you look back, you know, they used Stuxnet, a computer virus, to damage the centrifuges spinning there to enrich uranium in a more covert operation.

But it's really interesting.

And I think we're going to be looking at Stuxnet soon, and we're going to do some episodes on it, because it's very interesting because that was an example where it was always been seen as a joint US-Israeli operation.

but with the understanding that the purpose was to delay what we've seen in the last week, which is a kind of crisis.

So it seems as if the Americans signed up to it and signed up to going after the Iranian nuclear program through covert cyber attacks precisely to kind of put the Israelis off carrying out a military strike.

So under the Obama administration, the view was we want to defer and deal with Netanyahu's desire to attack Iran by agreeing with them to use other means to slow it down, to, if you like, defer the moment of crisis.

And that's what Stuxnet was about, was deferring this crisis, which we've now reached.

So the Shadow War was partly trying to degrade and undermine Iran's push for a nuclear program, partly trying to defer this very unpredictable situation we've now embarked on, where no one's quite sure how it's going to play out.

Well, exactly.

And Mehr Degan,

who was a former head of the Mossad and is a kind of key character in the setup for the story of the Shadow War, really, talked to Gordon about how really he saw, I guess, the combined effort of all of these different elements of assassinations, cyber attacks to slow down enrichment, even things like there was a very brazen Israeli operation in 2018 to actually go into Iran

and steal documentation from warehouses in South Tehran that showed really the progress that the Iranians had made on the nuclear program, right?

The Israelis actually went in and just stole documents and then made a lot of them public to make the case that the Iranians continued to press toward this nuclear capability.

So there's all these different sort of elements to the shadow war, all designed to slow down Iran's progress on a bomb.

And Mehr Degan has greatest fear in many respects.

And the reason why he believed killing Iranian scientists was justified as part of this was because he thought the kind of war that we seem to be walking into now was going to be so disastrous and would leave so many dead that killing an individual Iranian scientist here and there to slow the program down was totally justified.

He called it killing to save lives.

And the story of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, which we hope everyone here will listen to, I think is

a case study in the logic behind Israel's shadow war and in how

the Israelis very specifically target individuals in Iran, which is of course something we're seeing at a much wider scale today.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean it's interesting as well that at various times Israeli intelligence chiefs have been at variance at difference in tension with Netanyahu over his desire to strike Iran.

And there's been messages inside the system, you know, and people sometimes when they've left saying, I cautioned the prime minister to not press ahead with this.

So it would be very interesting to see what was going on in the system now and whether there really was new intelligence.

But it's certainly the case that the intelligence that Israel has had on the Iranian nuclear program is extraordinary.

And their insight...

into those scientists, you can see it in what's happened in the last week or so.

Their ability to target multiple nuclear scientists and military commanders at the same time as they are launching the air raids, the drone raids, all these other operations inside Iran, clearly something they've been preparing for for years, but the intelligence penetration and the ability to understand the movements and the location of those scientists all at the same moment is extraordinary.

And I think you do get an insight into what that takes.

from these episodes we've done on Mohsen Fakriza Day.

He was certainly one of the most valuable nuclear scientists, but I think the story really gives you a sense of what it takes to do that kind of operation.

Yeah, so with that, we hope you enjoy these these episodes on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and the hunt for Iran's top nuclear scientist.

with serious indications of an Israeli role shows desperate warmongering.

The Zionists seek to intensify and increase pressure on Iran to wage a full-blown war.

We will descend like lightning on the killers of this oppressed martyr and we will make them regret their actions.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski.

And those were the fighting words of an Iranian government official after the assassination on the 27th of November 2020.

of a man called Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

He may not be a household name, but he is an important man.

And this week we're going to look at his story and what it tells us about Iran's nuclear program and the efforts to stop it and my pronunciation, perhaps, of his name.

Go on, how do you rate it?

Your Persian accent during the reading, I think, left much to be desired.

It was an Anglo-Persian accent.

It's

an Anglo-Persian accent.

That's right.

And I have had some extended conversations with Persians about how you actually pronounce Mohsen Fakrizadeh's name.

And I've been told my pronunciation is very poor.

It's hard.

I think it's hard for us Anglos to get the name right.

So we're going to.

Fakrizadeh is the closest we'll go with, yeah?

I think that's pretty close.

I think you're putting the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable in there, but

I think it's close enough.

It's close enough.

So, who was he?

Why were we talking about him and not just the pronunciation of his name, though?

That's right.

Well, so as you teed up, Gordon, in your

sort of C- Persian accent during the reading, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was an Iranian nuclear scientist.

And I think it's fair to say that he wasn't.

We know, Gordon, that we love an Oppenheimer reference on the rest is classified.

We do.

And I think here it's actually apt.

I think we could say that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, before his death, was Iran's Oppenheimer.

He was the father of Iran's nuclear program, the brains behind it, from both, frankly, a scientific standpoint, but also an organizational and kind of bureaucratic standpoint.

And

he was

maybe like the actual Oppenheimer out at Los Alamos, sort of shrouded in mystery as he worked.

I mean, even to his own family.

But Mosin Fakrizadeh, and the reason we're talking about the man today and ultimately the operation that will claim his life, is that he has had a tremendous, profound impact on the Middle East from the shadows.

That's right, because I think he gives us a glimpse into Iran's nuclear program and the kind of shadowy aspect of this conflict.

It's not quite a war, but it is a conflict between Israel and Iran, which has been going on for decades, really.

And it's been running pretty hot in the last year or two.

You've had drone attacks, we've had missile attacks, we've had air attacks between Israel and Iran almost for the first time, kind of directly engaging in striking each other, as well as Iran's proxies like Hezbollah seeing their pages explode in Lebanon.

But behind all of that recent activity is this question of Iran's nuclear program and the issue of whether Iran, as its adversaries like Israel say, is going for a nuclear bomb, the efforts to stop that and the different ways, often covert, sometimes moreover, in which Israel and others have been trying to stop them.

And that's something which I think

has been in the news, but is going to be in the news in the next few months, because it does look like it's coming to a head again.

And I think it's quite likely that this year there's either going to be a diplomatic deal over Iran's nuclear program, or there's going to be a military strike on the nuclear program, I think by Israel and maybe by the U.S.

as well.

So it is a very important story in the Middle East.

And Fakhrizadeh is in the middle of it, isn't he?

That's right.

And, you know, I think, Gordon, I mean, so often in these headlines and these stories about the shadow war between Tel Aviv and Tehran, or between Tel Aviv and Iran's sort of clients or partners or proxies in the region,

we get a lot of the what.

So we understand what's happening, be it missile volleys, drone volleys back and forth, be it those pager attacks you mentioned, but we don't often get a lot of the how.

We don't really understand

exactly how both sides conduct this conflict.

And I think the Fakhrizadeh

assassination, because of some of the information that has come out since, I mean, in the five years since, we actually have a really interesting case study in how the Israelis operate inside Iran and how the Israelis think about this shadow conflict, the risks they're willing to take, the sort of operations they're willing to conduct.

and ultimately the threat that they feel from Iran, from its nuclear program, sort of as personified by a man like Mohsen Fakrizadeh.

That's right.

And he's an extraordinarily important figure.

But also, the operation to kill him is an astounding one, isn't it?

In terms of the details of the way it's done.

It's a story with

robotic killer machine guns talking about artificial intelligence.

I mean, it does sound like something out of sci-fi, doesn't it?

Well, it really does.

And what's so interesting about this story is sort of a robotic machine gun operated by satellite assisted by artificial intelligence.

I mean, that is the weapon that the Israelis will choose to, you know, to use in this operation.

And we're not talking about sci-fi.

We're not talking about the future.

We're talking about something that happened five years ago almost, right?

And it's hard.

I mean, there's so many interesting

questions of sort of spy craft and espionage and how you conduct these operations.

But there's also a big question, I think, around whether these sorts of operations.

I mean, there's the whole question of whether they're justified, right?

And then there's the question of, well, do they achieve their goals?

You know, do they practically help the Israelis achieve security or political goals, which I think is a sort of evergreen question that hangs over this type of work and one that

will be absolutely critical to understanding what impact the hit on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh has.

And maybe

we should start with him, Gordon, and just kind of dig into the man and his life and kind of set him up to get going.

Yeah, and there isn't much on him, is there?

I mean, he was genuinely a pretty shadowy figure, even by the standards of nuclear scientists and people in the center of Iran.

I mean, few pictures, few details.

Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, called Fakhrizadeh the shadow man in Iran's nuclear effort.

And it's fair to say that, I mean, most of what we know about the man really does come

after his death or is leaked by the Israelis, right?

So just to kind of set up the biography, I think we've got some interesting facts and bits on him, but I think the picture really is not fully complete.

I mean, the first photos of the man only come out really in 2018, so a couple years before he's dead, which is really remarkable in an age of so much just digital content out there that the first photos come out just a couple years before he's killed.

And I will say in these photos, if you're trying to get a sense of what this guy looks like, he's very unsmiling.

He's well-bearded.

I think he looks like a very dour, sort of disappointed Persian grandfather would be how

I would urge listeners to picture him.

But we do know a few things about him.

