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The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine
If Israel was going to kill a top Iranian official [Mohsen Fakhrizadeh[*]], an act that had the potential to start a war, it needed the assent and protection of the United States. That meant acting before Mr. Biden could take office. In Mr. Netanyahu's best-case scenario, the assassination would derail any chance of resurrecting the nuclear agreement even if Mr. Biden won.
[...] A killer robot profoundly changes the calculus for the Mossad. The organization has a longstanding rule that if there is no rescue, there is no operation, meaning a foolproof plan to get the operatives out safely is essential. Having no agents in the field tips the equation in favor of the operation.
[...] [The] machine gun, the robot, its components and accessories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran.
The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup, a common model in Iran. Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment. Finally, the truck was packed with explosives so it could be blown to bits after the kill, destroying all evidence. There were further complications in firing the weapon. A machine gun mounted on a truck, even a parked one, will shake after each shot's recoil, changing the trajectory of subsequent bullets.
[...] The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray. The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the car's speed.
[...] The entire operation took less than a minute. Fifteen bullets were fired. Iranian investigators noted that not one of them hit [Mohsen Fakhrizadeh's wife] Ms. Ghasemi, seated inches away, accuracy that they attributed to the use of facial recognition software.
[*] Mohsen Fakhrizadeh died 27 November 2020.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20 2021, @02:38PM (4 children)
Blown to bits and fuck any civilians around. Now, the police should have been more thorough in investigating suspicious vehicles.
Who is the ground crew in Iran, who drove the truck to its point of deployment and set up the gun? Jewish Iranians? If so, I am amazed at the Iranian government's restraint.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday September 20 2021, @07:52PM (2 children)
I'm more amazed that they just casually say "Yeah, we killed someone in another country 'cause we didn't like that asshole" and nobody considers this in any way a problem.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20 2021, @09:54PM (1 child)
The US and Russia did it to each other during the Cold War. It often made the papers but very little actually came of it. This is more of the same.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Opportunist on Tuesday September 21 2021, @12:09AM
To be honest, I can't remember an incident where they simply came out and bragged how they offed a top scientist of the other side.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 20 2021, @09:51PM
It reads to me like thermite charges rather than conventional explosives. Those are much more effective at destroying evidence, not that the average reporter knows the difference. The emphasis on knowing the vehicle's surroundings suggests that they wanted to make sure that nobody was too close when it went off. Believe it or not, Mossad do try to minimize collateral damage from their surgical strikes. Note that his wife, who was right beside him, wasn't hit. Spraying the group would have been much easier and probably cheaper.
The ground crew would be agents who either snuck across the border or were in the country on falsified paperwork, hence the comment in the summary about safe extraction. They go out of their way not to involve local Jewish communities in their operations for exactly the reason you state.