The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine
By Bergman & Fassihi, 9/18/21, New York Times
Iran’s top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn,
as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before
his day began. That afternoon, he and his wife would leave
their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their
country house in Absard, a bucolic town east of Tehran,
where they planned to spend the weekend. Iran’s intel
service had warned him of a possible assassination plot,
but the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had brushed it off.
Convinced that Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran’s efforts to
build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for
at least 14 years. But there had been so many threats and
plots that he no longer paid them much attention.
Despite his prominent position in Iran’s military establish-
ment, Fakhrizadeh wanted to live a normal life. He craved
small domestic pleasures: reading Persian poetry, taking his
family to the seashore, going for drives in the countryside.
And, disregarding the advice of his security team, he often
drove his own car to Absard instead of having bodyguards
drive him in an armored vehicle. It was a serious breach
of security protocol, but he insisted.
So shortly after noon on Friday, Nov. 27, he slipped behind
the wheel of his black Nissan Teana sedan, his wife in the
passenger seat beside him, and hit the road.
An Elusive Target
=================
Since 2004, when the Israeli govt ordered its foreign intel
agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear
weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of
sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment
facilities. It was also methodically picking off the
experts thought to be leading Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Since 2007, its agents had assassinated 5 Iranian nuclear
scientists and wounded another. Most of the scientists
worked directly for Fakhrizadeh (pronounced fah-KREE-zah-deh)
on what Israeli intel officials said was a covert program
to build a nuclear warhead, including overcoming the
substantial technical challenges of making one small enough
to fit atop one of Iran’s long-range missiles.
Israeli agents had also killed the Iranian general in
charge of missile development and 16 members of his team.
But the man Israel said led the bomb program was elusive.
In 2009, a hit team was waiting for Fakhrizadeh at the
site of a planned assassination in Tehran, but the operation
was called off at the last moment. The plot had been
compromised, the Mossad suspected, & Iran had laid an ambush.
This time they were going to try something new.
Iranian agents working for the Mossad had parked a blue
Nissan Zamyad pickup truck on the side of the road
connecting Absard to the main highway. The spot was on
a slight elevation with a view of approaching vehicles.
Hidden beneath tarpaulins and decoy construction material
in the truck bed was a 7.62-mm sniper machine gun.
Around 1 pm, the hit team received a signal that
Fakhrizadeh, his wife and a team of armed guards in
escort cars were about to leave for Absard, where many of
Iran’s elite have 2nd homes and vacation villas.
The assassin, a skilled sniper, took up his position,
calibrated the gun sights, cocked the weapon and lightly
touched the trigger.
He was nowhere near Absard, however. He was peering into
a computer screen at an undisclosed location more than
1,000 miles away. The entire hit squad had already left Iran.
Reports of a Killing
==================
The news reports from Iran that afternoon were confusing,
contradictory and mostly wrong.
A team of assassins had waited alongside the road for
Fakhrizadeh to drive by, one report said. Residents heard
a big explosion followed by intense machine gun fire, said
another. A truck exploded ahead of Fakhrizadeh’s car,
then 5 or 6 gunmen jumped out of a nearby car and opened
fire. A social media channel affiliated with the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps reported an intense gun battle
between Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards and as many as a dozen
attackers. Several people were killed, witnesses said.
One of the most far-fetched accounts emerged a few days later.
Several Iranian news orgs reported that the assassin was
a killer robot, and that the entire operation was conducted
by remote control. These reports directly contradicted the
supposedly eyewitness accounts of a gun battle between
teams of assassins and bodyguards and reports that some
of the assassins had been arrested or killed.
Iranians mocked the story as a transparent effort to
minimize the embarrassment of the elite security force
that failed to protect one of the country’s most closely
guarded figures.
“Why don’t you just say Tesla built the Nissan, it drove
by itself, parked by itself, fired the shots and blew up
by itself?” one hard-line social media account said.
Thomas Withington, an electronic warfare analyst, told the
BBC that the killer robot theory should be taken with “a
healthy pinch of salt,” & that Iran’s description appeared
to be little more than a collection of “cool buzzwords.”
Except this time there really was a killer robot.
The straight-out-of-sci-fi story of what really happened
that afternoon and the events leading up to it, published
here for the first time, is based on interviews with
American, Israeli and Iranian officials, including two
intel officials familiar with the details of the planning
& execution of the operation, and statements Fakhrizadeh’s
family made to the Iranian news media.
The operation’s success was the result of many factors:
serious security failures by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,
extensive planning and surveillance by the Mossad, and an
insouciance bordering on fatalism on the part of Fakhrizadeh.
But it was also the debut test of a high-tech, computer-
ized sharpshooter kitted out with A.I. and multiple-camera
eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing
600 rounds a minute.
The souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun now joins the
combat drone in the arsenal of high-tech weapons for remote
targeted killing. But unlike a drone, the robotic machine
gun draws no attention in the sky, where a drone could be
shot down, and can be situated anywhere, qualities likely
to reshape the worlds of security and espionage.
