'Puncturing the state:' Ismail Haniyeh killing points to alarming trend for Iran

Iran has lost senior generals and nuclear scientists in more than a decade of suspected Israeli assassinations

Iranian security forces during the funeral ceremony for Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard, in Tehran. EPA

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Security blunders that led to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran could be a sign of regime weakness, rather than a basic failure to protect the high-level guests, experts told The National.

The assassination – possibly involving a bomb planted in Mr Haniyeh’s guesthouse, a residence close to a palace run by the regime – shocked observers. It also led to calls inside Iran for the sacking of security officials.

It came after a long list of severe security breaches, including the shooting of chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020, by some accounts using a satellite-operated machinegun.

That was one of several lapses before Mr Haniyeh's assassination. Mr Fakhrizadeh, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was a pioneering figure in Iran’s nuclear programme.

After his death, regime official and IRGC member Mohsen Rezaei spoke of the need to “detect infiltrators and … thwart the formation of assassination teams”.

By the time of Mr Fakhrizadeh's death, these assassination teams had been operating in Iran for at least nine years.

Mossad in Tehran

For Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, Mr Haniyeh's killing in Iran represents “an intensification of a trend we've already been seeing where you've had major security force breaches”.

“The fact that a few years ago, a former Iranian Minister of Intelligence said that no official should be sleeping soundly at night or should be feeling safe given how punctured the state was,” he told The National.

“When you connect the dots, whether it's going after the nuclear scientists, or the seizing of the atomic archive, or targeting Iran's Chief Military nuclear scientists by a remote-controlled gun back in 2020, the security forces have a lot to answer for.”

The mysterious killings first started in Iran in 2011. Darioush Rezaeinejad, another leading figure in the country’s nuclear programme, was on his way to work at the Natanz nuclear research complex in July of that year when he was shot dead by a motorcyclist near its entrance.

Four months later, IRGC Gen Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, who led Iran’s missile programmes, was killed in an explosion at a base near Tehran, along with 16 others.

A pattern was being formed: the killings suggested intimate knowledge of the movement of senior figures in the regime. Sources across Iran were as important, if not more so than the technology used in the killings.

Mr Haniyeh’s assassination was a “humiliation” for the regime, said Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran Programme at the Middle East Institute, and could play a hand in further tightening the Iran-Russia alliance.

“People have been saying for years that Mossad is now deeply able to infiltrate the system. This isn’t new, what perhaps is going to be an outcome of this assassination is a more serious effort towards house cleaning and figuring out how bad this is in terms of infiltration. It’s a huge question if … they have the capacity to do it,” he told The National.

However, Tehran has “friends that are much better at the game of intelligence than they are”, he said.

“The Russians are some of the best in the world, and they have good ties with the regime. So you could see [the formation of] this Iranian Russian military security co-operation.”

Iran and Russia have been forging far stronger ties in recent years, after stop-start arms deliveries from Moscow, often delayed due to western sanctions. After Russia’s Ukraine invasion, a two-way military alliance is in full swing, with both sides co-operating on drone and missile technology.

The puncturing of Tehran’s intelligence infrastructure is like a “kaleidoscope,” Mr Ben Taleblu told The National.

He said a failing security apparatus could mean “disgruntled members of a security service willing to be a gun for hire and share information with a foreign intelligence service,” or “massive technical breaches in the command and control apparatus leading to leaks”.

“It can mean a whole host of these things we simply don't have enough information to know, but we do have enough of an understanding of how these things can happen to make an educated guess.”

The nuclear file

Mr Vatanka said that the nuclear question has traditionally played a crucial role in the desire to infiltrate Tehran's security apparatus.

“As long as this nuclear issue is a dispute, then you will have western powers and Israel with a greater motivation to want to infiltrate and be involved in Iran on the ground, so that's the motivation on behalf of external actors.”

But Israel's posture towards the Palestinians, particularly under the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and Washington's continued support for its ally throughout the war in Gaza also have a role in escalating tensions, Mr Vatanka said.

Mr Haniyeh’s killing unfolded as hawkish politicians in Washington were ramping up their anti-Iran rhetoric and emphasising an increased urgency on the nuclear question.

Last week, Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator, introduced a bill to the US Congress that would authorise the use of military force against Iran if there is a threat of imminent nuclear activity, which would include Tehran possessing weapons-grade uranium and a device capable of sending a nuclear weapon against Israel or other allies.

“I believe it is a certainty that, if we do not change course in the coming weeks or months, Iran would possess a nuclear weapon,” Mr Graham said.

Mr Vatanka said Iran has “been working on this for 40 years. No country has taken this long to achieve a nuclear weapon, if that's what they want to do they'd do it a long time ago. The cost-benefit analysis doesn’t add up for them yet”.

The UN’s nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency warned in January that Iran was “very close” to possessing a nuclear weapon. Experts agree the “breakout time” for Iran to obtain a bomb could be weeks.

However, there are still debates about some technical hurdles, such as making a complex nuclear warhead small enough to fit on a long-range missile, a process known as miniaturisation – or even whether Iran wants to take the last steps for a bomb.

“That could change if they feel tomorrow they might go into war with Israel or the United States … What they do want to have is to be able to have it, that’s what the focus on enrichment is about,” Mr Vatanka said. “But they're not suicidal.”

Iran’s security priorities

With Mr Haniyeh's killing, the rhetoric of vengeance from Tehran and enduring domestic human rights crackdowns under a new and purportedly moderate leader, Mr Vatanka said that “those sceptical about the value of reforming, right now feel vindicated”.

He said that they believe that “it doesn’t make any difference, the regime can keep going on and pursue repressive policies and not listen to the people. All it does is create a greater rift with Iranians and the regime. The Mossads of this world, if they know what they're doing, surely can take advantage of that”.

Mr Ben Taleblu agreed that there’s an ever-widening gap between the regime and its people.

“Take a look at Iranian social media you'll see a drastic divergence in the views between the state and the society. While the regime is fundamentally anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, the population is quite literally the opposite.”

“While the regime is threatening vengeance and talking about blood lust, the defending all of its official media and commentary, it's a drastically different mood on the street.”

“In an era when Iranian security forces are cracking down on civilians and protesters and dissidents, all it really shows is that this regime has a lot of bark and bites only for its own population,” he added.