Members of Iranian forces carry the coffin of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh during a funeral ceremony in Teheran.
A square box, rods sticking out of it: The crude sketch drawn by the great physicist Werner Heisenberg outlined the device that would allow Nazi Germany to unleash the apocalypse against its enemies. Inside the gilded dinner-room of the Savoy hotel in London one autumn evening in 1943—its elegant windows covered in blackout curtains ever since a bomb blew apart Room 421—the Danish physicist and committed anti-Nazi Neils Bohr, just escaped from Nazi-ruled Europe, explained the sketch Heisenberg had drawn for him two years earlier to an élite group of scientists.
The Allies were racing to build their own nuclear bomb, but Bohr’s reports gave reason to fear the efforts of the genius who gave birth to modern quantum mechanics would get Adolf Hitler there first.
In November 1944, the one-time baseball star-turned-spy Moe Berg stood in a Zurich lecture theatre with a pistol in his pocket, and instructions from the Office of Strategic Services—the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency—to shoot Heisenberg if there was the least hint Germany was close to building a nuclear weapon. Instead, Berg heard Heisenberg lamenting that Nazi defeat was now inevitable.
The man who introduced the Uncertainty Principle to modern physics thus lived: The assassin held his hand, concluding Heisenberg would be useful to the world after the end of the war.
Iran announced this week that nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakrizadeh had been assassinated with a satellite-controlled, artificial-intelligence controlled gun—a new class of weapon discussed in Moneycontrol earlier this month. The killing is the latest in a series attributed to Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, since 2007—preceded by Ardeshire Hassanpour, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, Majid Shariari and Darioush Rezaeinejad—in a secret war to slow down Iran’s progress towards building a nuclear weapon.
For intelligence services across the world, battling terrorism and rogue states, assassination has long been an attractive weapon: Decapitating enemy leadership, the argument goes, blunts their organisational capabilities and deters future attacks.
The CIA; Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB; Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate; the United Kingdom’s MI5 and MI6; India’s own intelligence and police services: All these have long used assassination as a tool, along with rulers dating back to the rise of organised political power thousands of years ago. Laws proscribing the use of assassination, both domestic and international, have had negligible impact.
For decision makers in the world capitals, the seduction of assassination isn’t hard to understand: Covert means offer the prospect of resolving intractable conflicts where the instruments of international law, designed to function in an ecosystem of responsible nation-states, have conspicuously failed. No-one could fail to understand, for example, why India might wish to assassinate the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Hafiz Muhammad Saeed.
Little reflection, though, has taken place on the critical questions: What are the consequences and costs of assassination? And does it actually work?
Israel’s use of assassination became embedded in its political culture early: The paramilitary Haganah, the country’s proto-army, issued orders as early as 1947 for a clandestine operation to execute Palestinian leadership. The use of assassination was sometimes intended to offset Israel’s relative military weakness.
For example, in 1956, Israel used booby-trapped packages to kill the head of Egyptian intelligence in the Gaza Strip, Colonel Mustafa Hafez. Large-scale killings of civilians, like the infamous 1953 massacre of Palestinian villagers at al-Qibya by the Israel Defence Forces fabled Unit 101, were cast as a means of deterrence.
The Israeli state also used its resources to track down and eliminate Nazi war criminals—though recent historical work demonstrates the programme amounted to somewhat less than advertised, focussing mainly on former Nazi missile scientists working for Egypt, and failing to find many of its actual targets.
From 1971, when a new Palestinian resistance emerged in the West Bank and Gaza, both targeted assassination and sometimes-indiscriminate civilian killing were deployed on a growing scale. Forty-man covert assassination squads, code-named Rimon, or Pomegranate received target lists from Israel’s internal intelligence service, Shin Bet for execution.
The killings formed the backdrop to the rise of terrorism, culminating in the savage massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. Mossad responded by unleashing Operation Wrath of God—arguably the best known of all its efforts—which, over the course of twenty years, used covert teams to target their alleged killers across Europe and the Middle-East.
Leaving ethics aside, the gains from Israel’s tactics are controversial: Rimon’s killings didn’t deter the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987; indeed, it could be argued to have radicalised an entire generation. Even leadership-decapitation operations, like the 1988 assassination of Palestine Liberation Organisation second-in-command Khalil al-Wazir, did little to change the course of history. Arguably, Israel’s anti-PLO operations only served to open the way for more dangerous Islamist groups.
