إيران تعمل على تسليح سوريا وحزب الله عن طريق البحر/Iran Working to Arm Syria and Hezbollah by Sea/إيران تلقي القبض على شبكة تجسس تابعة للمخابرات الأميركية بعض اعضائها حكموا بالإعدام/Iran Arrests 17 For Spying For The CIA, Some Sentenced To Death
Iran Arrests 17 For Spying For The CIA, Some Sentenced To Death إيران تلقي القبض على شبكة تجسس تابعة للمخابرات الأميركية بعض اعضائها حكموا بالإعدام Jerusalem Post/July 22/2019
Iran Says Busts CIA Spy Ring, Some Sentenced to Death إيران تلقي القبض على شبكة تجسس تابعى للمخابرات الأميركية بعض اعضائها حكموا بالإعدام Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 22 July, 2019
Iran Working to Arm Syria and Hezbollah by Sea إيران تعمل على تسليح سوريا وحزب الله عن طريق البحر Yaniv Kubovich/Haartz/July 22/2019
Tehran prefers sea route due to recent attacks aimed at preventing it from entrenching in Syria and transferring equipment to Lebanon, Israeli officials say
Iran is working to transfer weaponry to Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon by sea, to avoid assaults that have targeted arms shipments, Israeli officials believe. According to their assessments, recent attacks, some of which attributed to Israel, that were designed to prevent Iran from entrenching itself in Syria and transferring equipment to Lebanon have led the Iranians to prefer shipping a portion of the weaponry by sea. According to Israeli defense officials, despite growing tensions at sea between Iran and the United States and Britain in the Strait of Hormuz, Israel has not been directly affected. However, officials have warned of the risk that precision missiles launched by Iran or its proxies in the region could hit Israeli naval and commercial vessels. Iran would prefer to avoid a direct confrontation with Israel at sea due to Tehran’s interest in returning to the negotiating table to put a halt to the sanctions against the country, officials believe. These sanctions have increased since the U.S. administration’s withdrawal from the international nuclear accord with Iran. Officials also said that the Iranians would prefer that tensions not escalate into war, resorting instead to more isolated, lower-intensity incidents in which it has the upper hand, such as its seizure over the weekend in the Gulf of British-flagged oil tanker Stena Impero. However, Israel is preparing for a potential escalation of the situation at sea if Iran is pushed to the wall.
Iran’s envoy to Britain on Sunday urged the U.K. to contain “domestic political forces” which he said wanted to escalate tension between the two countries amid the capture of the Stena Impero. “U.K. government should contain those domestic political forces who want to escalate existing tension between Iran and the U.K. well beyond the issue of ships. This is quite dangerous and unwise at a sensitive time in the region,” Hamid Baeidinejad tweeted. Concerned over Iran’s significant role at sea not only in the Gulf but in the Mediterranean, too, Israeli has decided to erect a sea barrier at the military port in the southern Israeli city of Eilat, as part of the effort to protect the port. The move was also motivated by the need to halt civilian tourist naval traffic in the Gulf of Eilat.
Officials said they also currently consider Iran a threat to shipping in the Straits of Tiran, which leads to the Red Sea port of Eilat. In recent weeks, the navy has also been considering acquiring advanced undersea defense systems to help address the threat of naval mines.
Israel is preparing to fend off attacks on vessels through unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), drones, high-speed boats and even long-range anti-ship missiles fired from land. Israeli naval vessels are threatened regardless of Israel’s superiority in the naval arena, defense officials believe, while Iran realizes that hurting Israeli vessels would lead to an Israeli response.No Iranian intention to enter into a direct naval conflict has been detected by Israel, leading it to presume that should Iran decide to escalate tensions in the Gulf, it would do so through its proxies – Houthis in Yemen or Hezbollah in Lebanon. These organizations possess advanced means capable of targeting Israeli naval vessels within a 300-km range. *Reuters contributed to this report.
Iran Arrests 17 For Spying For The CIA, Some Sentenced To Death إيران تلقي القبض على شبكة تجسس تابعى للمخابرات الأميركية بعض اعضائها حكموا بالإعدام Jerusalem Post/July 22/2019
“The identified spies were employed in sensitive and vital private sector centers in the economic, nuclear, infrastructural, military and cyber areas.”
