Heightened paranoia, deepening angst and increasing insomnia. These are the three side effects Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s terror chief, and his patron, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, will almost certainly be enduring from last week’s Hezbollah pager bombings and strikes against elite Radwan commanders, including the killing of Ibrahim Aqil.
As the hangover from these attacks settles, Nasrallah and Khamenei will be awaking to an extremely disturbing reality: Hezbollah, the Iranian regime’s most important proxy, has been infiltrated at the highest levels. This will be their main takeaway – and concern – from what has been described as one of the most successful intelligence operations in modern history.
And while global leaders and the international community now focus almost all their attention on Hezbollah’s external response, for Nasrallah and his master, Khamenei, the internal response will be just as, if not more, important.
Nasrallah knows the attacks on Hezbollah simply could not have happened without internal collusion with foreign security services, not least that of Israel’s Mossad.
As a client of Khamenei, the Hezbollah leader will lean
heavily on his master’s lead on how to deal with enemy infiltration. The 85-year-old ayatollah has used three primary methods to oust disloyalty and safeguard ideological commitment: purges, indoctrination and the creation of overlapping counter-intelligence units.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) – Khamenei’s ideological army which controls Tehran’s proxy terror network – has undergone several rounds of purges at the senior levels, the most significant of which took place in 2009, 2013 and 2019.
Following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, all the signs indicate that Khamenei is about to double-down and wage another purge of the IRGC.
Reports have already emerged that “colluders with the Zionist regime” in Iran are being detained, including individuals from IRGC’s Ansar al-Mahdi Protection Unit, which was tasked with handling Haniyeh’s security.
Not only will Nasrallah mimic Khamenei’s methods and trigger an internal purge of Hezbollah, but the Iranian regime’s proxy in Lebanon will likely cede the authority of such purges to Khamenei’s intelligence apparatus.
Increasing ideological indoctrination across Hezbollah is another inevitable outcome from the recent strikes. Indoctrination has been Khamenei’s go-to mechanism to guarantee the IRGC and wider security-intelligence apparatus’ blind commitment to his authority. Each time there has been evidence of disloyalty, Khamenei has responded by increasing indoctrination, which now makes up for more than 50 per cent of training in the IRGC. This system, which Nasrallah will have no choice but to aggressively follow, gives precedence to ideological commitment over qualifications across recruitment and promotion protocols – not least among its senior command structures – and is designed to filter out any signs of subversion.
Finally, we should expect the expansion and duplication of Hezbollah’s counter-intelligence units – a move that is straight from Khamenei’s playbook. Throughout the years, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader has not only increased the resources of his regime’s security-intelligence apparatus, but he has created multiple counter-intelligence units to spy on each other, such as the Office of Supreme Leader counter-intelligence organisation and IRGC counter-intelligence unit.
As well as ordering the implementation of this model across Hezbollah, the IRGC has demanded it leads an internal review of Hezbollah’s intelligence failure. This reveals Khamenei is instructing the IRGC to obtain more authority over his Lebanese proxy’s intelligence infrastructure with the goal of increasing Tehran’s micromanagement over the group.
But these collective efforts will be akin to placing a sticking plaster over deep wounds. Purges are unlikely to eradicate disloyal members, the prioritisation of ideological commitment over qualifications will almost certainly result in greater incompetence, and the duplication of entities will only exacerbate paranoia and foster bitter competition leading to increased corruption.
Adding to Nasrallah’s problems are signs of emerging fractures among Hezbollah’s own social constituencies – fractures largely unknown to the outside world. Younger ranks in Hezbollah are starting to question the loyalty of their senior commanders, as well as its own capabilities, competency and hesitancy towards striking at Israel.
For decades, policymakers have viewed and treated Hezbollah as an irreversible reality to endure rather than dismantle. However, recent events have exposed major vulnerabilities not simply within this terrorist network, but also amongst its wider support base. Nasrallah will be fully aware that the West and its allies could further exploit these vulnerabilities – a course of action that could, if appropriately taken, start the unravelling of Iranian regime’s most important proxy. This prospect alone will almost certainly lead to more sleepless nights for Khamenei and his terrorist proteges like Nasrallah. The Hezbollah leader famously used to say “Israel is weaker than a spider’s web”, but recent developments suggest Nasrallah may have been looking in a mirror.
Kasra Aarabi is the director for IRGC Research at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)
