In the Game of Spy vs. Spy, Israel Keeps Getting the Better of Iran

Iam a member of a strange club that nobody wants to belong to, but whose numbers are steadily growing: innocent people convicted in Iran of espionage for what Iranian officials call the “tyrannical Zionist entity” (in other words, Israel). Many among us are foreigners—businesspeople, journalists, tourists, and academics like myself, who traveled to Iran for what they thought would be a brief visit, only to find themselves thrown in prison on dubious charges.

The European Union diplomat Johan Floderus, a Swedish citizen, is but the latest high-profile victim of Iranian hysteria over Israeli spies on its territory. Currently awaiting sentencing from a revolutionary court in Tehran, Floderus faces allegations of “very extensive intelligence cooperation with the Zionist occupation regime” and a charge of “corruption on earth,” which carries the death penalty. Sweden’s foreign minister has stated publicly that the accusations against Floderus are “completely baseless and false,” and the head of the EU foreign service has labeled him “illegally detained.”

I was convicted of espionage for Israel under similarly spurious pretenses in 2019. I had been invited to an academic conference in Iran as the guest of a local university, and was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport as I was about to fly home to Australia. I was handed a 10-year prison sentence, of which I served more than two years at the mercy of the IRGC before I was freed in a prisoner swap.

During my time in the Iranian prison system, I learned Farsi and used every opportunity possible to study my captors. In addition to IRGC interrogators and prison guards, I encountered a number of influential regime figures, including the head of IRGC intelligence, the deputy foreign minister, and even Iran’s current chief nuclear negotiator. At various junctures, these men came to the prison to meet and speak with me, or agreed to do so while visiting for seemingly other purposes.

The fact that someone who had been convicted of espionage, however unjustly, was given access to such people is testament to the chaotic way in which intelligence work is conducted in the Islamic Republic. Indeed, although Iran’s authorities talk tough and cast an extremely wide net in their quest to capture the Mossad agents they believe are in their midst, a prevailing lack of competence has meant that very few actual spies ever seem to get caught.

Not only does the Islamic Republic arrest a large number of innocent people domestically, but the agents of its two intelligence bodies, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the IRGC’s intelligence unit, have a long history of bungling operations overseas. Many operatives get caught: Just last month, a suspected member of the IRGC Quds Force was arrested in Peru for plotting to kill Israelis living in the country. Indeed the three IRGC members who were released in exchange for me had been convicted in Thailand of targeting Israeli diplomats in a failed bomb plot. Rather than making final preparations in the days before their operation, these hapless agents had been photographed drinking alcohol and partying with local prostitutes. In the course of resisting arrest, one of them had even blown off his own leg with the bombs they’d assembled.

Of course, not every overseas Iranian-intelligence operation fails, and the consequences are devastating when they do not. In 1994, 85 people were killed at a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, in a bombing that Argentine courts later ruled was carried out on the orders of the Islamic Republic. Just last week, Argentina issued an Interpol red notice for Iran’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, accusing him of having been behind the attack. The Islamic Republic is also apparently implicated in a string of assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents across Europe and the Middle East, as well as plots targeting Iranian opposition journalists in London and New York.

The incompetence and lack of professionalism of much of the Iranian intelligence apparatus stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of Israel’s, which is alleged to have carried out sophisticated sabotage and assassination plots on Iranian territory. Beginning in 2007, Israel is thought to have targeted scientists working on Iran’s nuclear program for assassination. At least six have been killed inside the country. In 2022 alone, seven officials affiliated with Iran’s missile or drone programs died under suspicious circumstances. Israel is also thought to have been behind two mysterious blasts at the Natanz nuclear facility, as well the theft of an enormous archive of documents relating to the nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran. In 2023, Mossad even announced that it had kidnapped an IRGC hit man inside Iran; the Israeli agency released footage from his interrogation outside the country.

