The Rest Is Classified - 40. Iran vs Israel: Mossad Assassinates Iranian Mastermind (Ep 2)

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

The future of warfare is already here, and it's more terrifying than we imagined. How did Israel deploy a remote-controlled robotic gun to assassinate a high-profile target? What does this operation reveal about the rise of AI-assisted killings? And are we prepared for a world where drones and robots can kill without human intervention? In 2020, the killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh demonstrated the deadly potential of remote-controlled weaponry. But this is just the beginning. As AI technology advances, the possibility of fully autonomous weapons systems becomes increasingly real. Listen as Gordon and David explore the technological and ethical dimensions of this assassination, and confront the unsettling reality of a future where killer robots may no longer be science fiction. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified Exclusive INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to https://incogni.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Iran's top nuclear scientists woke up an hour before dawn, as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before his day began. Then shortly after noon on Friday, November 27, 2020, he slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Tayyana sedan. Te-Tina? Teyana? I was actually thinking the same thing. I have no idea.

Teyana. Teyana. Teyana. We're not going to be sponsored by Nissan. This episode is brought to you by Nissan Teyana. He slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Teyana sedan, his wife in the passenger seat beside him, and hit the road. As the convoy left the Caspian coast, the first car carried a security detail. It was followed by

the unarmoured black Nissan driven by Mr. Facrizade. Two more security cars followed. The security team had warned Mr. Facrizade that day of a threat against him and asked him not to travel. But Mr Fakrizadeh said he had a university class to teach in Tehran the next day, and he could not do it remotely. Well, that's the definitive account of Mohsen Fakrizadeh's last morning written by the journalists Ronan Bergman and Farnas Fassihi from the New York Times. Welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClaskey. And we are looking at the story of the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on that day, November 27th, 2020. As we heard last time, he is the man at the heart of Iran's nuclear program. And we've explored how he played a key role in setting up that program in its clandestine efforts to smuggle the parts in for a bomb, how he's working both as a member of the Revolutionary Guards and as a university professor, as we heard, how Iran's enemies, particularly Israel, have identified him as a key player in that program.

And they have been going after the scientists already and have been this spate of assassinations of scientists involved in different aspects of Iran's nuclear program. And now as we approach November 2020, they've got Fakrizadeh himself in their sights, haven't they? So he is certainly one of their top targets. And we should say, Gordon, that even though Mayor Degan, the sort of the Mossad chief we talked about last time, who's so instrumental to really establishing this policy of targeted assassinations inside Tehran, so Degan is not the Mossad chief anymore, but the Mossad

chief at the time, Yossi Cohen, is a Dagon sort of acolyte, right, or protege. And he's been running the Iran portfolio in part for Dagon all the way back to 2004. So we have a sort of continuous policy of finding opportunities to go after some of these really senior Iranian scientists. And by 2020, as we'll see, the Israelis are at a point where they have a real opportunity to go after Mosin Fakhrizadeh. And worth just setting a bit of the international context at that time, because there had been of course a deal to put constraints around the Iran nuclear program, which had been signed

in 2015. But when President Trump in his first term pulled out of that deal, Iran started to push ahead with its program because there were no longer constraints about it. So, there is also a kind of renewed desire, I think, to do something about it. And one of the things Israel is going to do is go after Fakhrizadeh. And now, as we looked at last time, the people around him had been killed. Lots of people in his program. And so, he's going to have security to protect him. As we heard, when he's driving, he's got bodyguards, other cars. That kind of situation, it is a challenge, isn't it, to try and understand where you might get

that opportunity to go after someone. And I think there's one other, I guess, event that's worth mentioning to set up why I think the Israelis believe this operation is worth the risk at the end of 2020. And that's that in early 2020, the US killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Quds Force, their sort of military expeditionary group, right? He's killed in Baghdad by the US.

And there's really not a significant Iranian response to this. I mean, there's a sort of missile and rocket volley in response to it that does lead to some injuries, but it's not as much of a response perhaps as anyone might have expected. And so I think Fakhrizadeh is a bigger fish to go after than many of the other scientists that the Israelis have targeted in the decade prior. And so I think the risk calculation is also being framed by the fact that Soleimani had just been killed months earlier. But to go after Fakrizadeh, I mean, I think the way

from just an operational standpoint, listeners should think about this is you want to establish something called pattern of life, because you need to figure out how the target moves, lives, what they do, what their habits are, what their routines are to find the vulnerability, right? You don't start with a concept of how you kill somebody and then jam it into their life.