‘Remember That Name’
================
Prep for the assassination began after a series of meetings
toward the end of 2019 and in early 2020 between Israeli
officials, led by the Mossad director, Yossi Cohen, and
high-ranking American officials, including Trump, Sec'y
of State Mike Pompeo and the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel.
Israel had paused the sabotage and assassination campaign
in 2012, when the US began negotiations with Iran leading
to the 2015 nuclear agreement. Now that Trump had abrogated
that agreement, the Israelis wanted to resume the campaign
to try to thwart Iran’s nuclear progress and force it to
accept strict constraints on its nuclear program.
In late Feb, Cohen presented the Americans with a list of
potential operations, including the killing of Fakhrizadeh.
Fakhrizadeh had been at the top of Israel’s hit list
since 2007, and the Mossad had never taken its eyes off him.
In 2018, Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, held a news
conference to show off documents the Mossad had stolen
from Iran’s nuclear archives. Arguing that they proved that
Iran still had an active nuclear weapons program, he
mentioned Fakhrizadeh by name several times.
“Remember that name,” he said. “Fakhrizadeh.”
The American officials briefed about the assassination
plan in Washington supported it, acc. to an official who
was present at the meeting.
Both countries were encouraged by Iran’s relatively tepid
response to the American assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim
Suleimani, the Iranian military commander killed in a U.S.
drone strike with the help of Israeli intel in Jan 2020.
If they could kill Iran’s top military leader with little
blowback, it signaled that Iran was either unable or
reluctant to respond more forcefully.
The surveillance of Fakhrizadeh moved into high gear.
As the intel poured in, the difficulty of the challenge
came into focus: Iran had also taken lessons from the
Suleimani killing, namely that their top officials could
be targeted. Aware that Fakhrizadeh led Israel’s most-
wanted list, Iranian officials had locked down his security.
His security details belonged to the elite Ansar unit of
the Revolutionary Guards, heavily armed and well trained,
who communicated via encrypted channels. They accompanied
Fakhrizadeh’s movements in convoys of 4-7 vehicles,
changing the routes and timing to foil possible attacks.
And the car he drove himself was rotated among 4 or 5 at
his disposal.
Israel had used a variety of methods in the earlier
assassinations. The first nuclear scientist on the list
was poisoned in 2007. The second, in 2010, was killed by
a remotely detonated bomb attached to a motorcycle, but
the planning had been excruciatingly complex, and an
Iranian suspect was caught. He confessed and was executed.
After that debacle, the Mossad switched to simpler,
in-person killings. In each of the next 4 assassinations,
from 2010-2012, hit men on motorcycles sidled up beside
the target’s car in Tehran traffic and either shot him
thru the window or attached a sticky-bomb to the
car door, then sped off.
But Fakhrizadeh’s armed convoy, on the lookout for such
attacks, made the motorcycle method impossible.
The planners considered detonating a bomb along Fakhri-
zadeh’s route, forcing the convoy to a halt so it could be
attacked by snipers. That plan was shelved because of the
likelihood of a gangland-style gun battle with many casualties.
The idea of a pre-positioned, remote-controlled machine
gun was proposed, but there were a host of logistical
complications and myriad ways it could go wrong. Remote-
controlled machine guns existed and several armies had
them, but their bulk and weight made them difficult to
transport and conceal, and they had only been used with
operators nearby.
Time was running out.
By the summer, it looked as if Trump, who saw eye to eye
on Iran with Netanyahu, could lose the American election.
His likely successor, Joe Bide, had promised to reverse
Trump’s policies and return to the 2015 nuclear agreement
that Israel had vigorously opposed.
If Israel was going to kill a top Iranian official, an
act that had the potential to start a war, it needed the
assent and protection of the US. That meant acting before
Biden could take office. In Netanyahu’s best-case scenario,
the assassination would derail any chance of resurrecting
the nuclear agreement even if Biden won.
The Scientist
============
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh grew up in a conservative family in
the holy city of Qom, the theological heart of Shia Islam.
He was 18 when the Islamic revolution toppled Iran’s
monarchy, a historical reckoning that fired his imagination.
He set out to achieve two dreams: to become a nuclear
scientist and to take part in the military wing of the
new govt. As a symbol of his devotion to the revolution,
he wore a silver ring with a large, oval red agate, the
same type worn by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, and by Gen. Suleimani.
He joined the Revolutionary Guards and climbed the ranks
to general. He earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from
Isfahan U. of Technology with a dissertation on “identi-
fying neutrons,” according to Ali Akbar Salehi, the
former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency and a longtime
friend and colleague.
He led the missile development program for the Guards &
pioneered the country’s nuclear program. As research
director for the Defense Ministry, he played a key role
in developing homegrown drones and, acc. to two Iranian
officials, traveled to North Korea to join forces on
missile development. At the time of his death, he was
deputy defense minister.
“In the field of nuclear & nanotech & biochemical war,
Fakhrizadeh was a character on par with Qassim Suleimani
but in a totally covert way,” Gheish Ghoreishi, who has
advised Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Arab affairs, said
in an interview.
