The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  Fashi said his minders instructed him on conducting surveillance and countersurveillance and on the use of munitions. He was told to study and memorize Mohammadi’s daily activities. A model of the scientist’s house was constructed at the Mossad training camp in Azerbaijan, along with a mock-up of his neighborhood in northern Tehran. Fashi was schooled on how to conduct assassinations while on a motorcycle.

  In all, Fashi said, Mossad devised at least ten attacks for him to conduct inside Iran, targeting a number of scientists and other figures involved in the nuclear program. Israel was bent on showing Iran that its defenses were weak and that no one involved in the nuclear program was safe. The Israelis hoped to demoralize and instill fear in the country’s nuclear brain trust and make them think twice before cooperating with the military or the Revolutionary Guard—or even opening their mail.

  Iran made a state spectacle of Fashi’s execution. The widow of the murdered scientist told the assassin on government television that he would “face the wrath of God” for his duplicity. Fashi then said from the gallows, “The end of the road has nothing except repentance—and rope.” Finally hooded guards released a trap door beneath his feet.

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  THE TARGETING OF THE NUCLEAR scientists continued apace following Fashi’s execution. The assassins appeared intent on eliminating those men who worked for the Physics Research Center. If they couldn’t hit Mohsen Fakhrizadeh directly, they’d take out those close to him.

  On November 29, 2010, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani and Majid Shahriari, veterans of the center and the Parchin tests, prepared for their morning commute to work from their respective homes in the city’s affluent northern suburbs, not realizing they were being watched. It was indeed the case that the United States, Israel, and other Western intelligence agencies had been covertly tracking their work for more than five years, and the United Nations had sanctioned Abbasi-Davani in 2007 for his partnership with Fakhrizadeh, who had been blacklisted a year earlier. But the scientists had bigger problems that day.

  Assassins had been monitoring their movements to and from their homes and workplaces for months. On that November morning, masked men on motorcycles sped toward the two scientists. Jumping off their bikes, they attached magnetized bombs to the undersides of Abbasi-Davani’s and Shahriari’s sedans in an operation eerily reminiscent of Fashi’s. It happened so quickly bystanders didn’t realize anything was amiss. Tehran’s chaotic streets quickly swallowed up the masked men as they sped off into anonymity.

  Abbasi-Davani knew something was wrong when he heard a subtle click underneath his car, he told Iranian reporters. He grabbed his wife, and they dove out of their car just before the bomb detonated. They both sustained cuts and burns from the blast but walked away largely unhurt.

  Majid Shahriari wasn’t so lucky. The blast killed him instantly, sending a fireball high into the morning sky above Tehran. Photos of his contorted body made newspapers and television news broadcasts around the world. The Iranian government began displaying the carcass of the scientist’s car at national events as a symbol of the hostile acts perpetrated by the Americans and the “Zionists,” and eventually placed it on display at the Holy Defense Museum. Again Tehran accused Mossad of having the blood of Iranian scientists on its hands, though Israel never either confirmed or denied its role in the assassinations.

  President Ahmadinejad displayed defiance in a nationally televised event in February 2012, shortly after one of the attacks. The ceremony was officially convened to commemorate the fueling of Tehran’s research reactor, which for the first time was using uranium plates produced inside Iran. But photos of five murdered scientists were displayed behind the firebrand leader as he spoke on a dais. He fell to his knees after his oration to kiss the daughter of another murdered scientist, Darioush Rezaienejad, while Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani looked on. “We won’t rest until these martyrs are avenged,” Ahmadinejad said.

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  AT THE REVOLUTIONARY GUARD’S headquarters in Tehran, General Qasem Soleimani and his fellow commanders in the Qods Force plotted their retaliation. Soleimani was dusting off an old playbook. For decades, the Guard and its proxies had executed attacks on American, Israeli, and Arab targets overseas. These included the bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in 1983, which used a Hezbollah suicide bomber, and the 1994 attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The strikes often utilized Iranian diplomatic missions overseas, or Persian and Arab émigrés. They targeted Tehran’s exiled political rivals in European cities, including Berlin and Paris. This assassination campaign was particularly intense in the early 1990s in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, as Tehran sought to intimidate its political opponents.

