Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Wednesday June 18, 2025
Wednesday June 18, 2025

Ex-Iranian president: Israeli moles infiltrated intel unit tasked with catching mossad

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Ahmadinejad says 20 moles, including the counterintelligence chief, helped Mossad steal nuclear data.

Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made explosive allegations, claiming that the very Iranian intelligence unit responsible for uncovering Mossad agents was itself infiltrated, with its head secretly working for Israel.

Speaking to CNN Turk, Ahmadinejad stated that 20 members of the secretive counterintelligence division turned out to be Israeli moles. According to him, these double agents passed critical information on Tehran’s nuclear programme to Israel, enabling major Israeli intelligence coups inside Iran.

He pointed directly to the 2018 Mossad-led operation in which Israeli agents stole a trove of nuclear files from a Tehran warehouse. The documents were later publicly revealed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and are believed to have played a key role in persuading then-US President Donald Trump to abandon the Iran nuclear deal.

Ahmadinejad said the head of the counterintelligence unit was identified as a double agent in 2021 but managed to flee to Israel along with the rest of the team. He did not provide evidence to support his claims, but international media widely reported his remarks.

Ahmadinejad, known for his hardline rhetoric and fraught 2009 re-election marred by protests and a brutal crackdown, was barred from standing in Iran’s most recent presidential election. Despite this, he has continued to voice controversial opinions and assert deep state conspiracies within Iran.

Iranian fears about Mossad infiltration are not new. In 2022, an adviser to former president Hassan Rouhani warned that Israeli espionage had reached the highest levels of Iranian officialdom. Now, Ahmadinejad’s comments — if true — suggest a catastrophic breach of Tehran’s own internal defences.

His revelations come as Israel wages what appears to be an extremely successful intelligence campaign against Iranian-backed proxy groups, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon. In recent weeks, thousands of handheld communications devices belonging to Hezbollah exploded inside Lebanon, reportedly injuring over 1,500 members. Though Israel has not taken credit, the attacks are widely believed to be Israeli operations.

These developments culminated in the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on his bunker in southern Beirut. French newspaper Le Parisien, quoting a Lebanese source, reported that Iran may have inadvertently tipped off Israeli intelligence about Nasrallah’s location via a mole in Tehran.

The incident reportedly prompted Iran to move Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to a secure location.

Further compounding suspicions of Israeli penetration into the heart of Iran’s intelligence apparatus, in July, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion at an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-run guesthouse in Tehran. He was in Iran to attend the funeral of President Ebrahim Raisi, who had died in a helicopter crash.

In the aftermath, Iran detained at least 24 individuals, including senior IRGC and intelligence officials, raising serious concerns of internal sabotage. The New York Times reported that Iranian investigators feared a high-level breach had enabled Haniyeh’s assassination.

Iran has long blamed Mossad for a string of incidents, including cyberattacks and targeted assassinations. Most famously, in 2020, top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in a remote-controlled ambush reportedly orchestrated by Israel.

While Iranian state media often claims to have foiled Mossad plots — including the reported arrest of 12 alleged operatives last month — Ahmadinejad’s remarks suggest Israeli espionage has gone much deeper than previously acknowledged.

As Israel continues its military campaigns against Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon following the October 7 attacks, these revelations — if verified — mark a staggering intelligence victory for Mossad and a humiliating setback for Tehran

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