The Islamic Republic has variously accused Israel, the United States, Britain and the Mojahedin-e Khalq of carrying out the murders. Just this past week, Iranian officials added France and Germany to the list of killers.
But the new book says Israel did it all on its own.
Last month, the Iranian Intelligence Ministry said it had arrested all those involved in the assassinations. It did not announce any foreign nationalities, leaving the impression that everyone involved was Iranian.
The new book, “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars,” was written by Dan Raviv, who is the CBS correspondent in Israel, and Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist.
In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Raviv said Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, would use local hires for peripheral work, but never for the actual killing.
In Tehran, he said, they used some safe houses the Israelis created in the 1970s, before the revolution, suggesting that the Iranian intelligence service isn’t too swift if it hasn’t uncovered Israeli safe houses after a third of a century.
Raviv said the purpose of the assassinations is not just to knock some skilled people out of the Iranian nuclear program but also to discourage other skilled Iranians from ever joining the nuclear program.
The book was published in the United States and thus escaped Israeli censorship.
Raviv said Mossad agents “excel at accurate shooting at any speed and staying steady to shoot and to place exquisitely shaped sticky bombs,” all of which they consider their hallmark.
“They don’t farm out a mission that is that sensitive,” so sensitive that Israel’s prime minister must sign off on each individual hit, Raviv said. “They might use dissidents for assistance or logistics, but not the hit itself. The methodology and training and use of motorcycles is all out of the Mossad playbook. They wouldn’t want anybody else to do it.”
He didn’t explain how they could place an Israeli into Iran to live without being exposed as a foreigner by an accent. That left open the possibility that Israelis born in Iran or born to Iranian parents and thus native Farsi speakers are being used in the assassinations.
Co-author Melman spoke about the cyber campaign against Iran. He said that was also entirely an Israeli innovation, not an American plan with some Israeli assistance as American news reports have said. He said the idea was dreamed up by Israel’s code-breaking and communications eavesdropping agency and then presented to the Americans.
He said the joint effort then first developed the Flame worm, which was just exposed a few weeks ago, to spy on Iran’s program and gather the design information that would allow it to be damaged later. Once that intelligence information was obtained, the US and Israeli experts designed the Stuxnet worm, which was exposed two years ago, to do damage to the Iranian centrifuge program.
The book is only partly about Iran. It describes 50 years of assassinations and other plots by Mossad.
There is the possibility that the book is fundamentally a propaganda piece, made to make Mossad look almost invincible. Israel is notorious for exaggerating its intelligence accomplishments, claiming knowledge it never had and skills it never mastered in an effort to demoralize its opponents.
A report that it used only Israeli hitmen could send Iranian investigators down a dark alley and help protect Iranians working for Mossad.
Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been attacked in Tehran since January 2010. One, Fereydun Abbasi-Davani, heard the magnetic bomb being attached to his car and jumped out just in time. He is now the head of Iran’s nuclear program.
Another was shot dead and the Intelligence Ministry has said it believes he was killed for some personal reason and not as part of a foreign assassination plot. Three othera were killed in January 2010, November 2010 and January 2012. The United States and Britain have both specifically and firmly denied any involvement. Israel has been mute.
Just days before the book was published, Iranian Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi painted a picture of a massive, multi-nation conspiracy organized to kill Iran’s scientists. “The recently dismantled networks of assassination and bombing were in coordination with the main service,” he said at Friday prayers last week. “France, Germany, Israel’s Mossad, CIA, MI6 [of Britain] and all regional services assisted one another.” By “regional services” he was presumably referring to the Arab intelligence services around the Persian Gulf.
It wasn’t clear why Moslehi decided to add France and Germany to his list of guilty parties. Oliver Thraenert, head of the Zurich-based Center for Security Studies, told Reuters he suspected Moslehi was signaling his opposition to any deal with them on the nuclear issue.
“It might be the case that behind these allegations is an internal fight about whether Iran should seek a compromise with the Western countries,” Thraenert said.