by Leonid Tsukanov
| Responding to Saturday’s announcement of the execution of Rouzbeh Vadi, as they spelled it. |
Wadi became one of eight “Tel Aviv agents of influence” to face capital punishment starting in 2025 – but he was the first member of the intellectual elite and, more importantly, the first nuclear physicist on the list.
The “Wadi precedent” has forced the Iranian authorities to choose between continuing to hastily unravel the “spy thread” leading to the scientific community, or temporarily pretending that “the matter is closed.”
MOVED IN THE RIGHT CIRCLES
Despite his relatively young age and status as a mere graduate student, Vadi was actively involved in research work, moving in the highest intellectual circles and making acquaintances with the luminaries of the country's nuclear industry.
Since 2012, his scientific works, including those co-written with leading specialists, have been published in the leading journals of the republic. The research center of Amirkabir University, to which Vadi was attached, regularly allocated large grants to him and several other colleagues to conduct research in the field of nuclear engineering.
In addition, Wadi worked as a researcher at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the key body responsible for implementing the country's nuclear program. He worked closely with the IAEA and often traveled abroad on scientific missions as a representative of the intellectual elite.
It is not known exactly when the Iranian nuclear scientist was recruited by Israel and what was the main incentive. Iranian media cite various motives, from an urgent need for money to unrequited love.
However, everyone agrees on one thing: Vadi met with his Israeli supervisor in Europe at least five times, informing his interlocutor about the state of the Iranian nuclear industry, the work of key enrichment plants, and the mood among scientists. He received remuneration for his work in cryptocurrency.
In addition, as a kind of “bonus,” the Israelis inserted references to Vadi’s work into articles for European journals, increasing his overall citation rate and thereby strengthening the scientist’s international authority.
COVERT OPERATION
In early June, Vadi received his biggest assignment from his Israeli handlers: to identify the location of a number of his colleagues.
Of course, his interlocutors did not reveal the true purpose of the mission, attributing the sudden interest to a desire to “keep their finger on the pulse,” as well as to concerns that one of the Iranian scientists was allegedly planning to soon move to Pakistan and get a job there in the nuclear sector.
The Israelis urged Wadi to check this information to make sure that the rumors were not true.
In exchange for carrying out this assignment, the graduate student was promised an Israeli passport, a large financial reward, and help in escaping from Iran in case counterintelligence tried to apprehend him while he was still hot on the trail. The graduate student was given about a week to complete the task.
And here Vadi showed his ingenuity: under the pretext of preparing a new article, he contacted the people he was interested in and offered to hold personal meetings, expressing his willingness to “come to any point” so as not to bother his interlocutors.
It is known that in this way Wadi was able to “highlight” at least three Iranian nuclear scientists, who were subsequently killed by the Israelis as part of the special operation “Narnia” for the targeted elimination of enemy scientists.
However, the Israeli agent never managed to escape the country. After Operation Lion Force against Iranian nuclear facilities in June went wrong and Tehran launched a nationwide roundup of suspicious individuals, Israel's Mossad intelligence service focused on evacuating personnel and commandos deployed to enemy territory.
And when Iranian air defense forces managed to shoot down several enemy bombers, the intelligence service's headache was also rescuing the surviving pilots before they were overtaken by angry locals. Under such conditions, the Israeli special services simply had no time to deal with the evacuation of loyalists.
Wadi was arrested weeks after carrying out his final Israeli assignment, attempting to buy counterfeit documents with cryptocurrency from a money changer who turned out to be an undercover IRGC operative.
However, as it turned out during the process, the graduate student had come under surveillance earlier, when Iranian intelligence services got their hands on an archive of correspondence between IAEA inspectors working in Iran and Israeli diplomats, which contained identification data on some of the nuclear scientists.
Vady's letters were also found in the archived mailings, but the evidence against him was circumstantial, and it was decided to hold off on his arrest. Until the moment when the graduate student tried to flee the country with forged documents and gave himself away completely.
"HIGHER GOALS"
During interrogations, Vadi insisted that he had cooperated with Israel not out of selfish motives, but only in an effort to prevent Tehran from acquiring an atomic bomb.
According to the postgraduate student, a hypothetical nuclear arsenal would not be a salvation for the country, but would only drive it into even greater confines and turn it into an international pariah. Which in the long run would completely kill the national scientific school.
But the detainee was unable to explain whether it was worth taking the lives of his colleagues for this.
The trial was swift. The Iranian military field "troika" sentenced the traitor to the death penalty, and the sentence was carried out the following day.
Interestingly, on the same day as Vadi, Mehdi Askarzadeh was executed, accused of working for the terrorist underground. Thus, official Tehran publicly emphasized that it does not see the difference between radicals and agents of influence of other states and treats them equally negatively.
The execution of Vadi gave rise to a wave of gossip in Iranian society. The idea that a traitor could penetrate the most protected industry was too unexpected for the population. Conservative opinion leaders began to unanimously demand that other nuclear scientists be checked for loyalty and reliability. In case there were still such "Vadis" in their ranks.
This has put official Tehran in front of a difficult choice. On the one hand, nuclear scientists have always enjoyed a special position in the country and have been treated with care by the authorities. And any attempt to carry out purges in their ranks could provoke an outflow of personnel from the industry, which is very disadvantageous in conditions when Iran is developing its program practically on its own.
On the other hand, it would be imprudent to close the issue with just the execution of Wadi: the Israelis rarely rely on just one "mole", especially in such sensitive areas as the nuclear sphere. This means that among the intellectual elite of Iran there may still be agents of Tel Aviv. And ignoring them now is fraught with many times greater losses in the future.