The Commute Killings

On the morning of 29 November 2010, two university professors were being driven to work in separate cars across Tehran when, minutes apart, motorcyclists pulled alongside each vehicle. A passenger on the back of each motorcycle leaned over, slapped a small magnetic bomb onto the car's body, and sped off. Seconds later, both bombs exploded. Majid Shahriari, a nuclear engineer specializing in neutron transport, was killed instantly. Fereydoon Abbasi heard the click of the device attaching to his car, ordered his wife to jump out, followed her, and survived — wounded, but alive. He would later head Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.

It was not the first killing, and not the last. Over roughly two years, a pattern of deaths fell on men connected to Iran's nuclear program: Masoud Alimohammadi, a quantum field theorist, killed on 12 January 2010 by a bomb near his home; Darioush Rezaeinejad, a physicist, shot dead by motorcycle gunmen on 23 July 2011 outside his daughter's kindergarten; Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemical engineer at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, killed on 11 January 2012 by a magnetic bomb attached to his car — the date, Iranian media noted, being the second anniversary of Alimohammadi's death.

No government or organization ever claimed responsibility for any of the attacks. Iran blamed Israel — publicly, furiously, and in every case. In Washington, the official American position, articulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after the Roshan killing, was a "categorical" denial of any United States involvement. But in February 2012, NBC News reported that two senior Obama-administration officials, speaking anonymously, had confirmed that the killings were being carried out by the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) — an Iranian dissident group then on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations — which was, according to the same officials, "financed, trained and armed" by Israel's secret service. The MEK categorically denied any involvement.

That NBC report is the closest thing to a public attribution the story has ever received. Everything else is allegation and counter-allegation. A "source in Israel's intelligence community" told Germany's Der Spiegel that Mossad was behind the Rezaeinejad killing. Iran announced arrests of supposed Israeli spy rings after several attacks — claims impossible to verify independently. In November 2011, a massive explosion at an Iranian missile R&D base killed Major General Hassan Moghaddam and sixteen Revolutionary Guards; Israeli media, notably the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, pointed to "some assessments" that the blast was the result of an intelligence-based operation — Israel itself said nothing. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the US Joint Special Operations Command had trained MEK members from 2005 — a claim JSOC denied — though Hersh could not specifically link those trainees to the assassinations.

Even the victim list is contested: after Rezaeinejad's death, Iranian Deputy Interior Minister Safarali Baratlu said the man had nothing to do with the nuclear program and the killing was believed to be a personal dispute. What remains unknown is enormous: who built the bombs, who recruited the riders, who gave the orders — and what the killings actually achieved. Iran's nuclear program was not stopped; if anything, it accelerated under pressure.

Why it matters: this episode is attribution warfare at its most sophisticated. The pattern — daytime hits by local riders, deniable proxies, a plausible-deniability chain through a dissident group — is precisely what makes it impossible to adjudicate. It reveals the modern logic of covert action: the point is not only to kill a scientist, but to make the enemy uncertain whether the killing was done by a state, a proxy, or a rival — and to make every Iranian physicist wonder whether his commute is survivable.