When Iran needed sensitive equipment or technology that
was prohibited under int'l sanctions, Fakhrizadeh found
ways to obtain them.
“He had created an underground network from Latin America
to North Korea and East Europe to find the parts that
we needed,” Ghoreishi said.
Ghoreishi and a former senior Iranian official said that
Fakhrizadeh was known as a workaholic. He had a serious
demeanor, demanded perfection from his staff and had no
sense of humor, they said. He seldom took time off. And
he eschewed media attention.
Most of his professional life was top secret, better
known to the Mossad than to most Iranians.
His career may have been a mystery even to his children.
His sons said in a TV interview that they had tried to
piece together what their father did based on his sporadic
comments. They said they had guessed that he was involved
in the production of medical drugs.
When int'l nuclear inspectors came to call, they were
told that he was unavailable, his labs & testing grounds
off limits. Concerned about Iran’s stonewalling, the UN
Security Council froze Fakhrizadeh’s assets as part of
a package of sanctions on Iran in 2006.
Although he was considered the father of Iran’s nuclear
program, he never attended the talks leading to the
2015 agreement.
The black hole that was Fakhrizadeh’s career was a major
reason that even when the agreement was completed,
questions remained about whether Iran still had a
nuclear weapons program and how far along it was.
Iran has steadfastly insisted that its nuclear program
was for purely peaceful purposes and that it had no
interest in developing a bomb. Ayatollah Khamenei had
even issued an edict declaring that such a weapon would
violate Islamic law.
But investigators with the Int'l Atomic Energy Agency
concluded in 2011 that Iran had “carried out activities
relevant to the development of a nuclear device.” They
also said that while Iran had dismantled its focused
effort to build a bomb in 2003, significant work on the
project had continued.
Acc. to the Mossad, the bomb-building program had simply
been deconstructed and its component parts scattered
among different programs and agencies, all under
Fakhrizadeh’s direction.
In 2008, when President Bush was visiting Jerusalem,
PM Ehud Olmert played him a recording of a conversation
Israeli officials said took place a short time before
between a man they identified as Fakhrizadeh and a
colleague. Acc. to 3 people who say they heard the
recording, Fakhrizadeh spoke explicitly about his
ongoing effort to develop a nuclear warhead.
A spokesman for Bush did not reply to a request for
comment. The NY Times could not independently confirm
the existence of the recording or its contents.
Programming a Hit
================
A killer robot profoundly changes the calculus for the Mossad.
The org has a longstanding rule that if there is no rescue,
there is no operation, meaning a foolproof plan to get
the operatives out safely is essential. Having no agents
in the field tips the equation in favor of the operation.
But a massive, untested, computerized machine gun presents
a string of other problems. The first is how to get the
weapon in place.
Israel chose a special model of a Belgian-made FN MAG
machine gun attached to an advanced robotic apparatus,
acc. to an intel official familiar with the plot. The
official said the system was not unlike the off-the-rack
Sentinel 20 manufactured by the Spanish defense contractor
Escribano.
But the machine gun, the robot, its components & access-
ories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was
broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled
into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes
and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran.
The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup,
a common model in Iran. Cameras pointing in multiple
directions were mounted on the truck to give the command
room a full picture not just of the target & his security
detail, but of the surrounding environment. Finally, the
truck was packed with explosives so it could be blown to
bits after the kill, destroying all evidence.
There were further complications in firing the weapon.
A machine gun mounted on a truck, even a parked one, will
shake after each shot’s recoil, changing the trajectory
of subsequent bullets.
Also, even though the computer communicated with the
control room via satellite, sending data at the speed of
light, there would be a slight delay: What the operator
saw on the screen was already a moment old, and adjusting
the aim to compensate would take another moment, all
while Fakhrizadeh’s car was in motion.
The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper
and for the sniper’s response to reach the machine gun,
not including his reaction time, was estimated to be
1.6 sec, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go
astray.
The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the
shake and the car’s speed.
Another challenge was to determine in real time that it
was Fakhrizadeh driving the car and not one of his
children, his wife or a bodyguard.
Israel lacks the surveillance capabilities in Iran that
it has in other places, like Gaza, where it uses drones
to identify a target before a strike. A drone large enough
to make the trip to Iran could be easily shot down by
Iran’s Russian-made antiaircraft missiles. And a drone
circling the quiet Absard countryside could expose the
whole operation.
The solution was to station a fake disabled car, resting
on a jack with a wheel missing, at a junction on the main
road where vehicles heading for Absard had to make a
U-turn, some 3/4 of a mile from the kill zone. That
vehicle contained another camera.
At dawn Friday, the operation was put into motion.
Israeli officials gave the Americans a final heads up.
The blue Zamyad pickup was parked on the shoulder of
Imam Khomeini Boulevard. Investigators later found
that security cameras on the road had been disabled.
The Drive
============
As the convoy left the city of Rostamkala on the Caspian
coast, the first car carried a security detail. It was
followed by the unarmored black Nissan driven by Fakhri-
zadeh, with his wife, Sadigheh Ghasemi, at his side.
