BEIRUT, Lebanon – In less than nine months, an assassin on a motorcycle fatally shot an al-Qaeda commander who had taken refuge in Tehran, the Iranian nuclear scientist was machine-gunned on a country road and two separate and mysterious explosions shook a key Iranian nuclear facility in the desert, beating the heart of the country’s efforts to enrich uranium.
The constant beating of attacks, which intelligence officials said was carried out by Israel, highlighted the apparent ease with which Israeli intelligence services managed to reach deep inside Iran’s borders and repeatedly hit its strongest targets. guarded, often with the help of Iranian turncoats.
The attacks, the latest wave in more than two decades of sabotage and assassination, have revealed embarrassing security situations and left Iranian leaders looking over their shoulders as negotiations with the Biden administration continue to restore the 2015 nuclear deal.
The recriminations were caustic.
The head of Parliament’s strategic center said Iran had become a “spy paradise”. The former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has called for a review of the country’s security and intelligence apparatus. Lawmakers demanded the resignation of senior security and intelligence officials.
The most alarming thing for Iran, Iranian officials and analysts said, was that the attacks revealed that Israel had an effective network of collaborators inside Iran and that Iran’s intelligence services failed to find moles.
“The fact that the Israelis are able to strike Iran in such a bewildering way is extremely embarrassing and demonstrates a weakness that I believe is playing poorly inside Iran,” said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program. at Chatham House.
The attacks also cast a cloud of paranoia on a country that now sees foreign plots in every accident.
Over the weekend, Iranian state television released a photo of a man believed to be Reza Karimi, 43, and accused him of being the “perpetrator of the sabotage” in an explosion at the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant. , last month. But it was not clear who he was, if he had acted alone, and if that was his real name. In any case, he fled the country before the blast, the Iranian intelligence ministry said.
On Monday, after the Iranian state press reported that Brig. Gender. Mohammad Hosseinzadeh Hejazi, the deputy commander of the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards, died of heart disease, with immediate suspicions of gambling.
General Hejazi had long been the target of Israeli espionage, and the son of another prominent commander of the Quds Force insisted on Twitter that Mr. Hejazi’s death “is not related to the heart.”
A Revolutionary Guard spokesman failed to clear the air in a statement saying the general had died from the combined effects of “extremely difficult missions”, a recent Covid-19 infection and exposure to chemical weapons during the war. Iran-Iraq.
The general is said to have been the third senior Iranian military official to be assassinated in 15 months. The United States killed Major General Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force, in January last year. Israel assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s nuclear scientist and brigadier general in the Revolutionary Guard, in November.
Even though General Hejazi died of natural causes, the cumulative loss of three top generals was a significant blow.
The attacks are an increase in a long-running campaign by Israeli and US intelligence services to undermine what they see as threatening Iran’s activities.
These include a nuclear program that Iran insists is peaceful, Iran’s investment in proxy militias around the Arab world, and the development of precision-guided missiles for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant movement.
An Israeli military intelligence document from 2019 said that General Hejazi had been a leading figure in the last two, as commander of the Lebanese Quds Force corps and leader of the guided missile project. Revolutionary Guard spokesman Ramezan Sharif said Israel wanted to assassinate him.
Israel has been working to derail Iran’s nuclear program, which it considers a death threat since it began. Israel is believed to have begun assassinating key figures in the program in 2007, when a nuclear scientist at an Isfahan uranium plant died in a mysterious gas leak.
In the years that followed, six other scientists and military officials said they were critical of Iran’s nuclear efforts and were assassinated. A seventh was injured.
Another top commander of the Quds Force, Rostam Ghasemi, recently said he had easily escaped an Israeli assassination attempt during a visit to Lebanon in March.
But assassination is just a tool in a campaign that operates on many levels and fronts.
In 2018, Israel carried out a daring raid at night to steal half a ton of secret archives of the Iranian nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran.
Israel has also reached out to the world, pursuing equipment from other countries destined for Iran to destroy it, hide transponders in its packaging or install explosive devices that are detonated after the equipment has been installed inside Iran, according to to a former U.S. intelligence officer.
