Are Lebanese Hezbollah and the regime of the Iranian mullahs, long-time allies, infiltrated in their high ranks by agents of Mossad, the Israeli secret service? In any case, this is what Ayatollah Ali Khamenei fears, exfiltrated in a secret location outside Tehran for almost a week. It is thus isolated that the supreme leader of the Iranian revolution, who keeps the last word on foreign policy and the military domain, ordered the attack of the 200 missiles fired Tuesday against Israel, in retaliation for the death of the leader of Hezbollah , Hassan Nasrallah.
Shortly before the latter’s death in an Israeli strike, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had advised Hassan Nasrallah, through an emissary, to flee Lebanon and join Iran, suspecting Mossad moles of knowing where he found himself. Ali Khamenei cited intelligence that Israel had operatives within Hezbollah and planned to kill the iconic leader of the armed Shiite movement.
According to an article from Reuters published Wednesday, October 2, the death of the Hezbollah leader has prompted Iranian authorities to thoroughly investigate possible infiltrations within the regime itself, from the powerful Revolutionary Guards to senior security officials, a senior official said Iranian to the British news agency.
Authorities are particularly focusing on those who travel abroad or have relatives living outside Iran, the same senior official said. He told Reuters that the regime had become suspicious of some members of the guards who were traveling to Lebanon. Concerns were raised when one of them began asking where Nasrallah was, particularly how long he would stay in specific locations, the official added.
“Basically, Iran lost the biggest investment it had in recent decades,” Magnus Ranstorp, a Hezbollah expert at the Swedish Defense University, said of the profound damage done to Hezbollah. “This has shaken Iran to its foundations. It shows how deeply infiltrated Iran is as well: they didn’t just kill Nasrallah, they killed Abbas Nilforoushan,” he said, who was a trusted military advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei. This assassination sowed distrust between Tehran and Hezbollah, and within Hezbollah itself. “The trust that held everything together is gone,” the official told Reuters. The Supreme Leader “no longer trusts anyone,” said a third source close to the Iranian establishment.
Anti-Mossad agency infiltrated by Mossad
After the assassination of the Hezbollah leader, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also issued an accusation of espionage, according to which Mossad had infiltrated the Iranian anti-Mossad agency. In an interview with CNN Turk following the rejection of his candidacy in Iran’s June 2024 presidential election, Ahmadinejad claimed that Iran had created a special unit to combat Mossad activities in the country, and that the person running it had “turned out to be a Mossad agent.” The former president also claimed that this agent, with 20 people under his command, was responsible for the theft of Iranian nuclear documents in 2018 and the targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. The information, reported by numerous media, particularly in Israel and Turkey, has neither been confirmed nor denied.
The alarm about Mossad spies among senior Lebanese and Iranian officials had already been raised after the July assassination of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an Israeli airstrike on a secret site in Beirut while he was was meeting with an IRGC commander, two Hezbollah sources and a Lebanese security official told Reuters at the time. This assassination was followed a few hours later by the assassination of Hamas leader Ismaïl Haniyeh in Tehran.
Iran nevertheless regularly claims to uncover Israeli spies. In January 2024, the Islamic Republic executed by hanging four men arrested in 2022 on suspicion of spying for the Jewish state, AFP reported at the time. They were accused of having cooperated with Israeli spy services in a plan to sabotage an Iranian defense site.