Somewhat bizarrely, my exchange for three blundering IRGC operatives wasn’t the only connection between my wrongful imprisonment and the high-stakes war of espionage that has long been playing out between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Less than 48 hours after I was freed from prison—and likely not unrelated to the deal that freed me—Israel carried out one of its most audacious missions on Iranian soil.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was an IRGC commander and the shadowy mastermind of Iran’s covert nuclear-weapons program. While the regime was busy welcoming the three convicted terrorists home with garlands of flowers and sleek propaganda reels, agents acting for Israel parked a blue Nissan pickup truck on a highway intersection near the hamlet of Absard, north of Tehran. Hidden on the truck bed beneath a tarpaulin was a remote-controlled, AI-programmed machine gun. As Fakhrizadeh’s motorcade crossed the intersection, the sniper, watching via satellite from thousands of kilometers away, opened fire. Fakhrizadeh was killed in a hail of bullets. The truck then blew itself up.

The Israelis had clearly been surveilling Fakhrizadeh for months, if not years, prior to the attack. Yet they held their fire until after I had departed Iranian airspace, a move that was much to my benefit, as such a brazen operation would undoubtedly have scuppered the deal for my release. That the attack so closely coincided with my prisoner swap, however, was unlikely to be an accident, and had less to do with me than with the three IRGC terrorists exchanged for my freedom. Australia probably  had to secure Israel’s consent for trading them, as they had been caught targeting Israeli diplomats. The IRGC, of course, would have known that. And so the Israelis opted to send Tehran a message by allowing the deal to go through but killing Fakhrizadeh at nearly the same time: They would go after a bigger target, and on Iranian soil besides. Unlike the IRGC’s three amateurish agents in Thailand, they didn’t fail.

The Iranian regime has shown itself to be supremely adept at surveilling, arresting, and interrogating political dissidents, social-media activists, members of armed separatist groups, and even underground terror cells from organizations such as the MEK. As the unprecedented crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations shows, the regime retains a fierce grip on the country and runs it like a police state. All of which leaves one to wonder: Why does Iran do such a poor job of countering Israel’s operations inside its territory?

One clue lies in the fact that many, if not most, of the assassinations and other plots attributed to Israel, including the killing of Fakhrizadeh, are conducted with the participation of local Iranian recruits. Interestingly, the quadcopter drones thought to have been used in Israel’s April 19 attack on a military facility in Isfahan province were also most likely assembled and launched from inside Iran.

The Islamic Republic’s security apparatus has long assumed that Israel is sending foreign tourists and other visitors to Iran to spy on its behalf. But this supposition seems more and more like a costly distraction from the real issue at hand: A not-insignificant number of Iranian citizens inside Iran appear willing to risk torture, imprisonment, and execution in order to assist enemies of their own government.

Iranian security agencies have had little success in thwarting Israeli activities inside their country in part because authoritarian regimes prioritize loyalty over competence. IRGC intelligence officials tend to owe their positions to either ideological conformity or to strong family or personal ties within the organization. If you weren’t a true believer (or at least good at pretending to be one) and didn’t have other IRGC members to vouch for you, you didn’t have a hope of becoming even a lowly prison official in a Revolutionary Guard detention facility. As one guard boasted to me, “Our positions aren’t advertised.” In such a system, aptitude, skill, and even security training are much lower priorities. The least suitable people can attain high ranks, while better-qualified candidates who are deemed insufficiently ideologically committed miss out.

The result is a lack of professionalism, which I observed firsthand during the 804 days I spent in IRGC custody. For example, I was once able to text the Australian embassy in the middle of an interrogation, because my interrogator had made the rookie error of leaving my confiscated phone in the room after he stepped out. On another occasion, I was able to trick one of my captors into revealing details of the diplomatic negotiations surrounding my release. And although I’m unable to go into specifics, female prisoners are routinely able to take advantage of the IRGC guards’ squeamishness about women’s bodies to smuggle information outside the prison.

Selected for ideological orthodoxy, the Revolutionary Guards I interacted with bought into all manner of conspiracy theories, which undoubtedly distorted their understanding of geopolitics and hamstrung their ability to interrogate suspects. I was regularly forced to listen to lengthy tirades about secretive Zionists pulling the levers of the global economy, or Israeli plots to poison the sperm counts of Muslim men in a scheme to achieve demographic supremacy. My handlers admitted to watching spy shows involving the Middle East, such as Fauda, Tehran, and Homeland. These seemed to reinforce their tendency to see the hand of Mossad behind every calamity that befell Iran, man-made or otherwise. Such paranoia helps explain the shockingly high numbers of innocent people, most of them Iranian, imprisoned on charges of working for Israel. Sadly, many of these people make false confessions under duress, which in turn gives the authorities the impression that they are catching real spies.

