39. Iran vs Israel: Inside the Shadow War (Ep 1)

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Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today.

This cowardice, 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 Mossen Fakrizadeh.

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, 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 be able to do that.

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-minus 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 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 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 more overt, 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 US 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, you know, 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, 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, talk 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 spycraft 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 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 he's born in like the late 50s, maybe early 60s.

Again, not 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, all 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 about particular pieces 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 is 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 got to do it.

How do 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 Fakhrizadeh 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 Mosan Fakhuzide, he's a physics professor by training who is going 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.

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 Fakrizide 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 And let's talk briefly about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

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, Kriesadeh 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 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 for Krisadeh, 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 program 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 he'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 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 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 Fakhrizadeh, 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.

Is 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 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 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 are 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?

Or 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 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 program.

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 wasn't the chief in 2020.

He had retired by then, and so he's, you know, not a decision maker.

But Meir 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 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 Meridagon'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.

Meridon 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, 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 these 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 Mayor Degan 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 was 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 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 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, much more arguably violent in what he was willing to do.

Well, and Gordon, I don't know if you 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, 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 imagining them doing that in MI6 either.

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

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 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, the Gan 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?

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 at 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.

Okay.

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 Fakrizadeh.

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 Leap My 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 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 Dagan'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, 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 Fakhrisadeh, 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 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, 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.

Limpid 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.

Yeah.

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 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, 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.

Yeah.

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 create an absolutely chilling effect inside the research institutions, the bureaucracies that bring these people to work on the new project.

Because Iran is, 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 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 rest is 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 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 raid, I think, is actually one of the reasons why we even know as much as we do about Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 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 Fakhrizude Day 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 who is at the heart of Iran's nuclear program.

See you next time.

See you next next time.