Two more security cars followed.
The security team had warned Fakhrizadeh that day of a
threat against him and asked him not to travel, acc. to
his son Hamed Fakhrizadeh and Iranian officials.
But Fakhrizadeh said he had a university class to teach
in Tehran the next day, his sons said, and he could not
do it remotely.
Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Supreme National Council,
later told the Iranian media that intel agencies even had
knowledge of the possible location of an assassination
attempt, though they were uncertain of the date.
The Times could not verify whether they had such specific
info or whether the claim was an effort at damage control
after an embarrassing intel failure.
Iran had already been shaken by a series of high-profile
attacks in recent months that in addition to killing
leaders and damaging nuclear facilities made it clear
that Israel had an effective network of collaborators
inside Iran.
The recriminations and paranoia among politicians and
intel officials only intensified after the assassination.
Rival intel agencies — under the Ministry of Intelligence
and the Revolutionary Guards — blamed each other.
A former senior Iranian intel official said that he heard
that Israel had even infiltrated Fakhrizadeh’s security
detail, which had knowledge of last-minute changes to his
movement, the route and the time.
But Shamkhani said there had been so many threats over
the years that Fakhrizadeh did not take them seriously.
He refused to ride in an armored car and insisted on
driving one of his cars himself. When he drove with his
wife, he would ask the bodyguards to drive a separate car
behind him instead of riding with them, acc. to 3 people
familiar with his habits. Fakhrizadeh may have also
found the idea of martyrdom attractive.
“Let them kill,” he said in a recording Mehr News, a
conservative outlet, published in Nov. “Kill as much as
they want, but we won’t be grounded. They’ve killed
scientists, so we have hope to become a martyr even
though we don’t go to Syria and we don’t go to Iraq.”
Even if Fakhrizadeh accepted his fate, it was not clear
why the Revolutionary Guards assigned to protect him
went along with such blatant security lapses.
Acquaintances said only that he was stubborn & insistent.
If Fakhrizadeh had been sitting in the rear, it would've
been much harder to identify him and to avoid killing
anyone else. If the car had been armored & the windows
bulletproofed, the hit squad would have had to use
special ammo or a powerful bomb to destroy it, making
the plan far more complicated.
The Strike
===========
Shortly before 3:30 pm, the motorcade arrived at the
U-turn on Firuzkouh Rd. Fakhrizadeh’s car came to a near
halt, and he was positively identified by the operators,
who could also see his wife sitting beside him.
The convoy turned right on Imam Khomeini Blvd, and the
lead car then zipped ahead to the house to inspect it
before Fakhrizadeh arrived. Its departure left
Fakhrizadeh’s car fully exposed.
The convoy slowed down for a speed bump just before the
parked Zamyad. A stray dog began crossing the road.
The machine gun fired a burst of bullets, hitting the
front of the car below the windshield. It is not clear
if these shots hit Fakhrizadeh but the car swerved and
came to a stop.
The shooter adjusted the sights and fired another burst,
hitting the windshield at least 3 times and Fakhrizadeh
at least once in the shoulder. He stepped out of the car
and crouched behind the open front door.
Acc. to Iran’s Fars News, 3 more bullets tore into his
spine. He collapsed on the road.
The first bodyguard arrived from a chase car: Hamed
Asghari, a national judo champion, holding a rifle.
He looked around for the assailant, seemingly confused.
Ghasemi ran out to her husband. “They want to kill me
and you must leave,” he told her, according to his sons.
She sat on the ground and held his head on her lap,
she told Iranian state TV. The blue Zamyad exploded.
That was the only part of the operation that did not
go as planned.
The explosion was intended to rip the robot to shreds so
the Iranians could not piece together what had happened.
Instead, most of the equipment was hurled into the air
and then fell to the ground, damaged beyond repair but
largely intact.
The Revolutionary Guards’ assessment — that the attack
was carried out by a remote-controlled machine gun
“equipped with an intelligent satellite system” using A.I.
— was correct.
The entire operation took less than a minute.
15 bullets were fired.
Iranian investigators noted that not one of them hit
Ghasemi, seated inches away, accuracy that they attributed
to the use of facial recognition software.
Hamed Fakhrizadeh was at the family home in Absard when
he received a distress call from his mother. He arrived
within minutes to what he described as a scene of “full-on
war.” Smoke & fog clouded his vision, & he could smell blood.
“It wasn't a simple terrorist attack for someone to come
& fire a bullet & run,” he said later on state TV. “His
assassination was far more complicated than what you know
& think. He was unknown to the Iranian public, but he was
very well known to those who are the enemy of Iran’s
development.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html
The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine
By Bergman & Fassihi, 9/18/21, New York Times
Iran’s top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn,
as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before
his day began. ----
The blue Zamyad exploded.
That was the only part of the operation that did not
go as planned.
The explosion was intended to rip the robot to shreds so
the Iranians could not piece together what had happened.
Instead, most of the equipment was hurled into the air
and then fell to the ground, damaged beyond repair but
largely intact.
