Another Iranian nuclear scientist murdered in Tehran
According to Iranian media reports, assailants on a motorcycle killed a 35-year-old Iranian nuclear physicist outside his home and wounded his wife.
By Yossi Melman Tags: Iran nuclear Iran Published 02:39 24.07.11 Latest update 02:39 24.07.11
An Iranian physicist was gunned down yesterday near his home in south Tehran, according to Iranian media reports.
According to the reports, based on police sources, Darioush Rezaei, 35, was shot dead by two gunmen firing from motorcycles. Rezaei's wife was injured in the attack and rushed to hospital. This is the fourth attack on an Iranian nuclear scientist in the past year. In the previous cases, Iranian media outlets and spokesmen accused the Mossad, the CIA and MI6 of being behind the strikes.
Darioush Rezaei .. Photo by: Haaretz Archive
Rezaei, who was a university lecturer in the city of Ardabil, did his doctorate in neutron transport - which lies at the heart of nuclear chain reactions in reactors and bombs - at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad.
He was a member of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the country's official atomic energy commission. Ostensibly this agency is in charge of its civilian nuclear program, but according to various reports it is also involved, together with secret groups in the Revolutionary Guards, in Iran's nuclear weapons' production.
As of last night, official Iranian spokesmen had not issued a response to the killing.
In November 2010, another scientist, Majid Shahriari, was killed and on the same day an attempt was made on the life of nuclear laser expert Prof. Fereidoun Abbasi, injuring him.
Abbasi was later appointed head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Two months ago, he attended a meeting in Vienna of the International Atomic Energy Agency, where he made clear that Iran would continue its nuclear program and would not be deterred by pressure.
Earlier in 2010, Prof. Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed in Tehran by a bomb attached to his car.
According to Iran, the attacks show that those responsible - Iran blames Israel and the Mossad - are determined to strike at scientists involved in Iran's nuclear program.
All of the targeted Iranian nuclear scientists taught and conducted research at university physics departments. But according to Western officials, they were also working secretly for Iran's military nuclear program.
The attacks seem to be focused on taking out key people involved in the last and most important step on the road to nuclear weapons - the group known as the weapons group.
This is the stage at which the bomb is assembled, mainly an engineering process by which the fissionable materials are inserted into the bomb and an explosive mechanism created.
Iran is believed to have all the knowledge, ability and technology to manufacture a nuclear weapon but has still not assembled the bomb and is even farther from assembling a nuclear warhead on a missile.
One atomic researcher after the other has died in a series of recent murders in Iran. Is Israel's Mossad trying to sabotage the construction of a nuclear bomb with the attacks? Officials in Jerusalem aren't denying anything. Israeli military generals are even more hawkish, and their calls for air strikes on Iran are growing louder.
"Israel is not responding," Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said earlier this week when asked if his country had been involved in the latest slaying of an Iranian nuclear scientist. It didn't exactly sound like a denial, and the smile on his face suggested Israel isn't too bothered by suspicions that it is responsible for a series of murders .. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,739883,00.html .. of physicists involved in the controversial Iranian nuclear program.
There is little doubt in the shadowy world of intelligence agencies that Israel is behind the assassination of Darioush Rezaei. "That was the first serious action taken by the new Mossad chief Tamir Pardo," an Israeli intelligence source told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
On July 23, Rezaei became the latest victim in a mysterious series of attacks over the past 20 months which has seen the virtual decimation of the Islamic republic's elite physicists. The 35-year-old died after being shot in the throat in front of his daughter's kindergarten in east Tehran. The Iranian press has reported that the two alleged perpetrators in the attack escaped on a motorcycle.
A Setback for Iran's Nuclear Program
So who was the man who was shot in front of his wife and daughter? Israeli media reported the scientist, who had a PhD in physics, was working on the development of a trigger for a nuclear warhead. The physicist had apparently been seen daily at a nuclear research center in northern Tehran. An official from a member nation of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency later told the Associated Press that Rezaei had participated in developing high-voltage switches, a key component in setting off the explosions needed to trigger a nuclear warhead.