  One of Soleimani’s deputy generals in the Qods Force was a man named Abdul Reza Shahlai. His name was little known in Western intelligence circles. But among Shahlai’s primary responsibilities was oversight of terrorist strikes against Iran’s enemies, according to U.S. officials. The United States first encountered Shahlai in Iraq, when captured Shiite fighters described to their American interrogators how Shahlai had overseen the January 2007 attack on a U.S. military base in Karbala, which killed five American soldiers and was executed on the ground by members of Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militias.

  Shahlai’s reach stretched far beyond Iraq and the Middle East, including to a family member living in the United States. Shahlai’s cousin Mansour Arbabsiar had moved to the United States in the 1970s after gaining entrance to a Texas university. He later went on to work as a used-car salesman in Corpus Christi. He’d had a string of failed marriages to local women. Most of Arbabsiar’s neighbors viewed the balding, paunchy forty-seven-year-old as a semi-employed buffoon rather than a threat to the United States. But Arbabsiar maintained a high-level connection to Tehran that U.S. intelligence services hadn’t detected. Even after three decades in America, the Texan continued to communicate with his powerful cousin. They met up on the few occasions when Arbabsiar traveled back to visit Tehran, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

  In late 2011, Shahlai approached Arbabsiar with a proposition. As the murders of the Iranian scientists continued, the IRGC wanted to strike back by assassinating Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. One of King Abdullah’s closest strategic advisors, he regularly flew back to the kingdom to personally advise the monarch on the latest developments in the United States or to outline the important events shaping the Middle East. Al-Jubeir positioned himself as a hard-liner on Iran, pressing the Obama administration to confront the country and stop its nuclear advances by any means possible. And he was something of a star in Washington as well. In the wake of 9/11, he was a regular on Larry King’s talk show. He also dated Campbell Brown, a CNN news anchor, and had a high profile on Washington’s diplomatic circuit.

  Shahlai plotted to kill al-Jubeir while he lunched at Café Milano, a high-end Georgetown eatery known for its politically powerful clientele, according to U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence. Killing al-Jubeir in the heart of Washington would send a clear signal to the United States and its allies that Tehran could retaliate anywhere and that no one, no matter how powerful, was beyond the Qods Force’s reach. In essence, it reprised the strategy Iran believed the Israelis were using by targeting its nuclear brain trust. Because Tehran viewed Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States as operating together in targeting its nuclear program, it considered an attack on al-Jubeir to be a strike against them all.

  Arbabsiar was no seasoned terrorist. So the IRGC steered its plot in a more complex and international direction. The car dealer’s home in Texas was not far from the border with Mexico, an area overrun by criminals and drug gangs. Executions and beheadings were regular occurrences over the border in cities such as Juarez. Shahlai wanted his cousin to bring in hired assassins, preferably members of an international drug cartel known as Los Zetas, to carry out the attack on al-Jubeir. This would provide Iran with deniability. While the country had historically utilized
proxies, such as Hezbollah, for its overseas attacks, and was accused of launching attacks on Israeli targets in Argentina in the 1990s using local operatives, the Mexico plot was a novel twist.

  Arbabsiar began flying to Mexico to make contact with members of Los Zetas. Over a string of trips, he succeeded in conveying his cousin’s overture to the narco gang. But he also inadvertently tipped off the FBI. An undercover agent began meeting with Arbabsiar, posing as a member of Los Zetas, as the plot advanced. The agent probed Arbabsiar to find out for whom he was working in Iran and how far the planning had gone for the operation.

