On Friday, July 9, the Iranian website Ensaf News published a revelatory interview with an unnamed former intelligence official. But just a few hours later, the story was pulled. The operators stated that the piece had been taken down after they received a call from “a government supervisory agency”.
The interview brought two new points to light. The first was that ostensibly, the family of the late president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was being kept under constant surveillance by the Intelligence Ministry. But secondly and more significantly was that two weeks before the assassination of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020, two other nuclear scientists had apparently been extracted from Iran by the US.
This disclosure itself came shortly after Ali Younesi, a former intelligence minister, had warned that Israeli infiltration in Iran was now so deep that the lives of all Iranian officials were at risk.
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In the story filed by Ensaf News, the “former intelligence official” claimed that two weeks before Fakhrizadeh’s death, the United States had pulled two Iranian scientists who worked for Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, an agency headed by Fakhrizadeh and is tasked with the research and development of nuclear weapons, out of Iran.
The interviewee did not provide further details. But he appeared to be implying that two Iranian scientists had been working hand-in-glove with the US for some time before the assassination.
The allegations also echoed recent statements by Yossi Cohen, a former director of Mossad, who claimed his agency had been “physically close” to Fakhrizadeh for years. Shahram Amiri, a nuclear physicist who had been in the US between 2009 and 2010 and was executed in Iran in 2016 for allegedly working with US intelligence, had also been a colleague of Fakhrizadeh.
Some time ago, Israeli media reported that the assassination of Fakhrizadeh and other nuclear scientists had been planned for 2019 but was put on hold for various reasons, including that parts of the plan had been leaked. Officials of the Islamic Republic have also publicly said that their intelligence agencies knew Fakhrizadeh was at risk.
If true, the absconding of two Iranian nuclear scientists could also have ramifications beyond the killing of Fakhrizadeh. The Islamic Republic has never publicly confirmed that such a flight took place, although shortly after Fakhrizadeh was killed, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi did say that a “discharged” member of the military who had played a key role in preparation for the assassination had “escaped” Iran beforehand.
The former intelligence operative interviewed by Ensaf News also said that nobody had yet been arrested in connection with the killing. But had the of Mazyar Ebrahimi and others not been exposed, he said, it was likely that security agencies would have charged a handful of innocent people over the assassination by now instead.
Mazyar Ebrahimi was one of several people the Iranian regime falsely accused in 2012 of having assassinated four nuclear scientists, and of being behind the explosion that killed Hasan Tehrani Moghadam, an officer in the Aerospace Force of the Revolutionary Guards and the designer of Iran's ballistic missile project. The group were tortured and forced to confess, but were later released from prison in 2014 after they were proved innocent.
A few years later, the lawyer and MP Mahmoud Sadeghi told the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission – on which the intelligence minister also sits – that in total, the Ministry had arrested some 53 people in 2012 over the scientists’ deaths and ended up paying out about four billion tomans - over $2 million at the time – in compensation when they were later acquitted.
Was the Former Head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency a Spy?
Fereydoon Abbasi, a nuclear scientist, was the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency under President Ahmadinejad from 2011 to 2013. The unnamed intelligence official told Ensaf News that Abbasi was “most likely” working with the US and Israel. “Ahmadi Roshan [a nuclear scientist] was assassinated less than 1,000 meters from the Intelligence Ministry,” he was quoted as saying.
“What does this mean? It means the enemy wanted to show off his power. They used magnetic bombs to assassinate Ahmadi and [fellow nuclear scientist Majid] Shahriari, and they got what they wanted.”
Majid Shahriari and Fereydoon Abbasi were both targeted by apparent assassination attempts on November 29, 2010. Shahriari was killed but Abbasi survived, and later said that his experience with the Revolutionary Guards allowed him to recognize the moment a motorcyclist tried to affix a bomb to his car.
Ensaf News’s interviewee disagreed with this version of events. “Mr. Abbasi says he got out of the car, went to the other side, helped his wife out, and then the bomb went off and they were hit by shrapnel. If you told this story to a chicken it would burst out laughing.
“Has anybody looked to see whether this guy did any damage to the Atomic Energy Agency in the four years that he was its boss? Was the assassination [attempt] just a show to polish his image so he would be appointed as the agency’s boss?”
Fereydoon Abbasi is one of the fiercest open critics of President Rouhani and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Agency under Rouhani. Like Fakhrizadeh, Abbasi was a member of the Revolutionary Guards and then got involved in Iran’s nuclear program.
Khamenei’s Intervention in the Case Against Environmentalists
Away from nuclear matters, the person quoted by Ensaf News also said that during a widely-publicized criminal case against a group of environmentalists, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei took the side of the Intelligence Ministry against that of the Revolutionary Guards.
The group was arrested in early 2018 by the Revolutionary Guards’ Intelligence Unit, and charged with espionage. At the time, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, the newly-anointed chief justice of Iran who was then the judiciary’s spokesman, said the co-accused had given “classified information from sensitive locations to foreign intelligence services.”
The Intelligence Ministry did not agree with the Revolutionary Guards. In October 2018, the Tehran prosecutor changed the charge against four to “corruption on earth”, which can be punishable by death. But a year later Mohammad Hossein Aghasi, their lawyer, reported that this too has been dropped.
Surveillance of the Children of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
Since around 2013, the interviewee said, the Intelligence Ministry has been following the surviving family members of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in a bid to intimidate them. “Mehdi [Hashemi Rafsanjani],” he said, “went around in an old white Toyota that belonged to the Expediency Council. Sometimes who would lie down on the back seat to escape the view of those who were following him. Because of his past, especially the events of 2009 [in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election], they were keener. Both Mohsen and Yasser were also under surveillance.”
Mehdi Hashemi has been in prison since August 2015 for unspecified "security offences and financial crimes”. His sister Faezeh Hashemi has also previously reported both of her brothers were under surveillance, and claimed that on one occasion she had approached the Ministry’s agents and said: “Are men and women segregated even here? Why do you only follow the men of the family and not me?”.
According to Ensaf News’s interviewee, the surveillance was deliberately conducted in the open because Heydar Moslehi, President Ahmadinejad’s Intelligence Minister from 2009 to 2013, wanted to show off. In a TV interview in June 2021, Moslehi claimed he had played a key role in barring Rafsanjani from running in the 2013 presidential election by offering the Guardian Council his assessment of the political outcome of letting Rafsanjani run versus barring him. At the time, he added, there was solid information to suggest that if allowed to run, Rafsanjani would win the election.
The ostensible ex-intelligence official also told Ensaf News that it was this interview with Moslehi, and his abuse of the country’s security establishment, that had finally prompted him to speak out.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s various intelligence and security outfits have always been riven by rivalries and infighting – even before the Revolutionary Guards’ Intelligence Unit was created. Which body bullied Ensaf News into pull this eyebrow-raising interview after its publication remains unclear.
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