The era of AI assassinations has arrived

The remote-control murder of an Iranian general shows the need for high-tech war rulebook

By Roger Boyes

IF you want to kill a snake, runs the Arab proverb, you cut off its head. Targeted assassinations seek to do just that and have become not only part of the Hollywood thriller repertoire but also a staple of shadow wars in the real world. Now the revolution in military technology — artificial intelligence, sophisticated tracking of potential victims, remotely controlled precision weapons — has changed the terms of the hit job. It is becoming an easy and all-too-tempting option. Military commanders, intelligence chiefs and politicians should be getting around a table with ethicists and lawyers to discuss the limits of assassination in the new age. They’re not.

The Babylonian Talmud advises: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” That might have been the logic of placing a satellite-operated machine gun on a pick-up truck on a road in Tehran late last month. When the car of Brigadier-general Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, known as the father of the Iranian nuclear programme, passed close to the truck, the gun was remotely triggered. The nuclear scientist was killed. Fakhrizadeh’s wife, sitting in the same car, was not. This, say the Iranian investigators, demonstrates that facial recognition data had been fed into the assassination algorithm. Her face did not fit, so she survived.

The Israelis were immediately blamed by Iran but haven’t commented publicly. It could be that Tehran is spinning a yarn around the killing. If it had been the work of foreign assassins on the spot — Mossad’s hit unit, Kidon, for example — that would have represented a colossal failure for Iranian counter-intelligence. After a dozen or more killings of nuclear scientists in Iran, often by assassins on motorbikes who stick a limpet mine on the back of the target’s car, physicists on sensitive projects are given teams of bodyguards. Better by far for Tehran to pin it on Israel’s devious technological edge and its collaboration with the Trump administration than deal with a purge of incompetents and possible moles within the Iranian interior ministry.

The Iranian version, though, is plausible. Armies already have automatic firing mechanisms; it’s not difficult to write codes that shoot guns. Whatever the facts of the operation, high-tech war is changing the assassin’s art. Ronen Bergman, perhaps the best of Mossad’s chroniclers, recalls a meeting at the agency’s headquarters at the beginning of the covert campaign to kill Iranian researchers and delay the country’s progress towards getting a bomb. A woman officer stood up and said her father was a scientist on Israel’s own nuclear programme. “Going by the way of thinking prevalent here,” she said, “my father would be a legitimate target for elimination. I think that’s neither moral nor legal.” She did not win the argument — an Iranian bomb was seen as an existential threat and therefore trumped legal objections — but the principle of proportionality was observed. Bullets were not sprayed randomly; family members were kept out of the fray where possible. And the safety of the agent was paramount. No one wanted to see a Mossad officer swinging from a crane in the centre of Tehran.

But the most care in the past has been taken when Israeli agencies collaborate with the CIA. The Americans are forbidden from executing someone with whom the US is not at war. In 2007, Israel was determined to bump off Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah chief of staff, but needed American help in tracing his movements in and around his Damascus lair. President George W Bush agreed so long as US involvement was kept secret, no one apart from Mughniyeh was to be killed, and Americans wouldn’t take part in the actual hit. There then followed an elaborate inter-agency dance, with the head of Mossad blocking the operation 32 times in the space of six weeks because of the risk of killing others and of breaching his agreement with the US. In February 2008 Mughniyeh was blown up by a bomb hidden inside the spare tyre of his SUV.

American and Israeli intelligence co-operation took off under the Trump administration. At the start of the year a US Reaper drone fired a laser-guided Hellfire missile to kill Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani outside Baghdad airport. His movements had been tracked for years by the Israelis who shared the intelligence with the US. The drone took pictures of Soleimani’s face and clothes in his car and relayed it back to the US to confirm his identity. This was part of the new world of execution. It involved no one on the ground, it was intelligence-led, civilians were avoided, it was conducted precisely and at high speed.

The signal to allies is clear: if a country has sophisticated weapons technology and intelligence support, it can dodge ethical debate and decapitate a snake just because it is able to rather than because of any imminent threat. The clinical sterility of the kill made it the antithesis of Russia’s bungled poisoning of Sergei Skripal. Russian assassination abroad has barely advanced since an ice-pick was buried in the skull of Leon Trotsky. The new machinery of war, the surveillance and killing robots being designed to get close to an enemy, is speeding up conflict and relieving battlefield commanders, already overwhelmed by incoming data, of troublesome moral judgments. Soldier or spook, the kill algorithm will soon become an officer’s best friend. We need to be talking about the moral hazard of machine war.

Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk