Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed in an interview Monday that the head of a secret service unit created to target Mossad agents working in the country actually turned out to be an Israeli agent.
Speaking to CNN Turk, Ahmadinejad said that 20 other agents from the Iranian intelligence team responsible for monitoring Israeli intelligence activities had also turned against Tehran.
These alleged double agents were providing Israel with sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program, according to his comments in the interview, which were widely reported by international media.
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Tehran often claims to foil Mossad operations in the country, but the veracity of these claims is shaky.
Ahmadinejad said these agents were behind some significant Mossad successes in Iran, including the 2018 theft of documents relating to the nuclear program that were transported from Tehran to Israel and revealed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The discovery is believed to have helped convince then-US President Donald Trump to unilaterally withdraw from the nuclear deal between world powers and Iran.
The head of the counterintelligence unit was revealed as a double agent in 2021, but he and all other suspected Mossad moles were able to flee the country and now live in Israel, claimed Ahmadinejad, a firebrand populist known for his radical anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric and for the violent crackdown that followed his disputed re-election in 2009. He was blocked from running for president again earlier this year.
Other Iranian officials have in the past noted Mossad’s penetration of Iran. A former Iranian minister, advisor to former President Hassan Rouhani, said in 2022 that senior officials in Tehran should fear for their lives due to the “infiltration” of the Israeli spy agency, according to the website information in Persian Manoto, based in London.
Damaged buildings at the site where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was eliminated, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, September 29, 2024. (Hassan Ammar/AP)
Ahmadinejad spoke as Israel battles Iran’s proxy terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and achieves remarkable successes, apparently based on extensive intelligence. Over the past two weeks, thousands of Hezbollah hand-held communications devices have exploded in Lebanon, injuring at least 1,500 of its members in incidents that the terrorist group has blamed on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied his responsibility. Additionally, airstrikes killed nearly the entire upper echelon of Hezbollah’s chain of command, including the terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike Friday on his Beirut bunker.
The French newspaper The Parisianciting a Lebanese source, reported on Saturday that Israel had been informed of Nasrallah’s presence by an Iranian mole.
Immediately after the announcement of Nasrallah’s death, the Iranians rushed their supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to a safe location.
In July, the political leader of the Hamas terrorist group, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed by an explosion in the Tehran guest house where he was staying during a visit to attend the funeral of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Although Israel has not commented on or claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s death, Iran has promised to retaliate.
Days after Haniyeh’s death, Iran arrested around 20 people suspected of being linked to the assassination, the New York Timesciting two Iranians familiar with the investigation.
Those arrested included senior Iranian intelligence officers, military officials and staff members of the guest house run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranians feared that a major security lapse among senior officials may have made the audacious assassination possible.
Iranian workers installing a huge banner on a wall showing a portrait of Hamas terror group leader Ismail Haniyeh and the Dome of the Rock Islamic shrine atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, with a sign reading Farsi and Israeli: “Expect severe punishment,” in Palestine Square, Tehran, Iran, July 31, 2024. (Credit: Vahid Salemi/AP)
A series of mysterious explosions and other failures have affected Iran’s nuclear program over the years.
In November 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a senior Iranian nuclear scientist, was assassinated in Iran in what the New York Times later reported to be a sophisticated attack carried out by a Mossad team that allegedly deployed a computerized machine gun.
Last month, the Revolutionary Guards said 12 people had been arrested on suspicion of serving as agents collaborating with Israel and planning acts against Iran’s security.
Israel has been at war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza and engaged in daily fighting with the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon – both proxies of Iran – since Hamas carried out a massacre in southern Israel on October 7 2023.
