by Hugh Fitzgerald
When will the Mullahs ever learn that they can't best the Israelis?
Mossad recently pulled off one of those scarcely believable feats that it specializes in, and of which we learn about only a tiny handful. Its agents managed several weeks ago, inside Iran, to seize and interrogate an Iranian operative who was in charge of a plot to kill Israeli businessmen in Cyprus. The agents managed to extract from him a full confession of his role in the plot, including details on the IRGC officials who supplied weapons for the attack, and the names of all of those involved in the plot on Cyprus itself. The Israelis filmed his confession, and posted it on social media. That ensures that he will no longer be safe in that country, and likely has already left Iran for the safety of Israel. The story escaped wide notice when it was revealed last month, and deserves greater attention. “Mossad says it caught Cyprus terror plot assassin in Iran, airs clip of confession,” Times of Israel, June 29, 2023:
Israel’s Mossad spy agency announced Thursday that in a special operation in Iranian territory, it had caught the Iranian terrorist sent to lead a planned terror attack against Israeli targets in Cyprus.
The Mossad named the man as Yousef Shahbazi Abbasalilo and published a video of his interrogation by its agents, in which he confessed to the plot and gave details on it. It said Abbasalilo was given weapons for the attack from senior officials in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and instructions on its implementation. The spy agency said the plan was to target Israeli businessmen in the small island nation.
In his interrogation, Abbasalilo recounted following a target for assassination and waiting for an opportunity to kill him, but said police eventually caught wind of the plot and he was forced to flee back to Iran as he was being searched for.
The information obtained from Abbasalilo led to the dismantling of the rest of the terror cell by Cypriot security forces, Mossad said. The plotters included Iranians, Pakistanis and locals.Abbasalilo named his handler as Hassan Shoushtari Zadeh, a known and senior figure in the Guard’s Foreign Intelligence Branch.
In the video, Abbasalilo said Shoushtari Zadeh “discussed with me what he was planning to do in Cyprus. He told me, you need to enter northern Cyprus, where we have certain people who can send you from there to southern Cyprus.”
Northern Cyprus is both populated, and ruled, by Turkish Muslims, and the security services there would be less inquisitive than the Greek Cypriots, if a group of Muslims – Iranians and Pakistanis — were found to have entered the country.
“He told me himself: ‘I trust [The Pakistanis] and their group, they have carried out very important activity for me.’”
“I replied: ‘If it is possible, I will carry out this mission immediately.’ He replied: ‘Wait, it is not possible yet, as there are policemen searching for you.’”
Abbasalilo said he buried the weapon he had received under a bush, and eventually “I received my target via a WhatsApp interface that I received from the IRGC Intelligence Organization.”
“I received a photo from Mr. Shoushtari and the GPS route to the house where he lives.”
Abbasalilo then began following his target from afar, taking photographs and otherwise preparing for the assassination.
“My plan was that if the man was there — I mean after I found out that he was there and where he was going — if it was a quiet and empty road, I would kill him with the weapon.”
But his handlers “found out that the police were after me and ordered me to hide the weapon, get rid of all the equipment, and return [to Iran].”
It was not immediately clear what became of Abbasalilo after his interrogation.
The Israelis must surely have spirited him out of Iran and taken him back with them to Israel. For after they had filmed, and posted online, his full interrogation, as far as the IRGC is concerned, he is now a traitor who deserves death. To save his life, he’s going to have to spend a long time protected by the very Israelis whom he once plotted to kill. The only feasible alternative to Israel would be to send him off to the United States, where he could be given a new identity, as just one more Iranian “refugee” among hundreds of thousands already in the U.S.
Recent years have seen several foiled Iranian attempts to kill Israelis in Cyprus, Turkey, Georgia and Greece. The Times of Israel has been told that other attacks have been thwarted without the matter reaching the media….
In other words, there have been repeated attempts by Iran to kill Israelis in four states – Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, and Georgia – that were foiled by the Mossad, and many of them never made public.
