Ever since Israel’s attack, the Iranian authorities have asked citizens to alert them to anyone carrying bags, wearing sunglasses at night or even donning hats — an uncommon accessory in Iran.
They have urged the public to report stolen licence plates, pick-up trucks with covered beds, or vans travelling at odd hours. All of these, they warn, could be the tell-tale signs of enemies operating from within.
Reeling from the scope and scale of the Israeli strikes this month, Iran is conducting an intensive manhunt for suspected infiltrators and spies, and enlisting the public in the campaign. As authorities have swept up hundreds of people, the government has sped up trials and executions of alleged spies, and fast-tracked a law to broaden the use of the death penalty for anyone convicted of espionage.
Given the scale of the arrest campaign even after this past week’s cease-fire, some in Iran fear this could become another crackdown on political opponents by a government with a long history of repressing dissent.
“Like a wounded animal, the Islamic Republic is going after every perceived threat in the country with deadly force,” Hadi Ghaemi, the director for the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said in a statement on Thursday.
Iranian officials are not simply paranoid.
Israel has a history of successfully infiltrating Iran to gather intelligence and carry out assassinations and sabotage. Officials on both sides say that in the recent war, Israel flaunted its ability to build networks and launch widespread attacks from within Iran.
Iranian officials have recently reported a number of clues that they say point to Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, being aided by operatives on the ground. They include evidence that Israeli missiles were assembled and deployed within the country, and the discovery of thousands of miniature attack drones in the capital, Tehran.
“It’s clear the Mossad has a very wide network inside Iran — and probably 90 per cent of them are locals,” Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst who edits the independent regional news site Amwaj.media, said this past week. “The big question is: Who are they? Fingers are being pointed all over the place.”
Within hours of first striking Iran on June 13, Israel demonstrated a stunning breadth and accuracy of intelligence by killing a string of top generals and nuclear scientists in their homes. The attacks also destroyed missile launchers and air defences, and forced Iran’s supreme leader into hiding.
“We had a massive security and intelligence breach. There is no denying this,” Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iran’s Speaker of parliament, said recently in an audio recording assessing damage from the brief war.
For years, Iran’s theocratic government has struggled with the problem of intelligence breaches. Now, its nationwide spy hunt comes at a particularly sensitive time. Iranians who spoke to The New York Times, including some government critics, have shown a degree of understanding for Tehran’s security concerns.
But Iranian officials have shown little inclination, at least publicly, to reckon with their sweeping intelligence failures, even as they pursue an aggressive crackdown that rights groups say is disproportionately affecting ethnic and religious minorities, Opposition figures and foreigners.
These groups say many of those swept up over the past two weeks were detained without warrants and given no access to lawyers. Amnesty International has expressed concern over expedited, “grossly unfair trials” and executions in several cases, and called Iran’s recent actions “a misguided attempt to project strength”. Iranian officials did not respond to a request for comment.
On Wednesday, the Mossad released a rare video of its director, David Barnea, praising a room full of agents, their faces blurred, for their work on Iran. “We will be there, like we’ve been there so far,” he said.
Iran’s intelligence ministry has vowed that its “intelligence jihad will undoubtedly continue” against Israeli operatives. And the government, which has acknowledged shutting down Iran’s Internet for days out of concerns over cyber attacks, is still pushing Iranians to eschew international social media sites and stick to domestic online platforms.
For decades, Iran has witnessed periods of popular protest, which were met by lethal crackdowns.
There could also be strong financial incentives to spy, with Iran mired in a deep economic crisis that stems from decades of Western sanctions and government mismanagement.
New York Times News Service