Israel’s battles against Iran expose infiltration

Published on: 08/11/2024 – 16:02Altered: 08/11/2024 – 4:00 PM

4 minutes

It remains a closely guarded secret how and how deeply Israel has infiltrated the Iranian government and security apparatus.

But analysts say Israel’s recent successes – including assassinations, targeted attacks and covert operations – would be impossible without high-level information leaks.

The question of the extent of Israel’s reach within the Islamic republic is particularly acute as tensions rise between the two enemies, with each side openly attacking the other’s territory for the first time.

In a rare public acknowledgment of the seriousness of the matter for the Islamic republic, a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week that the “problem of infiltration had become very serious in recent years.”

“There have been cases of negligence for years,” said Ali Larijani, a former parliament speaker and nuclear negotiator, quoted by the ISNA news agency.

“It hurts you in an instant.”

The assassination of the leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, during an Israeli attack in Beirut in late September was only possible with detailed knowledge of the whereabouts of a figure whose movements were closely guarded and shrouded in secrecy.

The political leader of the Iran-backed Palestinian militant group Hamas, Ismael Haniyeh, was killed this summer at a home in Tehran, allegedly using an explosive device planted by Israeli agents weeks earlier.

A day earlier, Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and held talks with Khamenei.

Most notable was the simultaneous explosion of hundreds of pagers used by Hezbollah militants in Lebanon after a years-long operation to infiltrate the devices’ supply chain, killing 37 people and injuring 3,000.

Although Israel has never publicly acknowledged its role in Haniyeh’s killing or in the pager attacks, both are widely blamed.

“You have an opponent who thinks for years and hurts you in the blink of an eye,” Larijani said.

‘Willing to help Israeli intelligence’

But these were certainly not the first such cases attributed to Israel, which has long been believed to have carried out sabotage operations through its Mossad spy agency in Iran.

According to US media reports, the Mossad killed top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020 using a machine gun that his agents gathered close to his home and then fired from a distance after they left.

Iran’s judiciary announced on Tuesday that it had sentenced three people to death for the murder. The Kurdistan Human Rights Network collective said all three are Kurds, two from northwestern Iran and one from northern Iraq.

According to some media outlets, including the Iran International television channel, Israeli agents have even captured and interrogated the Revolutionary Guards in Iran to obtain intelligence.

Alexander Grinberg, an expert on Iran at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said Larijani’s statements “highlight the inability of Iranian services to stop Israeli infiltration.”

Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, said Israel can find help in all departments in Iran, including the Revolutionary Guards.

“There is a high level of dissatisfaction within Iran with the Iranian regime and many people, even within the government, are willing to help Israeli intelligence in exchange for money and because they disagree with the regime,” he said.

‘Someone in the know’

Former French spy agent turned author Alain Chouet said the nature of Nasrallah’s killing indicated that Israel must have had human intelligence – from a source or sources inside Iran – as well as signals intelligence obtained from communications.

“He didn’t sleep in the same place for two nights, he didn’t stay in the same place for two hours, which was extremely difficult to locate, he didn’t have an ounce of electronics on him,” he told AFP.

“They hit with certainty and hit the target at the right time and in the right place. Someone inquired.”

In a 2020 Turkish media interview that was shared virally this fall, Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran had created a special unit to target Israeli agents, but discovered that the head of the unit itself ‘turned out to be a Mossad. agent along with 20 others”.

“There is enormous dissatisfaction in Iran with the current leadership and that provides recruitment opportunities for foreign intelligence services like Mossad,” said Jason Brodsky, policy director of the US-based United Against Nuclear Iran.

© 2024 AFP