You watch them if you can and figure out where you might create an opportunity or exploit a vulnerability to go after them. And it seems pretty clear that he would have been a top collection target for a long time for the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, and they would have been collecting what signals intelligence they'd have been trying to get inside of his communications, they'd have been trying to get agents close to him, and we won't know the exact details

of that. But that's what we're talking about, isn't it? Is having as many different ways of understanding his life and his movements as possible. Well, and I think this is one of the central mysteries that, for very good reasons, has not come out in any of the actual reporting on this is exactly how did the Israelis get insight into his routines and movements, right? But what seems pretty clear from the way this killing was planned is that Masad was in the guy's comms, right? They probably had access to phones,

emails, laptops, like they had access to electronics that were floating around him or that perhaps were even his, it seems to me. And potentially for a long time before the hit, because I think they would have, again, we'll see some of the hints later on that they kind of knew this guy's routines really well. So it's not like they'd had this stuff for a couple of weeks. They'd probably been watching him really closely. And

in Iran, I mean, the way the Israelis talk about this kind of synthesis between SIGINT, signals intelligence and human intelligence is what Masad calls Hugent. Hugent, I guess, maybe is that right? So it's the synthesis of both of them. So it's probably some combination of there's somebody that Masad recruited to get access to those guys comms, right? I guess you'd call it human-enabled signals intelligence

in many respects, right? But we don't know. This remains a mystery, I think, exactly how they got access to it. In fact, the sort of penetration of Foucrise Dey and his inner circle was so complete and total that apparently there was actually a dispute in Massad about the wisdom of killing him at all

because he was essentially an unwitting source, because they had access to so much of his life that they could effectively glean a lot on sort of Iran's nuclear program plans and intentions, that kind of thing, just from watching him, right? So apparently there was some dispute about this. And there's a great quote in some of Ronan Bergman's reporting, and he is a New York Times journalist

and Israeli with exceptional access to the Mossad who has written, I would say the definitive account of this hit. And Bergman wrote, Mossad breathed with the guy, referring to Fakhrizadeh, woke up with him, slept with him, traveled with him. They would have smelled his aftershave every morning if he had used aftershave,

which is a great little indication of how close you are that you even know that this guy doesn't use aftershave, which is a great little indication of how close you are that you even know that this guy doesn't use aftershave, which I guess I would have assumed too, given how bearded he is. Well, we said we don't know much about him, as we said in the previous episode, but one thing we know is he doesn't use aftershave. So there's a few things we know. He's not a big shaver. No, but the picture we have of him is that he's not a soft target.

I mean, he's got a security detail. He's got bodyguards around him when he travels, when he moves. As we heard in that opening quote, he's got a carful of bodyguards with him. So he is taking the kind of precautions you'd expect someone to take in his position to avoid being the subject of one of these assassination attempts, knowing that sometimes it's happened with people driving up to cars, you know, with guns or with mines to attach to them. So the Mossad watches for a while and they find what they think might be a vulnerability, which is as Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is driving from Tehran, so he's actually got a country house in Absard,

which is a bit outside of the city. There's a vacation home up on the Caspian and Fakrizadeh likes to drive himself, which I can relate to that. I mean, why would he want to have a driver if he's driving, especially if he's going up for kind of a personal weekend with his wife, family. Maybe the last thing you'd want is to be in the back seat. Well, you've got this driver driving you there.

Like you'd rather just drive yourself. And while of course we're talking about an assassination, I mean, in Fakrizadeh's mind, I mean, he is on his home turf, driving between his houses in comfortable places that he has known for many, many years. But the fact that he's got this impulse to drive himself is really one of the things that's going to get him in trouble. And in particular, it's this drive from his country house in Absard back to Tehran. Now, just a couple of words on Absard.

It's actually I've watched YouTube videos of drives around there. It's a very lovely place. It's a small town set into the mountains full of apple and cherry orchards, modernist villas, Persian style palaces. I guess it's an elite escape from Tehran, Gordon, to spend the weekend. I don't know. What's the British equivalent of getting out of London

for the weekend? Well, three or four hours. Maybe it's your Cornwall country house, I see, but you'd be lucky to do it in three or four hours. Okay. Even given what the traffic is like there. I don't know, Devon Dorsett, somewhere like that. OK.