So he's born in like the late 50s, maybe early 60s.

Again, we don't have precise information.

We have contradictory information about when he's born.

He's born in Qom to a conservative pious Shia family.

And so by the time of the revolution in 1979, he's in his late teens, right?

So in this kind of very formative period.

Now, he is,

I think, ideologically devoted to the Islamic State.

I mean, he's a true believer, right?

He spends time each morning studying scripture and Islamic philosophy, and he'll become a member of the Revolutionary Guards in the aftermath of 1979.

And we should probably explain what the Revolutionary Guards are.

They are an enormously powerful group within Iran, set up after the revolution in 1979 to defend the revolution.

They're a military group, but separate from the regular armed forces, and they report directly to the supreme leader.

They've got militias at home to enforce power.

They've got an external wing which runs all these proxy groups in places like Lebanon and Syria and Iraq.

But they also run chunks of the Iranian economy and they're hugely influential within government.

So

it's a kind of elite within the elite, isn't it?

And he's very much part of that.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, I think the economic sprawl is also a fascinating piece because usually, I would say most of us in the West, when we encounter the name the Revolutionary Guards,

we're oftentimes reading articles about particular pieces of the of the IRGC, this Revolutionary Guard Corps that are sort of expeditionary abroad and very engaged in military activity.

But the reality of the Revolutionary Guards is that it controls a massive amount of Iran's economic activity as well.

And it's one of the most powerful institutions inside Iran in even sectors like construction or engineering or things like that, right?

So very sprawling, influential group.

Now, one kind of interesting detail that we can glean from the photos is that Fakrizadeh wears a ring.

And as a symbol of his devotion, I guess, to the revolution, he's got a silver ring with a large oval, kind of red, is it pronounced agate, Gordon?

Agate?

How does one pronounce this word?

I've looked at it.

I've done it.

However, you want to do it.

However you want to.

Yeah, you do it, whatever you want to.

I'm not going to correct you.

The key here is not my terrible pronunciation of that stone.

It's that it's the same type of ring worn by the Supreme Leader of Iran and by General Ghassim Soleimani, who had been the head of the IRGC's expeditionary force before he was killed in a U.S.

strike

back in 2020.

Now, like so many Iranians, Mohsen Fakhruzadeh is also an avid reader of classic poetry, Hafez and Rumi.

This is a big focus in Persian culture, is this type of sort of epic poetry.

So he's an avid reader of that.

And Mohsen Fakhrizide, he's a physics professor by training who is going to to earn a degree in nuclear physics from Isfahan University of Technology, and then he's going to become a lecturer at another university in Tehran.

He's even got a wonderful alias for his teaching activities, Gordon, Dr.

Hassan Mossani.

And so we have this interesting kind of duality of the man emerging here where he is a public physics professor, and in secret, he's a brigadier general, becomes a brigadier general in the Revolutionary Guards.

That strikes me as somewhat unusual and perhaps somewhat alien to our cultures.

I mean, the idea that your physics professor, if there are any students listening who are physics students, and if their professors might also be kind of clandestine leaders in their country's nuclear weapons program and have a kind of military rank and spend their time lecturing students the rest of the week, it's a kind of interesting example of the, I mean, the covert role of this nuclear program, I guess, and the way in which he's also an interesting man because he is, on the one hand, a kind of academic and a scientist, and on the other hand, he's a defense official and within the Revolutionary Guards.

So the equivalent, if we wanted to use an Oppenheimer comparison, I guess the equivalent would be that as Oppenheimer is building the bomb at Los Alamos, he's continuing to commute to Berkeley to give lectures or something like that, right?

And then he's doing the weapons work in secret while he grades student papers, right?

I mean, that's kind of, that is what Fakhrizadeh is doing.

And in fact, later in the story,

this duality is going to end up being one of the vulnerabilities that he actually has, right?

Because he's going into Tehran to deliver these classes.

So even though we don't know a lot about the man, I think we can make a couple judgments.

One is that, as I said, he's an ideological true believer, right?

I mean, there are plenty of Iranian government officials, you know, and sort of bureaucrats who I'm sure are quite ambivalent about the sort of the Islamic Republic.

Mohsen Fakrizadeh does not appear to be one of those people, right?

He's in the IRGC.

He's helping to build Iran's bomb.

This is not a man who's going home with real doubts about the system, right?

I think he's an Iranian nationalist.

He is

kind of a hard man, I think, a hard-edge, a practical problem solver, right?

He's a physicist.

He's a workaholic, we're going to learn.

He's pretty humorless, as those pictures show.

He's totally secretive.

I mean, even his children are not going to be fully aware of what he's doing.

And what is going to become his life's work is building an Iranian bomb.

And let's talk briefly about Iran's nuclear ambition.

So Iran has got a civilian nuclear program actually from before the revolution.

The issue is, though, from the 80s and 90s, it looks to start to want to secretly at least explore the idea of having a nuclear weapon.

It's got the opposition from the US.

It's also had this war with Iraq in the 80s.

So Iran is looking covertly to try and build this program.

And it's putting together networks to try and smuggle in some of the components.

In fact, Kriesaday looks like he's involved in that.

Then in the early 2000s, a secret facility at Natanz used for uranium enrichment gets exposed.

So, for the first time, the kind of rest of the world wakes up to the idea Iran might be secretly going for a nuclear weapon.

Iran, of course, says this is all for peaceful reasons.

We just want nuclear power.

Not many people believe them.

But it's interesting because at that point, it gets exposed.

And the Iranians do shift when it gets exposed.

And so, they actually put a lot of the program underground.

They start to disperse it.

They pause some of the weaponization aspects of it because they're worried that it will invite a strike because this is 2003 when the us has just invaded iraq the iranians are worried that they're going to be next and that they might be attacked so they kind of

they take on a different strategy which is to build up the infrastructure for a bomb without ever actually going making that last leap towards weaponization and building it which they know might invite an attack So they're kind of trying to get as far as they can without making that move.

And Fakrizadeh looks like he is playing a particular role.

He chairs some meetings I think in the summer of 2003 to preserve some of the nuclear programme as it's dispersed and to try and protect it.

And so it effectively sets the scene for what we see in the last 20 years, which is Iran trying to keep pushing as far as it can, but without inviting an attack, diplomatic efforts to try and do a deal to stop it, but also covert and sometimes overt attempts

to undermine that nuclear program and stop it.

But Fakriza Day is at the heart of this inside Iran, even though it's largely unknown.

I was really hoping for a way in, Gordon, to ask you to give us a briefing on the physics of a nuclear bomb again, which listeners to our

previous episodes on Klaus Fuchs will know that both of us are, of course, highly qualified to talk about...

to talk about the physics of a bomb.

But I didn't find one in your briefing there, Gordon.

So kudos to you for defending yourself valiantly.

I mean, we should also say that in the summer of 2003, this is the point in the invasion of Iraq where U.S.

officials are legitimately talking about doing like a left turn, I think they called, into Damascus.

So just sort of, you know, veering left out of Baghdad to go and wreck the Assad regime.

So this is before the insurgency has really taken off and before

the entire kind of nation-building project in Iraq seems to have gone down as an abysmal failure.

And so what the Iranians and what Mohsen Fakhrizadeh I think are doing is pretty logical in 2003 because they've got to be looking next door at Saddam and saying, well, the Americans just went and wrecked a country who actually, you know, didn't have a nuclear program.

You know, what might they do if it really becomes fully known how far along we're going, right?

Yeah.

So it does does make sense to sort of pause pieces of it, fragment it, which I think from an intelligence standpoint makes a ton of sense because if it's centralized, it's probably more vulnerable to sort of understanding both your capabilities and also your plans and intentions.

Whereas if it's spread out over, you know, 10, 12, 15 pieces of your bureaucracy, I think it's a more difficult collection target for Western intelligence agencies to understand what's really going on.

But Fakrizede, he's still in the sort of catbird seat, isn't he?

I mean, he's still running this thing to give the supreme leader, to give the Iranian government the capability to eventually have a breakout capacity for a nuclear weapon.

And by 2020, by the year that he's finally targeted by the Mossad, Fakhrizadeh is running what's known as the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, Persian acronym SPND, which, I mean, sounds very innocent, doesn't it, Gordon?

But it's, of course, the hub of Iran's nuclear program.

And Fakhrizadeh is really the, I guess, chief advisor on almost anything involving their nuclear capabilities, right, at this point in time.

Now,

the SPND isn't, they're not only doing weapons research.

Fakhrizadeh is helping Iran deal with the COVID pandemic, of all things.

The Iranian vaccine is called Fakhravak.

It's that after him?

Is it named after him?

It's named after him.

That's right.

It's pretty extraordinary.

I mean, his kids don't have any idea what he's doing, but clearly he's got, you know, a very key role in the program.

Now,

he's also, you know, we talked about him being a really practical man in many respects, and he has built up by 2020 an underground network of suppliers and logistics routes from Latin America to North Korea to Eastern Europe to get the equipment and parts necessary for this sprawling nuke program, right?

Now, something we should address is

why do the Iranians want this?

I mean, why is it so important to someone like Fakhrizadeh and to the men around him to have a bomb?

