They’re the Iranian covert operatives whose work could spark a war between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel has identified three Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers who it says are helping the terrorist group Hezbollah build a secret arsenal of ballistic missiles in Lebanon.
The move comes just as Israel allegedly carried out airstrikes on Iranian missile infrastructure in Lebanon and Iraq to prevent Iran from building up an arsenal its proxies could use to strike Israeli territory. So who are Iran’s men in Beirut and what are they up to?
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Covert playbook: The operation described by Israel is one born of adaptation in the face of repeated Israeli airstrikes. The Israel Defense Forces claims that Iran first tried to send fully assembled missiles to Hezbollah through Syria in 2013, only to see those larger and relatively easy to spot shipments blown up by Israeli warplanes. Iranian spies reportedly shifted tactics and sent easier to smuggle missile components into Lebanon, stashed them at a collection point, and then moved them to clandestine Hezbollah facilities in Beirut while training Lebanese operatives in missile assembly and operation in Iran.
The covert smuggling operation appears to be remarkably similar to another one Iran’s intelligence services have pulled off over the past few years in Yemen. Iranian-backed Houthi forces have launched Iranian ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia after Iran chopped them up with blowtorches, smuggled them into Yemen on the back of trucks and fishing boats, and welded them back together again.
Preview trailer: Before the announcement, Israeli social media accounts teased that they would “declassify” information about the operatives and rolled out a lame and dorky “Guess Who” game visual for the release. The hype about the names being a revelation, however, wasn’t entirely new, as two lesser-known Arabic-language sources outed some of the missile crew two weeks prior to the Israeli announcement.
Both the Beirut Observer and the Dubai-based Syrian opposition news outlet Orient News ran with one of the alleged missile operatives’ names as early as Aug. 13. Both outlets cited anonymous sources for the scoop, and Orient News claimed that the Iranian officers had arrived in Lebanon last May.
The brass: So who are Iran’s missile men in Beirut? The highest ranking among them is Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hejazi, an IRGC general who’s well known to the Western world for his appearance on a number of sanctions lists.
Both the European Union and the United States have sanctioned Hejazi for his role in Iran’s ballistic missile program, as well as for human rights violations. Before he took up working on missiles, Hejazi was the top commander of Iran’s paramilitary force, the Basij. The European Union claims that he “played a central role in the post-election crackdown of protesters in 2009” during Iran’s allegedly rigged presidential elections and “played a key role in intimidating and threatening Iran’s ‘enemies’.”
The logistician: The second big name Israel identified as part of the missile project in Lebanon is Brig. Gen. Ali Asrar Nuruzi. Nuruzi, according to Israel, is “responsible for transferring precision weapon components from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.” That lines up well with his known portfolio in the IRGC as deputy commander for logistics and support. Nuruzi has made a few appearances in the press praising logistics troops killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s at different memorials.
It makes sense to have a logistics expert on hand if you want to build up a ballistic missile force in Lebanon. That kind of a covert project requires the transportation of tons of material from Iran all the way to Syria, undetected by Israeli intelligence. Judging from previous Israeli airstrikes targeting Iranian arms transfers to Hezbollah, it’s involved aircraft flying from Iran to Syria and overland routes that pass through both Iraq and Syria before arriving in Lebanon.
Revenge of the fallen? One of the alleged missile engineers identified by Israel is Col. Majid Nuab. The IDF identified Nuab as the top subject-matter expert who “actively manages and oversees the precision weapons project with Hezbollah.” Almost nothing else is known about Nuab, but there’s an intriguing possibility that he may be related to another Iranian missile scientist who died in a mysterious explosion.
Brig. Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam was a top Iranian general in charge of developing ballistic missiles for Iran. That is, he was until an explosion blew him up along with a number of his employees at the Shahid Modarres missile base in 2011. Iranian officials claimed the explosion was an accident, but at least one “Western intelligence official” told Time magazine that the explosion was a covert act of Israeli sabotage.
Among the 17 people killed in the explosion was Mehdi Nuab, who worked as a missile technology consultant for Moghaddam. Obituaries for Nuab include remembrances from a brother with the same name as the colonel identified by Israel on Thursday—Majid Nuab, who fought alongside Mehdi in the Iran-Iraq war.
It’s unclear whether the two Nuabs are the same person, but they wouldn’t be the first family pair to work for the intelligence services of Iran and its Hezbollah proxies. Iran’s most senior military officer, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, is the brother of Hasan Bagheri, the founding father of the IRGC intelligence who became a celebrated martyr when he was killed by a mortar during the Iran-Iraq war. Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Hezbollah’s external operations chief Imad Mughniyeh, took up his father’s mantle when the U.S. and Israel assassinated Imad with a car bomb in 2008, only to die in a 2015 Israeli airstrike in Syria.
On blast: If you’re an IRGC officer, having Israel put you on blast is an implied threat to, well, put you on blast. Just look at the events of the past few days.
When the Israeli air force struck Hezbollah and IRGC operatives preparing for what Jerusalem said was a planned drone attack on Israel, officials said they were tipped off to the plot in because they were able to track the targeted men’s movements into Syria.
So is the outing of Iranian missile officers an implied threat to those involved? It’s hard to say whether Israel is ready to open a second front in Lebanon by striking Iranian personnel there or whether Iran or Hezbollah would want to trigger one by responding with force. But at a minimum it’s at least an implied threat. Case in point: IDF social media accounts threw in the detail that Brig. Gen. Hejazi moved to Lebanon with his family to oversee the missile assembly, sending the not-so-subtle message of “we know where you live.”
