Contrary to reports of employing MEK for the killings, the authors say, Israel wouldn’t risk such operations with mercenaries.
Israeli Mossad agents are themselves the ones that have been assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, not Iranian dissidents working for Israel, according to a new book by veteran US and Israeli journalists.
CBS reporter Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, a former intelligence correspondent for Haaretz, write in their new book “Spies Against Armageddon” that contrary to reports linking the killings to members of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK), Israel is very unlikely to have contracted out these sensitive operations through a third party dissident group.
“Our in-depth study of fifty years of assassinations by Israel’s foreign espionage agency,” the authors write at the Daily Beast, “including conversations with current and former Mossad operatives and those who work with them in countries friendly to Israel – yields the conclusion that” those Iranians that have been accused in connection with the assassinations are not the killers.
“The methods, communications, transportation, and even the innovative bombs used in the Tehran killings are too sensitive for the Mossad to share with foreign freelancers,” they find.
“Instead, the assassinations are likely the work of Israel’s special spy unit for the most delicate missions: a kind of Mossad within the Mossad called Kidon (Bayonet).”
Top US officials in February disclosed to NBC News their belief that Israel had employed the MEK, which is an Iranian dissident group currently designated as a terrorist group by the United States, to carry out the attacks.
While Israel may have not employed the MEK, they have certainly considered supporting Iranian dissident groups to act against the Iranian regime. Former director of the Mossad Meir Dagan told a senior US official in 2007, as revealed in a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks that the US and Israel should exploit disaffected minority groups in Iran in order to “change the ruling regime in Iran.”
As recently as 2007, a State Department report warned that the MEK, retains “the capacity and will” to attack “Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.” In 2002, the Bush administration claimed Saddam Hussein’s support for the MEK ”terrorist” group justified a US invasion of Iraq.
Still, there has been a big money push by many influential people in Washington to get MEK removed from the State Department’s terrorist list, presumably to make them eligible for US funding.
Whether or not Israel employed the MEK to carry out the killings or it was Mossad agents themselves, Israel has been carrying out illegal assassinations of civilian scientists working on a nuclear program that, even the US and Israel concede, is not a nuclear weapons program.
By John Glaser,