A former Israeli intelligence agent said that in order to compromise such equipment, she and another officer will drive to the factory and organize a crisis, such as a car accident or a heart attack, and the woman will call to the guards for help. This would give her enough access to the facility to identify her security system so another team could enter and disable it, she said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not allowed to discuss operations under covering.
In an interview on Iranian state television last week, Iran’s former nuclear chief revealed the origins of an explosion at the Natanz nuclear power plant in July. The explosives had been sealed in a heavy office that had been placed in the plant a few months earlier, said Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
The blast exploded at a factory producing a new generation of centrifuges, which withdrew Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by several months, officials said.
Alireza Zakani, head of parliament’s research center, said on Tuesday that in another case, the cars at a nuclear site had been sent abroad for repairs and returned to Iran with 300 kilograms of explosives packed inside.
Little is known about the more recent explosion at Natanz this month, except that it destroyed the plant’s independent power system, which in turn destroyed thousands of centrifuges.
It would have been difficult for Israel to carry out these operations without the help of the Iranians, and that could be what replaces Iran the most.
Iranian security officials have sued several Iranian citizens over the past decade, accusing them of complicity in Israeli sabotage and assassination operations. The punishment is execution.
But the infiltrations have also tarnished the reputation of the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence wing, which is responsible for guarding nuclear sites and scientists.
A former commander of the guards called for a “cleansing” of the intelligence service, and Iran’s vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, said the unit responsible for security at Natanz should be “responsible for its failures.”
Deputy Prime Minister Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi told Iranian media on Monday that it was no longer enough to blame Israel and the United States for such attacks; Iran needed to clean its own house.
According to a publication affiliated with the guards last week, Mashregh News: “Why is the security of the nuclear plant acting so irresponsibly that it is hit twice from the same hole?”
But the Revolutionary Guards are only answering to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and so far there have been no signs of a top-down reshuffle.
After each attack, Iran struggled to respond, sometimes claiming to identify those responsible only after they left the country or said they had been released. Iranian officials also insist they have foiled other attacks.
Calls for retaliation are on the rise after each attack. Conservatives have accused the government of President Hassan Rouhani of weakening or subjecting the country’s security to nuclear talks in the hope that they will lead to better US sanctions.
Indeed, Iranian officials have turned to what they called “strategic patience” in the last year of the Trump administration, calculating that Israel has tried to lead them into an open conflict that would eliminate the possibility of negotiations with a new democratic administration.
Both Mr Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have said they will not allow the attacks to derail negotiations, as lifting sanctions was a priority.
It is also possible that Iran tried to retaliate, but failed.
Iran has been blamed for a bomb that exploded near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi in January, and 15 Iran-linked militants were arrested in Ethiopia last month for plotting to attack Israeli, US and Emirati targets.
But any obvious retaliation risks an overwhelming Israeli response.
“They are in no hurry to start a war,” said Talal Atrissi, a political science professor at Lebanese University in Beirut. “Retaliation means war.”
Instead, the timing of Israel’s latest attack on Natanz suggested that Israel sought, if not, to derail talks, at least to weaken Iran’s bargaining power. Israel opposed the 2015 nuclear deal and opposes its resurrection.
The United States, which is seeking to negotiate with Iran in Vienna, said it was not involved in the attack, but did not publicly criticize it.
And if the repeated Israeli attacks had the effect of fomenting national paranoia, an intelligence official said, this was a secondary benefit for Israel. Iran’s additional measures to scan buildings to find surveillance devices and overwhelm employees to eliminate potential spies have slowed enrichment, the official said.
The conventional wisdom is that neither side wants a large-scale war and relies on the other not to escalate. But at the same time, the hidden regional war between Israel and Iran has intensified with Israeli airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria and on ship attacks.
But as Iran faces a struggling economy, rampant Covid-19 infections and other poor governance issues, pressure is on to reach a new agreement soon to remove economic sanctions, Chatham’s Vakil said. House.
“These low-level attacks in the gray area reveal that the Islamic Republic urgently needs to bring the JCPOA back into a box” to free up resources to solve its other problems, she said, referring to the nuclear deal called formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan. action.
Eric Schmitt contributed to the reports in Washington and Hwaida Saad in Beirut, Lebanon.