Oded Ailam, a former senior Mossad official who served in the organization for twenty-four years, revealed in an interview with the German newspaper Bild that Israel has a “vast” intelligence network operating within Iran.

In the interview, which took place last week, Ailam explained how Israel managed to recruit so many agents in the heart of a hostile country despite constant attempts by the Iranian regime to locate and eliminate them.

He said that the key to its success lies in the social structure of Iran, which boasts a wide ethnic diversity. Only forty percent of Iran’s ninety million residents are Persians. “This makes it very difficult for the government to control the population,” Ailam said. “The surveillance system has huge gaps. It is not comparable to what the Stasi (secret police) did in East Germany.”

Ailam noted that ethnic groups such as Kurds, Turkmens, Baluchs, and Azeris are relatively easy to recruit, noting that many of them do not act out of sympathy for Israel, and not even always because of financial incentives, but out of deep frustration with the Iranian regime.

“There are a lot of dissatisfied people in Iran,” he said. “Large parts of society live in poverty. Iran sits on huge gas reserves, but instead of investing the capital in the country, the mullahs have invested billions in terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.”

He also emphasized the geographical aspect. “Iran is a huge country. It has borders that cannot always be monitored and this makes it possible to smuggle anything into it.”

According to Ailam, the Mossad provides full protection to agents operating inside Iran, including the possibility of taking their family members to a safe area if necessary. “When someone works for us, we take care of both him and his family,” he said.

Ailam stressed that the organization invests a lot of time and resources to ensure that each agent is indeed suitable for his mission. “When we define a target, we do not rely on only one agent. There is always more than one source to make sure that the information is accurate, and to make sure that the harm will be done to the right person.”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)