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The third scientist, Dariush Rezaeinejad was shot on July 23, 2011 after
picking up his child at a day care; his wife described hearing shots whiz by
as she chased the assailants. The most recent assassination was the Jan. 11,
2012 death of Mustafa Ahmadi-Roshan, an expert on uranium enrichment,
also by a magnet bomb slapped on his car during his morning commute.
By then, Iran was trying to strike back. The task of avenging the scientists
fell to the sprawling Quds Force’s own covert-operations division, known
as Unit 400. It took a shotgun approach, targeting Israeli diplomatic
missions in a variety of countries, mostly in the developing world where
the global antiterrorism mesh is not so fine. Exposed in Baku, Tbilisi,
Johannesburg, Mombasa and Bangkok, the failures mounted at a pace that
was itself one of the problems. In the world of espionage, a quality covert
operation can take years to pull together. Yet in the 15 months from May
2011 to July 2012, the Quds Force and Hizballah attempted 20 attacks, by
the count of Matthew Levitt, a former State Department counterterrorism
official. “Hizballah and the Quds Force traded speed for tradecraft and
reaped what they sowed,” Levitt writes in a January report for the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Quds Force planners were
stretched thin by the rapid tempo of their new attack plan, and were forced
to throw together random teams of operatives who had not trained
together.”
The decline in quality was so striking it initially inspired disbelief. Recall
the preposterous-sounding plot weaving together a former used-car
salesman, Mexico’s Zetas drug gang and a bank transfer from a
Revolutionary Guard account to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador —
by bombing a Washington restaurant? A year on it looks like the new
normal. In Bangkok last month, an Iranian agent entered a courtroom in a
wheelchair, having accidentally blown his legs off while fleeing police. A
January alert issued by Turkish intelligence was light on specifics but
quite certain the Quds operatives would be staying in five-star hotels.
“There’s a number of reasons that Iranian intelligence has suffered,” says
Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born analyst who lectures at the
Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. “No. 1,” he says, “is the 2009
uprisings in Iran.” The street protests over a fraudulent election

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