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.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.