Let’s Give the Iranian Masters of Counter-Espionage Their Due

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Some of the comical episodes of Iranian counterespionage, and on the remarkable achievements of Israel’s spies, can be found here: “Iran’s Crazy Search for Spies,” by A.J. Caschetta, IPT News, July 3, 2025:

Of course, the real spies knew exactly where “atomic activities” were carried being out.

Prior to October 7, Israel had accomplished some remarkable feats of spy craft inside Iran. In addition to the Stuxnet caper, Israel killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the director of Iran’s nuclear program, on November 27, 2020. He wasn’t the first Iranian nuclear scientist to be eliminated, but Israeli spies accomplished the task with sci-fi panache using a remote-control gun just a few miles east of Tehran.

There was no human directly involved in killing Iran’s senior nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. As his car sped along the highway to his vacation house outside Tehran, with security guards in the cars directly in front of and behind his, a rifle set up by the side of the road somehow sensed not only which car was his, but calculated precisely the split-second when his car would pass, triggering the shot that killed him. It was better than anything in James Bond.

After October 7, Israel began eliminating its enemies throughout the Iranian terror empire, including Lebanon where on July 30, 2024, it killed Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah co-founder who masterminded the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.

Israel’s killing of Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah co-founder who masterminded the murder of 241 American servicemen, including 220 Marines, as thy slept in their barracks in October 1983, could be seen not only as eliminating one of Israel’s most dangerous enemies, but also a way of taking revenge on behalf of those murdered American servicemen.

The very next day, July 31, Israel foreshadowed what would come in the Twelve-Day War by killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Its patient spies had smuggled a small bomb into the VIP guest house months prior to the assassination. The hit further degraded an already diminished Hamas, and its precision and timing embarrassed Iran’s leaders….

Mossad managed to smuggle a bomb into a guest house in Tehran, months before Ismail Haniyeh stayed there, and to wait patiently until he finally arrived to visit. He was shown to the room he had stayed in during a visit long before. The bomb, set off remotely, blew up the senior leader of Hamas’ political wing. Haniyeh might, of course, have chosen another room in the guest house. Or he could have chosen not to stay in a guest house. Or he might not have gone to Tehran, but remained in Qatar. So many possibilities, so many things that might have foiled the plot. The Mossad plan went off perfectly, and Ismail Haniyeh, who died a martyr, now has his 72 dark-eyed houris to keep him eternal company.

And in June 2025, the Mossad knew exactly where each of Iran’s senior military leaders and nuclear scientists all lived, down to the very apartment, even to the very bedroom each one would be sleeping in. Mossad knew how to inveigle the nuclear scientists to attend a fake meeting, where they all dutifully assembled, and then were blown up.

The Stuxnet computer worm that caused thousands of centrifuges to self-destruct, the seizure of Iran’s complete nuclear archive, the targeted assassinations of a dozen commanders and a half-dozen nuclear scientists in the first day of the war, the killing of Hamas’ leader in Tehran, the destruction wrought on dozens of Iran’s nuclear facilities, including the top secret one at Parchin and the vast nuclear complex at Isfahan, the damage done to the uranium enrichment plant built underground at Natanz, and to another built inside a mountain at Fordow — these are some of the Mossad highlights we know about, but how many more deeds of derring-do by Mossad will we only find out about decades from now?

But let’s give the Iranian masters of counter-espionage their due. Think of those four spy-squirrels, smuggled into Iran but caught by the watchful Iranians just in time. Think of those two pigeons spying on the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, and that other pigeon, the black one with the blue ring tied to it by an “invisible string,” also a spy. The pigeons, like the squirrels, were similarly stopped by Iran’s counterspies before they could do any harm. And let’s not forget those reptiles — lizards, chameleons — whose skins send off “atomic waves” that can help them detect uranium mines, but again, those reptiles were seized by Iran’s ever-vigilant counter-spies before they could do any damage by sending information on those mines back to Israel. Finally, what about those clouds over Iranian skies that the Israelis somehow prevented from releasing rain? The cloud theft. The snow theft. But the Iranians weren’t fooled. Nothing fools the Iranians.