00:02This is apropos. Iran regularly claims to arrest or execute spies working for the Israeli
00:09intelligence service Mossad. This week it said it had detained 30 people including one foreign
00:15national it accused of spying on behalf of the US and Israel and acting as a proxy for two
00:21Gulf states. It comes as further details emerge about how Israeli and American authorities spent
00:27weeks tracking the movements of senior Iranian leaders sharing information that allowed the
00:32initial strikes on Tehran to be successfully carried out. James Vazina has the details.
00:40An announcement made by Iran's intelligence ministry in which officials said they'd arrested
00:4530 people. That includes one foreigner who was detained in the northeast of the country for
00:51spying on behalf of two Persian Gulf countries in the name of the American Zionist enemy,
00:56transmitting information about the location and movements of police and army forces.
01:02Human rights groups say that the charges may have been made up and that the arrests were carried
01:06out to try and win concessions from other countries. Tehran denies having detained people for political
01:13reasons. The situation is reminiscent of the wave of arrests carried out during last year's 12-day war.
01:20700 Iranians were accused of acting as agents for Israel by controlling drones, building explosives and
01:27passing on data. Israel's intelligence agency has long relied on help from inside to infiltrate Iran,
01:34as was the case in the attack that killed Ali Khamenei. According to Al Jazeera, Mossad is able to
01:40cooperate with opposition groups inside of Iran who are willing to join forces for ideological reasons.
01:47Aid from people who hold dual citizenship avoids raising suspicion as Israel gathers intelligence
01:54from within.
01:56Well, for more, we're joined now by Dr. Aviva Goodman, a lecturer in strategy and intelligence
02:02at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. Thanks so much for being with us
02:07on the programme. Firstly, talk to us a little bit about what role Israeli spies have played in tracking and
02:14targeting Iranian leaders, military commanders, nuclear scientists, not just in this current conflict,
02:20but over the past decade or so.
02:24Yes, thank you. I think it is really important to remind ourselves that since 2022, the Israeli government
02:36has put Iran as a threat as a priority. So we have seen it took one minute to take down
02:43Ali Khamenei, but it took
02:45probably like 20 years of preparation for for these kind of attacks. But I'm happy to go a bit more
02:50into into detail,
02:52but just to keep us to keep us to remind us that this really is an operation that has been
02:57prepared in a long haul that has been
02:59step by step, bit by bit for, I would say, really 20 years. This has been in the in the
03:06planning and in the preparation
03:08and in studying Iran, determining its weak points and infiltrating it and, you know, going through it, the society.
03:17Well, take us through, sorry for cutting across you, take us through some of those steps, perhaps. You say it's
03:23been two
03:23decades or so in the in the making. How exactly does Mossad manage to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles
03:31of the Iranian security and intelligence apparatus?
03:36So I think also what we have to understand is that there's quite a bit of a Persian diaspora in
03:43Israel itself.
03:44So it can have, it can draw from quite a bit of expertise on Iran. It has developed an expertise.
03:51It knows a lot about its
03:52culture. It knows a lot about the language, the political system. And so there is a huge expertise
03:59on Iran and that at first, before every operation, it's studying and understanding your enemy, if you will.
04:08And I think what I understood is its weak point is precisely that the authoritarian and discriminatory regime
04:17and there are a lot of people who just disagree with the regime, lots of dissidents. So they have for
04:23quite a while already tried to capitalize on this opposition. There are minorities like the Kurds,
04:29the Azeris or the Balochis who will have worked together with the Israelis. So those are the people who
04:37voluntarily will have been recruited by the Israelis and try to work together with them to try to have,
04:46they're both basically, you know, they both want regime change. But what we also have are what
04:53in intelligence problems we would call infrastructure agents. So these are people,
04:58and this might be the people that have been arrested. These are people who Mossad will be using to
05:08acquire all the necessary logistics. So that can be a Mossad front company who will be hiring somebody to
05:17drive a car for place A or place B. And those people might not even realize that they are actually
05:23working for Mossad because Mossad will be hiding behind a company, for instance. And also Mossad, we know
05:32Mossad has posed as Iranian dissidents in exile. So people who thought that they're actually talking to
05:42or working with their fellow dissidents actually was the Israelis behind. So I would say they were using
05:49every single trick in the toolbox of an intelligence agency that is available with a very, very careful
05:55study of the Iranian society and the carefully geared plan towards them. The other type of agents that
06:04Mossad would be using is called then the combatants. Those are people that Israelis will have trained,
06:11probably not in Iran itself, but abroad. And those will be the ones who will then
06:18do the operations and carry out military operations. Yes. And I think all of that is based on the
06:26realization that the Israelis thought it is too dangerous for Israelis themselves to operate in Iran. So
06:32they needed to have local networks on the ground who can do the job with them for them. And I
06:41think a lot
06:42of them can also be managed abroad with the technological means that we have nowadays it can, you know,
06:50we don't have to be in a place as we all know in order to do spy work. I think
07:02we are focusing quite
07:04a bit on human agents. We should not forget that they also have a massive technological
07:11advantage, especially in pairing up with the Americans. So the Americans and the Israelis,
07:18I think, are really on top of spy where one can infiltrate a phone, you know, on a phone that
07:24we
07:24use in every day. And we don't even know that somebody is listening in and is also watching whatever
07:29we are watching. And the camera can also see everything that that wants to see without the
07:36person who has the phone realizing it. So we do know that Iranian leaders have been advised not to
07:42use their phone. But we also have heard that they love their phones, they don't want to give up their
07:45phones. And so it might just be that there's a weakness that was exploded in that way as well.
