Iran’s former leader claims secret service division tasked with rooting out Israeli spies had within its ranks 20 who were working as moles and provided nuclear information
Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addresses the media after registering his candidacy for Iran's presidential election in Tehran on June 2, 2024. (ATTA KENARE / AFP)
The head of an Iranian secret service unit set up to target Mossad agents working in the Islamic Republic turned out to be an Israeli agent himself, according to former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Speaking to CNN Turk, Ahmadinejad claimed Monday that a further 20 agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also turned against Tehran.
The alleged double agents provided Israel with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program, according to his comments in the interview, which were widely picked up by international media.
Ahmadinejad said the agents were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the 2018 theft of nuclear program documents that were taken from Tehran to Israel and revealed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The trove is thought to have been a factor in convincing then-US president Donald Trump to pull out of the nuclear agreement between world powers and Iran.
The head of the counterintelligence unit was revealed as a double agent in 2021 but he and all of the other alleged Mossad moles were able to flee the country and are now living in Israel, claimed Ahmadinejad, a firebrand populist known for his hardline anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric and for the violent crackdown that followed his disputed 2009 reelection. He was prevented from running again for president earlier this year.
Other Iranian officials have in the past remarked about Mossad’s penetration in Iran. A former Iranian minister who served as an adviser to former president Hassan Rouhani said in 2022 that senior officials in Tehran should be fearing for their lives due to the “infiltration” of Israel’s spy agency, according to the London-based Persian-language Manoto news site.
Damaged buildings at the site of the assassination of Hezbollah terror group leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut’s southern suburbs, September 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Ahmadinejad’s assertions came as Israel has been battling Iran’s proxy terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, and achieving remarkable success apparently based on profound intelligence. In the past two weeks, thousands of Hezbollah handheld communications devices exploded in Lebanon, injuring at least 1,500 of its members in incidents the terror group blamed on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility. In addition, airstrikes have killed almost the entire top tier of Hezbollah’s command structure, including the terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a Friday airstrike on his Beirut bunker.
French newspaper Le Parisien, citing a Lebanese source, reported Saturday that Israel was tipped off about Nasrallah’s presence by an Iranian mole.