  Arbabsiar began calling a Tehran-based intermediary of his cousin’s, named Ali Gholam Shakuri, to discuss the details of the plot. In conversations taped by the FBI, the two men referred to the assassination of Ambassador al-Jubeir as the “Chevrolet” they were hoping to purchase. “How are your efforts going to buy the Chevrolet?” Shakuri asked his U.S.-based interlocutor in the summer of 2011. “We’re ready for the purchase,” Arbabsiar responded.

  Shortly thereafter, the Qods Force wired Arbabsiar more than $100,000 to execute the assassination. This fueled panic inside the FBI, as concerns mounted that the Iranian plot was imminent. FBI agents stormed Arbabsiar’s home in Texas and whisked him to New York for an arraignment. He was accused of abusing the New York financial system in an attempt to conduct murder. Top U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, called the plot one of the greatest terrorist operations ever thwarted in the United States. “This was directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and specifically senior members of the Qods Force,” Holder told reporters. “High-up officials in those agencies…were responsible for the plot.”

  Some Iran experts, both inside the United States and overseas, quickly discounted the FBI’s claims. They cited the spectacular, Hollywood-style nature of the plot and cast doubt on the notion that the Iranians would risk courting a direct conflict with Washington by carrying out an assassination inside the United States. For one thing, nothing like that had ever been done before. An alternative theory was that members of the Qods Force purposely wanted the plot exposed to embarrass President Ahmadinejad and weaken those in Tehran still hoping to negotiate with the United States on the nuclear issue.

  Arbabsiar, though, eventually pleaded guilty, getting more than thirty years in prison. And the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence services were convinced that the plot was real. They cited the large wire transfer to Arbabsiar. They also understood the extent of the feud between Iran and the United States and feared that things were spinning out of control.

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  THE PLOT AGAINST THE SAUDI envoy was just one of at least a half dozen operations the Qods Force launched in retaliation for the assassinations of the nuclear scientists. They dispatched Iranian and Hezbollah operatives to Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2011 to target American and Israeli diplomats using explosives and snipers, according to U.S. and Azeri officials who investigated the operation. Bombing plots linked to Iran were exposed in Nairobi, Mombasa, Bangkok, and New Delhi in early 2012. That July, a suicide bomber struck a bus in the Bulgarian resort of Burgas that carried forty-two Israeli tourists, mostly youths; five were killed and thirty-two injured. Bulgarian authorities charged Hezbollah with executing the strike.

  As the tit-for-tat bloodletting intensified, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh continued his work in north Tehran. Once more the scientist renamed his office and moved its location. The newest incarnation of the Physics Research Center was known as the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research or by its Persian acronym, SPND. Fakhrizadeh staffed the body with many of the same senior scientists and Revolutionary Guard officials who had worked at his center more than a decade earlier, according to IAEA staff. The SPND hosted six directorates, including research labs for metallurgy, chemistry, and explosives testing. IAEA and U.S. officials believed Fakhrizadeh and his staff were still working on perfecting technologies applicable for developing atomic weapons. But Fakhrizadeh knew his operations were under constant scrutiny, so he was more guarded and kept SPND’s operations diffuse.

  Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the scientist who had survived the downtown Tehran assassination attempt, used his newfound national celebrity to move up the chain of the Iranian government’s bureaucracy. President Ahmadinejad named him vice president of Iran in 2011 and concurrently the president of the Atomic Energy Organization. His post gave him expansive powers to oversee the direction of Tehran’s nuclear fuel production and Iran’s relationship with the IAEA. He’d essentially moved from being at the center of Iran’s secret nuclear program to being the public face of its aspirations.

  Abbasi-Davani, despite facing a UN travel ban, was afforded special diplomatic status as vice president and began traveling regularly to Vienna to meet with IAEA officials. Interestingly enough, in that role he negotiated with the agency on its demands to have unlimited access to inspect the Parchin military facility, where he had allegedly taken part in the clandestine weapons work a decade earlier and which remained at the center of Western fears about Iran’s long-term intentions. But Abbasi-Davani and his diplomatic colleagues repeatedly rebuffed the IAEA’s demands.