The fact that Rezaei's death has struck a nerve in Iran is apparent in the official reaction to the killing. Kazem Jalali, the head of the Iranian parliament's national security committee, said the murder of Iranian physicists showed that the United States and Israel are "desperate" in the face of Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
Rezaei is the third Iranian nuclear physicist who has paid for his job with his life since the start of 2010:
* In January 2010, the nuclear physicist Masoud Ali Mohammadi .. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,672522,00.html .. died when a remotely detonated bomb rigged to a motorcycle exploded next to his car. Western experts considered Mohammadi to be one of Iran's top nuclear scientists.
* On Nov. 29, 2010, unknown perpetrators committed two attacks which involved motorcyclists attaching explosive devices to their victims' cars while driving. Majid Shahriari, a professor of nuclear physics who specialized in neutron transport, which is relevant for making bombs, was killed when his car exploded. His wife was seriously injured in the attack.
* Fereidoun Abbasi was targeted in a simultaneous attack. Abbasi, an expert in nuclear isotope separation, noticed the suspicious motorcyclist, however, and he and his wife jumped out of the car. They were both injured in the explosion. After Abbasi recovered, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed him as one of Iran's vice presidents as well as head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.
Iran suspects that a "triangle of wickedness," consisting of the US, Israel and their hired accomplices, is behind the attacks, according to sources in Tehran. Washington denies any responsibility: "We were not involved," a spokeswoman for the US State Department said in response to Rezaei's death. Israel, for its part, has opted for a policy of ambiguous silence.
Part of a Campaign
According to sources in Israeli intelligence, the killings are part of a campaign to sabotage, or at least slow down, Iran's nuclear program. .. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,739883,00.html .. The alleged campaign also involves other tactics as well as targeted assassinations. The cyber-attack using the Stuxnet computer virus, which paralyzed large parts of the Iranian nuclear program in the summer of 2010, is supposedly also part of Israel's secret campaign against Iran.
But for hardliners in the Israeli military, the covert action does not go far enough. The calls for bombing Iran are getting louder and louder, especially among Israeli Air Force officers, the informant told SPIEGEL ONLINE. There is apparently a heated debate about the effectiveness of such assassination campaigns and whether they can fulfill their goal, reported Yossi Melman, intelligence expert at the Israeli daily Haaretz. In addition, Israel has already faced fierce criticism over other assassinations .. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,739908,00.html .. allegedly committed by its agents in foreign countries.
Until now, Mossad experts have been able to convince decision-makers that the construction of an Iranian bomb can best be delayed through attacks on key figures and nuclear facilities. But it is unclear how long Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to follow this advice. Politicians in Jerusalem know well that Mossad is also pursuing its own interests when it argues that its agents should play the leading role in the struggle against Iran.
"As long as Mossad is leading the fight against the bomb, it will get the big budgets," said the source. Whether there will be an open attack on Iran's nuclear facilities in the future will partly depend on whether the Israeli military or intelligence wins the internal power struggle, the source said. "Just like with everything, this is also about prestige."
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed that Rezaei had worked on the development of high-voltage switching systems. In reality, it was an official from a member nation of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency who told this to the Associated Press, rather than a official statement by the IAEA. We have corrected the article accordingly. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,777899,00.html
Following the Second World War, people who had been involved with the American, British and other Allies’ “Jedburgh” teams supporting the European Resistance just before the Normandy landings, and the work of the British Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services in Asia, were among those planning for the eventuality of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
We know now that this invasion never was a serious risk, either while Stalin was alive or after his death in 1953, but it was a threat that preoccupied governments in the West. Before the creation of NATO, a rudimentary “stay-behind” network of Europeans was developed to provide the nucleus for resistance following such an invasion. This was the work of the U.S. State Department-controlled Office of Policy Coordination, predecessor to the CIA, and British Intelligence’s MI9 department, which had run underground networks during the war. The U.S. part of the project was later assigned to the Defense Department. The operation was called “Gladio” (a Roman short sword) and remained secret until 1990. (In Italy and certain other countries, it had been corrupted by acquiring a right-wing conspiratorial political character.)