Even Operation Wrath of God, notwithstanding its iconic status, has come in for sharp criticism in reflective historical work. Aaron Klein, a strategic advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alleged in his 2015 book that Mossad in fact only eliminated one terrorist directly linked to the killings, and assassinated figures like Waiel Zweiter based on inaccurate intelligence. Israeli commentator Ronen Bergman has pointed to the limits of its efforts: “This campaign stopped most PLO terrorism outside the borders of Israel. Did it help in any way to bring peace to the Middle East? No. Strategically it was a complete failure”.
The problem, the scholar Paul Aaron has pointed out in a superb analysis of Mossad’s policies, is that the use of assassination rests on a “mechanistic psychological model”. From prisoner interrogations, informant reports and surveillance reports, he argues, it is clear that leaders of resistance groups possess “a capacity for self-sacrifice rooted not just in religious faith but also in nationalist identity”.
Key to the problem of assessing the effectiveness of assassination is the problem of measurement: For obvious reasons, it’s hard to assign an objective, long-term value to the assassination of terrorists like al-Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki or Osama Bin Laden. There is, for example, copious evidence that while al-Qaeda’s central leadership was hollowed out by CIA targeted assassinations, the organisation has reinvented itself and today enjoys significantly enhanced reach in Afghanistan, Pakistan and West Africa.
Economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken attempted an empirical answer to the question in a 2009 paper, using a data-set of 2,440 leadership assassination attempts in 187 countries from 1875 to 2004. “The successful assassination of autocrats produces institutional change, substantially raising the probability that a country transitions to democracy”, they found. “The results for war are less systematic, with some evidence that assassination can exacerbate moderate-level conflict but hasten the end of intense conflict”.
This finding, however, casts little light on the outcomes of assassinating terrorists or rogue scientists. To understand the difficulties, consider this: Did the use of extra-judicial execution against Khalistan terrorists and jihadists in Kashmir inflict unbearable attrition—or fuel the conflict, by creating martyrs who inspired new recruits?
In the case of complex systems, like Iran’s nuclear programme, answers to these questions are even more difficult. For one, as scholar William Tobey has noted, modern nuclear-weapons programmes don’t involve cutting-edge science, where individual genius is important. “Depending on the maturity of a program”, he notes, “engineers may be more valuable than scientists, and technicians, who actually operate machinery, may be most indispensable of all. At least with respect to crude but still-devastating nuclear weapons, manufacture is now more about engineering than science”.
Even more important, the strategic consequences of assassination are hard to calibrate: Iran, for example, responded to the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani by announcing it intended to accelerate the growth of its fissile-material stockpile. The assassination of Fakrizadeh could complicate efforts by President-elect Joseph Biden to revive a 2015 deal between the P5+1 powers—the United Nations’ Security Council’s five permanent members along with Germany—and Iran, reining in its nuclear programme.
Put another way, Israel’s assassination programme could mean the country is more likely to face an existential threat from a nuclear-armed Teheran in coming years, not less. There are dozens of similar examples: President Vladimir Putin’s use of assassination against his political adversaries could, conceivably, engender a culture of political violence that ultimately undermine the strong state he seeks to build; the United States own long history of seeking regime change through CIA-sponsored coups and assassinations has often backfired spectacularly.
In 1938, Georg Esler—carpenter, loving father, committed anti-Nazi—took a train to Munich, and planted a time-bomb he had carefully assembled over several weeks under the podium at the Bürgerbräukeller beer-hall in Munich. Germany’s soon-to-be Führer left the podium thirteen minutes before the bomb exploded, killing eight people. Esler understood, long before most people, the horrors Adolf Hitler would unleash; those thirteen minutes separated the world which experienced World War II from a different one, without the genocides of 1939-1945, and the killings of millions in battle.
Or did it?
Might Hitler merely have been replaced by another ruler, just as evil? Might the assassination have given rise to a more technocratic Nazi leader, who understood the value of pushing nuclear scientists like Heisenberg to begin work on a nuclear weapon even sooner?
We simply have no way to now.
For leaders frustrated by the failures and delays of politics, and the uncertain outcomes of international law, there’s this lesson: Like all other decision making, assassination is also plagued by an uncertainty principle. The actual outcomes of almost all executive action are impossible to reliably calculate. The wise decision-maker must always beware of unanticipated consequences.
PRAVEEN SWAMI
moneycontrol.com
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