  The scientist oversaw the rapid expansion of nuclear-fuel production at Iran’s atomic sites, including the underground enrichment facility in the city of Qom. Faster centrifuges, which could increase the output of enriched uranium by three to five times, were installed under the scientist’s watch. Abbasi-Davani told Iranian lawmakers that the country would develop nuclear submarines, a program that required Iran to produce highly enriched uranium, meaning uranium that was 90 percent pure rather than its previous level of 20 percent.

  U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials doubted Tehran had the capability to produce submarines. But they saw the vice president’s comments as an excuse for Iran to move to the brink of producing weapons-grade fuel. They were further unnerved when Abbasi-Davani met in 2012 with North Korean officials to sign an agreement on scientific cooperation. U.S. and Israeli officials had long believed Tehran and Pyongyang were sharing nuclear weapons data and equipment. At an event in Tehran, North Korea and Iran announced they were establishing joint laboratories, engaging in scientific transfers, and exchanging their scientists. “The Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea have common enemies since the arrogant powers can’t bear independent governments,” Supreme Leader Khamenei said at the time.

  Abbasi-Davani, meanwhile, railed against the West, which he accused of the attempt on his life. On a trip to Vienna in late 2011, he gathered international reporters at the IAEA’s headquarters near the Danube River and told them that Israel, the United States, and Britain had plotted for more than five years to kill him. But he defiantly and triumphantly stressed that he had survived. “Six years ago the intelligence service of the U.K. began collecting information and data regarding my past,” he said. They even “checked into the back door of my room in the university to see whether I had a bodyguard or not….But I am still here.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Rial War

  Iran’s rapid advances on its nuclear program were sowing panic in the Obama administration and the Israeli government. Military threats, the assassination of nuclear scientists, and diplomatic isolation weren’t curbing Tehran’s gains. The U.S. administration was increasingly concerned that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu might strike Iran on his own, risking a broader Middle East war. The United States had for decades imposed various forms of trade sanctions on Tehran, but with only limited impact. The White House thus decided to ratchet up pressure on Iran where it really hurt—its bank accounts.

  In the summer of 2011, U.S. intelligence services began tracking large flows of Iranian oil money that were being processed through a small bank in the United Arab Emirates’ financial capital, Dubai. The firm, Noor Islamic Bank, was then transferring these funds back to Tehran through Iranian state banks the U.S. Treasury Department had already san
ctioned for allegedly financing Iran’s nuclear program and supporting international terrorism. The fact that Iran was using such a small banking partner showed the United States that penalties imposed since 2006 were effective in driving the country underground and out of the global economy. But Iran was still finding loopholes. The remittances going through Noor Islamic Bank made up as much as two-thirds of Iran’s total oil revenues in 2011, according to U.S. officials. The Obama administration saw an opportunity to hit the Iranians hard, as pressure from the U.S. Congress was building for the White House to try to shut down Iran’s entire oil trade—the lifeblood of the country’s economy.

  For five years already, the Treasury Department and the U.S. Congress had pursued an intensifying financial war against Iran in a bid to force Tehran to end its nuclear program. The U.S. sanctions were targeting virtually every sector of the Iranian economy—particularly its banks, shipping companies, and insurance sector. But increasingly the heart of Washington’s strategy was to dry up Iran’s oil exports, which financed around 70 percent of Tehran’s total budget, by crippling its ability to conduct any trade. Denying Iran this cash, U.S. officials believed, might be the only way to get Iran to capitulate on its nuclear work, short of war.

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  IN 2004, THE GEORGE W. BUSH administration established a new office at the Treasury Department. It was called the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, or TFI, and included units focused on intelligence collection, sanctions, and financial crime. Up until that year, successive administrations had at times used the Treasury Department to punish America’s enemies with economic sanctions or to track the finances of Latin American drug kingpins and American organized crime leaders. But Treasury didn’t yet have a seat at the table in the country’s national security apparatus. It was a marginal player, even though Treasury’s offices were situated right next door to the White House.