Iran’s Spies Are at War With Each Other – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/09/irans-spies-are-at-war-with-each-other
As international tensions rise, two different branches of the Iranian security state are increasingly butting heads.
[…]
While the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign and growing threats of war are fueling nationalist sentiments across the political spectrum, they are also exposing the fault lines between the Rouhani administration and its Intelligence Ministry on the one hand and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its intelligence organization on the other. The infighting is mainly over which body is better positioned to protect the country—and over which aspects of the country most need protecting.
The latest fuel for infighting came on Aug. 3, when BBC Persian aired a rare and exclusive interview with Mazyar Ebrahimi, a former prisoner in Iran who was jailed on suspicion of collaborating with Israel to assassinate four Iranian nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2012. His story shed new light on the workings of the Intelligence Ministry and its relationship with the IRGC. Above all, the interview undermined the conventional belief that the Intelligence Ministry is the “good cop”—the more rational and responsible actor—to its “bad cop” hard-line rival, the IRGC intelligence unit.