On Monday, Channel 12 reported that the targets of the Cyprus plot included an Israeli real estate businessman and a Chabad House, as well as hotels and entertainment venues frequented by Israeli tourists. This information was not confirmed by Mossad.
The targets were a disparate lot. The whole idea was simply to kill Israelis, or even non-Israeli Jews (as at Chabad House), and to make Cyprus too dangerous a place for them to visit or do business with, just as those Cypriot-Israeli economic ties have been expanding.
The network also said that in recent days, Greek intelligence services arrested seven Pakistani nationals who were recruited by Iran to carry out attacks in the country. It was not clarified if they were also linked to the Cyprus plot….
Greece, too, under President Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has, like Cyprus, grown much closer to Israel. Greece, Cyprus, and Israel are linked together economically through joint projects to produce natural gas from fields in the eastern Mediterranean, from the three Israeli fields of Tamar, Levaiathan, and Karish, as well as from newer Cypriot and Greek fields, then sent by pipeline to Cyprus, where the gas is to be liquified and then transported to markets in Europe.
Those seven Pakistanis would undoubtedly have targeted Israeli businessmen and businesses, to frighten away Israeli businessmen and throw a spanner into the works of Greek-Israeli economic ties. But now those seven Pakistanis, instead of carrying out Iranian plans to attack Israel-linked sites in Greece, are sitting inside a Greek prison, where they are likely to spend a good many years.
Mossad no doubt supplied the Greek police with the information they needed to locate and arrest the seven Pakistanis.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a branch of the Iranian army that is considered a terror organization by several countries, including the United States….
In October 2021, Israel said that an Iranian plot against Israeli businesspeople in Cyprus had been foiled. According to reports, the hired killer was of Azeri origin and had arrived in Cyprus on a flight from Russia, using a Russian passport. Cyprus charged six people in the plot, including the main suspect and three Pakistani nationals….
Iran has been very busy, using Pakistanis, an Azeri, and its own nationals, in plots to kill Israelis in Cyprus and Greece, as well as in Georgia and Turkey. And the always-alert agents of Mossad have managed to foil all those attacks, sometimes by themselves, and sometimes by aiding the police of the other nations involved, especially Greece and Cyprus.
But the most amazing feat is that which it has just accomplished, and we ought to stare in mute admiration at what Mossad has managed to do this time. Somehow, inside Iran, Mossad agents located, and seized, and interrogated at a safe house, the Iranian who was in charge of a plot to kill Israelis in Cyprus. He must have been stunned at this display of the Mossad’s knowledge and reach inside Iran. He knew when there was no exit and no doubt he feared that Mossad had ways of making him talk – the demonization of Mossad by its enemies has actually helped make it more fearsome – so he was ready to supply his Farsi-speaking captors with all the information they wanted about the plotters in Cyprus. How did the Mossad manage to set up shop inside Iran without being detected? Where did it find a safe house in what is a police state? How did Mossad agent manage to locate and kidnap the hapless Yousef Shahbazi Abbasalilo? And now that Abbasalilo has been spirited out of Iran, what else may he know about the IRGC that he’s going to reveal to Mossad in its Tel Aviv offices?
Israel is a speck on the world map, but the Mossad, with an annual budget of $3 billion and a staff of seven thousand people, is consistently rated the second most powerful intelligence agency in the world after the CIA. After the Stuxnet computer worm, after the repeated sabotages of centrifuge factories at Natanz, after the assassinations, four of them in the middle of Tehran traffic, of five Iranian nuclear scientists, after the spiriting away of Iran’s entire nuclear archive, the Iranians know that Mossad agents are deeply imbedded in their country. The latest feat that reminds them of this unhappy truth is the seizure and interrogation by Mossad of the loose-lipped Yousef Shahbazi Abbasalilo, who told them everything they needed to know about Iranian assassination plots in Cyprus.
When will Iran ever learn that it cannot best the Israelis? If Israel is the Road Runner, Iran is Wile E. Coyote, forever hoist by his own malevolent petard.
Hugh Fitzgerald
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/__trashed-2/
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