June 22, 2018
Former Israeli Energy Minister Gonen Segev has been arrested and charged with spying for Iran, the Israel Security Agency, known as Shin Bet, has announced.
Segev, now 62, was a cabinet minister in the 1990s and did not spy for Iran then. He was later convicted of drug smuggling. After his release from prison, he moved to Africa where Shin Bet said he was recruited by Iran’s embassy in Nigeria in 2012.
Segev had been sentenced for attempting to bring 25,000 ecstasy pills into Israel from the Netherlands. He said he thought they were M&M candies.
He was extradited to Israel last month at the request of Israeli police.
According to Shin Bet, Segev met twice with Iranian operatives, knowing they were from Iranian intelligence. The agency said Segev was given a communications system to encrypt messages sent to his handlers.
The former energy minister stands accused of revealing information connected to Israel’s energy market and security sites, including intelligence on buildings, and officials in political and security organizations, Shin Bet said.
He was also in touch with Israeli citizens working in security and foreign relations, it said, connecting them with Iranian intelligence officials posing as regular businessmen.
But he had been out of the government for 16 years before he began working for Iran, so he did not have access to current Israeli secrets.
Segev was charged with spying for the enemy and a number of other offenses. Additional details of the investigation are under a gag order.
A lawyer for Segev, Moshe Mazor, told CNN, “Recently, an indictment has been filed. Most of the details are confidential at the state’s request. Even at this early stage, it is possible to say that the permitted publication looks extremely severe, even though in the indictment, whose full details remain confidential, an entirely different picture emerges.”
Segev served in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, from 1992 to 1996 in the Tzomet and Yiud political parties. He served as Minister of Energy and Infrastructure under Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, from 1995 to 1996, but was not re-elected in 1996.
A pilot in the Israeli military, he held the rank of captain before leaving the service and becoming a physician. Segev found his public standing soured when he was arrested in 2004 for attempting to smuggle the ecstasy pills from the Netherlands to Israel.
He left Israel in 2007 after his release from two years in prison and has since lived in West Africa.
The police and Shin Bet said they rearrested Segev after he attempted to fly to Equatorial Guinea in May. He was refused entry and extradited to Israel where he remains in custody.
Shin Bet said his medical license in Israel was canceled after his conviction. But he was allowed to practice medicine in Africa and served as a physician to Israeli diplomats in West Africa. That enabled him to maintain contacts with Israelis in official positions.