The shadowy Iranian global intelligence service you’ve never heard of

Various investigations into Iranian activities have revealed that over the years, the ministry has used multiple forms of non-official cover. In some cases, the MOIS has set up intelligence bases in cultural and charitable organisations and mosques. In addition, MOIS officers are believed to have operated as journalists, students, and medical personnel, as well as employees of private businesses, the foreign branches of Iranian banks, and Iran Air, the state-owned airline.

The MOIS recruits informants by offering them a salary, gold coins and other gifts. MOIS officers also use informants to help recruit others. In one report from Iraq, for example, an MOIS handler claimed to have used an informant to prepare a friend who would be working for the United States at Al-Asad Airbase for recruitment and direction.

Other recruitment methods involve the use of the internet and the development of elaborate cover stories. An Israeli investigation that resulted in the arrest of five Jewish immigrants from Iran in early 2022 revealed that Iranian intelligence officers had used financial incentives to recruit the assets, who were initially contacted and then directed over the internet. The Israelis reported that the Iranian officers had used family members in Iran to transport funds to them in Israel.

In 2012, the MOIS recruited Gonen Segev, a former Israeli cabinet minister living in Africa who had been jailed in the 1990s on narcotics charges. Captured by Mossad, Segev was sentenced to prison for giving Iran information related to Israeli political and security officials and the country’s security sites and energy sector. The court case revealed that MOIS handlers had twice brought Segev to Iran for meetings and had given him a communication system for encrypted messages.

In 2018, the FBI arrested two Iranian-American dual citizens affiliated with the MOIS and charged them with acting as agents of Iran.

The pair had been secretly monitoring Jewish centres and Iranian opposition members in the United States.

More recently, in 2019, the MOIS turned to the internet and cyber operations to hack the mobile phone of former Israeli armed forces chief Benny Gantz, who was Israel’s defence minister from 2020 to 2022.

Gantz claimed that no classified information was compromised but political opponents questioned whether his lost personal information made him vulnerable to blackmail.

In early December 2023, the United States blacklisted two alleged MOIS officers for recruiting individuals for various surveillance and lethal operations in the US, including targeting current and former US government officials to avenge the death of IRGC Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by an American drone strike in 2020.

Across the world, the MOIS and IRGC have deployed non-Iranian and dual-national operatives who travel on their own or false passports, including forged Israeli ones. Iran also has outsourced some operational activities to criminal organisations, such as the 2015 contract killing of opposition militant Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi, who was living under an assumed name in the Netherlands.

Iran used Dutch criminals for the late 2017 murder of Ahmad Mola Nissi, an Arab separatist leader, outside his home in The Hague. Similarly, an employee of a Turkish crime boss was the prime suspect in a MOIS lethal operation in Istanbul in the late 2010s against regime critic Saeed Karimian, who was accused of spreading Western culture and anti-Islamic values by broadcasting foreign programmes dubbed into Persian on his Gem TV network.

Another high-profile MOIS assassination plot that occurred in Europe in 2018 showcased ministry tradecraft. Asadollah Assadi, an MOIS officer operating under diplomatic cover as the third secretary of Iran’s embassy in Vienna, recruited an Iranian-Belgian couple to plant a bomb targeting Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella opposition group. The indiscriminate explosive could have killed many others, including President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was scheduled to speak at the rally near Paris. In the event, a MOIS operational security shortcoming allowed Israeli intelligence to detect the plot, and acting on its tip Belgian intelligence officers intercepted the couple.

Iranian operations occasionally demonstrate poor tradecraft, as in Iraq, where the activities of some Iranian officers and assets showed bumbling and comical ineptitude. In a 2009 example, Iranian officers recruited a naturalised US citizen of Iranian descent with no relevant experience for a surveillance job. The asset was easily spotted and arrested before quickly pleading guilty. The MOIS operatives involved in a 2021 kidnap plot explored renting a speedboat for an escape of roughly 2,200 nautical miles to Venezuela, a trip that was beyond the capabilities of the craft under discussion.

