The Islamic Republic has a long history of threatening and assassinating foreign nationals abroad
The head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, has been under round-the-clock protection for weeks in Vienna after Austrian security services received intelligence of a “specific Iranian threat,” according to a Tuesday report.
Grossi, who has led the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog since 2019, has been guarded by Austria’s elite Cobra counterterrorism unit since late June after intelligence pointed to an Iran-linked threat against him, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Austria deploys its Cobra force to “counter the gravest threats, such as terror plots and to secure top-ranking individuals, including the Austrian chancellor,” according to the Journal.
The news comes as Iranian officials have already publicly threatened the IAEA chief over his reports on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities, the Journal reported. Ali Larijani, a top aide to Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, warned that “when the war ends, we are going to deal with Grossi.” Other senior Iranian officials have demanded Grossi’s removal from IAEA and threatened to put him on trial.
Grossi, who “had the backing of the first Trump administration” to take the IAEA job, has focused his efforts on persuading “Iran to limit its violations of the 2015 nuclear deal and has faced what IAEA officials call Iranian stonewalling of a six-year probe into undeclared nuclear material found in Iran,” the Journal noted. He recently told Fox News in an interview that U.S. and Israeli strikes earlier this year set back Iran’s nuclear program “significantly,” describing the differences as “night and day.”
Iran has been linked to several assassination plots against prominent U.S. figures, including President Donald Trump, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and former national security adviser John Bolton. Last November, U.S. prosecutors charged an IRGC-linked asset with orchestrating a murder-for-hire network targeting Trump and an American journalist.
Last July, then-director of national intelligence Avril Haines assessed that the Islamic Republic was organizing and paying anti-Israel protesters in the United States to sow division ahead of the 2024 election. Months earlier, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei openly praised the anti-Israel student protesters as “a branch of the Resistance Front.”
The news from Austria comes one day after another U.S. ally revealed it was facing a threat from Iran. Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday that his country’s domestic spy agency had “credible intelligence” that Iran orchestrated at least two major anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish sites in Sydney and Melbourne. In response, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador, closed its embassy in Tehran, and announced plans to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
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