Iran's threats to Israeli nationals in Turkey have been generating headlines, with unusually concrete, imminent, and specific warnings being telegraphed from Jerusalem.
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Tehran has grown increasingly desperate to rebalance the deterrence equation in the aftermath of the killing of multiple operatives in Iran proper.
Two important aspects of this latest battle of the shadow war between Israel and Iran include familiar models of brazenness in Iranian targeting and increasing paranoia inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
For over a year, periodic news reports have showcased Iran's attempted terrorist plotting against Israeli interests. It started in India's New Delhi in January 2021, with a bombing near the Israeli embassy where a letter was found nearby addressed to Israel's ambassador dubbing the incident a "trailer" after the deaths of the late IRGC's Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani and the father of Iran's past nuclear weapons program Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Then in February came news that Iranian intelligence agents were casing the embassies of the United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates in Ethiopia. Later that fall, in October, Israel accused Iran of hunting Israeli businesspeople living in Cyprus. In November, news dropped that five people linked to Iran, who had been in Ghana, Senegal, and Tanzania, were arrested. Among their targets were Israeli tourists taking safaris.
That same month, news broke in El Tiempo that Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah was targeting an Israeli businessman in Colombia, who was a former intelligence officer. Reports also surfaced that Israel's Mossad spy agency foiled a plot by the Quds Force to assassinate an Israeli diplomat in Istanbul.
While security officials thwarted these schemes, aside from the episodes in Africa, most were focused on Israeli diplomats and businessmen. Fast forward to the current threat landscape, rather than focusing on diplomats and businessmen, who are more guarded by virtue of their work, Iranian squads have become less selective in their targeting - now pursuing Israeli civilians visiting Istanbul, who are more vulnerable.
Israel's Channel 13 News reported that a woman received a call from a senior Israeli official at a market in Istanbul warning her not to return to her hotel room because assassins were waiting there to kill her and her spouse. While Iran and its satellites have murdered Israeli tourists before - for example, in the July 2012 Burgas bus bombing in Bulgaria - the current faceoff demonstrates an escalation in risk-readiness on the part of the Iranian leadership, signaling a degree of dangerous desperation to restore deterrence.
This has been a recurring pattern in Iranian-directed operations. Throughout 2012, in the aftermath of the killing of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh and Iranian nuclear scientists, Tehran and Hezbollah attempted a series of terror attacks against Israeli targets in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kenya, India, and Thailand, culminating in Bulgaria.
The operations initially and almost exclusively focused on Israeli diplomats - its ambassador to Azerbaijan, an embassy vehicle in Georgia, the wife of a military attaché in New Delhi, and an embassy in Kenya. But none of these incidents resulted in Israeli deaths. This lack of success likely frustrated the Iranians, but it resulted in the Burgas bus bombing which killed Israeli tourists.
Fast forward to 2022, with unsuccessful targeting gradually morphing from diplomats and businessmen to tourists in Istanbul, the cycle is repeating itself. The summertime travel season thus presents a prime opportunity for the Iranian leadership to strike - as it did through Hezbollah in July 2012 in Burgas. And Turkey is not the only place where Israeli travelers are vulnerable - for example, Iranian dissidents have been kidnapped from locales like Dubai.
Israeli media reports have focused on the role of Hossein Taeb, the now-former head of the IRGC's Intelligence Organization, and how he was under "intense pressure" to carry out a successful hit as the Iranian leadership was considering removing him from his post.
The fact that Taeb, a cleric who held his position since 2009, was replaced on Thursday with Mohammad Kazemi, a non-cleric who formerly headed the IRGC's Intelligence Protection Organization, is a sign of the counterintelligence paranoia inside the ranks of the guardsmen. The Intelligence Protection Organization is a separate entity from the Intelligence Organization, focusing on security inside the IRGC.
This is especially true in that the Iranian system had other options, with speculation of figures like Taeb's deputy Hassan Mohaghegh or former Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi being elevated as Taeb's replacement. Kazemi was thus likely seen as a change given that he comes from outside the IRGC's Intelligence Organization - in contrast to Mohaghegh - but not one as radical as promoting a figure like Moslehi who came from its competitor in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
Nevertheless, Kazemi was also in his previous post amid multiple assassinations and sabotage incidents, which raises questions about just how effective he will be in comparison to Taeb, not to mention the future of the longstanding rivalry between the IRGC's Intelligence Organization and MOIS, which is still headed by a cleric.
Taeb's departure has the potential to alter the power dynamic in Iran's broader intelligence community given his influence on the supreme leader's influential son Mojtaba Khamenei. As former Intelligence Minister Ali Younesi warned last year, "parallel organizations are busy fighting insiders rather than monitoring and confronting infiltrators."
At least initially, Taeb's departure can also be seen as a demotion as he will merely be an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami.
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This is a comedown as Taeb, who is described by critics as "unhinged" and "imbalanced," has been protected and promoted through the years despite controversies given his association with Iran's supreme leader and his closeness to Mojtaba. He was sacked as head of counterintelligence in MOIS during the Presidency of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani because he was so controversial, but Khamenei nevertheless found a landing spot for him as a deputy coordinator in his office.
Later, despite performance issues, the Basij exhibited under his command during the 2009 electoral unrest and Khamenei being warned by a then intelligence minister of his extremist qualities, Taeb was still installed as the inaugural head of the IRGC's Intelligence Organization months later. As this has been a theme of Taeb's career, it cannot be discounted that he will eventually occupy another powerful role.
But, in the short term, this is a sign of dissatisfaction with the IRGC's Intelligence Organization's performance.
This article was first published by i24NEWS.
