The Guardian:

Before Israel launched its war on Iran last month, its security service uncovered an extensive network of its own citizens spying for Tehran – on a scale that has taken the country by surprise.

Since Iran’s first missile barrage on Israel in April 2024, more than 30 Israelis have been charged with collaboration with Iranian intelligence.

In many cases, the contacts began with anonymous messages offering money for information or for small tasks. The payments were then ratcheted up in line with ever more dangerous demands.

Judging by court documents, the surge in Iranian espionage efforts over the past year achieved little, falling short of Tehran’s aspirations of carrying out high-level assassinations of Israeli officials.

However, so many Israelis were prepared to carry out modest missions that the spying campaign may have been successful as a way of crowdsourcing data on strategically important sites that would later become targets of Iranian ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile, Israel spied on Iran to devastating effect, allowing the Mossad to locate and assassinate much of Iran’s high command and its nuclear scientists in a single instant in the early hours of Friday 13 July, among many other targets.

Since the war began, the Iranian regime has arrested more than 700 people accused of spying for Israel, according to the Fars news agency. But the trials have been secret, and in at least six cases led to summary executions, making it impossible to judge how much of the alleged network is real and how much a figment of official hysteria.

By contrast, in the case of the Israelis accused of spying for Iran, the prosecution has filed detailed indictments. Though there has only been one conviction so far from the recent wave of arrests, leaving individual guilt to be assessed, a clear picture has emerged from court documents of how Iran set about casting a wide net for potential agents.

It typically began with a text message from an anonymous sender. One such message, from the sender “news agency”, asked: “Do you have any information about the war? We are ready to buy it.” Another, sent by “Tehran-Quds” (Tehran-Jerusalem) to a Palestinian Israeli citizen, was more overt, saying: “A free Jerusalem unites Muslims. Send us information about the war.”

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