Eli Lake reports at the Daily Beast:
…Patrick Clawson, the director of research at the Washington Institute for Near Policy, said the signs point to Israel.
“This sophisticated technique is uncharacteristic of the Iranian armed opposition and the Iranian government, it is characteristic of the Mossad,” he said. “I am unaware of episodes when Americans and Europeans have done this kind of assassination. Of course, the Americans are involved in assassinations using predators, but not this kind of operation with agents on the ground, the natural suspect is the Mossad.”
A former Mossad officer now living in Canada who goes by the pseudonym Michael Ross said the attacks bore the hallmarks of an Israeli operation. “This tactic is not a new one for the Mossad, and worked very effectively against Egypt’s rocket program in the 1960s. During that period, the scientists involved in that project were assassinated and the program suffered immensely.”
The United States and Israel have cooperated on intelligence-gathering in Iran as well as, in some cases, sabotage operations such as the 2009 Stuxnet cyber attack that stymied the logic board that controlled the spinning centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility. Much of this kind of cooperation intensified in George W. Bush’s second term.
One document that hints to this cooperation is a diplomatic cable from Aug. 17, 2007 disclosed first by WikiLeaks that details a conversation between then Mossad chief Meir Dagan and then undersecretary of state for political affairs, Nicholas Burns.
The cable says there are five pillars to Israel’s approach to Iran: “Political Approach,” “Covert Measure,” “Counter-proliferation,” “Sanctions,” and “Force Regime Change.” Under the section of the memo that deals with “covert action,” there is this tantalizing sentence: “Dagan and the Under Secretary agreed not to discuss this approach in the larger group setting.”
See here and here for some of my coverage of the assassinations. Lake discounts charges that the U.S. had any direct involvement in the kills and points to his earlier reporting which tried to show the U.S. working to dissuade the Israelis from a unilateral attack. I would only say that, given the reality of U.S. support to Israel – it exceeds any other state in the world – it’s fair to characterize Israeli policy, whether in the West Bank, Gaza, or towards Iran, is de facto sanctioned by the U.S. It’s possible these assassinations are solely the work of Mossad with no direct help from the CIA or the Obama administration. But even if that’s the case, Israel would not be able to do such things without faithful economic, military, and diplomatic support from America.
