Assassination of Lead Nuclear Scientist Highlights Iran’s Security Weakness | Voice of America

Friday’s assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the second Iranian military figure to be killed this year, highlighted Tehran’s weakness in protecting key officials and its adversaries’ ability to eliminate them, some analysts say.

Iran said Fakhrizadeh, 59, was killed in a daylight armed attack on a vehicle he was traveling in in the northern city of Absard, some 90 kilometers east of the capital Tehran.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the killing of Fakhrizadeh, who headed the Organization for Defense Research and Innovation of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, known by the Persian acronym SPND. He had previously led a secret nuclear weapons program that Iran launched in the late 1980s and apparently abandoned in 2003, according to the United Nations nuclear agency IAEA.

Fakhrizadeh’s assassination occurred nearly 11 months after a US airstrike killed Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Soleimani, in Baghdad on January 3. Washington called that attack a defensive operation to protect US personnel overseas from Soleimani, who led the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a US-designated foreign terrorist organization.

Speaking with the Persian VOA, Middle East security specialist Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa, said the murders of Fakhrizadeh and Soleimani represent serious security failures on the part of the Iranian leadership.

“You have to assume that both men were under very serious protection from the Iranian regime,” Juneau said.

He said the killings also highlight the relative strengths of Iran’s opponents.

“Whoever was responsible for the killing of Fakhrizadeh exercised a high degree of skill by carrying out the operation in the suburbs of the capital during the day and on the street while he was allegedly under protection,” Juneau said. “As for the killing of Soleimani, it was the result of the United States dedicating enormous amounts of energy and resources to follow him and listen to his conversations to find out what he was doing.”

Islamist-ruled Iran, which denies ever seeking nuclear weapons, blamed Fakhrizadeh’s killing on its regional enemy Israel and threatened harsh retaliation.

Israel, whose destruction Tehran has long supported, did not comment. The Jewish state and its main ally, the United States, have refused to rule out military action to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear armed.

Fifth assassination

Fakhrizadeh is the fifth Iranian nuclear expert to be assassinated in the past decade. A series of bombings and shootings that Iran also attributed to Israel killed two experts in 2010, a third in 2011 and a fourth in 2012. Similarly, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a role in those killings.

Eric Brewer, a nuclear analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA that Iran does not have a good track record of protecting its nuclear scientists.

He also noted Iran’s inability to stop an Israeli operation that stole nuclear archives from an Iranian warehouse in early 2018. Iran has contested the authenticity of the stolen material, but US intelligence officials did. they looked into it and felt it was authentic.

Israel said the archives showed that Fakhrizadeh and SPND have continued the secret work on nuclear weapons in recent years.

“From the perspective of Iran and the scientists, they need to be concerned about the secrecy of their efforts and their ability to protect that kind of work,” Brewer said.

Suzanne Maloney, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, tweeted that Friday’s assassination raises more doubts about Iran’s security capabilities.

“What does it say about Tehran’s much-vaunted security forces and apparent candidacy for regional hegemony when they are repeatedly unable to prevent their main adversary’s agents from entering the capital and seizing warehouses full of sensitive information or assassinating key officials?” she wrote.

In a tweeted response to Maloney, Alex Vatanka, Iranian program director at the Middle East Institute, said that Iran “always talks about a bigger game than it can offer.”

“And just imagine the pool of potential regime insiders ready to work on behalf of foreign powers. At this rate, no one in the Iranian Islamist regime is safe from assassination, ”Vatanka wrote.

This article originated in the Persian service of VOA.