Because they're really engaged, I mean, especially in the kind of post, you know, Operation Iraqi Freedom period.

I mean, they're engaged in a very risky activity here that could, I guess, put them in the U.S.

crosshairs if it's sort of fully revealed and discovered.

On the the one hand, I think it's entirely logical why Iran would want nuclear weapons if you're the Iranian regime, because it's one of the few things that can, frankly, protect you from what you see as a U.S.

policy of regime change.

The lesson of the Iraq war in 2003 was, you know, Saddam got taken out by the Americans because he didn't have a nuclear weapon to protect him.

If you've got a nuclear weapon, if you're in North Korea or somewhere else,

then it's much harder to take you on.

So it provides a form of protection.

And I think also, as time goes on,

they'll look at Colonel Gaddafi and Mamogaddafi in Libya, who also around this time gives up his nuclear program to the West.

So in the wake of the Iraq war, he declares it, he gives it up.

And what happens a few years later, there's a popular revolution.

The West backs the rebels and he ends up dead.

So one of the lessons is a nuke can buy you security.

But of course, the dangerous bit is the journey towards the nuke.

And I think the Iranians have played a very clever game, which is to build up the capacity, but never actually be seen to make that final leap towards making a bomb, to actually weaponizing, which would invite an attack, but to consistently get as close to being able to do that without having an attack as possible, to get them the option.

And I think that's what they've got themselves effectively, and what Frakrisadeh is doing, is getting them the option that if they ever feel they need to make that leap, they can do it.

Well, and I guess I also think of our old friend Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who attempted essentially to buy a nuclear bomb from the North Koreans and install a reactor in the eastern desert that the Israelis found, bombed, destroyed.

And then a few years later, he's dealing with a popular uprising and

he doesn't have that protection, right?

Even Ukraine, I guess, which gave up its weapons in the early 90s in exchange for security guarantees in part from the Russians that Ukraine would be independent and protected.

And look how that turned out.

So, yeah, I think it's entirely rational on the one hand for the Iranians to pursue this strategy.

It's also pretty rational for the Israelis, who see Iran as committed to their destruction, to want to stop them.

So, at that point, maybe let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll look at how the Israelis do decide to go after the Iranian nuclear program and some of the really adventurous ways in which they try and seek to stop it.

Welcome back.

We're looking at the story of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and the Iranian nuclear program.

And we've looked at this man, the Iranian nuclear scientist, the central figure, even if not much is known about him in that Iranian programme.

But let's look now at the Israeli side, the people who are going to target him, and the reasons they want to do it and the people who are behind going after Iran.

Well, I think on the Israeli side, Gordon, it makes sense to start the story with a very fascinating man named Meir Degan,

who was the head of Mossad in the early 2000s.

And he actually wasn't the chief.

in 2020.

He had retired by then.

And so he's, you know, not a decision maker.

But Mehr Degan's, Degan's, I guess, philosophy on the fight against the Iranians really lays the foundations for, I think, a new way of dealing with the Iranian threat.

And it's pretty important to set him up to understand why the Israelis are doing what they're doing.

So he's born in 1945 to Polish-Jewish parents who had fled, I think, in the late 30s to Siberia, where they sort of waited out the war.

There is this very,

I think, emblematic story about Mer de Gaan because, in his office, is hanging a picture of a man kneeling in front of a German soldier just seconds before he's being shot.

And that's Meride Gon's grandfather, who is killed by the Nazis in the Second World War.

And Meridagon uses, I mean, that, I mean, first of all, we should just imagine, here's a man who has the picture of his grandfather just prior to execution that's actually hanging in his office.

And the lesson is that Jews need to fight.

You get down on your knees like that, you're going to get shot, right?

Now, eventually the family emigrates to Israel.

Meridagon drops out of high school at 17, enlists in a very elite commando force, the Siderat Metgal.

Sort of becomes, I guess, a feeder for political intel, military, kind of the upper echelons of the Israeli security establishment, but he doesn't make the cut.

And the gun, he's very interesting because he's kind of an outsider in Israel.

So he's not a Sabra, he's not a native-born Israeli, right?

He's not a kibbutznik, right?

So he's not a guy who was out on one of these kibbutz farms, sort of, you know, settling the land, right?

He's he's a Russian, right?

He's a Russian who's come to, you can think about him, I mean, I realize he's born in Poland, but he's kind of a Russian settler in Israel.

And I think that's not a bad way to think about him, right?

So he's going to spend the next few decades in special ops units in the Israel Defense Forces, the military, in the Shinbet, Israel's internal security force.

He's involved in pretty much every one of Israel's wars throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s.

One of the soldiers in Dagan's unit said that Dagan, quote, had a serious malfunction.

in his fear mechanism.

So he is physically courageous, adventurous.

He's also a landscape painter, interestingly enough.

It's one way of relaxing.

Yes, he enjoys that in his downtime.

And in 2002, Ariel Sharon is the Prime Minister of Israel, and he appoints Dagan to head the Mossad, which is Israel's foreign intelligence agency.

The Institute for Intelligence and Special Task

is its official name.

But everyone knows it as the Mossad.

So many of the security agencies that we talk about on the show, Gordon, have just wonderfully bureaucratic acronyms to them to hide the fact that they do incredible things.

And Sharon,

of course, has a very aggressive outlook and we'll say at the time that he wants a Mossad chief with a dagger between his teeth.

And so he taps Meridagon for the role.

And he takes over from Ephraim Halevi, who I actually met many years ago, who was the previous head of Mossad, who is a very different character.

I mean, Halevi is more of your kind of George Smiley-like spy master.

Definitely not a man who, when I met him, had a dagger between his teeth as we sat and did a kind of quite genteel interview.

I did do a radio series many years ago on the Mossad, and I went over to Israel.

And I always remember I arrived at the airport, and when you arrive at the airport at Tel Aviv, they ask you what you're doing in the country, and they kind of question you.

And I thought, well, I better be honest.

So I said to the woman there at the kind of, you know, the desk, I said, doing a documentary on the Mossad.

And she just looked up and looked at me and and went, I'll get my boss.

Thus began Gordon's nightmare experience of being detained at Ben Gurian Airport.

No, they were 14 hours.

But I thought, I might as well be honest about it.

But anyway, that was one of the times I met Halevi.

But Halevi, I think it's fair to say, was a different character.

And Sharon wanted this kind of aggressive character in the form of Mayor Degan, who was going to be much more proactive and much more arguably violent in what he was willing to do.

Well, and Gordon, I don't know if you intended intended to skip past this wonderful quote that I had put in here,

but I'm going to read it anyway, because

I think it's illustrative of the sort of mentality of Mayor Degan.

When Degan takes over, he goes to the Mossad kind of canteen, I guess, a place where the workforce congregates, and he delivers an opening speech.

Right.

And as I was reading the setup for this, in my head, I was thinking of it's pretty typical when a new CIA director takes over for them to address the workforce from what we call the bubble, which is our big kind of auditorium that's right there on the Langley campus.

Not everybody goes, of course, but it can hold, you know, hundreds of people.

Crowd will go in.

It'll be on video.

It's usually kind of milquetoast stuff, right?

And so I'm thinking, well, okay, that's probably what this is going to be.

And so this is a line from Mer Degan's sort of opening speech at the Mossad.

And he's telling a story about his journeys fighting in Lebanon during the Israeli occupation of much of the country.

And he said, in Lebanon, I witnessed the aftermath of a family feud.

A local patriarch's head had been split open, his brain on the floor.

Around him lay his wife and some of his children, all dead.

Before I could do anything, one of the patriarch's sons scooped up a handful of the patriarch's brain and swallowed it.

That is how they do things in family feuds in that place.

Eat the brain, swallow the power.

I don't want any of you to have your brains eaten.

You eat their brains.

And then God apparently punches his clenched fist into the palm of his hand as he's delivering that last part.

So your CIA directors never told you to eat your enemy's brains.

We were not.

Yeah.

You were not instructed.

No, we were not imagine them doing that in MI6 either.

It's not the right kind of speech you get in the MI6.

The opening speeches were far more boring when

CIA directors took over.

It does tell you something, though, doesn't it?

It tells you something about the man.

About the man and also about that that's what Ariel Sharon wants from the man.

And of course, as we said, this is 2002 and just at that point where the Iranian nuclear program is being exposed and made public, isn't it?

And where it's suddenly becoming an issue that Iran might want the bomb.

And so you can see why this is going to be one of the priorities for him.

That's right.

Well, and one of my CIA colleagues who got to spend some time with Dagan said that, you know, sometimes when Dagan would be sitting in meetings with American officials who maybe weren't as educated on the region as they should be, Dagan would say in his very thick accent, he'd say, you didn't grow up in this neighborhood, did you?

You know, to talk about the region.

And I think that idea that the Israelis are living in an extremely tough neighborhood, in which

if they do not reach out and touch people,

they will be sort of victimized themselves, right?

Yeah.

Is deeply ingrained in his psychology.

And I think as Dagan looks out, he's looking at an Iran that is essentially going to,

you know, reach for a nuclear capability which threatens his entire sort of, I think he sees it as an existential threat at this point.

And so it becomes a priority to deal with that.

And it's interesting, isn't it?