07:52And to one further aspect, I think also is the use of AI. There is unit 9900 in Israeli military
08:01intelligence who is collecting all kinds of information, all kinds of data. And then it
08:07uses AI to sift through them and to get a picture of a specific picture that we can zoom in.
08:13So they're
08:14taking satellite images, hacked CCTV cameras, other openly available sources, the information from the
08:21phones that they have hacked, and also the information that the local agents will give them. And all of that
08:27is feed into a massive database. And through that, then AI can be extremely useful in creating a
08:37clear picture. Among others, for Ali Khamenei, for instance, they will be able to find out his daily
08:43routines of him, his family members, his associates. And they have been able to build a profile for years
08:51about him. And you mentioned mobile phone use there or misuse. How much of Mossad's success can
08:57also come down to kind of carelessness by its enemies? And are these spies also benefiting from
09:03the fact that Iranian intelligence services themselves have been so downgraded?
09:12I think the Iranian intelligence agencies are extremely geared to internal control, surveillance,
09:20and keeping the regime in place. So it might be that they have not the same counterintelligence
09:28capacities in order to spot Israeli or CIA or other foreign intelligence agencies capacities to prevent
09:37that infiltration and that degree of manipulation. Yeah, so it is, it is possible that and that's
09:49absolutely, that is also the key of every intelligence agency to study where are the weak points and how
09:56can they be exploited. And it seems that the long study and the long analysis has paid off
10:05to some degree in its recent events. And Aviva, Israel itself also seems to have weak points. Authorities
10:13there have previously charged their own citizens with spying for Iran. So it seems to work the opposite
10:18way as well. How successful has Tehran been when it comes to trying to infiltrate Israeli echelons,
10:26the Israeli security apparatus and the government there?
10:31This is hard to tell, but what we do know is that Iranians have kind of worked with a new
10:38method and
10:38it's called disposable spies, where the idea is that you don't have to have these long haul
10:46infiltration. But you want, for instance, to commit a sabotage attempt, a sabotage attack in a country,
10:53say in Israel. And you're kind of using the gig economy in order to perpetrate a terrorist attack.
11:00So you will hire somebody, a bit similar to how Mossad is actually operating, how I was describing the
11:06infrastructure agents. We know that Iran and we also know that the Russians are using these
11:11these disposable agents, where they are commissioning different people for specific tasks. And those
11:23people, they don't actually know that they are part of a potential terrorist attack or potential
11:27sabotage operation, because they are only hired, for instance, to drive the car with explosives that
11:32they might not know that there are explosives in there from place A to place B. And then the next
11:37person will be hired to buy petrol, and then the next person will be hired to buy a lighter. And
11:44only
11:44the one that they actually know then what the whole thing is about will in the end then light
11:48the whole thing up. So Iran has made a big emphasis on these disposable agents. And we know that is
11:58really dangerous as well, because any government will have a really hard time to tracking
12:04these people back to Iran, because it's extremely deniable, and very plausibly deniable. And it's
12:12difficult to track. And those people themselves may not have realised that they were actually part of
12:17the Iranian sabotage operation.
12:20It's a fascinating topic, but we'll have to leave it there for now. Thank you so much for being with
12:24us in the programme, Aviva. That is Dr. Aviva Goodman, lecturer in Strategy and Intelligence
12:28at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. Well, that's it.
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