The Revolutionary Guards’ assessment — that the attack
was carried out by a remote-controlled machine gun
“equipped with an intelligent satellite system” using A.I.
— was correct.
------ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html
On 9/19/2021 3:19 AM, David P wrote:
The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing MachineQuite the 'gun' that has altered politics!
By Bergman & Fassihi, 9/18/21, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html
The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine
By Bergman & Fassihi, 9/18/21, New York Times
Iran’s top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn,
as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before
his day began. That afternoon, he and his wife would leave
their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their
country house in Absard, a bucolic town east of Tehran,
where they planned to spend the weekend. Iran’s intel
service had warned him of a possible assassination plot,
but the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had brushed it off.
Convinced that Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran’s efforts to
build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for
at least 14 years. But there had been so many threats and
plots that he no longer paid them much attention.
Despite his prominent position in Iran’s military establish-
ment, Fakhrizadeh wanted to live a normal life. He craved
small domestic pleasures: reading Persian poetry, taking his
family to the seashore, going for drives in the countryside.
And, disregarding the advice of his security team, he often
drove his own car to Absard instead of having bodyguards
drive him in an armored vehicle. It was a serious breach
of security protocol, but he insisted.
So shortly after noon on Friday, Nov. 27, he slipped behind
the wheel of his black Nissan Teana sedan, his wife in the
passenger seat beside him, and hit the road.
An Elusive Target
=================
Since 2004, when the Israeli govt ordered its foreign intel
agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear
weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of
sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment
facilities. It was also methodically picking off the
experts thought to be leading Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Since 2007, its agents had assassinated 5 Iranian nuclear
scientists and wounded another. Most of the scientists
worked directly for Fakhrizadeh (pronounced fah-KREE-zah-deh)
on what Israeli intel officials said was a covert program
to build a nuclear warhead, including overcoming the
substantial technical challenges of making one small enough
to fit atop one of Iran’s long-range missiles.
Israeli agents had also killed the Iranian general in
charge of missile development and 16 members of his team.
But the man Israel said led the bomb program was elusive.
In 2009, a hit team was waiting for Fakhrizadeh at the
site of a planned assassination in Tehran, but the operation
was called off at the last moment. The plot had been
compromised, the Mossad suspected, & Iran had laid an ambush.
This time they were going to try something new.
Iranian agents working for the Mossad had parked a blue
Nissan Zamyad pickup truck on the side of the road
connecting Absard to the main highway. The spot was on
a slight elevation with a view of approaching vehicles.
Hidden beneath tarpaulins and decoy construction material
in the truck bed was a 7.62-mm sniper machine gun.
Around 1 pm, the hit team received a signal that
Fakhrizadeh, his wife and a team of armed guards in
escort cars were about to leave for Absard, where many of
Iran’s elite have 2nd homes and vacation villas.
The assassin, a skilled sniper, took up his position,
calibrated the gun sights, cocked the weapon and lightly
touched the trigger.
He was nowhere near Absard, however. He was peering into
a computer screen at an undisclosed location more than
1,000 miles away. The entire hit squad had already left Iran.
Reports of a Killing
==================
The news reports from Iran that afternoon were confusing,
contradictory and mostly wrong.
A team of assassins had waited alongside the road for
Fakhrizadeh to drive by, one report said. Residents heard
a big explosion followed by intense machine gun fire, said
another. A truck exploded ahead of Fakhrizadeh’s car,
then 5 or 6 gunmen jumped out of a nearby car and opened
fire. A social media channel affiliated with the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps reported an intense gun battle
between Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards and as many as a dozen
attackers. Several people were killed, witnesses said.
One of the most far-fetched accounts emerged a few days later.
Several Iranian news orgs reported that the assassin was
a killer robot, and that the entire operation was conducted
by remote control. These reports directly contradicted the
supposedly eyewitness accounts of a gun battle between
teams of assassins and bodyguards and reports that some
of the assassins had been arrested or killed.
Iranians mocked the story as a transparent effort to
minimize the embarrassment of the elite security force
that failed to protect one of the country’s most closely
guarded figures.
“Why don’t you just say Tesla built the Nissan, it drove
by itself, parked by itself, fired the shots and blew up
by itself?” one hard-line social media account said.
Thomas Withington, an electronic warfare analyst, told the
BBC that the killer robot theory should be taken with “a
healthy pinch of salt,” & that Iran’s description appeared
to be little more than a collection of “cool buzzwords.”
Except this time there really was a killer robot.
The straight-out-of-sci-fi story of what really happened
that afternoon and the events leading up to it, published
here for the first time, is based on interviews with
American, Israeli and Iranian officials, including two
intel officials familiar with the details of the planning
& execution of the operation, and statements Fakhrizadeh’s
family made to the Iranian news media.
The operation’s success was the result of many factors:
serious security failures by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,
extensive planning and surveillance by the Mossad, and an
insouciance bordering on fatalism on the part of Fakhrizadeh.
