On October 22, David Barnea, who ran Mossad until June 2026, told an Israeli conference how his agency handled Iran’s counterintelligence. Before the 12-day war in June 2025, he said, he approved sending dozens of agents into Iran. “But they are there in Tehran, living their lives.” He claimed nearly all of Israel’s assets were never detected. He also described the method, and the method is the part worth slowing down for. Israel, by his account, tried to push up the number of Iranians arrested who had nothing to do with Mossad, so that the real agents would be lost among them. Footage released showing agents with a Mossad logo, he said, led to thousands of arrests of exactly that kind.
That is Barnea’s version, and a spy chief has his own reasons for describing his operation as a success. But think about what the claim implies. An intelligence service set out to make its opponent arrest as many innocent people as possible, and expected it to work, because it judged that the opponent’s security apparatus would not resist arresting people. If he is right about that, Iran’s spy hunt has two customers. One is Israel, which gets cover for its agents. The other is the Iranian state, which gets a reason to detain anyone it already wanted to detain.
That second customer is the subject of a report by Al Jazeera, in which analysts argue that Tehran is taking a security failure that is entirely real and using it as a warrant against dissent.
The failure really is real, and nobody serious disputes that. Saeid Golkar, an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, points to the killing of senior figures, among them former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, the first day of the latest US-Israeli assault. A state that cannot keep its supreme leader alive on the first day of a war has an espionage problem. Negar Mortazavi of the Center for International Policy calls the threat “very real” too. Israel’s recruiting is not even especially hidden: rews has written about Mossad’s open online pitches to people in Lebanon and Iran.
But Golkar says the regime has long used “real or, most of the time, perceived security threats” to justify repression, and that the current crackdown is a mix of “legitimate counterintelligence concerns” and an effort to frighten society. Mortazavi puts the line where it belongs: there is “a fundamental distinction between espionage and dissent,” she says, and the authorities have been treating opposition politics and independent journalism as if they were simply foreign intelligence work by other means.
The numbers
In October, judiciary spokesman Ali Kazemi said at least 1,895 people face active cases for alleged cooperation with Israel or other hostile states. Ninety-four of them are media workers, about 5 percent of the total, which is a lot of journalists for a list that is supposed to be about spies. At least 21,000 people were arrested after the June 2025 war. At least 50,000 were detained over the January 2026 protests, a crackdown in which, according to the rights group HRANA, thousands of civilians were killed. A UN fact-finding mission has said the authorities committed crimes against humanity during it. Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei has cited wartime conditions as grounds for fast-tracking punishment of alleged collaborators, and in May the Ministry of Intelligence said “enemies” were waging a “hybrid war.”
Then there are the executions. The UN counted at least 19 hangings in espionage-related cases between June and December 2025. Iran Human Rights, based in Oslo, recorded 16 espionage executions between January and September 2026, along with 33 protesters and 13 prisoners affiliated with banned groups. That makes 62 executions in categories with an obvious political or security angle, out of at least 604 the group counted in total by early October. Amnesty International counts at least 34 executions linked to the January protests as of October 13, five of them between September 30 and October 5.
The individual cases follow a pattern. In August two men, Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat, were hanged after being accused of sending Israel coordinates of military and security sites, which the Washington Times described as part of a wave of hangings since the joint air campaign began. On September 19 the judiciary said Hossein Pedaran had been executed for passing missile-site intelligence to Israel during the 12-day war; Iran International reported that rights groups say such cases rest on confessions extracted in detention. Whether any given defendant actually spied is precisely what a closed, fast-tracked wartime process cannot tell you. If Barnea is to be believed, it is also what Israel was working to make hard to tell.
The wiring
The legal plumbing makes the overlap between journalism and espionage close to automatic. Sending material to outlets the state deems hostile, BBC Persian for instance, can bring 10 to 15 years in prison. Add other charges and it can become “corruption on Earth,” which carries the death penalty. The authorities call Starlink a “tool of war,” and tens of thousands of terminals have been smuggled into the country anyway. In other words, the same satellite dish that could carry intelligence to Tel Aviv also carries protest footage to London, and the law makes no distinction between the two.
The state’s other tool is to switch the country off. Near-total internet shutdowns have hit 90 million people: for several days during the 12-day war, for 20 days during the January protests, and for 88 days at the start of the current war. Add those up and you get well over 100 days without a connection in roughly 16 months, which is a hefty price to pay for a counterintelligence measure that, according to the man running the other side, did not catch his agents.
Golkar’s summary of the logic is that the state treats regime security and national security as “interchangeable concepts.” Iran, he argues, has become a system run by its security services, in which even peaceful activism looks like a threat to the regime’s survival. Once you accept that equation, every arrest of a critic counts as counterintelligence, and the arrest numbers look like evidence that it is working.
By Barnea’s account, the dozens of agents are still in Tehran, living their lives. The thousands of people arrested in their place are the ones who are not.