Because there are different options.

And at various points, Israel does look full-out military strikes against Iran as one of the options to deal with that program.

But actually, in the end, they're going to go down the more covert route as the more effective one, aren't they?

Well, that's right.

And here, Gordon, I think we should commend the work of an Israeli journalist named Ronan Bergman, who has written extensively over the past 20, 25 years about the shadow war between Israel.

and Iran and who has written an absolutely phenomenal book on Israeli targeted killings and assassinations called Rise and Kill First.

And so much of the story, I think, really comes out of Ronan Bergman's reporting.

But he reports in the early 2000s on a critical meeting where at Dagan's Mossad, they're basically laying out options.

for what to do about Iran's nuclear program.

And these are the three options that Mossad puts out there.

One, conquer Iran.

Two, change the regime.

Three, slow the program down.

So at the breaking point, they will not be armed with a weapon.

I think Kissinger used to joke about how you always wanted to have like three options, right?

Two, which were completely unthinkable to the policymaker, and then one that you wanted them to choose.

Oh, I'll have that one.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll have that one.

So there's one realistic option on here, which is slow the program down.

And on this kind of menu, I guess, Dagan has put out a lot of different pressure points.

So there's diplomatic pressure, sanctions, support to the Iranian opposition.

One of them, though, is targeted killings, assassinations of really scientists, civilian scientists involved in Iran's nuclear program.

And Dagan is going to call these a series of pinpoint operations meant to change reality.

And 15 scientists, researchers, engineers, are put on Mossad's kill list.

And one of them, even in the early 2000s, is Mohsen Fakriza dead.

And so it is interesting this, isn't it?

Because as you said, these are not military targets in the classic sense of it.

They are scientists and research scientists.

The ethics of that, I think, are

questionable, complex.

I mean,

you know, it's one thing, Oppenheimer being targeted perhaps by the Nazis or the Japanese, you could imagine during World War II.

But at that point, the countries are at war.

So maybe it's slightly different.

Here you're in a kind of, there isn't a declared war between the two sides and yet, you know, one is targeting the scientists of the other.

I don't know what the comparison or what the parallel would be for the West today.

I mean, it would be as if there was some top AI researcher in a Silicon Valley firm who the Chinese or the Russians targeted.

You know, they're working at, I don't know, OpenAI or Google LeapMight or somewhere and working on some technology which the military in the US was going to use, and you took them out.

I mean, it's not straightforward, is it, in terms of the ethics?

But I guess that goes back to the Israelis, if you like, having a different view of the world, you know, whatever people may think about it, and acting in a different way.

Well, I think the Israelis essentially collapsed the distinction between

an enemy combatant and a civilian who is providing a very unique and critical military capability to an enemy state, right?

Yeah.

Because I think here in the States, I think we would draw a distinction.

We'd say a targeted killing, to conduct that lawfully, it would have to be someone who is actually an enemy combatant, right?

Imposing an imminent threat.

And posing an imminent threat.

Whereas an assassination,

which would not be permitted, would be of a civilian, right?

Who's supporting that foreign program?

Whereas I I think the Israelis, they do not draw a distinction between those two types of

operations.

No, and I mean, there's a history of that.

If you go back into the past, where they're targeting scientists, they're targeting businessmen and engineers.

I mean, there was a famous guy, I think it was Gerald Bull, who was building a super gun supposedly for Iraq, and he gets killed, you know, it's thought by Mossad.

So they do have a history of going after those people who are providing, even if they're foreigners, providing capability to a state which Israel considers an enemy.

So it is within that.

But this, I guess what we're talking about here is a very specific campaign to try and degrade that nuclear program.

And on the one hand, when you go back to your kind of option list, those three options, it's worth saying that this is partly done to avoid a war.

I mean, we can see it as a shadow war, but there is also a sense in which the alternative option for Israeli politicians, and particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, who's kind of very hawkish on Iran,

is actually a military strike.

So it becomes a kind of, well, we can either try and degrade them through these covert acts and sabotage and things like that, or else we're going to have to have an all-out war.

And if that's your alternative, then actually

being offered the chance to try and slow it down and buy time rather than go to war is a perhaps more attractive one.

Well, yeah, and Dagan and some of the people around him will start to call this killing to save lives.

And important to understand their mentality and mindset is Dagan is absolutely horrified by the prospect of an all-out war with Iran.

It is the thing he is trying most to avoid.

And there's a story from 2010 where Netanyahu was apparently close to ordering a strike on Iran.

And Dagan is like apoplectic about this, right?

He doesn't think that there is any way that Israel can stop Iran's new project by force alone.

Because unlike the Iraqi program in the 80s, the Syrian program in 2007,

the Iranian program is sprawling and vast, right?

There's multiple facilities, some of which by the late, you know, sort of, I guess, aughts, early 2000s, you know, it's they're underground, deep in bunkers that are unreachable by the munitions that the Israelis have.

It is homegrown in many respects, in that the Iranians have a really deep bench of scientists and researchers and engineers who are building the capabilities for the program.

And so I think Dagan looks at this and says, we can't really stop this militarily, but by killing a few targeted people, we can really slow their progress down, avoid this war.

delay it as long as possible, and save a lot of lives as a result.

And so Dagon's view, I think, is that these killings are a lot more moral because it's the only way to slow down the program and avoid a war that he, I think, believes Netanyahu wants.

That's still the case, isn't it?

Where people are saying, well, maybe a military strike might happen even this year, but that doesn't necessarily end the program.

It might just stead it back a few months,

but it is well buried, well-hardened, and it might just spur the Iranians to move faster once they can rebuild it.

So I think it is a really interesting, complicated kind of policy discussion.

So, back to Fakhruzadeh, at this point, I guess around about 2007, it seems like we start to see evidence of this new Israeli policy to target the scientists, particularly in the program.

Well, that's right.

I mean, and just a few examples of this.

And we should say, by the way, the Israelis don't claim any of these operations, right?

I mean, we attribute them to the Israelis.

We attribute them to the Israelis, but they weren't.

But they don't claim them publicly, right?

So in January of 2007, a nuclear scientist working at this Fahan uranium plant dies under very mysterious circumstances following a quote gas leak.

And then, Iran is convinced that the Israelis have poisoned him.

In 2010, another scientist, this time someone who's actually working directly with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, is walking toward his car in North Tehran.

He opens his car door.

A booby-trap motorcycle next to him explodes and kills him.

Later that year, in November of 2010, two motorcyclists blow up the cars of two figures involved in the nuke program.

One of them is a particle physicist who's killed by a limpet mine, which is attached to his car while he's in heavy traffic.

20 minutes later, a professor of nuclear engineering who worked on Fakrizadeh's team is almost killed in a northern suburb, but he survives.

And Dagan,

by the way, in this sort of period,

his term at Mossad is up, right?

And some of his successors have taken over.

But the program or this sort of set of operations to go after the brains of Iran's nuclear program keeps going.

In July of 2011, 2011, two gunmen on motorcycles follow the car of a nuclear physicist, an expert in the high-voltage switches used to trigger nuclear warheads.

Bikers kill him, hit him with five shots.

And then a year later, in 2012, a chemical engineer at a uranium enrichment facility leaves for the lab.

Limpet mining gets attached to his car by a motorcyclist.

He's killed.

Now, Dagon calls these hits divine interventions.

Again, the Israelis don't claim them.

And I think by this point, it's worth maybe reflecting on what all of this means for Mohsen Fakrizadeh, because we can talk about this kind of clinically, but for him, he's having friends and colleagues are being murdered,

you know,

by the Israelis trying to stop his life's work from happening.

You know, this is going to really affect the operation that we're going to talk about in the next episode is that.

The security has increased massively on scientists and engineers involved in the program over these these years, and especially on Mohsen Fakrizadeh.

So they've got bodyguards, cops around their homes.

A lot of these scientists are probably very miserable because

they're not soldiers.

Yeah, it's not much of a life.

Right.

They're not soldiers.

They're not in a war zone.

They're living in comfortable neighborhoods in Tehran, and they're being sort of, you know, put under 24-7 protection because they've had friends and colleagues who are being killed by the Israelis.

And you get some of what are called white defections, which are where people basically decide, I don't want to do this.

I don't want to work on the nuclear program.

I mean, you can see why.

If you're a scientist and you think, well, am I going to work on that and I might have a limpet mind attached to my car and get blown up?

Or shall I go and work on something else?

I mean, you can absolutely see why they might ask to be or want to transfer to something else.

I actually think this was probably one of the major...

effects that Mayor Degan was hoping these killings would have is to discourage people to create an absolutely chilling effect inside the research institutions, the bureaucracies that bring these people to work on the new project.

Because Iran isn't, I mean, obviously, it's not a democratic system.

It's not an open system, but like you still have people who are probably like, you know, hey, I'll do a two-year rotation to this thing and then I go do something else.

Or there's probably some amount of choice involved here.

And you've got to think that at night when some of these scientists go home and talk to their wives about their next rotation or role, you're thinking, maybe I don't work on this anymore.

Maybe I go do something else.

So I think that absolutely was in Dagan's gun sights as he was promoting these attacks.