Somewhere a bit. What's the American equivalent? Jersey. I was trying to think about this. Yeah, so maybe it's the equivalent of a wealthy New Yorker driving from a home, like on Martha's Vineyard, into one of the suburbs in Connecticut outside New York or something like that.

Again, the traffic could probably be really nasty there. But the point being is this is a casual day for Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, right? He's not in a war zone. He's on a three to four hour drive on open roads that he knows between his homes. But what's critical from a really an operational, a planning perspective from Mossad

is that they've got a guy who's gonna be driving his own car, moving down a road. And it's not gonna be a really packed city road in the crush of Tehran traffic, which Tehran traffic by the way is absolutely horrendous and probably contributed, and if a cruise a day would remember this, contributed to the death of some of his friends when they were stuck in traffic and would have basically

magnetic explosives attached to their car or someone would pull up on a motorcycle and shoot them dead as they sit in rush hour traffic. So he's going to be moving down a pretty open country road and Mossad has a vulnerability and now they have to come up with a plan to exploit that vulnerability. And one option is to just shoot him, right? Have someone pull up to the car, pull alongside the car and shoot him. Now this is really risky. I mean, the Israelis have a saying, no rescue, no operation. So the plan needs to be foolproof.

They need their agents or assets to escape. They do not want to sacrifice agents or assets. So they rule out the run and gun shootout idea. Now, another one is a roadside bomb or a car bomb. Now, that is imprecise, difficult to place correctly. You would also maybe not be certain that you would kill him. And the Israelis really want to limit collateral damage. And if he's driving with his wife in the car, there is a really good chance that she would

die as well. So they come up, and this is where it gets pretty wild. They come up with an extraordinary idea, which is a remote controlled satellite linked gun, a robotic gun, which as we were researching this did make me think, I don't know if you've seen this movie, Gordon the Jackal, the late nineties, Bruce Willis flick. Nope, nope. Okay.

On my list. Sorry. He uses a robotic machine gun and Jack Black gets his arm blown off by it in the movie, but it's a robotic machine gun. And this is the idea that the Israelis have now. The advantages are, I can't believe you haven't seen the Jackal Gordon. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's a that's as shameful as the fact that I haven't seen war games.

We'll deal with both of those in time. I finally got even. So but the advantages of this gunner, I think immediately clear, which is the support assets that the Israelis will use can place it and then get away. There's no shooter on site. So you're gonna operate this from, in this case, it's gonna be thousand miles away. It can be very precise so that you are not going to kill

bodyguards or his wife. And what I think is fascinating is that, I mean, remote operated weaponry is not, is not particularly new. I mean, it's not a new idea. I mean, we ran the Jackal reference, but I mean, it actually goes back to maybe the second world war where B 29 super fortresses, they had, you know, turrets with separate gunners located throughout the aircraft.

And then they actually consolidated it into one gunner aiming multiple guns from kind of a plexiglass dome Kind of sighting station and is actually using an early version of a GE computer to direct the guns where they should be pointing There's actually another example of this which is Something called the common remote operated weapon station or crows now. I know you're a pigeon guy Gordon But this is a crows system another bird reference. Yeah. And basically it's a remote operated gun set atop a US Humvee. Right. So instead of a gunner actually having their half of their body, their head out, they could be down from the safety of the cab firing the gun.

But I guess what's with both of those examples, what you're still talking about, it is remote controlled on one level, but only maybe by a few feet. You know, the person is still in the B-29 Superfortress or they're in the Humvee. They're operating it, but it's basically just above them or close to them. So in a sense, it's remote controlled, but not in a way this operation is going to be. I mean, that's what's remarkable about this is the distance, if you like, between the person operating it, the controller, and the target. We're talking about, what is it, 1,000 miles?

Something extraordinary between Israel and this remote part of Iran. In many respects, it's like a land-based drone. The Israelis in this case couldn't obviously fly a drone from Israel to Iran without it being shot down or noticed or whatever. But in this case, you can have all of the advantages of that distance with all of the accuracy of a gun as opposed to using something from the air. Now, what they choose seems to be an FN mag machine gun, probably Belgian made with armor penetrating capabilities. It's attached, according to unnamed Israeli officials, to a robotic apparatus that is very similar to a piece of equipment actually made by a Spanish arms manufacturer called the Sentinel 20.