Iran has captured 17 spies working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and some have been sentenced to death, Iranian media reported on Monday, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.
State television quoted the Intelligence Ministry as saying it had broken up a CIA spying ring and captured 17 suspects. None of the spies were in contact with each other and all of those arrested were Iranian citizens, according to Fars.
The announcement comes after three months of spiraling confrontation with the West that began when new, tighter US sanctions took effect at the start of May, Reuters reported. Last week, Iran captured a British tanker in the Strait of Hormuz after Britain’s Royal Marines seized an Iranian tanker off the coast of Gibraltar in July 4. “The identified spies were employed in sensitive and vital private sector centers in the economic, nuclear, infrastructural, military and cyber areas… where they collected classified information,” said a ministry statement read on state television.
The CIA recruited some of the spies by offering to aid them with the US visa application process and promises of permanent residence permits, according to Fars. The Iranian nationals were also assured of their safety in Iran and abroad.
Some of the recruitment was conducted by CIA officers on the sidelines of scientific conferences in Europe, Africa and Asia. The agency also began correspondence with some of the Iranian nationals through social networks and email.
As part of the espionage operation, the CIA established fake companies to communicate with the Iranian nationals on the pretext of hiring Iranian experts or supplying equipment from abroad.
The spies established secure communications with the CIA with the help of intelligence tools and complex technical equipment from the agency.
Espionage equipment and money were transported into the country inside stones with spyware embedded in them. Agents would then retrieve the stones from various areas in cities, parks and mountain areas and remove the equipment by breaking the stones.
The agents were also provided with fake identity documents.
The CIA had developed an emergency escape plan for the spies, in which the agents would meet CIA officers at a predetermined place in a border town and then exit the country with the agent. Instead, the agents were captured by Iranian officials when they arrived at the predetermined escape point, according to Fars. Iran’s Intelligence Ministry stated that although the spies had undergone training to withstand interrogation, all the members of the spy network ended up confessing to communicating with the CIA. Fars also reported that information from the spies was directed against the US.
The Iranian Intelligence Ministry will provide information uncovered regarding this spy ring to intelligence services in other countries, in order to further thwart CIA espionage attempts. This will most likely affect other European and Asian countries as well, according to Fars.
Iranian state media reported that the arrests were made in the Iranian calendar year ending in March 2019, according to Reuters.
The Iranian judiciary issued sentences for the spies a few days ago, according to Fars. Some were sentenced to death while others received long-term prison sentences. Those arrested were professionals and experts in Iran, but did not serve any official roles.
According to the ministry, the spy network failed to sabotage or disrupt activities in the Islamic republic.
It was not immediately clear if the arrests were linked to the case where Iran said in June that it had exposed a large cyber espionage network it alleged was run by the CIA, and that several US spies had been arrested in different countries as a result of this action, according to Reuters.
Iran Says Busts CIA Spy Ring, Some Sentenced to Death إيران تلقي القبض على شبكة تجسس تابعى للمخابرات الأميركية بعض اعضائها حكموا بالإعدام Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 22 July, 2019
Iran said on Monday that it arrested 17 suspects and sentenced some to death after allegedly dismantling a CIA spy ring.
Security agencies “successfully dismantled a (CIA) spy network,” the head of counter-intelligence at the Iranian intelligence ministry, whose identity was not revealed, told reporters in Tehran. “Those who deliberately betrayed the country were handed to the judiciary… some were sentenced to death and some to long-term imprisonment.”The suspects were reportedly arrested between March 2018 and March 2019. Iran announced in June that it had broken up an alleged CIA spy ring but it was unclear whether Monday’s announcement was linked to the same case. Iran’s new claims come amid soaring tensions between Tehran and Washington. In May 2018, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from a landmark 2015 deal putting curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The US administration reimposed biting sanctions on Iran, which retaliated by increasing its enrichment of uranium beyond limits set in the nuclear accord. Trump called off air strikes against Iran at the last minute in June after Iran downed a US drone, one of a string of incidents including attacks on tankers in the Gulf. The tensions have escalated since British authorities seized an Iranian oil tanker on suspicions it was shipping oil to Syria in breach of EU sanctions. In what was seen by Britain as a tit-for-tat move, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards seized a UK-flagged tanker in the strategic Strait of Hormuz on Friday, angering the US ally.