Now, we should note, and we won't go into extensive detail on any of this here because these are frankly all, many of these operations are future episodes on the Restus Classified, to be quite honest, but the killings are only one component of the havoc that Mossad is wreaking on Mohsen Fakrize in this period.

That's right.

You've got Stuxnet, you know, the cyber attack, which the U.S.

look to have been involved in as as well, which undermines the program.

You've got an operation in 2018, I think, when the Israelis break into a warehouse, it's an amazing operation in Tehran, and actually steal the files, you know, some of the files about the history of the nuclear program.

So that operation in 2018 is absolutely, to use a technical term, bananas.

Because what the Israelis do is they literally drive trucks into

a warehouse facility in a Tehran suburb that is housing all of the hard copy material on the nuclear weapons program going back like many years.

Many of those papers are actually written by Fakhrizide or they've got his writing in the margins, his signature on them.

And it shows really the full extent of the Iranians' deception on the true nature of the program.

The Israelis quite literally break into the facility.

steal the material, put it on trucks, and drive it out across the border.

And that rate, I think, is actually one of the reasons why we even know as much as we do about Mohsen Fakrizadeh, because so much of the information that's come out about him is coming from those files and documents.

So by 2020, Israel has really been pushing in lots of ways against Iran's nuclear program, and it has got Mohsen Fakhrizudeh in its crosshairs now.

Really, it's decided that it's going to go after the mastermind, the man at the center of it.

And so I think let's take a break there, David.

But when we come back, we will look at this really extraordinary operation involving robotic machine guns,

artificial intelligence, satellites, covert operatives, which is used to finally get to this man.

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Iran's top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn, as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before his day began.

Then, shortly after noon on Friday, November the 27th, 2020, he slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Tayana sedan.

Tiana?

Tiana?

I was actually going to say something.

I have no idea.

Tiana.

Tiana.

Tiana.

Tiana.

We're not going to be sponsored by Nissan Tiana.

This episode is brought to you by Nissan Tayana.

He slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Tayana sedan, his wife in the passenger seat beside him, and hit the road.

As the convoy left the Caspian coast, the first car carried a security detail.

It was followed by the unarmoured black Nissan driven by Mr.

Fakrizadeh.

Two more security cars followed.

The security team had warned Mr.

Fakrizadeh that day of a threat against him and asked him not to travel.

But Mr.

Fakhrizadeh said he had a university class to teach in Tehran the next day, and he could not do it remotely.

Well that's the definitive account of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh's last morning written by the journalists Ronan Bergman and Farnaz Fasihi from the New York Times.

Welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski.

And we are looking at the story of the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on that day, November 27th, 2020.

As we heard last time, he is the man at the heart of Iran's nuclear program.

And we've explored how he played a key role in setting up that program, in its clandestine efforts to smuggle the parts in for a bomb, how he's working both as a member of the Revolutionary Guards and as a university professor, as we heard, how Iran's enemies, particularly Israel, have identified him as a key player in that program.

And they have been going after the scientists already.

And there have been this spate of assassinations of scientists involved in different aspects of Iran's nuclear program.

And now, as we approach November 2020, they've got Fakhrizadeh himself in their sights, haven't they?

So, he is certainly one of their top targets.

And we should say, Gordon, that even though Meir Degan, the sort of the Mossad chief we talked about last time, who was so instrumental to really establishing this policy of targeted assassinations inside Tehran.

So, Dagan is not the Mossad chief anymore, but the Mossad chief at the time, Yossi Cohen, is a Dagan sort of acolyte, right, or protege.

And he's been running the Iran portfolio in part for Dagan all the way back to 2004.

So

we have a sort of continuous policy of finding opportunities.

to go after some of these really senior Iranian scientists.

And by 2020, as we'll see, the Israelis are at a point where they have a real opportunity to go after Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

And worth just setting a bit of the international context at that time, because there had been, of course, a deal to put constraints around the Iran nuclear program, which had been signed in 2015.

But when President Trump, in his first term, pulled out of that deal, Iran started to push ahead with its program because there were no longer constraints about it.

So there is also a kind of renewed desire, I think, to do something about it.

And one of the things Israel is going to do is go after Fakhrizadeh.

And now, as we looked at last time, the people around him had been killed.

Lots of people in his program.

And so he's going to have security to protect him.

As we heard, when he's driving, he's got bodyguards, other cars.

That kind of situation, it is a challenge, isn't it, to try and understand where you might get that opportunity to go after someone.

And I think there's one other, I guess, event that's worth mentioning to set up why I think the Israelis believe this operation is worth the risk at the end of 2020.

And that's that in early 2020, the U.S.

killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, their sort of military expeditionary group, right?

He's killed in Baghdad

by the U.S.

And there's really not a significant Iranian response to this.

I mean, there's a sort of missile and rocket volley in response to it that does lead to some injuries, but

it's not as much of a response, perhaps, as anyone might have expected.

And so I think Fakhrizide is a bigger fish to go after than many of the other scientists that the Israelis have targeted in the decade prior.

And so I think the risk calculation is also being framed by the fact that Soleimani had just been killed months earlier.

But to go after Fakhrizideh, I think the way, from just an operational standpoint, listeners should think about this is you want to establish something called pattern of life because you need to figure out how the target moves, lives, what they do, what their habits are, what their routines are to find the vulnerability, right?

You don't start with a concept of how you kill somebody and then jam it into their life.

You watch them if you can.

and figure out where you might create an opportunity or exploit a vulnerability to go after them.

And it seems pretty clear that he would have been a top collection target for a long time for the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad.

And they would have been collecting what signals, intelligence, they'd have been trying to get inside of his communications, they'd have been trying to get agents close to him.

And we won't know the exact details of that, but that's what we're talking about, isn't it?

That's right.

Is having as many different ways of understanding his life and his movements as possible.

Well, and I think this is one of the central mysteries that, for very good reasons, has not come out in any of the actual reporting on this is exactly how did the Israelis

get insight into his routines and movements, right?

But what seems pretty clear from the way this killing was planned is that Mossad was in the guy's comms, right?

They probably had access to phones,

you know, laptops, like they had access to electronics that were floating around him or that perhaps were even his, it seems to me.

Yeah.

And potentially for a long time before the hit, because I think they would have, again, we'll see some of the hints later on that they kind of knew this guy's routines really well.

So it's not like they'd had this stuff for a couple of weeks.

They had probably been watching him really closely.

And in Iran, I mean, the way the Israelis talk about this kind of synthesis between SIGINT, signals intelligence, and human intelligence is what Masad calls Hugint.

Hugint, I guess, maybe is that

it's the synthesis of both of them.

So

it's probably some combination of there's somebody that Mossad recruited to get access to this guy's comms, right?

I guess you'd call it humant-enabled signals intelligence in many respects, right?

But we don't know.

This remains a mystery, I think, exactly how they got access to it.

In fact, the sort of penetration of Fokrizadeh and his inner circle was so complete and total that apparently there was actually a dispute in Mossad about the wisdom of killing him at all all because he was essentially an unwitting source because they had access to so much of his life that they could effectively glean a lot on sort of Iran's nuclear program, plans and intentions, that kind of thing, just from watching him, right?

So apparently there was some dispute about this.

And there's a great quote in some of Ronan Bergman's reporting, and he is a New York Times journalist and Israeli with exceptional access to the Mossad, who has written, I would say, the definitive account of this hit.

And Bergman wrote, Masad breathed with the guy, referring to Fakrizi Day, woke up with him, slept with him, traveled with him.

They would have smelled his aftershave every morning if he had used aftershave, which is a great little indication of how close you are that you even know that this guy doesn't use aftershave, which I guess I would have assumed too, given how bearded he is.

Well, so we don't know much about him, as we said in the previous episode, but one thing we know is he doesn't use aftershave.

So there's one of the few things we know.

He's not a big shaver.

No, but the picture we have of him is that he's not a soft target.

I mean, he's got a security detail, he's got bodyguards all around him.

When he travels, when he moves, as we heard in that opening quote, he's got a car full of bodyguards with him.

So he is taking the kind of precautions you'd expect someone to take in his position to avoid being the subject of one of these assassination attempts, knowing that sometimes it's happened with people driving up to cars, you know, with guns or with mines to attach to them.

So the Mossad watches for a while and

they find what they think might be a vulnerability, which is as Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is driving from Tehran, so he's actually got a country house in Absard, which is a bit outside of the city.

There's a vacation home up on the Caspian.

And Fakhrizadeh likes to drive himself, which I can relate to that.

I mean, why would he want to have a driver if he's driving, especially if he's going up for kind of a personal weekend with his wife, family?

Maybe the last thing you'd want is to be in the back seat while you've got this driver driving you there.

Like you'd rather rather just drive yourself.

And well, of course, we're talking about an assassination.

I mean, in Fakrizadeh's mind, I mean, he is on his home turf driving between his houses in comfortable places that he has known for many, many years.

But the fact that he's got this impulse to drive himself is really one of the things that's going to get him in trouble.

And in particular, it's this drive from his country house in Absard

back to Tehran.

Now, just a couple words on Absard.

It's actually, I've watched YouTube videos of drives around there.

It's a very lovely place.

