Remote-Controlled Assassination
What to do if you don’t have a drone?
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that Israel and Iran don’t get along. Since the 1990s, Israel has considered an Iranian nuclear bomb a serious threat to its existence. Iran is a sworn enemy of Israel and has long attempted to develop nuclear weapons. Israel’s concern is that Iran could attack it outright with nukes or give them to terrorists who could conduct their own attacks.
It also shouldn’t be news that Israel may want to take out Iranian facilities and scientists before they can build a nuclear weapon. You know, like they’ve done in the past, with a computer virus, the assassinations of five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007, and airstrikes.
And a failed assassination against Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. But the Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA, was working on that.
Apparently, by 2020, he had grown complacent. He had previously been targeted for assassination in 2009 when a hit team was ready to carry out its plan, but the operation was called off as the Mossad feared an ambush. He disregarded warnings of a possible assassination attempt and drove his own vehicle, an unarmored Nissan sedan, with his bodyguards in separate cars behind him.
But those bodyguards were still a problem, because they could make an assassin pay with his own life. But how do you kill someone by remote control?
In this case, Mossad started with a remote control mechanism for machineguns, similar to an M151 Protector RWS (Remote Weapons Station). This is a mount that will elevate and traverse a weapon, a camera for sighting, and a trigger control. A gunner can remain inside their armored vehicle and still be able to view targets via a screen and control the weapon with a joystick.
That’s good in real time, but if the shooter was outside the country – which was the whole point of using remote control – then there would be about a 1.6 second lag time for the video images to reach their control station and for the gunner’s actions to be transmitted back to the mount. Mossad had to add on an artificial intelligence that would compensate for the lag by calculating where the target would be 1.6 seconds in the future and adjust the aim accordingly. It also figured in the speed of the vehicle on top of the lag and automatically led the target. This means that the gun is fired ahead of the vehicle such that the bullets and the target reach the same place at the same time, much like a hunter firing at moving game. They also programmed it to account for the recoil, as the firing shook the mount.
Reportedly, the device and the weapon, a modified FN MAG M240 machinegun, weighed about a ton. That seems very excessive. The MAG is only 26 pounds, and even throwing in a big stack of ammo should still keep it below 50 pounds. The mount is about 300. Perhaps the rest was additional mounting hardware and the explosives. Anyway, they smuggled everything into Iran in small pieces and assembled it once in-country. This took about eight months and involved some twenty agents.
Intelligence indicated that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh would head out to his beach house in Absard on November 27, 2020, and the operation shifted into high gear.
The weapon was mounted in a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck and stationed by Iranian agents working with Mossad at a junction on Imam Khomeini Street in Tehran where drivers heading for Absard had to make a U-turn.
His car and the ones full of bodyguards slowed for a speed bump just before the parked truck, at which point the operatives could positively identify Fakhrizadeh as the driver of the Nissan. The shooter, located at an undisclosed location out of the country, unleashed a hail of bullets, about a dozen.
Fakhrizadeh’s car swerved and came to a stop, after which he stepped out and crouched down beside the open door. He was then hit with three more bullets. The first bodyguard arrived at the scene with a weapon and “looked around for the assailant, seemingly confused.”
The blue truck then exploded but most of the equipment remained largely intact, though severely damaged. No one was injured in this explosion.
Israel has never publicly claimed responsibility, although a recent Jerusalem Post report links Mossad to the assassination. Fakhrizadeh was declared a martyr by Iranian authorities and given a state funeral.
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I have upmost respect for Mossad's assassination abilities.