January 21, 2025:
In late 2024 Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency reported that it had arrested seven Israelis who had been operating as Iranian spies since the October 2023 Hamas uprising in southern Israel. The seven spies had operated from 2022 t0 2024, gathering information on the Israeli military as well as port activity, Iron Dome batteries and a power plant.
The Iranian spies were originally from Azerbaijan and were caught using specialized espionage equipment to observe Israeli air bases. The Israeli spies were apparently identifying targets for Iran to attack. This was a high value operation because Israeli police found that the spies had been paid several hundred thousand dollars for their efforts. Suspicious activity by members of this espionage team was detected by Shin Bet and that led to the arrest of the team members and disruption of their plot.
Israel is accustomed to dealing with foreign spies. Years ago Lebanese police arrested seventeen Lebanese and accused them of being Israeli spies. Some of the suspects apparently were Israeli spies. Lebanon attributed this sudden success to closer cooperation with Hezbollah and Iran. Well, it admits that it is cooperating with Hezbollah but played down any Iranian involvement. Iran had been sending more intelligence officers, including some senior ones, to Lebanon for several years. Most of these Iranian officials are there to keep an eye on the Hezbollah leadership, which angered their Iranian patrons with their aggressive actions against Israel that led to a 2006 war with Israel. Hezbollah declared a victory, but the Israelis inflicted far more damage on Hezbollah, and Lebanon, than they received. The 2006 attack angered many Christian Lebanese who had long been somewhat pro-Israeli. It was from this population that useful information about Israeli spies was obtained in the last few years.
The Lebanese had caught one or two Israeli spies a year for over a decade. It appeared that the Israelis had an extensive, and not unexpected, espionage network in Lebanon and Syria. The Israelis were known to pay well, and try to get their agents, if discovered, out of trouble. Still, several Israeli spies were executed by Arab countries over the last seventy years, as well as a number of innocents who were prosecuted because the local counterintelligence officials were under a lot of pressure to do something about Israeli spies.
Some of these spies are Jewish, but most are local Moslem, Christian or Druze Arabs who hated the local rulers more than Israel. Many confessed when caught, knowing that, otherwise, long periods of abuse and torture would ensue. The Israeli intelligence effort against its Arab neighbors was intense and prolonged. The Israelis also spied on their friends, which is not an unusual practice. But the Israelis tended to be more successful at it, in part because they lived in a very rough neighborhood, and faced extinction if they did not succeed in keeping their hostile neighbors at bay.