It's essentially a robotic turret that allows the operator to move the gun around and to compress the trigger. Now it's rigged up with cameras everywhere so you can see probably 360 degrees around this thing up, all that. Now, one of the problems is that when the Israelis put all this together,

and of course they tested extensively inside the Israelis put all this together, and of course, they tested extensively inside Israel before they ever deploy it, it weighs almost 2,000 pounds. Yeah, it's a big bit of cake. Right now, no one really knows, but in the Ronin Bergman account of killing, he claims that Mossad used maybe about 20 officers and support assets to sort of assemble and position everything in Iran, right? Which means you're probably smuggling this thing in piece by piece in like produce trucks that are going across the border with Iraqi Kurdistan. It probably takes a

long time to get all of this kit into Iran. I actually saw just a reference that a few months ago, so years after the operation, the Iranians had charged, prosecuted, convicted, I think, three people of treason for a role in this. I mean, they were described as Kurdish smugglers and alcohol smugglers, and that had been their cover. They may have been used to bring in some of those parts, witting or unwitting, we don't know.

And obviously, that may only be one part of the operation, but you can imagine a very complex long-term operation using smugglers, perhaps using existing criminal smuggling networks to bring those parts in, and then someone who can assemble it in this place, ready to do it and camouflage it, I guess. Yeah. Make sure it doesn't look suspicious.

Have the cameras there, wire it up so it's ready to go. I mean, it's a pretty serious bit of effort. But I guess that's the advantage of having chosen this remote location in the middle of the countryside on this route. Everything you just laid out there, Gordon, it's very labor intensive, I think, to do this. They decide to rig the gun up on the back of a Zamiya pickup truck, which is a type of truck, very common in Iran and to camouflage it.

So it looks like a workman's truck, right? So it kind of has tools, construction equipment in the back all situated to hide this gun. Now the Israelis have another problem, which is they need to verify in real time that it's most infa-crisis day in the car. At the wheel. Yeah.

At the wheel. He's the one driving. Right. Because it could be his wife driving. It could be a body. I mean, they need to be certain that it's him. And so they come up with another idea, which is to basically set up a car along the route that

will precede the Zamiyad pickup truck that's got the gun. And that will be rigged up with cameras to allow the Israelis with enough time to confirm or to call the whole thing off that it's actually Fakrizadeh at the wheel. So they position a car on the route, which is gonna look broken down. It's got a wheel missing, you know, it's

sort of on a jack as if a tire is being changed, and maybe someone's left it there. But in it, as a series of cameras, which will grab an image of who's driving the cars in the convoy. And it's just far enough from the sight of the gun to give the Israelis time to confirm the identity of the driver and adapt what they're doing. So that's how they'll do the check. Now, there's another problem which we haven't discussed, and I think this is how we end up with the maybe somewhat exaggerated claim that the gun that

killed Mosin Bakriziadet was AI enabled. And it's the idea that that distance from Israel where presumably the operators of this robotic gun will be sitting and Iran, there's a lag. There's a comms lag from that message going from the operator in Israel to Iran and back and forth. So you have a time lag issue. You also have an issue of most of the remote operated weapons systems we were just talking about,

the crows, the B-29. The guns are really, they're on a very stable surface, right, or they're sort of- Stabilized, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because it's gonna move when you fire. It's gonna move. when you it's gonna move There's gonna be there's gonna be recoil, right?

Every time you fire the pickup the Zamiat is gonna sort of rock and tilt the car so you've got you've got the movement of the vehicle that the gun is in and You've got that that comms delay. Yeah, which is about one and a half seconds. Yeah, that's right These really calculate its it's 0.8 seconds each way. So round trip, it's a 1.6 second delay. And by the way, you're going to be aiming at a car that might be moving. Yeah, that has the creasaday in it. So it's a little bit like, I guess the lag, Gordon in like a video game. Yeah. And the

Israelis develop a piece of software to overcome this, to compensate. And that is where we get these claims that it's AI enabled, right? But it's really, it's an algorithm that the Israelis have built, purpose built to account for the rock of the car, the movement of Moslem Fakrizadeh's car, and the comms lag between

Israel and Iran. Yeah, I think it's worth stressing that because I think when people hear about AI robot guns, they immediately think of something which is, if you like, an autonomous weapon where some computer algorithm is deciding itself when to fire and when to shoot and what to shoot at. And that's the kind of, you know, That's the sci-fi vision of, if you like, about AI and warfare and drones, which to some extent we're heading to. You're starting to see some of that autonomous weapon systems being used in places, including in

