On November 27, 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist who had for years overseen the Islamic Republic’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, was assassinated while being driven through downtown Tehran. Based on interviews with unnamed sources, Jake Wallis Simons confirms what has long been assumed: that the Mossad carried out the assassination. Simons also sheds light on much that has so far been unknown, including the method by which it was done:

Neither [Fakhrizadeh’s] wife nor any of his [twelve-person] security team were harmed in the attack, which was carried out using a hyper-accurate automated weapon in order to protect civilians from collateral damage. The bespoke weapon, operated remotely by agents on the ground as they observed the target, was so heavy because it included a bomb that destroyed the evidence after the killing.

The Mossad made up its mind to eliminate Fakhrizadeh after examining the nuclear archive that it had spirited out of Iran in 2018:

“[The archive] contained original documents ordering the concealment of the nuclear program, many of them in Fakhrizadeh’s handwriting,” a source said. “Analysts realized they were looking at his ink, his fingerprints, his pressure on the paper as he wrote. He was the one who was behind the deception. [He] was the father of everything we found in the archive. All was under his command, from the science and the secret sites to the personnel and know-how. He had led an operation to hide it from the world. From that point, it was just a matter of time.”

Besides finding out some of the Hollywood style derring-do behind the operation, Simons also learned about its benefits. He quotes a source who told him:

Tehran has assessed that it will take six years to find a replacement for Fakhrizadeh. Israeli analysis has now put the breakout time (the period it would take Iran to finalize a nuclear bomb) at two years. Before Fakhrizadeh departed, it was about three months.

In an interview on Sunday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated that the Biden administration remains committed to nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic, even as it pursues its brutal crackdown on the protests that have swept the country. Robert Satloff argues not only that it is foolish to pursue the renewal of the 2015 nuclear deal, but also that the White House’s current approach is failing on its own terms:

[The] nuclear threat is much worse today than it was when President Biden took office. Oddly, Washington hasn’t really done much about it. On the diplomatic front, the administration has sweetened its offer to entice Iran into a new nuclear deal. While it quite rightly held firm on Iran’s demand to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from an official list of “foreign terrorist organizations,” Washington has given ground on many other items.

On the nuclear side of the agreement, the United States has purportedly agreed to allow Iran to keep, in storage, thousands of advanced centrifuges it has made contrary to the terms of the original deal. . . . And on economic matters, the new deal purportedly gives Iran immediate access to a certain amount of blocked assets, before it even exports most of its massive stockpile of enriched uranium for safekeeping in a third country. . . . Even with these added incentives, Iran is still holding out on an agreement. Indeed, according to the most recent reports, Tehran has actually hardened its position.

Regardless of the exact reason why, the menacing reality is that Iran’s nuclear program is galloping ahead—and the United States is doing very little about it. . . . The result has been a stunning passivity in U.S. policy toward the Iran nuclear issue.