The shocking killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the heart of the Iranian capital has sparked speculations and warnings about serious flaws and “Israeli infiltration” in Iran's intelligence and security agencies.
Critics say these flaws allowed an intricate intelligence network of infiltrators in the highest levels of Iranian security agencies to provide vital information to Israel to make a complex operation of this scale possible.
Israel has not taken responsibility for Haniyeh’s assassination but Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who holds Israel responsible for the killing has vowed to avenge it.
The conservative Jomhouri Eslami (Islamic Republic) newspaper on Thursday criticized the authorities for not heeding the many warnings about Israeli infiltration after other Israeli assassinations such as the killing of Iran's top nuclear man and Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) member Mohsen Fakhrizadehnear in Tehran in November 2020.
“The fact that the Zionist regime can lead its rocket through the window of Ismail Haniyeh’s bedroom in a highly guarded area of Tehran and martyr him only means that this criminal regime has infiltrators among us,” Jomhouri Eslami wrote.
“More important than taking revenge is blocking the enemy's paths of penetration through the air and on the ground and identifying and punishing their agents,” the newspaper said.
Jomhouri Eslami also reminded the authorities of the historical case of Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Syrian military and government in the 1960s and called for a “fundamental clean up in intelligence and security agencies”.
Mansour Haqiqatpour, a former spokesman of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee also criticized the security and intelligence agencies in an interview with Rouydad 24 news website on Wednesday.
“Decisions must be made about some of our political, military, and security authorities some of whom must be sacked because of this incident,” Haqiqatpour, an IRGC general who served as Qasem Soleimani regional deputy in the Qods Force for over a decade, told Rouydad 24.
Jalal Sadatian, Iran’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom, also warned about the possibility of infiltration. “We have been bitten by [snakes crawling out of this] hole many times as in the assassination of nuclear scientists and other figures," he told the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) Wednesday.
Israel has been blamed for the assassination of at least five Iranian nuclear scientists in and around Tehran since 2010 as well as several sabotage attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities.
In an interview with Israel's Channel 12 TV in June 2021, former Mossad chief Yosef ‘Yossi’ Cohen suggested that Israel was behind both the Fakhrizadeh killing and the April 11 2021 attack on the Natanz enrichment plant.
“The most smashing response to Israel [for Haniyeh’s assassination] is identification and neutralization of the agents that have infiltrated the system to the bone,” prominent reformist politician Mohsen Mirdamadi who also suggestively used the hashtag “Eli Cohen” tweeted Thursday. “Infiltrators are those whose Death to Israel cries reach as far as Tel Aviv,” he added.
In 2021, in an interview with reformist Jamaran news website, former intelligence minister Ali Younesi said all Iranian officials are at risk of being killed by Mossad. Younesi who served under reformist President Mohammad Khatami from December 2000 to August 2005 pointed out that rivalries between the Intelligence Ministry, the Intelligence Organization of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and other security agencies had weakened them.
"Parallel organizations are busy fighting insiders rather than monitoring and confronting infiltrators," Younesi argued.
A video of the interview has been widely circulating on Persian-language social media and news websites since the announcement of Haniyeh’s assassination.
Videos of past interviews with Iran's former populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2021 have also been widely circulating on social media in which he warned about a “corrupt gang at the high level” of Iran's intelligence agencies.
Ahmadinejad claimed in one of the interviews that a top official of the intelligence ministry during his second term of presidency who was responsible for the Israel Desk, was executed for spying for Israel.
“Whoever claims that Israeli infiltration is limited to that one person in the intelligence ministry wants to conceal the existence of Israel’s infiltration network in Iran,” Ahmadinejad said.