Tehran’s Tit for Tat: The First Agent Is Hanged

On Tuesday, December 28, in Tehran, Iran publicly hanged Ali Akbar Siadat (picture) after convicting him of spying for the Israeli Mossad. He was the second Iranian citizen to be executed on this charge. two years after Ali Ashtari was put to death on Nov. 23, 2008.
Both were importers of electronic goods and exporters to Turkey and the Far East. But Ashtari's trial was covered in the Iranian press in broad detail with many pictures of the accused man and the spying gadgets allegedly supplied him by the Mossad, whereas Siadat's arrest, trial and conviction were kept secret until Monday, Dec. 27, just hours before his execution. But then, a stream of information about his alleged spying activities was released.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and Tehran sources point to other differences between the two cases:
Ali Ashtari was described as a lone operative, whereas Siadat was depicted as having headed a large, countrywide spy network employing many Iranian agents.
Tehran claimed Siadat first contacted Israeli intelligence back in 2004 and, until his arrest on Dec. 13, 2008, was paid by the Mossad $60,000 – or $15,000 per year – for procuring classified Iranian data. Iranian security were purportedly on to him by the end of 2004, having intercepted calls he made with a phone card received from the Israeli service which was supposed to protect the caller's identity from detection.

Siadat believed to have headed a large spy network

Siadat is claimed to have admitted under interrogation that he was in contact with foreign agencies and on several occasions visited Israeli embassies in Turkey, Holland and Thailand to deliver detailed reports on Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) activities. On one such visit, he received instruction in the use of a digital camera for transmitting documents. In 2007, he was equipped with "special equipment" including a laptop to speed up his relays to Mossad.
The sensitive information he is said to have admitted passing to Israeli intelligence officers covered Iranian military parades, war games, photos of army bases, numbers of Iranian jet fighters, daily training flights conducted from Air Force and IRGC air unit bases, accidents and their causes as well as the missile facilities operated by the IRGC.
At one meeting, Saidat was given a bag with a secret compartment for hiding documents. He was caught at Tehran international airport two years ago carrying 29 pages of classified information in that bag while trying to leave with his wife. The cache was ready for handover to an Israeli intelligence officer with whom he had arranged to rendezvous in Thailand.
According to Iranian sources, there was no way Siadat could have accumulated this amount of data without help; he was presumed to have been abetted by a flock of Iranian informants who had garnered the documents for passing on to Mossad.
This assumption provides one key to the extreme secrecy surrounding his case.

Hanging spies as a negotiating tactic

Until the very last moment, his interrogators were not sure he had given them all the names of his network members. And not all those who had been named were caught.
Most compellingly, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources report, a decision was taken in Tehran to make Siadat's execution the first in a series with many more victims to come.
According to those sources, Iran is holding in secret a large number of people alleged to have collaborated with the Israeli Mossad and other Western intelligence services. They will be produced and hanged as and when Iran finds it expedient, depending on how three other events pan out:
1. Negotiations with the Five Security Council Members plus Germany which are due to resume in Istanbul in the first week of January.
In the first round which took place in Geneva in early December, Saad Jalili, head of Iran's National Security Council, took up most of the session with complaints about the way Dr. Majid Shahriani, head of Iran's counter-Stuxnet program, was assassinated in Tehran in broad daylight on Nov. 29 by killers on motorbikes using sticky bombs, and how a second hit team failed to kill Prof. Feredoun Abbassi-Davani, director of the centrifuge enrichment facility at Natanz.
He demanded to know why all the ambassadors present were not denouncing and disavowing these acts of terrorism, although he suggested he knew the culprits, namely the United States.
Tehran is going to repeat this tactic of using up future nuclear negotiating sessions by laying out complaints after finding it the most effective way to spin out the talks until the six powers realize that until the secret war they are accused of waging against the Islamic Republic is not called off, Iran will not budge on the nuclear controversy.
Even if all is quiet on the covert front for the next month or two, Iran will still be in a position to make sure it stays that way by pulling out of Evin Prison in North Tehran one member after another of Ali Akbar Siadat's alleged spy network, extract their confessions and put them to death.

More executions brandished as a deterrent

A hint that Iran was holding this threat over the heads of its partners in the nuclear dialogue was thrown out in reports published Tuesday, Dec. 28, that a second Iranian had been sentenced to death as an Israeli spy.
"His identity will be revealed after confirmation of the sentence," Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi was quoted by the Mehr news agency as saying.
2. For the Islamic Republic, the prospect of more hangings is brandished as a means of deterrence. It tells its opponents that the gloves are off in the covert war the American CIA and Israeli Mossad are accused of waging, sometimes with the aid of other Western clandestine agencies with a presence in Iran.
Tehran is making it known that there will be reprisals for every future attack, be it the assassination of key nuclear scientists or attacks on military and religious targets.
On Tuesday, December 28, Iranian interior minister Mostafa Najjar pointed a blunt finger at US and Israel. At a briefing to reporters in Tehran, he alleged that a group of terrorists, who are based in Pakistan and commute across the border to stage terrorist operations against Iran, "are equipped by Mossad and the CIA."
(See also DEBKA-Net-Weekly 472 of December 3: The Last Straw for Iran – Enraged Tehran Will Kick Back for Terror).
This means that the secret war the US and Israel are waging against Iran is about to move up to a new level. (Details to follow in the next item).
3. As in other undercover wars, much more is hidden beneath the surface than is revealed. This one is not confined to Iranian soil or its intelligence turf but tends to spill over into the United States, Israel and other parts of the Middle East. The survivors of the Saidat network are now hostages for the Iranians employed under cover by the US and Israel – but also against future Israeli and US moves in the covert contest afoot between them and Iran.