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The best spy thrillers leave you guessing who dunnit and why for weeks, if it’s a television series like Tehran, the enthralling espionage drama playing now on Apple TV. 

And so it goes with the real-life Tehran drama that debuted in the New York Times last week. According to the paper, later corroborated by other well versed reporters, Al Qaeda’s number two ranking operative, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al-Masri, was gunned down with his daughter in Tehran on August 7 by two motorcycle-riding Israeli assets, “at the behest of the United States.”

The date was freighted with bloody history and scented with revenge: It marked the 22nd anniversary of two simultaneous terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which together killed 224 people, most of them locals, and wounded hundreds more. Al-Masri is said to have played a key role in the attacks.

For decades al-Masri and other top Al Qaeda operatives had been hiding out, so to sp…