Senior Iranian parliamentary officials announced that the country has arrested 12 agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency.Member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Parviz Sorouri said that the agents had been operating in coordination with Israel’s Mossad and other regional agencies, and targeted the country’s military and its nuclear program.
“The US and Zionist regime’s espionage apparatuses were trying to damage Iran both from inside and outside with a heavy blow, using regional intelligence services,” Sorouri told the Islamic republic news agency on Wednesday.
“Fortunately, with swift reaction by the Iranian intelligence department, the actions failed to bear fruit,” Sorouri said.
The lawmaker did not specify the nationality of the agents, nor when or where they had been arrested.
This current announcement follows the unraveling by Lebanon’s Hezbollah of a CIA spy ring in that country.
Hezbollah Leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah revealed in June on television he had unmasked at least two CIA spies who had infiltrated the low ranks of the organization.
Though the US Embassy in Lebanon officially denied the accusation, American officials later confirmed Nasrallah’s announcement.
US officials confessed on Tuesday that Iranian intelligence forces and Hezbollah have unraveled the CIA’s spy network in Iran and Lebanon and arrested dozens of informants, severely damaging the intelligence agency’s reputation and ability to gather vital information on the two countries at a sensitive time in the region.
US officials said several foreign spies working for the CIA had been captured by Hezbollah in recent months. The blow to the CIA’s operations in Lebanon came after top agency managers were alerted last year to be especially careful handling informants in the Middle East country.
Separately, counterintelligence officers in Iran also succeeded in uncovering the identities of at least a handful of alleged CIA informants, Washington officials said.
A CIA-led program in the Middle East is up in the air after officials confirmed to news organizations today that paid informants in Iran and Lebanon working for the US government have disappeared while attempting to infiltrate Hezbollah.
During the past year, leaders of both Iran and Hezbollah have publicly announced the successes of their security and counterintelligence forces in uncovering CIA informants.
Iranian intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi announced in May that more than 30 US and Israeli spies had been discovered and he quickly took to Iranian television to broadcast information explaining the methods of online communication that the agents would use to trade intel. Only a month later, Hezbollah leader Seyed Hassan Nasrallah announced that two high-ranking officers within his own organization had been identified as CIA spies. Just now, however, does the US government confirm that not only is this information true, but they believe that the rest of their Hezbollah-targeted operations in the Middle East have been compromised.
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