Ukraine and Russia. But this is slightly different. It's AI assisting a remote-controlled weapon rather than, if you like, an autonomous weapon which fires by itself. So it's very it's not quite the killer robots idea. And so there with the gun in place controlled remotely hidden in the pickup truck. Let's take a break and when we come back it's going to be the 27th of November 2020, an otherwise pleasant afternoon on Imam Khomeini Boulevard. That is the street name outside this lovely country town of Absaad. And we'll see what happens with this operation to target Mohsin Fakrizadeh. This episode is brought to you by our friends at NordVPN.

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A car with a flat tire is parked at a roundabout just before it. And Mohsen Fakrizadeh is at the wheel of his car, a black Nissan. He's driving and his wife is in the passenger seat. They're on the road late that morning. It's a convoy, we should point out because as we mentioned, Gordon Fakrizadeh, of course, has a security detail with him at all times.

The first car carries the security guys. The second car is Mohsen Vakrizadeh and his wife in the family Nissan. And then there's two cars that have security men behind them. So it's a four car convoy. And what I think is quite wild is that later the Iranians will say they actually got wind that there might be a threat against Fakhrizadeh, but they didn't know when or where it would happen.

Fakhrizadeh had nonetheless been warned against travel. One does wonder if in the years since his friends and colleagues were targeted by the Israelis, if he's getting a constant stream of threats all the time, many of which are quite vague, and he's just totally desensitized to them at this point. But I also love the detail. He's teaching a class in Tehran the next day. It goes back to his dual life as kind of secret commander

of this nuclear weapons program, and then under another identity, an academic. And he's due to be teaching, and he doesn't want to do it remotely. He doesn't want to do it by Zoom, which I've got to give him some respect for. From a pedagogical standpoint. He wants to see his students in person, yeah.

That's right. You could imagine this guy going, no, I've had this warning, but I'm tired of these warnings. I've got to get to my class. And also I'm going to drive my car, you know, brushing it all off. But, um, I guess that's, I guess that's him. And maybe he's just stubborn.

Yeah. I think there's some stubbornness here. Maybe complacent. I don't know. Maybe a bit of, bit of that. He's also like a, I think he's probably a very stubborn kind of hard headed old guy who wants to drive his own car. Who's probably getting

15 of these threat reports every year and nothing has come to pass in, you know, recent memory for him. Also, I mean, I think we shouldn't brush past the fact that dread of a Zoom call probably contributes to his death in some way because he did not want to teach the class remotely, right? And he presumably could have, but I can also understand that as he doesn't want to do it. Yeah. You know, he's got his own play and he wants to run it. So by 3.30 local time, the motorcade has arrived outside Absard. And here I think it is a little fascinating to speculate on what's actually going on in that

car because he's just in there with his wife. I mean, he's listening to music, a podcast, a book on tape. Are they arguing? Are they in a silent, you know, sort of just silent car ride enjoying the scenery? We have absolutely no idea, but it's a very human moment. I mean, we've all been on road trips with, you know, friends, families, significant others. It's this idea he likes to drive himself. I find quite interesting. You can imagine without the bodyguards in the car time with his wife, this is almost the closest he gets to relaxing. You know, he's in the countryside and they're coming south down the road from the Caspian crosses over these beautiful mountain ranges. I think it's amazing scenery. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. And you can actually see some of these drives

on on YouTube and it's very lovely countryside mountains, rolling hills, orchards, quite lovely. So he's probably just taking in some of the scenery and enjoying the drive, enjoying being out of the grind of Tehran traffic kind of on the open road. And they come to this U-turn where essentially Fakhrizadeh in order to turn right onto Imam Khomeini Boulevard, which is this fateful road, they've got to go up kind of past Imam Khomeini Boulevard and hit a roundabout and kind of turn back around so they can actually make that right hand turn. And that

is where that roundabout is where the Israelis have placed the car. The lookout car. The lookout car. Exactly. To confirm that it's Fakhris today. So the convoy turns, something interesting happens. The lead car kind of jets off for the main house, which makes sense because they want to go and check things out at their destination, right?

