{"id":187060,"date":"2019-04-20T05:58:36","date_gmt":"2019-04-20T05:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=187060"},"modified":"2019-04-23T06:44:45","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T06:44:45","slug":"intel-minister-iran-identified-290-cia-spies-made-arrests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=187060","title":{"rendered":"Intel minister: Iran identified 290 CIA spies, made arrests"},"content":{"rendered":"

Press TV \u2013 April 19, 2019<\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi speaks before weekly Friday prayers sermons in the Iranian capital Tehran on April 19, 2019. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Iran has identified 290 CIA\u00a0agents\u00a0across different countries, forcing the US to form a special committee to reassess its\u00a0cloak-and-dagger operations,\u00a0Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi says.\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

“CIA operatives in those countries were identified and arrested and the contacts of the US\u00a0intelligence agency with its sources were disrupted\u00a0in such a way that a committee to assess the failure was set up in America,”\u00a0Alavi said\u00a0during\u00a0Friday prayers in Tehran.<\/span><\/p>\n

He touched on\u00a0what numerous US spy experts have\u00a0said about the major intelligence defeat, making reference to a specific November 2018 Yahoo News article that had interviewed numerous American spy experts over the \u201cincredibly damaging\u201d incident.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The article claimed that Iranian intelligence had gained access to a secret CIA communications system, allowing Iranians to not only discover and detain US assets in the country, but also probably share key findings with Chinese and Russian authorities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen these types of compromises happen, it\u2019s so dark and bad,\u201d said a former official speaking to Yahoo.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen this was going on, it was all that mattered,\u201d said another former intelligence community official describing the gravity of the American intelligence setback.<\/span><\/p>\n

CIA officials were consequently worried about the network \u201ctotally unwinding worldwide\u201d, according to the article.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIran was aggressively going out to hunt systems down,\u201d said one former official. \u201cThey weren\u2019t just protecting themselves anymore.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Referring to the article<\/a>, Iran\u2019s intelligence minister specifically highlighted a quote from American\u00a0national security analyst Irvin McCullough, who described the major American intelligence setback as\u00a0“one of the most catastrophic intelligence failures\u201d since the September 11 attacks in 2001.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alavi said that\u00a0further details of the operations\u00a0would be publicized soon, adding that a similar successful counter-espionage operation had been carried out against Britain’s\u00a0MI6\u00a0intelligence service.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Iranian minister added that the breakthrough comes as his ministry has\u00a0shifted from focusing on defensive operations to conducting offensive counter-intelligence operations, some of which had even \u201cexpanded deep\u201d into Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere was an outcry in Israel; some members of their cabinet were cooperating with the Intelligence Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran<\/strong><\/a><\/span>\u201d, said Alavi.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alavi went on to highlight some of the ministry\u2019s other successful intelligence operations, saying that they had \u201ctraumatized\u201d foreign services.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn one of these cases, the Intelligence Ministry\u2019s counter-espionage [force] successfully identified a company that was slipping defective parts into a sensitive center, neutralized it and discovered the defective parts,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The sabotage operation could have led to a “humanitarian catastrophe” if it wasn’t dealt with, Alavi said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Iranian intelligence chief added that as much as 114 Takfiri terrorist teams, 116 Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization\u00a0(MEK) teams, 44 teams seeking to overthrow the Iranian government and 380 drug smuggling teams had also been busted in the past year alone.<\/span><\/p>\n

He added that the operations of 188 other groups were neutralized, including a recent case where four people were arrested southwest of the country along with 15,000 AK-47 rounds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Iran has been successful in protecting itself from the spillover of terrorism and foreign-backed conflict \u2014 constant features of life in a number of regional countries \u2014 due to high vigilance by its intelligence and security forces.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iran reveals \u201cmajor intelligence defeat\u201d for the U.S. as it arrests nearly 300 CIA linked operatives <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Iran"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187060"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187063,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187060\/revisions\/187063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}