But it was also the debut test of a high-tech, computer-
ized sharpshooter kitted out with A.I. and multiple-camera
eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing
600 rounds a minute.
The souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun now joins the
combat drone in the arsenal of high-tech weapons for remote
targeted killing. But unlike a drone, the robotic machine
gun draws no attention in the sky, where a drone could be
shot down, and can be situated anywhere, qualities likely
to reshape the worlds of security and espionage.
‘Remember That Name’
================
Prep for the assassination began after a series of meetings
toward the end of 2019 and in early 2020 between Israeli
officials, led by the Mossad director, Yossi Cohen, and
high-ranking American officials, including Trump, Sec'y
of State Mike Pompeo and the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel.
Israel had paused the sabotage and assassination campaign
in 2012, when the US began negotiations with Iran leading
to the 2015 nuclear agreement. Now that Trump had abrogated
that agreement, the Israelis wanted to resume the campaign
to try to thwart Iran’s nuclear progress and force it to
accept strict constraints on its nuclear program.
In late Feb, Cohen presented the Americans with a list of
potential operations, including the killing of Fakhrizadeh.
Fakhrizadeh had been at the top of Israel’s hit list
since 2007, and the Mossad had never taken its eyes off him.
In 2018, Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, held a news
conference to show off documents the Mossad had stolen
from Iran’s nuclear archives. Arguing that they proved that
Iran still had an active nuclear weapons program, he
mentioned Fakhrizadeh by name several times.
“Remember that name,” he said. “Fakhrizadeh.”
The American officials briefed about the assassination
plan in Washington supported it, acc. to an official who
was present at the meeting.
Both countries were encouraged by Iran’s relatively tepid
response to the American assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim
Suleimani, the Iranian military commander killed in a U.S.
drone strike with the help of Israeli intel in Jan 2020.
If they could kill Iran’s top military leader with little
blowback, it signaled that Iran was either unable or
reluctant to respond more forcefully.
The surveillance of Fakhrizadeh moved into high gear.
As the intel poured in, the difficulty of the challenge
came into focus: Iran had also taken lessons from the
Suleimani killing, namely that their top officials could
be targeted. Aware that Fakhrizadeh led Israel’s most-
wanted list, Iranian officials had locked down his security.
His security details belonged to the elite Ansar unit of
the Revolutionary Guards, heavily armed and well trained,
who communicated via encrypted channels. They accompanied
Fakhrizadeh’s movements in convoys of 4-7 vehicles,
changing the routes and timing to foil possible attacks.
And the car he drove himself was rotated among 4 or 5 at
his disposal.
Israel had used a variety of methods in the earlier
assassinations. The first nuclear scientist on the list
was poisoned in 2007. The second, in 2010, was killed by
a remotely detonated bomb attached to a motorcycle, but
the planning had been excruciatingly complex, and an
Iranian suspect was caught. He confessed and was executed.
After that debacle, the Mossad switched to simpler,
in-person killings. In each of the next 4 assassinations,
from 2010-2012, hit men on motorcycles sidled up beside
the target’s car in Tehran traffic and either shot him
thru the window or attached a sticky-bomb to the
car door, then sped off.
But Fakhrizadeh’s armed convoy, on the lookout for such
attacks, made the motorcycle method impossible.
The planners considered detonating a bomb along Fakhri-
zadeh’s route, forcing the convoy to a halt so it could be
attacked by snipers. That plan was shelved because of the
likelihood of a gangland-style gun battle with many casualties.
The idea of a pre-positioned, remote-controlled machine
gun was proposed, but there were a host of logistical
complications and myriad ways it could go wrong. Remote-
controlled machine guns existed and several armies had
them, but their bulk and weight made them difficult to
transport and conceal, and they had only been used with
operators nearby.
Time was running out.
By the summer, it looked as if Trump, who saw eye to eye
on Iran with Netanyahu, could lose the American election.
His likely successor, Joe Bide, had promised to reverse
Trump’s policies and return to the 2015 nuclear agreement
that Israel had vigorously opposed.
If Israel was going to kill a top Iranian official, an
act that had the potential to start a war, it needed the
assent and protection of the US. That meant acting before
Biden could take office. In Netanyahu’s best-case scenario,
the assassination would derail any chance of resurrecting
the nuclear agreement even if Biden won.
The Scientist
============
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh grew up in a conservative family in
the holy city of Qom, the theological heart of Shia Islam.
He was 18 when the Islamic revolution toppled Iran’s
monarchy, a historical reckoning that fired his imagination.
He set out to achieve two dreams: to become a nuclear
scientist and to take part in the military wing of the
new govt. As a symbol of his devotion to the revolution,
he wore a silver ring with a large, oval red agate, the
same type worn by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, and by Gen. Suleimani.
He joined the Revolutionary Guards and climbed the ranks
to general. He earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from
Isfahan U. of Technology with a dissertation on “identi-
fying neutrons,” according to Ali Akbar Salehi, the
former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency and a longtime
friend and colleague.
