Inside the risky shooting orders behind the assassination of Iran’s nuclear chief

How the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakrizadeh bought Israel time to improve capabilities for June attack on Iran.

The founder and chief of Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated on November 27, 2020, with Iran pointing the finger at the Mossad. Israel, even after the June conflict with Iran, has not taken responsibility for the episode.

While many details of Fakhrizadeh’s assassination were previously disclosed by The Jerusalem Post and other media outlets, there is one new major detail that has not been reported to date.

At a key point during the operation to kill Fakhrizadeh, he was hit by gunfire from his assassins while inside his car.

The Post understands, however, that operation commanders believed Fakhrizadeh was still alive and might survive, and that the operation should continue until his death was confirmed.

It was so important to remove Fakhrizadeh from the playing field that it was worth investing additional time during which aspects and assets of the assassination plan would be dangerously more exposed, i.e., the assassins were more likely to be found and seized once they had opened fire, and Iranian security forces were actively trying to find the source of the gunfire.

It turned out that their suspicions were correct.

Fakhrizadeh, though wounded, was able to make it out of his car and started to move away from the scene, potentially to safety and medical attention, which could have kept him alive.

Yet, because the assets were kept in place, the assassins managed to resume gunfire on Fakhrizadeh.

This additional gunfire pummeled him until he was killed on the spot and fell to the ground.

At Fakhrizadeh’s funeral on November 30, official Iranian sources, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said the nuclear scientist had been killed by a fantastical and science-fiction-style remote-controlled, satellite-linked machine gun.

Israeli intelligence sources later confirmed to the Post that this was not science fiction, and that a remote-controlled gun was in fact the weapon used, specifically because it was believed that it would be more precise and only strike Fakhrizadeh and not his wife, who was also traveling with him.

This gun, along with explosives, had been smuggled into Iran in pieces and clandestinely assembled there over a period of some eight months by a team of 20 operatives inside Iran who also tracked Fakhrizadeh’s every movement.

According to Iran, Iranian agents working for the Mossad had strategically parked a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck along the Imam Khomeini Boulevard with a 7.62-millimeter US-manufactured M240C machine gun concealed in the truck, set up to be managed by an operator thousands of miles away.

There was another car, seemingly broken down on the main road, which was also equipped with cameras to confirm Fakhrizadeh’s identity about three-quarters of a mile before the designated assassination spot.

Afterward, Fakhrizadeh was described as having been gunned down while traveling in a black Nissan Teana sedan some 40 miles east of Tehran, spilling out of the car and collapsing in a pool of blood.

Iran’s founding nuclear chief was evacuated by helicopter, but at 6:17 p.m. local time, Iran’s Defense Ministry announced his death.

Fakhrizadeh was declared a martyr of the highest order. The next day, his coffin, draped in the green, white, and red-striped Iranian flag, was carried by an honor guard to the Islamic Republic’s holy sites in the spirit of being a national hero.

Yossi Cohen was the director of the Mossad from 2016 until June 2021.

An earlier Mossad chief, Meir Dagan (2002-2011), had wanted to kill Fakhrizadeh in 2009.

Debates about the value of continuing to gather intelligence through surveillance, as well as over the costs and benefits of assassinations of such senior figures, had prevented Dagan from moving forward.

There had even been a prior potential operation to kill Fakhrizadeh, which was called off because of operational difficulties.

By the time Fakhrizadeh was finally assassinated in 2020, Tehran had thousands of operating older-generation centrifuges, hundreds of advanced centrifuges, and a large volume of scientists who could replace him for directing the enrichment of uranium at the 60% level.

“There is no doubt that if he had disappeared off the map earlier, killing him would have caused graver damage,” former Mossad director Tamir Pardo (2011-2016) told the Post.

From a technical perspective, he was already more replaceable. But from a wider strategic perspective, Fakhrizadeh was at the height of his power and influence with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his 25-year-long iron grip on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear moves was unique.

He was also notorious for his capacity to move and hide Iran’s nuclear pieces from Westerners trying to keep tabs on Iran’s nuclear progress – shutting down some pieces, renaming some, and folding others into half-civilian nuclear programs.

The moment Cohen was updated that Fakhrizadeh’s death was confirmed, he felt Israel was safer from Iran’s nuclear threat than the situation he had been handed in early 2016.

Cohen had a serious and grudging respect for Fakhrizadeh, but that did restrain him from relishing in his death, he said.

Iran would recover from his death, and that recovery would eventually necessitate Israeli action against Iran this past June.

But when he was taken off the board, Israel was able to receive the all-important asset: time – some say multiple years in delaying aspects of Iran’s nuclear advancement – including time to improve its attack and intelligence capabilities for when the IAF would finally be called on for a historic and broader attack to push back the Iranian nuclear threat.

Even after June, the nuclear threat from Iran could return, senior Israeli officials told the Post.

It is now the job of Cohen’s successors in the Mossad and the IDF to prevent Iran from making a bomb, knowing that the Military Intelligence Directorate said in the late 1990s that absent Israeli intervention, the ayatollahs could have a nuclear weapon within a couple of years.