Once upon I time I talked about Heath Robinson Assassination, using reporting on the killing of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as an example.
I based my discussion on a Guardian newspaper article which said:
“The operation was very complex and took place using electronic devices, and no one was present at the scene,” [Ali Shamkhani, secretary for Iran's supreme national security council] told Iranian media ...
A [Fars news agency] report said Fakhrizadeh and his wife were travelling in a bulletproof car along with three vehicles for bodyguards when gunfire hit his car. Fakhrizadeh exited the car to check the damage, the report said, speculating that he may have thought he had hit something.
“At this moment, from a Nissan car that was stopped 150 metres away from the martyr’s car, several shots were fired at the martyr from an automatic remote-controlled machine gun,” the [Fars] report said, adding that one bullet hit his back.
“Moments later, the same stopped Nissan exploded,” it said, adding that the owner of the car, which it did not identify, had left the country a month ago. It said the weapons may have been controlled by satellite.
The Iranian state-owned broadcaster Press TV cited unidentified “informed sources” as saying remnants from the attack showed Israeli arms had been used to kill Fakhrizadeh.
Turns out, some of this was a load of old hooey.
I’ve been listening to The Rest Is Classified podcast, part of the Goalhanger family of podcasts, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in spycraft. Night’s Black Agents players and Directors should binge this, but their recent MKUltra discussion will interest Delta Green folks too.
From the Classified discussion, I discovered a few interesting facts.
Among them:
- Fakhrizadeh was not driving a bulletproof car. He was in his own car which was, in fact, the Nissan mentioned in the article. It wasn’t protected in any way; it was a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill, please-shoot-me-full-of-holes Nissan.
- Fakhrizadeh did not get out of the car. He was shot while driving, and fell out of the car, possibly trying to take cover. At that point he was seriously injured but not dead; the killing shots came directly afterward.
- The explosion that destroyed the Israeli vehicle, which was intended to destroy all the evidence, didn’t work as intended. The machine gun survived more or less intact, or at least intact enough to be identified as a Belgian FN MAG general purpose machine gun – an old warhorse. That puppy’s been around, in one form or another, since the late 1950s.
- The Heath Robinson machinery was smuggled in over a lengthy period, probably by people who didn’t know what they were carrying. Classified alleges that several people had been charged with smuggling in relation to this attack.
Officially, nobody knows who did it, though judging by the comments made on Classified there doesn’t seem to be much doubt as to who did what to whom.
Honestly? A lot of this reminded me of the preamble in the Forsythe novel The Day of the Jackal, which describes an attempt on the life of General de Gaulle. Particularly the description of the kill point, with one car out in advance spying on approaching vehicles to see if Fakhrizadeh was coming, while the kill team lies in wait further down the road.
The de Gaulle shooting was the Petit-Clamart attack of 22 August 1962, where the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) signaler was supposed to give the alert by waving a newspaper. At which point the gunmen further down the road were to take action. However, the whole thing went wrong when fading daylight made seeing the newspaper difficult. This delayed the shooting by a vital few seconds, allowing de Gaulle’s vehicle to slip past – though not unscathed.
It turns out, if Classified is to be believed, that the Fakhrizadeh shooting nearly came undone thanks to a similar problem, though this time it was distance, not fading light, that proved problematic. Thanks to the distance between the shooter and the kill site, the remote shooter faced a time lag of a few fractions of a second between the signal to shoot and the shot itself, which in turn affected accuracy. AI had to be used to solve the computational problem, allowing the instruction and the shot to happen simultaneously.
Still, consider: Petit-Clamart involved at least 12 people on the day, not including support staff and sympathizers, of whom 15 total were arrested. This includes the leader Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, who was the only one whose sentence of death was carried out. This was a devastating blow to the OAS, which didn't survive past 1963.
This is a significant difference from the Fakhrizadeh killing. In that attack, there were no operatives on the ground, either at the spotter car or the shooter. The whole thing was done remotely. We don't even know who was at the trigger, who the spotters were.
However, to my mind the biggest difference by far between the two assassinations was that de Gaulle was driven by a professional, Gendarme Francis Marroux, whose skills made the difference on the day. Fakhrizadeh insisted on driving himself. That may have been a fatal mistake.
So! Some of my comments in the previous article are comprehensively disproved. Though I did rely rather too much on one source, which was my error. Turns out the source was talking out of his hat.
Does any of this change the game advice I gave concerning Heath Robinson Assassination, Distance Shooter and Difficulty assessment? Not really. The advice stands.
However, since we're here:
Uncover the Shooter
An important target (eg. Edom Duke) has been assassinated, by someone using a specially built, remote-targeted rifle. The target's organization is in an uproar, and the agents are brought in to find out who it was that carried out the attack.
For complete success, the agents need to discover both the organization that sponsored the attack, and the shooter. Partial success means uncovering the organization, but not the shooter.
The assassination took place in public in a major European public place (eg. on the steps of Westminster Abbey, or in St. Mark's Square, Venice) and was witnessed by several people, including the target's bodyguards. An explosion took place seconds later which eliminated much of the evidence.
Tradecraft indicates there are perhaps half-a-dozen freelancers, world-wide, capable of carrying out the attack, all of them Wire Rats. Assuming, of course, that the attack was carried out by a freelancer.
Military Science identifies the type of rifle used, despite the explosion. It's a Russian SVD which, in combination with the Tradecraft clue, narrows down the suspect list to two, assuming it's a freelancer. Most Wire Rats would use different tech.
Notice or Forensic Pathology indicates that the target was chemically dosed with an agent that created what amounts to a glowing bullseye, invisible to the human eye, to assist targeting. Occult knows that the substance used to create this target is an alchemical substance favored by some Russian Satanic groups. This narrows the freelancer list to one.
It was:
Option One: CIA. The killing was orchestrated by Find Forever, who mimicked the kill style of a particular Russian asset to throw shade on the Litsky Brava Russian criminal group. Find Forever is playing a Yojimbo Option; it wants the targeted side to start fighting with the Litsky Brava, at which point Find Forever will offer its services against the Russian threat.
Option Two: Alraune/Unternehmen Braun The killing was orchestrated by a German-based group, either the German vampire program or the deathless Alraune, and whoever it was used an old Rote Armee Fraktion asset to do it. The Red Army shooter has been around since the 1960s but is forever updating their methods; back in the day, its codename was Trapdoor Spider. The killing was an attempt to remove what the targeting organization sees as a nuisance.
Option Three: Edom. The killing was orchestrated by Britain's vampire program, to take out an important Conspiracy target - though the agents may not know that the target was, secretly or otherwise, in the Conspiracy's pay. Edom hired an outsider to pull off the hit as it didn't want anything left behind that might allow the target's organization to work out who did it. The shooter is a former Turkish asset who wants enough money to retire, and who doesn't realize that Edom's bank accounts aren't as bottomless as they've been led to believe. This lack of funding may tempt the Wire Rat to betray his paymasters, at a crucial juncture.
That's it from me! Enjoy.