It's a small town set into the mountains, full of apple and cherry orchards, modernist villas, Persian-style palaces.

I guess it's an elite escape from Tehran, Gordon, to spend the weekend.

I don't know.

What's the British equivalent of getting out of

London for the weekend?

Well, three or four hours.

Maybe it's your Cornwall country house,

but you'd be lucky to do it in three or four hours, hours,

even given what the traffic is like there.

I don't know, Devon, Dorset, somewhere like that.

Okay.

Somewhere a bit out.

What's the American equivalent?

Jersey?

I was trying to think about this.

Yeah, so maybe it's the equivalent of a wealthy New Yorker driving from a home like on Martha's Vineyard into one of the suburbs in Connecticut outside New York or something like that.

Again,

the traffic could probably be really nasty there.

But the point being is

this is a casual day for most of the fuckery, right?

He's not in a war zone.

He's on a three to four hour drive on open roads that he knows between his homes.

But what's critical from a really an operational, a planning perspective for Mossad is that they've got a guy who's going to be driving his own car moving down a road.

And it's not going to be a really packed city road in the crush of Tehran traffic, which Tehran traffic, by the way, is absolutely horrendous and probably contributed, and and if Cruzi Day would remember this, contributed to the death of some of his friends when they were stuck in traffic and would have basically magnetic explosives attached to their car, or someone would pull up on a motorcycle and shoot them dead as they sit in rush hour traffic.

So he's going to be moving down a pretty open country road.

And Mossad has a vulnerability, and now they have to come up with a plan to exploit that vulnerability.

And one option is to just shoot him, right?

Have someone pull up to the car, pull alongside the car, and shoot him.

Now,

this is really risky.

I mean, the Israelis have a saying: no rescue, no operation.

So the plan needs to be foolproof.

They need their agents or assets to escape.

They do not want to sacrifice agents or assets.

So they rule out the run-and-gun shootout idea.

Now, another one is a roadside bomb or a car bomb.

Now, that is

difficult to place correctly.

You would also maybe not be certain that you would kill him.

And the Israelis really want to limit collateral damage.

And if he's driving with his wife in the car, there is a really good chance that she would die as well.

So they come up, and this is where it gets

pretty wild.

They come up with an extraordinary idea, which is a remote-controlled, satellite-linked gun a robotic gun which

as we were researching this did make me think i don't know if you've seen this movie gordon the jackal the late 90s bruce willis flick nope nope not on my list sorry he uses a robotic machine gun okay and jack black gets his arm blown off by it in the movie but it's a robotic machine gun and this is the idea that the israelis have now the advantages are, I can't believe you haven't seen the Jackal Gordon.

Yeah, that's.

I'm sorry.

That's as shameful as the fact that I haven't seen Wargames.

We've seen Wargames.

Yeah, exactly.

We'll deal with both of those in time.

I finally got even.

But the advantages of this gun are, I think, immediately clear, which is the support assets that the Israelis will use can place it and then get away.

There's no shooter on site, so you're going to operate this from, in this case, it's going to be a thousand miles away.

It can be very precise so that you are not going to kill bodyguards or or his wife and what i think is fascinating is that i mean remote operated weaponry is not is not particularly new i mean it's not a new idea i mean we had the jackal reference but i mean it actually goes back to maybe the second world war where b-29 superfortresses They had, you know, turrets with separate gunners located throughout the aircraft, and then they actually consolidated it into one gunner, aiming multiple guns from kind of a plexiglass dome kind of sighting station.

And it's actually using an early version of a GE computer to direct the guns where they should be pointing.

There's actually another example of this, which is something called the Common Remote Operated Weapon Station, or CROSE.

Now, I know you're a pigeon guy, Gordon, but this is a CROS system.

So that's a bird reference, yeah.

And basically, it's a remote-operated gun set atop a U.S.

Humvee, right?

So instead of a gunner actually having their half of their body, their head out, they could be down from the safety of the cab firing the gun.

But I guess what with both of those examples, what you're still talking about, it is remote controlled on one level, but only maybe by a few feet.

You know, the person is still in the B-29 Superfortress or they're in the Humvee.

They're operating it, but it's basically just above them or close to them.

So in a sense, it's remote controlled, but not in a way this operation is going to be.

I mean, that's what's remarkable about this is the distance, if you like, between the person operating it, the controller, and the target.

We're talking about, you know, what is it, a thousand miles?

Something extraordinary between, you know, Israel and this remote part of Iran.

In many respects, it's like a

land-based drone.

You know, I mean, the Israelis in this case couldn't obviously fly a drone from Israel to Iran without it being shot down or noticed or whatever.

But in this case, you can have all of the advantages of that distance with all of the accuracy of a gun as opposed to using something from the air.

Now, what they choose seems to be an FN Mag machine gun, probably Belgian-made, with armor-penetrating capabilities.

It's attached, according to unnamed Israeli officials, to a robotic apparatus that is very similar to a piece of equipment equipment actually made by a Spanish arms manufacturer called the Sentinel-20.

It's essentially a robotic turret that allows the operator to move the gun around and to compress the trigger.

Now, it's rigged up with cameras everywhere so you can see probably 360 degrees around this thing, up, all that.

Now, one of the problems is that when the Israelis put all this together, and of course they test it extensively inside Israel before they ever deploy it, it weighs almost 2,000 pounds.

Yeah, it's a big bit of kit.

Right.

Now, no one really knows, but in the Ronin Bergman account of the killing, he claims that Mossad used maybe about 20 officers and support assets to sort of assemble and position everything in Iran, right?

Which means you're probably smuggling this thing in piece by piece in like produce trucks that are going across the border with Iraqi Kurdistan.

It probably takes a long time to get all of this kit into Iran.

I actually saw just a reference that a few months ago, so years after the operation, the Iranians had charged, prosecuted,

convicted, I think, three people of treason for a role in this.

I mean, they were described as Kurdish smugglers and alcohol smugglers, you know, and that had been their cover.

And they may have been used to bring in some of those parts, witting or unwitting.

We don't know.

And obviously, that may only be one part of the operation.

But you can imagine a very complex long-term operation using smugglers, perhaps using existing criminal smuggling networks to bring those parts in and then someone who can assemble it in this place ready to do it and camouflage it, I guess, make sure it doesn't look suspicious, have the cameras there, wire it up so it's ready to go.

I mean, it's a pretty serious bit of effort.

But I guess that's the advantage of having chosen this remote location in the middle of the countryside on this route.

And everything you just laid out there, Gordon, it's very labor-intensive, I think, to do this, right?

And they decide to rig it up, rig the gun up on the back of a a Zamiad pickup truck, which is a type of truck very common in Iran, and to camouflage it so it looks like a workman's truck, right?

So it kind of has tools, construction equipment in the back, all situated to hide this gun.

Now, the Israelis have another problem,

which is they need to verify in real time.

that it's Mohsen Fakrizadeh in the car.

At the wheel, yeah.

At the wheel.

At the walk.

Right, because it could be his wife driving.

It could be a bodyguard.

I mean, they need to be certain that it's him.

And so they come up with another idea, which is to basically set up a car along the route that will precede the Zamiad pickup truck that's got the gun and that will be rigged up with cameras to allow the Israelis with enough time to confirm or to call the whole thing off that it's actually Fakharizadeh at the wheel.

So they position a car on the route, which is going to look broken down.

It's got a wheel missing.

You know, it's sort of on a jack as if a tire is being changed.

Maybe someone's left it there.

But in it is a series of cameras, which will grab an image of who's driving the cars in the convoy.

And it's just far enough from the side of the gun to give the Israelis time to confirm the identity of the driver and adapt what they're doing.

So that's how they'll do the check.

Now,

there's another problem which we haven't discussed.

And I think this is how we end up with the maybe somewhat exaggerated claim that the gun that killed Mohsen Bad Krizade was AI-enabled.

And it's the idea that that distance

from Israel, where presumably the operators of this robotic gun will be sitting, and Iran,

there's a lag.

There's a comms lag from that message going from the operator in Israel to Iran and back and forth.

So you have a time lag issue.

You also have an issue of

most of the remote operated weapon systems we were just talking about, the Crows, the B-29, the guns are really,

they're on a very stable surface, right?

Or they're sort of...

Stabilized, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Because it's going to move as when you put it.

It's going to move.

There's going to be recoil.

Recoil, right?

Every time you fire the pickup, the Zamiad is going to sort of rock and tilt the car so you've got you've got the movement of the v the vehicle that the gun is in and you've got that that comms delay yeah which is about one and a half seconds yeah that's right the israelis calculate it's it's 0.8 seconds each way so round trip it's a 1.6 second delay and by the way you're going to be aiming at a car that might be moving yeah that has fakrizi in it So it's a little bit like, I guess, the lag, Gordon, in like a video game.

Yeah.

And the the Israelis develop a piece of software to overcome this, to compensate.

And that is where we get these claims that it's AI enabled, right?

But it's really, it's an algorithm that the Israelis have built, purpose-built, to account for the rock of the car, the movement of Mohsen Vakhrizadeh's car,

and the comms lag.

between Israel and Iran.

