The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup, a common model in Iran.
54% : That afternoon, he and his wife would leave their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their country house in Absard, a bucolic town east of Tehran, where they planned to spend the weekend.
53% : By the summer, it looked as if Mr. Trump, who saw eye to eye on Iran with Mr. Netanyahu, could lose the American election.
53% : When Iran needed sensitive equipment or technology that was prohibited under international sanctions, Mr. Fakhrizadeh found ways to obtain them.
52% : But investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded in 2011 that Iran had "carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device.
51% : The straight-out-of-science-fiction story of what really happened that afternoon and the events leading up to it, published here for the first time, is based on interviews with American, Israeli and Iranian officials, including two intelligence officials familiar with the details of the planning and execution of the operation, and statements Mr. Fakhrizadeh's family made to the Iranian news media.
48% : As the intelligence poured in, the difficulty of the challenge came into focus: Iran had also taken lessons from the Suleimani killing, namely that their top officials could be targeted.
48% : But Mr. Fakhrizadeh said he had a university class to teach in Tehran the next day, his sons said, and he could not do it remotely.
47% : In 2009, a hit team was waiting for Mr. Fakhrizadeh at the site of a planned assassination in Tehran, but the operation was called off at the last moment.
47% : Arguing that they proved that Iran still had an active nuclear weapons program, he mentioned Mr. Fakhrizadeh by name several times.
46% : Concerned about Iran's stonewalling, the United Nations Security Council froze Mr. Fakhrizadeh's assets as part of a package of sanctions on Iran in 2006.
45% : Israel had paused the sabotage and assassination campaign in 2012, when the United States began negotiations with Iran leading to the 2015 nuclear agreement.
44% : Iran had already been shaken by a series of high-profile attacks in recent months that in addition to killing leaders and damaging nuclear facilities made it clear that Israel had an effective network of collaborators inside Iran.
43% : They also said that while Iran had dismantled its focused effort to build a bomb in 2003, significant work on the project had continued.
41% : The plot had been compromised, the Mossad suspected, and Iran had laid an ambush.
41% : The black hole that was Mr. Fakhrizadeh's career was a major reason that even when the agreement was completed, questions remained about whether Iran still had a nuclear weapons program and how far along it was.
40% : The news reports from Iran that afternoon were confusing, contradictory and mostly wrong.
39% : Iran has steadfastly insisted that its nuclear program was for purely peaceful purposes and that it had no interest in developing a bomb.
38% : The entire hit squad had already left Iran.
38% : So the equipment was broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran.
36% : Israel lacks the surveillance capabilities in Iran that it has in other places, like Gaza, where it uses drones to identify a target before a strike.
35% : Since 2004, when the Israeli government ordered its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facilities.
35% : If they could kill Iran's top military leader with little blowback, it signaled that Iran was either unable or reluctant to respond more forcefully.
35% : A drone large enough to make the trip to Iran could be easily shot down by Iran's Russian-made antiaircraft missiles.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.