He led the missile development program for the Guards &
pioneered the country’s nuclear program. As research
director for the Defense Ministry, he played a key role
in developing homegrown drones and, acc. to two Iranian
officials, traveled to North Korea to join forces on
missile development. At the time of his death, he was
deputy defense minister.
“In the field of nuclear & nanotech & biochemical war,
Fakhrizadeh was a character on par with Qassim Suleimani
but in a totally covert way,” Gheish Ghoreishi, who has
advised Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Arab affairs, said
in an interview.
When Iran needed sensitive equipment or technology that
was prohibited under int'l sanctions, Fakhrizadeh found
ways to obtain them.
“He had created an underground network from Latin America
to North Korea and East Europe to find the parts that
we needed,” Ghoreishi said.
Ghoreishi and a former senior Iranian official said that
Fakhrizadeh was known as a workaholic. He had a serious
demeanor, demanded perfection from his staff and had no
sense of humor, they said. He seldom took time off. And
he eschewed media attention.
Most of his professional life was top secret, better
known to the Mossad than to most Iranians.
His career may have been a mystery even to his children.
His sons said in a TV interview that they had tried to
piece together what their father did based on his sporadic
comments. They said they had guessed that he was involved
in the production of medical drugs.
When int'l nuclear inspectors came to call, they were
told that he was unavailable, his labs & testing grounds
off limits. Concerned about Iran’s stonewalling, the UN
Security Council froze Fakhrizadeh’s assets as part of
a package of sanctions on Iran in 2006.
Although he was considered the father of Iran’s nuclear
program, he never attended the talks leading to the
2015 agreement.
The black hole that was Fakhrizadeh’s career was a major
reason that even when the agreement was completed,
questions remained about whether Iran still had a
nuclear weapons program and how far along it was.
Iran has steadfastly insisted that its nuclear program
was for purely peaceful purposes and that it had no
interest in developing a bomb. Ayatollah Khamenei had
even issued an edict declaring that such a weapon would
violate Islamic law.
But investigators with the Int'l Atomic Energy Agency
concluded in 2011 that Iran had “carried out activities
relevant to the development of a nuclear device.” They
also said that while Iran had dismantled its focused
effort to build a bomb in 2003, significant work on the
project had continued.
Acc. to the Mossad, the bomb-building program had simply
been deconstructed and its component parts scattered
among different programs and agencies, all under
Fakhrizadeh’s direction.
In 2008, when President Bush was visiting Jerusalem,
PM Ehud Olmert played him a recording of a conversation
Israeli officials said took place a short time before
between a man they identified as Fakhrizadeh and a
colleague. Acc. to 3 people who say they heard the
recording, Fakhrizadeh spoke explicitly about his
ongoing effort to develop a nuclear warhead.
A spokesman for Bush did not reply to a request for
comment. The NY Times could not independently confirm
the existence of the recording or its contents.
Programming a Hit
================
A killer robot profoundly changes the calculus for the Mossad.
The org has a longstanding rule that if there is no rescue,
there is no operation, meaning a foolproof plan to get
the operatives out safely is essential. Having no agents
in the field tips the equation in favor of the operation.
But a massive, untested, computerized machine gun presents
a string of other problems. The first is how to get the
weapon in place.
Israel chose a special model of a Belgian-made FN MAG
machine gun attached to an advanced robotic apparatus,
acc. to an intel official familiar with the plot. The
official said the system was not unlike the off-the-rack
Sentinel 20 manufactured by the Spanish defense contractor
Escribano.
But the machine gun, the robot, its components & access-
ories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was
broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled
into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes
and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran.
The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup,
a common model in Iran. Cameras pointing in multiple
directions were mounted on the truck to give the command
room a full picture not just of the target & his security
detail, but of the surrounding environment. Finally, the
truck was packed with explosives so it could be blown to
bits after the kill, destroying all evidence.
There were further complications in firing the weapon.
A machine gun mounted on a truck, even a parked one, will
shake after each shot’s recoil, changing the trajectory
of subsequent bullets.
Also, even though the computer communicated with the
control room via satellite, sending data at the speed of
light, there would be a slight delay: What the operator
saw on the screen was already a moment old, and adjusting
the aim to compensate would take another moment, all
while Fakhrizadeh’s car was in motion.
The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper
and for the sniper’s response to reach the machine gun,
not including his reaction time, was estimated to be
1.6 sec, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go
astray.
The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the
shake and the car’s speed.
Another challenge was to determine in real time that it
was Fakhrizadeh driving the car and not one of his
children, his wife or a bodyguard.
Israel lacks the surveillance capabilities in Iran that
it has in other places, like Gaza, where it uses drones
to identify a target before a strike. A drone large enough
to make the trip to Iran could be easily shot down by
Iran’s Russian-made antiaircraft missiles. And a drone
circling the quiet Absard countryside could expose the
whole operation.
The solution was to station a fake disabled car, resting
on a jack with a wheel missing, at a junction on the main
road where vehicles heading for Absard had to make a
U-turn, some 3/4 of a mile from the kill zone. That
vehicle contained another camera.
At dawn Friday, the operation was put into motion.
