Head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Israel intelligence desk, Seyyed Ahmed Dabiri is executed as Israeli spy
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 16, 2015
highly credible Iranian exile sources in Europe have revealed to debkafile that the Director of the Israel Desk of the Revolutionary Guards clandestine service was executed by a firing squad in late June or early July after he was accused of spying for Israel.
Aged 46, Seyyed Ahmed Dabiri was his codename. His real name is not known. The sources report that he was tried by a Guards martial court and found guilty of tipping Israel off on classified information, including the movements of Iranian military commanders in Syria, Iranian arms shipments to Syria and arms convoys bound for Hizballah in Lebanon.
Suspicion first fell on Dabiri after the Israeli air force struck the convoy of Iranian and Hizballah commanders that was on a top-secret visit to the village of Mazraat Amal near the Golan town of Quneitra on Jan. 18. They were there to survey the terrain preparatory to planting a Hizballah rocket position just across from IDF’s Golan outposts, a mission which ended in disaster.
Killed in the attack were the Iranian general in charge of the Syrian front, Gen. Mohammad Ali Allah-Dadi, the high-ranking Hizballah intelligence officer Ali al-Tabtababni, who was in charge of liaison with the Iranian Guards, and Jihad Mughniyeh, son of the iconic Hizballah commander in chief, the late Imad Mughniye. He had been assigned command of the Hizballah Golan base whence to launch a new offensive against Israel.
After the air strike, the plan was abandoned, a setback with devastating effect on the Iranian and Hizballah high commands. Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah announced at the time that the gloves was now off against Israel and that “rules of engagement” with the Jewish state were no longer in force.
No more than a handful of big shots were privy to the Golan tour in the highest Revolutionary Guards highest echelon and the inner circle of Nasrallah. The IRGC’s chief Gen. Ali Jafari and Iran’s Middle East commander in chief Gen. Qassem Suleimani ordered an all-encompassing investigation to find out who was responsible for leaking to Israeli intelligence the secret of the Golan tour.
According to the Iranian exiles, the high Hizballah command and the Guards headquarters in Tehran were exhaustively investigated.
debkafile’s sources point to the fact that on Jan. 5, two weeks before Israel’s deadly air strike, Nasrallah’s deputy, Sheikh Naim Qassem, complained that “Hizballah is battling espionage within its ranks and has uncovered some major infiltrations.” A short time earlier, in December 2014, Mohammad Shawraba, 42, the deputy chief of Unit 910, which is responsible for external terrorist operations, was arrested on suspicion of spying for Israel. So in the weeks leading up to the Israeli Golan attack, Hizballah was buzzing with Israeli spy fever.
Yet the Guards probe failed to discover the source of the leak either in Beirut or Tehran. When no Israeli mole was identified, the Guards intelligence chief Gen. Hassan Taeb set a trap and baited it with a false piece of intelligence. On April 25, Israel air planes struck what they believed to be Syrian and Hizballah bases and arms dumps in the Qalamoun Mountains on the Syrian-Lebanese border. Middle East media carried confused reports on this attack – some claiming it targeted an arms convoy heading into Lebanon from Syria; others cited missile stores or even the Syrian army’s 155th and 65th Brigades. Israeli sources declined to confirm or deny any of those versions.
The cause of the mix-up was that the target was a red herring. But the attack enabled Iranian spy catchers to narrow down the source and discover that Ahmad Dabiri was the mole who had tipped Israel off..
