Death in Tehran

Yesterday, the head of the Israeli military, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, told a knesset committee that 2012 would be “critical” for Iran because of “things that happen to it unnaturally.”

Maybe one of those unnatural things happened this morning. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan Behdast, a nuclear scientist and a deputy director for commerce at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was assassinated. A “sticky” or magnetic bomb placed on his car was to blame. He is the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be targeted in the last two years. The Iranian government was quick to blame Mossad, the CIA and MI6.

Spy agencies rarely admit to assassination, but the attempts to curtail Iran’s nuclear programme are getting more desperate. The US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in Beijing, trying to persuade the Chinese to stop importing Iranian oil – not easy, because Iran is China’s third biggest supplier after Saudi Arabia and Angola. The EU is now committed to banning Iranian oil, and the US has imposed sanctions on banks which deal with the Iranian central bank, the clearing house for oil payments.

Iran’s response is a mixture of insouciance and threat: last week it carried out military manoeuvres in the Straits of Hormuz, a major international shipping route, which it said it would shut  if its oil exports were blocked. This week, President Ahmadinejad is touring what his friend Hugo Chavez of Venezuela called “the axis of evil of Latin America” – in other words, all the countries in America’s backyard which hate Uncle Sam. They mocked the US, saying Iran was helping Venezuela make “an atomic bicycle”.

None of which is very funny for Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an Iranian-American who has been accused of being a US spy, and condemned to death in Tehran. His family say he was visiting relatives, but his background in the US marines and as a language specialist seems to have roused suspicion. More than that, he worked for a company called Kuma Games which in 2005 developed a game called “Attack on Iran”. “Diplomacy is impossible” says the strapline, over sonorous music. “Destroy the materials. Destroy the knowledge. Leave no trace.” The chances of the CIA employing someone involved in something so provocative and public are small. All signs are that this is not a game, that “unnatural” events are raising tension with Iran to perilous levels.

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