Yeah, I think it's worth stressing that because I think when people hear about AI robot guns, they immediately think of something which is, if you like, an autonomous weapon where some computer algorithm is deciding itself when to fire and when to shoot and what to shoot at.

And that's the kind of, you know, that's the sci-fi vision of, if you like, about AI and warfare and drones, and which we're, which to some extent we're heading to.

And you're starting to see some of that autonomous weapon systems being used in places, including in Ukraine and Russia.

But this is slightly different.

It's AI assisting a remote-controlled weapon rather than, if you like, an autonomous weapon which fires by itself.

So it's very, it's not quite the killer robots idea.

And so there with the gun in place, controlled remotely, hidden in the pickup truck.

Let's take a break and when we come back, it's going to be the 27th of November 2020, an otherwise pleasant afternoon on Imam Khomeini Boulevard.

That is the street name, outside this lovely country town of Absad.

And we'll see what happens with this operation to target Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Welcome back.

It's dawn on Friday the 27th of November 2020.

There's a blue gun-laden Zamiad pickup parked on the side of this road in the countryside.

A car with a flat tire is parked at a roundabout just before it

and Mohsen Fakrizadeh is at the wheel of his car, a black Nissan.

He's driving and his wife is in the passenger seat.

They're on the road late that morning.

It's a convoy.

We should point out because as we mentioned, Gordon, Fakrizadeh, of course, has a security detail with him at all times.

The first car carries the security guys.

The second car is Mohsen Fakrizadeh and his wife in the family Nissan.

And then there's two cars cars that have security men behind them.

So it's a four-car convoy.

And what I think is quite wild is that later the Iranians will say they actually got winned that there might be a threat against Bakhrizadeh, but they didn't know when or where it would happen.

Bakhrizadeh had nonetheless been warned against travel.

One does wonder if in the years since his friends and colleagues were targeted by the Israelis, if he's getting a constant stream of threats all the time, many of which are quite vague.

And he's just, he's totally desensitized to them at this point.

But I also love the detail.

He's teaching a class in Tehran the next day.

It goes back to his dual life as kind of, you know, secret commander of this nuclear weapons program and then under another identity, an academic, and he's due to be teaching.

And he doesn't want to do it remotely.

He doesn't want to do it by Zoom, which I've got to give him some respect for.

From a pedagogical standpoint.

He wants to see his students in person.

Yeah.

That's right.

You could imagine this guy going, no, I don't, you know, I've had this warning, but I'm tired of these warnings.

I've got to get to my class.

And also, I'm going to drive my car, you know, brushing it all off.

But

I guess that's him.

And maybe he's just stubborn.

Yeah, I think there's some stubbornness here.

Maybe complacent.

I don't know.

Maybe a bit of that.

He's also like a, I think he's probably a very stubborn, kind of hard-headed old guy.

who wants to drive his own car, who's probably getting 15 of these threat reports every year, and nothing has come to pass in recent memory for him.

Also, I mean, I think we shouldn't brush past the fact that dread of a Zoom call probably contributes to his death in some way because he did not want to teach the class remotely, right?

And he presumably could have.

But I can also understand that as he doesn't want to do it.

Yeah.

You know, he's got his own play and he wants to run it.

So by 3:30 local time, the motorcade has arrived outside Absard.

And here I think it is a little fascinating to speculate on what's actually going on in that car because he's just in there with his wife.

I mean, is he listening to music, a podcast, a book on tape?

Are they arguing?

Are they in a silent, you know, sort of just silent car ride enjoying the scenery?

We have absolutely no idea, but it's a very human moment.

I mean, we've all been on road trips with, you know, friends, family, significant others.

It's this idea he likes to drive himself.

I find it quite interesting.

You can imagine without the bodyguards in the car, time with his wife, this is almost the closest he gets to relaxing, you know, because he's in the countryside.

And they're coming south down the road from the Caspian, crosses over these beautiful mountain ranges.

I think it's amazing scenery.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

And you can actually see some of these drives on YouTube.

And it's very lovely countryside, mountains, rolling hills, orchards, quite lovely.

So he's probably just taking in.

some of the scenery, enjoying the drive, enjoying being out of the grind of Tehran traffic, kind of on the open road.

And they come to this U-turn where essentially Fakhrizadeh, in order to turn right onto Imam Khomeini Boulevard, which is this fateful road, they've got to go up kind of past Imam Khomeini Boulevard and hit a roundabout and kind of turn back around so they can actually make that right-hand turn.

And

that is where that roundabout is where the Israelis have placed the car.

The lookout.

The lookout car, car, exactly, to confirm that it's Fakhrizadeh.

So the convoy turns, something interesting happens.

The lead car kind of jets off for the main house, which makes sense because they want to go and check things out at their destination, right?

It would be logical that a foreign intelligence service like the Israelis would know where he was going and could have sprung a trap on him at the house.

And so the lead car zooms out to go and look.

Now, what is terrible about this from a security standpoint for Mohsen Fakhrizide is that he's now fully exposed because he's driving the lead car of the convoy by himself with his wife, right?

So there's no security in there.

And Mossad might even be a little bit shocked by that because that makes their job a lot easier.

Now, Mossad has placed that blue Zamyad with the robotic gun in it about 500 meters south of the junction.

So he's going to turn off onto Imam Khomeini.

Boulevard.

The Zamyad is parked about 500 meters south of that.

Now, this shows, I think, the amazingly granular detail of the intelligence that the Israelis have, because you can actually see them on the satellite imagery.

There are speed bumps on Imam Khomeini Boulevard.

And so the whole convoy has to slow down for the speed bump right before it reaches the pickup.

And so they've placed this pickup.

Mossad has placed this pickup very intentionally.

to make the shooter's job easier.

So he's not going to hit a car going 30, 40 miles an hour.

He's going to hit a car that's almost stopped.

Or is it sort of a, you know, a rolling stop?

And we're told it's going to, you know, comes up to that speed bump, it slows down.

And we're told in the Ronin Bergman Farnas Fasihi account in the New York Times that, quote, a stray dog began crossing the road, which I assume wasn't a mossad dog.

Which I assume was not a Mossad dog.

And I think is indicative of the sourcing that these journalists had for this piece, because that's probably coming from somebody who actually watched the video in real time or later.

Now, the machine gun fires, so it hits the front of the car, kind of right, maybe on the top part of the hood before the windshield.

The account isn't clear here, but I think it suggests that in this initial volley, Bakrizide perhaps was not hit.

Now, the car swerves, comes to a stop.

The shooter in Israel, and by the way, we've got no idea who this person is, but he makes an adjustment, and they fire again, hit the windshield maybe three times, and here they hit Fakhrizadeh once in the shoulder.

And how do they know it's the shoulder?

Well, you might hold it a bit.

Maybe they had to look at the tape afterward.

But in any case, Fakhrizadeh slumps out of the car and crouches behind the door.

Now,

he's probably confused as to what's going on here.

Yeah, where the police are coming from.

Where the bullets are, where's the shooter, right?

The Iranians will claim that three more bullets hit him.

He falls dead on the road.

Now, Mrs.

Fakhrizadeh is in the car.

She's unhurt, at least bodily, even though she's about 10 inches away.

And not a single one of the assassins is in the country.

What's remarkable is the ability to move that gun because he comes out of the car, it looks like, and it's, you know, they are able to move the gun, point it to him, and shoot him and kill him.

and not hurt his wife.

I mean, it's remarkable how accurate that is, given that it's all done remotely.

So at this point, the operation looks remarkably successful from an Israeli point of view.

One bit does go wrong, though, doesn't it?

Because they'd wired up

the robot gun to blow up and to destroy the evidence.

But it looks like that didn't quite work after it's done its job.

Obviously, the Israelis would prefer that the Iranians have very little to really peek through or exploit afterward.

they have rigged up the Zamiad and the gun with explosives, but whether it was the quantity of explosives or the positioning or something else, what they do is instead of destroying the gun, explosives launch it skyward, but intact, mostly.

And the Iranians are later able to piece together what's happened.

And they come to the conclusion that 15 bullets were fired out of this gun.

And the whole thing took less than a minute.

I mean, amazing.

Extraordinary.

So I remember this as a journalist being called by the news desk on the day it happened.

And it was fascinating because it was clear that he'd been killed and that something dramatic had happened.

But there were really conflicting reports about what it was.

There was lots of talk about a shootout.

And I think the assumption from a lot of people was that a team of gunmen had...

had ambushed the vehicle, had shot him and then escaped.

And that was definitely the view that there was a group of, you know, 12 shooters and 50 support personnel.

There'd been a gun battle.

He'd been dragged from the car.

You know, these were some of the stories that came out at that point.

And then soon after, you started to hear this talk about a robotic machine gun being used in the aftermath.

I think it took a few weeks.

And I remember people actually dismissed it at first.

Oh, just laughed at it.

Yeah, they laughed at it because people said, well, that's absurd.

That's science fiction.

And also they were saying, well, this is the Iranians trying to justify what was clearly a huge security lapse and allowing their top nuclear scientists to be killed.

So they were coming up in response with some wild idea about robotic machine guns to cover up the fact that a group group of gunmen had got in and managed to kill him and then escape.

But actually, it appears that was the truth of what happened.