The American Army, traditionally hostile to “special” or “elite” units, was in 1952 persuaded to develop a force that in wartime would sustain these stay-behind networks by parachuting in small units (“A Teams”) of American soldiers to provide them with tactical advice, leadership, arms, tactical training and medical services. These were the original “green berets,” making up the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg. After the East German workers’ riots in 1953, the unit was split and one part moved to Germany, leaving the rest at Fort Bragg to become the 77th Special Forces Group, a support and training element for the 10th. It, in turn, created Army Reserve units, one of them near New York City, where I lived.
At the time I was a young and highly romantic American veteran of the Korean War, where I had planned to become a hero.
This plan did not work out, but, still influenced by having read too much T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), this new Special Forces detachment in the Army Reserve was just what I had been waiting for.
Advertisement I signed up, and subsequently spent a couple of years of summer vacations at Fort Bragg, and weekends during the rest of the year attending not very inspiring training sessions at a New Jersey armory. Then I told myself to grow up—I was not a potential hero and had more interesting things to do with my life. So I resigned from the Army Reserve.
I am writing about this because I want to describe Special Forces during those years. We conceived of ourselves as potential liberators of a Soviet-conquered Europe, supporting Europe’s guerrilla resistance. (That was to change with the Vietnam deployment in the 1960s, when Special Forces were given the mission of chasing guerrillas down and killing them.) We were bound by the laws of war and were expected (if only for our own protection under the Geneva Conventions) to operate in military uniform while carrying military identification.
We’ve come a long way since—both Army Special Forces and the United States’ idea of its mission in the world. Today, Special Forces have been grouped with the Army’s Delta Force, Rangers (specialized light infantry), the Navy’s SEALs and the Marine Corps’ Special Operations units, plus some air units, in something called U.S. Special Operations Command, which, according to The Washington Post, was deployed in 75 countries last year, and expects to be operating in 120 countries by the end of this year.
According to a report by Nick Turse, an editor of the website TomDispatch.com and editor of the book “The Case for Withdrawal From Afghanistan” (Verso Books), the current mission of Special Operations Command includes counterterrorism raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.
It also does assassinations. According to John Nagl, a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the Command includes a clandestine sub-unit operating under White House authority, which is “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.” This unit was responsible for killing Osama bin Laden.
None of this is likely to be news to anyone who follows American policy. I bring it up to challenge such a program and policy, not simply out of considerations for national and individual morality, but for political and military policy reasons.
The global security domination program that the U.S. has followed since 2003 expresses a militarism, ruthlessness and disregard of international law that now characterizes the Pentagon. In the absence of resistance by the American political class, this has bestowed upon the American nation an identity that 19th century Prussia once possessed—the nation that was owned by its army. This is what Dwight Eisenhower warned against.
As many of us have argued, global domination is a political policy that cannot possibly succeed. The world is not open to domination by a single state. The effort to establish it will destroy the United States itself. The reasons are evident in history. The danger was there in 1960, when Dwight Eisenhower left office, and in 1963 when Lyndon Johnson became president and discovered what the United States had been doing in the Caribbean. He exclaimed that the Kennedy administration and the CIA had been “running a goddamned Murder Incorporated down there!” (This is from “Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964” Simon & Schuster, 1998, edited by Michael R. Beschloss).
A global policy of assassination of what are conceived to be America’s enemies endlessly creates, motivates and augments the number and determination of those enemies. It defeats itself. It is an assault upon the most powerful force in modern history, nationalism, which is composed of religion and culture, and incorporates a people’s moral identity and sense of destiny.
Visit William Pfaff’s website for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.
The killing of the scientists in Iran now hardens the attitudes of the hard-line clerics in power, gives them justification for further crackdown on those working for more democracy in Iran, and puts in danger many of the gains democracy-minded Iranians have made in the over the years.
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