On 18 December, the Intelligence Ministry of Iran announced that it identified and arrested the members of a Mossad spy network who were planning to sabotage the country’s defense industry through security marketing, according to the state-run Tasnim news agency.
Tehran has reportedly managed to detect and dismantle an espionage network that planned to carry out sabotage actions in the country’s defense industries through the creation of covert companies and resorting to different forms of marketing.
The Israeli Mossad hired an information broker, named Frank Genin, who established an information gathering network of companies cooperating with Iran’s defense industry.
He has been cooperating with several Iranian companies for many years as a sales manager of one of the companies supplying parts.
In 2017, Genin invited a number of his contract employees to a seminar in Malaysia and introduced them to a person named Hadrien Lavaux, a Mossad security officer, who in the same year, registered a company in Singapore and connected it with Iranian companies, according to IRNA.
Lavaux’s colleagues in Iran, for their part, participated in exhibitions and monitored scientific seminars to learn about the needs of the Persian country’s military and defense industry.
Then, they invited the directors and sales managers of the companies to supposed seminars in Turkey, Thailand, Hungary, Jordan, and Georgia in order to have direct contact with them and use the information they had, according to Press TV.
However, Iranian Intelligence had infiltrated this espionage network and was aware of all the visits and trips they made.
In recent months, the Mossad has increased its espionage activity and engaged in a covert war against Iran by encouraging extremist groups and bloody uprisings across the nation.
On 19 December, four members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its auxiliary force, the Basij, were killed in armed clashes in Saravan, in the country’s southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, the IRGC said in a statement.
They were reportedly killed “in a terrorist act, followed by an armed clash with a terrorist cell in the city of Saravan,” the IRGC statement read.