And it was a remarkable fact which took some time to emerge and which I think people just didn't believe at first because it just seemed too much.

Well, and Fakhriza Dani is given a full martyr's funeral.

The coffin is draped in the Iranian flag.

It's carried by an honor guard on a pilgrimage of sorts to shrines in Qom and Tehran.

It ends in a big state funeral.

Now, this is COVID times, and so everyone is wearing masks in the videos of the funeral.

You can tell by the chair placement, it's a socially distanced funeral.

The chairs are six feet apart.

And the Iranians, despite this incredible security failure, you know, they sort of lionize Fakhrizadeh.

They print his mug and put it on posters.

And they say, we will chase the criminals to the end.

And Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is buried and put to rest.

So I think, I mean, Gordon, there's so many different ways we could talk about what all of this means.

I think one of them, which is very striking to me, is that there can be a tendency to talk about AI, facial recognition, autonomous weaponry as the future, but in reality, it's kind of the past.

I mean, this was, we're talking about a killing that happened five years ago.

Yeah.

And it makes you think that science fiction like this is really, I mean, it's here.

Yeah, we're starting to see it.

As we said, this was kind of AI-enabled remote weaponry.

Yeah.

And not autonomous.

It's not autonomous out there, but you're it's not autonomous.

But I think what's interesting is if you just took that on one step and you said, well, what if the cameras

the two sets of cameras in the observation car and in the shooting pickup had had had facial recognition software which were designed to automatically work out and do facial recognition on who was sat at which point in which car and then shoot the gun based on spotting it yeah that is technically feasible so in that sense you could see the technology to make a weapon system like that actually fully autonomous just using facial recognition rather than having a human remotely authorize it and physically pull the trigger.

So, technically, it's possible to move that on to remote-controlled and autonomous.

And you are starting to see that being used.

I mean, there's a lot of interesting kind of work around this autonomy of weapons, particularly with drones.

And that's the main way we think about it.

And you see it with some of those drones which are being used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict to target people and where there's elements of AI.

Now, we haven't quite got to that fully autonomous killer robots world yet, but I don't think it's that far away.

And I think this shows us the way it might be used for very targeted operations against individuals.

And I think in many ways it's quite a terrifying future.

You know, if someone could launch a drone or have a killer robot hidden somewhere and just wait for someone to pass who a facial recognition software says, yep, that's the target or the type of target.

And based on a certain signature or a facial recognition, you know, launch the drone, drop the bomb, fire the machine gun.

I mean, this is the future, if not of warfare, of covert operations, I think, by intelligence agencies.

It's interesting.

It did make me think of the mass production of kind of first-person view FPV drones that we're seeing now in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,

how cheap they are and how effective they are.

at killing from just an efficiency standpoint well beyond what you would see from kind of dumb munitions or artillery.

And we are not far from, and in fact, probably already in a world where you can merge really cheap drone technology with really cheap facial recognition technology and have something that could be used in a really terrifying way in our societies in the West, too, that are not in war zones.

I mean, the issue with the Fakrizadeh killing

and what made it so labor-intensive was

the legwork required to smuggle all of this stuff into Iran, put it together there,

and probably to develop the intelligence picture in the first place.

Yeah, to get a hard, a well-protected target.

Right, exactly, exactly.

And I think that kind of work across massive kind of distance will continue to be really labor-intensive, right?

Especially if you're trying to limit collateral damage.

But if you're not concerned with limiting collateral damage and you're going after targets that are not all that far away, the implications of it get really spooky, really quickly.

Yeah, and some people do worry that

the remoteness of being able to kill people also makes it easier to pull the trigger, if you like.

I mean, I remember going to visit Creech Air Force Base in Nevada in the US, where at that point the RAF was flying Reaper drones.

So this was the Brits operating Reaper drones over Afghanistan, and where they were starting, just as I was there to start to use them to drop bombs as well as to kind of carry out some events.

I remember asking one of the operators, doesn't it feel like a video game?

And they got very offended with me.

And I can understand why, because in their view, they are in combat.

They are involved in potentially killing people.

And yet...

The distance of the fact that they would then go back to their homes in Las Vegas at the end of the day, where they were saying the disconnect between those two realities of being able to kill people at a distance remotely in that way, or at the next stage, perhaps even just programming it and not even having to pull the trigger yourself.

It does raise quite complicated issues about how

warfare is changing and whether that makes it, if you like, too easy to kill people at a distance because you're not seeing them.

eye to eye, but equally, you're not putting your own people at risk, which is why people want to do it.

It's why the Israelis did it in this case and why people use drones rather than man planes in some cases to drop munitions in other situations.

So it is an interesting one ethically.

I think also the ethics and the efficacy of targeting these scientists and these nuclear scientists is another interesting one.

A, is it right?

And B, does it work?

Those are the questions about it.

Yeah, let's take the efficacy point first.

I mean, did the assassination slow the nuclear program?

Or did this whole set of targeted killings going back almost 20 years now,

has it had a material impact?

on Iran's race toward a bomb.

I mean, that is, I think, probably an impossible question to answer because we can't know.

It's, you know, the counterfactual is: well, if you hadn't killed any of these people, would the Iranians, would they be three years ahead?

Would they be five years ahead?

It's almost impossible to say.

I think we can say, though, that the Iranians at this point have never been closer to a breakout capability, right?

So

it's possible that these killings have slowed the program.

They certainly have not stopped it.

And I think you have to say, though, that

you have to say it's almost, it's just, it's an impossible counterfactual to answer, really.

I mean, but it's, I think it's possible they've slowed the program down.

Yeah.

Run in Bergman's book on targeted killings.

I mean, he basically makes the point after hundreds and hundreds of pages of going through these operations that the Israelis have had a really hard time connecting these targeted killings to broader kind of political or strategic outcomes.

Right.

And I think you have to say in this case that the whole suite of pressure measures that the Israelis have taken has not stopped the Iranians from pursuing a bomb.

And why would it, right?

It has not changed the strategic calculation for the Iranians to go after a weapon.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think it hasn't changed their desire to do it.

Certainly, some individuals can play an important role, but often, almost always, they are replaceable or have passed on their knowledge or information.

And so taking them out of the picture does not stop the program.

I think it's very rare where you have one individual who, by removing them, would stop it.

I mean, if you think, you know, if you go back to the Oppenheimer comparison, I mean, if somehow, I don't know, the Japanese or the Germans in World War II had got to Oppenheimer, I don't think it would have stopped the Manhattan Project.

There were too many people, too many things already set and trained.

Too much of the knowledge had been dispersed.

So I'm not sure that it makes a strategic difference.

You can buy a bit of time.

And I think that is the only point where I think it, you know, it is interesting to think, well,

ultimately, this is not about changing the strategic calculus.

All it is doing is buying perhaps some time.

And in that time, the question is, what else can you do?

You know, can you come up with diplomatic solutions?

Can you find out with some other ways of changing the calculus about Iran?

Or if it is simply about avoiding a military strike.

And I do take

that point from inside Mossad and, you know, back to Meir Degan, thinking, actually, I'm doing what looks like a very aggressive action, but I'm actually doing it to stop a war, because otherwise, my prime minister, Benjamin Sanyahu, may do something actually quite crazy, which may have very detrimental consequences.

You know, these are the quite complex equations I think people are making in this situation.

You're right.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of complex strategic and operational and ethical questions to this.

There's also at the root of it something exceedingly simple.

So, Bergman's book is titled Rise and Kill First.

And it got that title because as he was interviewing people in Mossad who were involved in these operations, he kept getting quotes from, of all places, the Babylonian Talmud when they were having conversations about sort of the justification for these operations.

And the piece of scripture was, whoever comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.

So there is a very simple, I think, perspective here inside the Mossad as well, which is

the Iranians are trying to build the capability to destroy us.

We are justified as a result of that in going and killing people who are involved in, you know, threatening us.

It's kind of not more complicated than that in some respects.

But I suppose my question is: does it actually serve your country's interest and your national interest in the long run compared to to a policy which might try and put a different strategic or diplomatic lid on the Iranian nuclear program.

If this becomes a substitute for a policy which might actually be able to restrain Iran, then I kind of question it.

Aaron Powell, I think the assumption is that it's not realistic, that there's not a path toward

a sort of better way of interacting with

the Islamic Republic, right?

I mean,

I think that's the assumption, right?

You'd have to say that.

Well, that's the assumption from the hawkish quarters, but I guess there was a lid on the iranian nuclear program for a few years you know with a deal so i don't think it's impossible i don't think the iranians are crazy enough not to look at the possibilities of deals and not to be subject to other you know other incentives so i yeah i think it's an interesting question i guess in some ways we may find out some of the answers this year as to how iran and israel play out that calculation about whether to go for the bomb or whether to attack iran if you're israel because i think all the signs are in the next few months

you know, this issue may come to a head, and it may come to a head, you know, in terms of military action or in terms of a deal.

But who knows which, David?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

And so, maybe there, Gordon, with really thorny issues of ethics and efficacy, maybe totally unresolved.

Let's end it and end our exploration into the life and times and death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and our journey into the shadow war between Israel and Iran.

So, see you on Monday.