It would be logical that a foreign intelligence service like the Israelis would know where he was going and could have sprung a trap on him at the house. And so the lead car zooms out to go and look. Now, what is terrible about this from a security standpoint for Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is that he's now fully exposed because he's driving the lead car of the convoy by himself with his wife, right?

So there's no security in there. And Masad might even be a little bit shocked by that because that makes their job a lot easier. Now Masad has placed that blue Zamiyad with the robotic gun in it about 500 meters south of the junctions. He's going to turn off on the Imam Khomeini Boulevard. The Zamiyad is parked about 500 meters south of that. Now, this shows, I think, the amazingly granular detail

of the intelligence that the Israelis have, because you actually see them on the satellite imagery, there are speed bumps on Imam Khomeini Boulevard. And so the whole convoy has to slow down for the speed bump right before it reaches the pickup. And so they placed this pickup, Masada has placed this pickup very intentionally to make the shooter's job easier. So he's not going to hit a car going 30, 40 miles an hour.

He's going to hit a car that's almost stopped or is it sort of a, you know, a rolling stop and we're told it's going to, you told it comes up to that speed bump, it slows down, and we're told in the Ronan Bergman, Farnas Fasihi account in the New York Times, that quote, a stray dog began crossing the road, which- I assume wasn't a Mossad dog. Which I assume was not a Mossad dog. A Mossad dog, yeah.

And I think is indicative of the sourcing that these journalists had for this piece because that's probably coming from somebody who actually watched the video in real time or later. Now the machine gun fires, so it hits the front of the car kind of right maybe on the top part of the hood before the windshield. The account isn't clear here,

but I think it suggests suggested in this initial volley, Fakrizadeh perhaps was not hit. Now, the car swerves, comes to a stop, the shooter in Israel, and by the way, we've got no idea who this person is, but he makes an adjustment and they fire again, hit the windshield maybe three times, and here they hit Fakrizadeh once in the shoulder and how do they know

it's the shoulder? Well you might hold it a bit maybe they had a look at the tape afterward but in any case Fakrizadeh slumps out of the car and crouches behind the door. Now he's probably confused as to what's going on here. Yeah obviously where the bullets are where's the shooter right? The Iranians will claim that three more bullets hit him. He falls dead on the road. Now, Mrs. Fakhrizadeh is in the car. She's unhurt, at least bodily, even though she's about 10 inches away and not a single one of the assassins is in the country. What's remarkable is the ability to move that gun because he comes out of the car, it looks like, and they are able to move the gun, point it to him, and shoot him, and kill him, and not hurt his

wife. It's remarkable how accurate that is, given that it's all done remotely. At this point, the operation looks remarkably successful from an Israeli point of view. One bit does go wrong, though, doesn't it? Because they'd wired up the robot gun to blow up and to destroy the evidence. But it looks like that didn't quite work after it's done its job. Obviously, the Israelis would prefer that the Iranians have very little to really peek through or exploit afterward. And they have rigged up the Zamiyad and the gun with explosives. But whether it was the quantity of explosives or the positioning or something else, what they do is instead of destroying the gun,

the explosives launch it skyward, but intact mostly. And the Iranians are later able to piece together what's happened. And they come to the conclusion that 15 bullets were fired out of this gun and the whole thing took less than a minute. I mean, that's amazing. Which is extraordinary. So, I remember this as a journalist being called by the news desk on the day it happened and it was fascinating because it was clear that he'd been killed and that something dramatic

had happened, but there were really conflicting reports about what it was. There was lots of talk about a shootout. I think the assumption from a lot of people was that a team of gunmen had ambushed the vehicle, had shot him, and then escaped. That was definitely the view that there was a group of 12 shooters and 50 support personnel. There hadn't been a gun battle. They'd been dragged from a car. These were some of the stories that came out at that point.

Then soon after, you started to hear this talk about a robotic machine gun being used in the aftermath. I think it took a few weeks. I remember people actually dismissed it at first. Oh, just laughed at it. Yeah, they laughed at it because people said, well, that's absurd. That's science fiction. Also, they were saying, well, this is the Iranians trying to justify what was clearly a huge security lapse

in allowing their top nuclear scientists to be killed. So they were coming up in response with some wild idea about robotic machine guns to cover up the fact that a group of gunmen had got in and managed to kill him and then escape. But actually, it appears that was the truth of what happened. It was a remarkable fact which took some time to emerge and which I think people just didn't believe at first because it just seemed too much. Well, and Faqrizadeh is given a full martyr's funeral. The coffin was draped in the Iranian flag. It's carried by an honor guard on a pilgrimage of sorts to shrines and come and Tehran, it ends in a big state funeral. Now this is COVID times.