The MOIS also is responsible for counterintelligence operations on home turf and has repeatedly declared that it infiltrated and broke CIA espionage networks directed against Iran. The MOIS uses these supposed counterintelligence accomplishments to boast of its effective operational and analytic capabilities, sow doubt about the veracity of information gathered by foreign intelligence networks and denigrate foreign intelligence services’ capabilities.

Over the years, the MOIS has claimed the disruption of various Mossad networks, although these actions usually came after damaging Israeli operations had already occurred. In 2012, the MOIS announced the discovery of an alleged Israeli network targeting Iran’s nuclear activities, as well as the arrests of the operatives involved in the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

One of the conspirators, Majid Jamali-Fashi, confessed on television to receiving training and a payment of $120,000 from Mossad. However, the claimed counterintelligence successes suffered from credibility problems stemming from the ministry’s harsh interrogation tactics. The MOIS in 2019 reluctantly acknowledged that some of the other conspirators’ confessions had been obtained under torture.

More recently, in late July 2021, the ministry claimed that it had arrested alleged members of an Israeli intelligence network on Iran’s western border, seized arms intended to support riots in Iranian cities, and disrupted a plan to conduct “acts of sabotage” during Iran’s presidential election that June.

In early 2023, Iran revealed another significant, if somewhat delayed, MOIS counterintelligence success. Four years earlier, the MOIS had arrested dual British citizen Alireza Akbari, a former Iranian deputy defence minister who was an associate of Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Shamkhani, for allegedly spying for London since 2004. The MOIS held him in secret for three years. During this time, they had Akbari regularly use a British-provided computer to communicate with his handlers to mislead them. In January 2023, the Raisi administration revealed Akbari’s detention, conviction and death sentence.

Regime leaders in late 2020 credited the MOIS with “nearly” preventing one of a string of high-profile assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists stretching back more than a decade and attributed to Israel and Mossad-recruited operatives. The regime believes the assassinations may have started in 2007 when a nuclear scientist at a uranium plant in Esfahan died in a mysterious gas leak.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh – the reputed “father” of Iran’s nuclear programme – was killed in November 2020 in an ambush of his four-car convoy on a rural road 40 miles east of Tehran. The Mossad hit team, comprising more than 20 Israelis and Iranians, carried out the high-tech assassination following months of painstaking surveillance. The ambush used a one-ton remote-controlled machine gun smuggled piece-by-piece into Iran, a car bomb, and two snipers, the JC revealed at the time.

Government spokesperson and former MOIS deputy minister Ali Rabii said that the Ministry of Intelligence had identified the people who brought the “devices and technologies” used for the killing. Supreme National Security Council secretary Shamkhani, a former senior IRGC officer, repeated that Iran’s intelligence services had information about the plot – including the location – but blamed the breakdown in protection on a complacent failure to observe precautions after years of frequent warnings.

Alavi later claimed in an interview that the Fakhrizadeh assassination was organised by a member of the Iranian armed forces, but no evidence or subsequent confirmation were offered.

If true, Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus suffers significant operational weaknesses and potentially is compromised by foreign service penetrations. Consumed by soft-war dangers, security officials seem to have been caught repeatedly looking in the wrong places for threats.

Other recent protection failures in the period surrounding Fakhrizadeh’s death included the August 2020 assassination of al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Abu Muhammad al-Masri, who had been held in loose custody in Tehran from 2003 to 2015 before settling there, and the July 2020 and April 2021 explosions at a nuclear facility in Natanz. The 2020 blast at Natanz was traced to explosives sealed inside a heavy desk that had been placed in the facility months earlier. The 2021 Natanz attack sparked official criticism of the intelligence and security community over “the Israel within,” a reference to perceived Mossad penetrations of Iranian facilities and organisations.

In 2018, Israeli operatives conducted a daring night raid to steal a half ton of secret nuclear programme archives from a warehouse in Tehran. These operations revealed an MOIS inability to prevent Israeli intelligence from establishing effective networks of collaborators inside Iran and repeatedly gaining access to sensitive sites.

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Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence: A Concise History, by Steven R Ward (Georgetown University Press), is out now