Institutional incompetence is not the sole reason Iran’s agencies have been losing the shadow intelligence war with Israel. Like all brutal authoritarian regimes, the Islamic Republic knows no language other than intimidation and the threat of violence. It has proved unable to offer positive incentives or rewards to those who might be in a position to assist it. The population, including the Islamic Republic’s traditional religious constituency, broadly loathes the regime; even the most disinterested and self-serving opportunist is reluctant to gather information on its behalf. The IRGC in turn distrusts the people it rules over and believes that cooperation can only be forcibly coerced.

I experienced this approach myself in Evin Prison. Before I was put on trial, Revolutionary Guard interrogators accosted me with an offer of recruitment. Would I agree to travel to London to collect information on the Iranian dissident community? Would I use my status as an academic to visit Israel, effectively as an Iranian agent? Then, after the trial, they used the absurd 10-year sentence I was dealt as a lever of blackmail. The IRGC would only enter into negotiations over my freedom, I was told, if I agreed to work for them; if I did agree, I would be beholden to them in every way once freed.

“How do you know I won’t just run away after I’m allowed to leave Iran?” I asked the recruiters.

The answer was sobering. The IRGC had operatives on Australian soil, they told me, just as they did in Europe and North America. If I reneged, they would kill me. For more than 18 months, I resisted this pressure. It relented only after I leaked to the international press that I was a recruitment target.

The IRGC are better placed to blackmail Iranian or dual-national prisoners than they were with me. Anyone who has family members living in Iran faces an impossible choice: Agree to spy for the regime, or see your loved ones jailed and tortured alongside you. And because unwilling recruits can’t be fully trusted, they are then subjected to near-constant surveillance and threats to prevent them from escaping. During the years I spent in IRGC custody, I encountered several such people, three of whom were ultimately sent abroad on behalf of the IRGC.

Iran’s heavy-handed approach contrasts sharply with the methods that Israel is rumored to employ inside Iran. In prison I met several Iranian Muslims convicted of activities that linked them to Israel, and I heard stories of numerous others. Some were shown to have been calling Israel over Skype, or chatting with Israelis in internet message forums. Of course, many such people are innocent of any crime, and were likely just curious about a neighboring country whose name they had been encouraged to curse since primary school. There appeared to be slightly more substance to the allegations against a small number of others.

From what I came to understand, Israel has been able to capitalize on the Islamic Republic’s record of poor governance, economic mismanagement, poverty, and political repression to offer would-be collaborators valuable ways out. These could take the form of bundles of cash or offers of permanent residency, not only for Iranians who assist their operations, but for their family members as well. In this respect as in many others, the Islamic Republic has become its own greatest adversary: Having shown itself over the decades to be impervious to ideological moderation or reform from within, it has become so hated that its own people—its biggest victims—are willing to embrace the possibility that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. I lost track of the number of Iranians in prison who advocated for heavier economic sanctions and openly welcomed American or Israeli air strikes on Iran.

These sentiments have translated into robust support for Israel on social media, including from inside Iran, much of it making no reference to the horrors currently unfolding in Gaza. Some Iranians condemned the IRGC’s April 13 missile and drone attacks on Israel and cheered on Israel’s retaliation. Somewhat embarrassingly, the regime was forced to issue an official notice threatening to arrest anyone expressing these sentiments online. It followed through by arresting Mobina Rostami, a member of the national volleyball team, after she posted on social media: “As an Iranian, I am truly ashamed of the authorities’ attack on Israel, but you need to know that the people in Iran love Israel and hate the Islamic Republic.”

Israel and Iran’s tit-for-tat military strikes on each other’s territory will likely lead to a further intensification of their long-standing clandestine activities. As a result, Iran will likely throw more innocent people in prison; it will bungle more overseas operations; and ultra-hard-liners in its security establishment will double down on repressing a population that despises them. Such authoritarian tactics have already benefited Iran’s enemies and will continue to do so, offering Israel the upper hand in the covert war of espionage within Iran’s borders and abroad.