And so everyone is wearing masks in the videos of the funeral. You can tell by the chair placement, it's a socially distanced funeral. The chairs are six feet apart. And the Iranians, despite this incredible security failure, you know, they sort of lionize Fakhrizadeh, they print his mug and put it on posters, and they say, we will chase the criminals

to the end. And Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is buried and put to rest. So I think, and Gordon, there's so many different ways we could talk about what all of this means. I think one of them, which is very striking to me, is that there can be a tendency to talk about AI facial recognition, autonomous weaponry as the future. But in reality, it's kind of the past. I mean, this was we're talking about a killing that happened five years ago. And it makes you think that science fiction like this is really, I mean, it's here. Yeah, we're starting to see it. As we said, this was kind of AI enabled remote weaponry.

Yeah, and not autonomous. I threw autonomous out there, but it's not at all. But I think what's interesting is if you just took that on one step and you said, well, what if the cameras, the two sets of cameras in the observation car and in the shooting pick-up had had facial recognition software, which were designed to automatically work out and do facial recognition on who was sat at which point in which car and then shoot the gun based on spotting it. That is technically feasible. In that sense, you could see the technology to make a weapon system like that actually

fully autonomous, just using facial recognition rather than having a human remotely authorize it and physically pull the trigger. So technically it's possible to move that on to remote controlled and autonomous. And you are starting to see that being used. I mean, there's a lot of interesting kind of work around this autonomy of weapons, particularly with drones. And that's the main way we think about it. And you see it with some of those drones, which are being used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict to target people and where there's

elements of AI. Now, we haven't quite got to that fully autonomous killer robots world yet, but I don't think it's that far away. I think this shows us the way it might be used for very targeted operations against individuals. I think in many ways it's quite a terrifying future. If someone could launch a drone or have a killer robot hidden somewhere and just wait for someone to pass, a facial recognition software says, yep, that's the target or the type of target, based on a certain signature or facial recognition, launch the drone, drop the bomb, fire the machine gun. This is the future, if not of warfare, of covert operations, I think, by intelligence

agencies. It's interesting. It did make me think of the mass production of first-person view FPV drones that we're seeing now in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, how cheap they are and how effective they are at killing from just an efficiency standpoint well beyond what you would see from dumb munitions or artillery. We are not far from, in fact, we're probably already in a world where you can merge really cheap drone technology with really cheap facial recognition technology and have something that could be used in a really terrifying way in our societies in the West too that

are not in war zones. I mean, the issue with the Fakrizadeh killing and what made it so labor intensive was the legwork required to smuggle all of this stuff into Iran, put it together there and probably to develop the intelligence picture in the first place. Yeah, to get a hard, a well-protected target. Right, exactly, exactly. And I think that kind of work across massive kind of distance will continue to be really labor intensive, right? Especially if you're trying to limit collateral damage. But if you're not concerned with limiting collateral

damage, and you're going after targets that are not all that far away, the implications of it get really spooky really quickly. Yeah, and some people do worry that the remoteness of being able to kill people also makes it easier to pull the trigger, if you like. I mean, I remember going to visit Creech Air Force Base in Nevada in the US, where at that point the RAF was flying Reaper drones. So this was the Brits operating Reaper dronesrones over Afghanistan. They were starting, just as I was there, to start to use them to drop bombs as well as to carry out events. I remember asking one of the operators, doesn't it feel like a video game? They got very offended with me. I can understand why. Because in their view, they are in combat. They are involved in potentially killing people. And yet, the distance of the

fact that they would then go back to their homes in Las Vegas at the end of the day where they were staying, the disconnect between those two realities of being able to kill people at a distance remotely in that way, or at the next stage, perhaps even just programming it and not even having to pull the trigger yourself. It does raise quite complicated issues about how warfare is changing and whether that makes it, if you like, too easy to kill people at a distance because you're not seeing them eye to eye, but equally you're not putting your own people at risk, which is why people want to do it. That's why the Israelis did it in this case and why people use drones rather

than man planes in some cases to drop munitions in other situations. It is an interesting one ethically. I think also the ethics and the efficacy of targeting these scientists and these nuclear scientists is another interesting one. A, is it right? And B, does it work? Those are the questions about it. Yeah. Let's take the efficacy point first. I mean, did the assassination slow the nuclear program? Or did this whole set of targeted killings going back almost 20 years now, has it had a material impact on Iran's race toward a bomb? I mean, that is, I think, probably an impossible question

to answer because we can't know, you know, the counterfactual is, well, if you hadn't killed any of these people, would the Iranians, would they be three years ahead? Would they be five years ahead? It's almost impossible to say. I think we can say though that the Iranians at this point have never been closer to a breakout capability, right?

