Iran arrests dozens in connection with alleged CIA spy ring

Iran

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Iranian intelligence services have announced the arrest of at least 30 individuals accused of being part of an elaborate CIA “espionage and sabotage network” operating in the country. According to Iran’s Fars News Agency, spy ring members, which include government administrators, were handled from abroad by as many as 42 CIA operatives, whose identities are allegedly known to Iranian counterintelligence investigators. Iran’s Intelligence Ministry claims that spy ring members, who are believed to be Iranian, were recruited by CIA officers operating out of US embassies in several predominantly Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Malaysia. They were then trained and sent into Iran to gather intelligence on energy projects, academic research, as well as telecommunications installations and border control systems. Last October, the Iranian government announced the arrest of an several alleged nuclear spies, reportedly in connection with Stuxnet, a sophisticated virus that infected computers used in Iran’s nuclear energy program.  In November, two teams of motorcyclists, each consisting of a driver and a backseat rider, targeted two senior Iranian nuclear scientists during the morning rush hour in Tehran, managing to kill one Dr Majid Shahriari, senior nuclear researcher and prominent professor at the Shahid Beheshti University, who had taught at the Iranian armed forces’ Supreme National Defense University. The Iranian Intelligence Ministry has not announced the identities of those arrested in this latest case, and has released no further information on the case. There was no immediate response from the US government as of this morning.