Israeli officials gave the Americans a final heads up.
The blue Zamyad pickup was parked on the shoulder of
Imam Khomeini Boulevard. Investigators later found
that security cameras on the road had been disabled.
The Drive
============
As the convoy left the city of Rostamkala on the Caspian
coast, the first car carried a security detail. It was
followed by the unarmored black Nissan driven by Fakhri-
zadeh, with his wife, Sadigheh Ghasemi, at his side.
Two more security cars followed.
The security team had warned Fakhrizadeh that day of a
threat against him and asked him not to travel, acc. to
his son Hamed Fakhrizadeh and Iranian officials.
But Fakhrizadeh said he had a university class to teach
in Tehran the next day, his sons said, and he could not
do it remotely.
Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Supreme National Council,
later told the Iranian media that intel agencies even had
knowledge of the possible location of an assassination
attempt, though they were uncertain of the date.
The Times could not verify whether they had such specific
info or whether the claim was an effort at damage control
after an embarrassing intel failure.
Iran had already been shaken by a series of high-profile
attacks in recent months that in addition to killing
leaders and damaging nuclear facilities made it clear
that Israel had an effective network of collaborators
inside Iran.
The recriminations and paranoia among politicians and
intel officials only intensified after the assassination.
Rival intel agencies — under the Ministry of Intelligence
and the Revolutionary Guards — blamed each other.
A former senior Iranian intel official said that he heard
that Israel had even infiltrated Fakhrizadeh’s security
detail, which had knowledge of last-minute changes to his
movement, the route and the time.
But Shamkhani said there had been so many threats over
the years that Fakhrizadeh did not take them seriously.
He refused to ride in an armored car and insisted on
driving one of his cars himself. When he drove with his
wife, he would ask the bodyguards to drive a separate car
behind him instead of riding with them, acc. to 3 people
familiar with his habits. Fakhrizadeh may have also
found the idea of martyrdom attractive.
“Let them kill,” he said in a recording Mehr News, a
conservative outlet, published in Nov. “Kill as much as
they want, but we won’t be grounded. They’ve killed
scientists, so we have hope to become a martyr even
though we don’t go to Syria and we don’t go to Iraq.”
Even if Fakhrizadeh accepted his fate, it was not clear
why the Revolutionary Guards assigned to protect him
went along with such blatant security lapses.
Acquaintances said only that he was stubborn & insistent.
If Fakhrizadeh had been sitting in the rear, it would've
been much harder to identify him and to avoid killing
anyone else. If the car had been armored & the windows
bulletproofed, the hit squad would have had to use
special ammo or a powerful bomb to destroy it, making
the plan far more complicated.
The Strike
===========
Shortly before 3:30 pm, the motorcade arrived at the
U-turn on Firuzkouh Rd. Fakhrizadeh’s car came to a near
halt, and he was positively identified by the operators,
who could also see his wife sitting beside him.
The convoy turned right on Imam Khomeini Blvd, and the
lead car then zipped ahead to the house to inspect it
before Fakhrizadeh arrived. Its departure left
Fakhrizadeh’s car fully exposed.
The convoy slowed down for a speed bump just before the
parked Zamyad. A stray dog began crossing the road.
The machine gun fired a burst of bullets, hitting the
front of the car below the windshield. It is not clear
if these shots hit Fakhrizadeh but the car swerved and
came to a stop.
The shooter adjusted the sights and fired another burst,
hitting the windshield at least 3 times and Fakhrizadeh
at least once in the shoulder. He stepped out of the car
and crouched behind the open front door.
Acc. to Iran’s Fars News, 3 more bullets tore into his
spine. He collapsed on the road.
The first bodyguard arrived from a chase car: Hamed
Asghari, a national judo champion, holding a rifle.
He looked around for the assailant, seemingly confused.
Ghasemi ran out to her husband. “They want to kill me
and you must leave,” he told her, according to his sons.
She sat on the ground and held his head on her lap,
she told Iranian state TV. The blue Zamyad exploded.
That was the only part of the operation that did not
go as planned.
The explosion was intended to rip the robot to shreds so
the Iranians could not piece together what had happened.
Instead, most of the equipment was hurled into the air
and then fell to the ground, damaged beyond repair but
largely intact.
The Revolutionary Guards’ assessment — that the attack
was carried out by a remote-controlled machine gun
“equipped with an intelligent satellite system” using A.I.
— was correct.
The entire operation took less than a minute.
15 bullets were fired.
Iranian investigators noted that not one of them hit
Ghasemi, seated inches away, accuracy that they attributed
to the use of facial recognition software.
Hamed Fakhrizadeh was at the family home in Absard when
he received a distress call from his mother. He arrived
within minutes to what he described as a scene of “full-on
war.” Smoke & fog clouded his vision, & he could smell blood.
“It wasn't a simple terrorist attack for someone to come
& fire a bullet & run,” he said later on state TV. “His
assassination was far more complicated than what you know
& think. He was unknown to the Iranian public, but he was
very well known to those who are the enemy of Iran’s
development.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html
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