May 17, 2019
He said some were in Iran and have been arrested, though he gave no number, while others were scattered across other countries, none of which he named.
His claim came after a November report from Yahoo News asserting that Iran had learned of a method the CIA used to communicate with spies over the Internet, which allowed Iran to identify US spies in many countries. Monica Witt, who once worked with US Air Force intelligence and later defected to Iran, is suspected by some to have revealed the communications method to Iran.
It is possible that Iran exposed 290 spies with Witt’s information. On the other hand, the number Alavi gave may be purely imaginative. The Yahoo news report spoke only of 30 spies being exposed.
Iran has a habit of announcing frequent arrests of spies, but nothing further is normally heard of them, leading to suspicions that Iran is trying to give the impression it is very clever and also to discourage Iranians from volunteering as spies by making it seem likely they will be found out.
Alavi made reference to the Yahoo News article on the communications technique, but said nothing about Witt. He made his claim of exposing 290 spies in a speech before Friday prayers in Tehran April 19.
He spoke one day after CIA Director Gina Haspel said she had changed the emphasis of her agency so it was now devoting more resources to threats from Russia and Iran.
“Our Russia and Iran investment has been strengthened after years of falling behind our justifiably heavy emphasis on counter-terrorism in the wake of 9/11,” she said. “Groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda remain squarely in our sights, but we’re honing our focus and resources on nation-state rivals.”
It might have surprised Iranian officials to hear the CIA had not been putting so much emphasis on Iran the past 18 years.
Alavi also boasted that “some members” of Israel’s cabinet were spying on Israel for Iran. A few weeks ago, an Israeli court convicted Gonen Segev on charges of spying for Iran. Segev was an Israeli cabinet minister in the 1990s, but did not spy for Iran until long after that.
Alavi also boasted that his ministry had succeeded in identifying a foreign company that was shipping defective parts to Iran’s military. That was a response to an American news report that the United States had arranged for defective missile parts to be shipped to Iran.
In a statistical compendium, Alavi said that over the last year Iran had managed to arrest members of 116 “teams” from the Mojahedin-e Khalq, 144 Takfiri terrorist teams, and 44 teams seeking to topple the regime.