So it's possible that these killings have slowed the program. They certainly have not stopped it. And I think you have to say though, that you have to say it's almost, it's just, it's an impossible counterfactual to answer really. I mean, but it's, I think it's possible they've slowed the program down. Yeah. Ronan Bergman's book on targeted killings. I mean, he basically makes the point after hundreds and hundreds of pages of going through these operations that the Israelis have had a really hard time connecting these targeted killings to broader kind of political or strategic outcomes, right?

And I think you have to say in this case that the whole suite of pressure measures that the Israelis have taken has not stopped the Iranians from pursuing a bomb. And why would it? Right? It has not changed the strategic calculation for the Iranians to go after a weapon. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it hasn't changed their desire to do it.

Certainly some individuals can play an important role, but often, almost always, they are replaceable or have passed on their knowledge or information. And so, taking them out of the picture does not stop the program. I think it's very rare where you have one individual who by removing them would stop it. I mean, if you think, you know, if you go back to the Oppenheimer comparison, I mean, if somehow, I don't know, the Japanese or the Germans in World War II had got to Oppenheimer, I don't think it would have stopped the Manhattan Project. There were too many people, too many things already set in train, too much of the knowledge had been dispersed. So I'm not sure that it makes a strategic difference.

You can buy a bit of time. And I think that is the only point where I think it is interesting to think, well, ultimately, this is not about changing the strategic calculus. All it is doing is buying perhaps some time. In that time, the question is, what else can you do? Can you come up with diplomatic solutions? Can you find out some other ways of changing the calculus about Iran?

Or if it is simply about avoiding a military strike? I do take that point from inside Mossad and back to Medellin thinking, actually, I'm doing what looks like a very aggressive action, but I'm actually doing it to stop a war because otherwise my prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may do something actually quite crazy, which may have very detrimental consequences. These are the quite complex equations I think people are making in this situation. You're right. I mean, there's a whole bunch of complex strategic and operational and ethical

questions to this. There's also at the root of it, something exceedingly simple. So Bergman's book is titled Rise and Kill First. And it got that title because as he was interviewing people in Mossad who were involved in these operations, he kept getting quotes from, of all places, the Babylonian Talmud when they were having conversations about sort of the justification for these operations. And the piece of scripture was whoever comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first. So there is a very simple, I think, perspective here inside the Masad as well, which is the Iranians are trying to build the capability to destroy us.

We are justified as a result of that in going and killing people who are involved in, you know, threatening us. It's kind of not more complicated than that in some respects. But I suppose my question is, does it actually serve your country's interest and your national interest in the long run compared to a policy which might try and put a different strategic or diplomatic lid on the Iranian nuclear program. If this becomes a substitute for a policy which might actually be able to restrain Iran, then I kind of question it. I think the assumption is that it's not realistic, that there's not a path toward a sort of better

way of interacting with the Islamic Republic, right? I mean, I think that's the assumption, right? You'd have to say, look- Well, that's the assumption from the hawkish quarters, but I guess, you know, there was a lid on the Iranian nuclear program for a few years, you know, with a deal. So I don't think it's impossible. I don't think the Iranians are crazy enough not to look at the possibilities of deals and are not to be subject to other, you know, other incentives.

So yeah, I think it's an interesting question. I guess in some ways, we may find out some of the answers this year as to how Iran and Israel play out that calculation about whether to go for the bomb or whether to attack Iran if you're Israel. Because I think all the signs are in the next few months, this issue may come to a head and it may come to a head in terms of military action or in terms of a deal, but who knows which David? I guess we'll have to wait and see. So maybe they're Gordon with really thorny issues of ethics and efficacy, maybe totally

unresolved. Let's end it and end our exploration into the life and times and death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and our journey into the shadow war between Israel and Iran. So see you on Monday.