The Iranian regime has earned a reputation for less than truthful announcements, touting fake aircraft, satellites that were duds, and even a shoddy contraption Tehran claimed detected corona.
By United with Israel Staff
On Saturday, Iran claimed members of its intelligence community had “dismantled a group linked to the Mossad,” Israel’s spy agency.
According to the Iranian announcement, authorities busted the spies before they were able to pull off “terror operations inside Iran,” reported the Associated Press.
“According to Iran’s state-run TV, members of the group had entered Iran from an unspecified neighboring country’s Kurdish-populated area. Both Turkey and Iraq have a minority Kurdish population living alongside the Iranian border,” added the AP report.
The Iranian announcement arrived just days after the Financial Times published an article quoting an Iranian reformist politician who claimed, “Israel is clearly targeting Iran’s ‘highly secure’ image to tarnish its greatness in people’s eyes.”
“Who gives information to Israelis? Those inside the system must be doing it,” said the source quoted by FT. “We feel safe, but then who knows; maybe the system is falling apart from inside similar to the USSR.”
There was no immediate comment from Israel regarding the Iranian claims on Saturday about the alleged busted Mossad cell. In 2018, Israel admitted to spiriting out of Tehran a massive trove of documents taken from a secret warehouse location in the Iranian capital. Among the items was evidence that then Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu announced proved Iran pursues nuclear weapons, contradicting the mullahs’ statements to the contrary.
High-ranking Iranian officials and scientists have also been killed during the past several years, with Israel fingered as the culprit in such attacks.
Fake Planes and Hoax Contraptions
In the past, Israeli officials have flagged Iran’s tall tales.
In 2018, for instance, Tehran touted a “new” all-Iranian-made twin-seat fighter jet, claiming it possessed advanced avionics and fire control systems that would enhance Tehran’s deterrence capabilities in confronting Washington.
Israel laughed at the aircraft, identifying it as a copy of a very outdated F-5 model.
“The Iranian regime unveils the Kowsar aircraft and claims [it is a] ‘100% homemade Iranian fighter,” tweeted Ofir Gendelman, the Arabic language spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, adding, “I immediately saw that this is a very old US F-5 warplane (manufactured in the late 1950s).”
Prior to the Kowsar fiasco, Iran unveiled in 2013 its “first” domestic fighter jet, the Qaher F-313, which Western analysts identified as nothing more than a plastic model of an aircraft too small to actually fly.
In 2017, a Trump administration official exposed an Iranian ballistic missile launch as a fraud, with the Israeli defense establishment confirming the conclusion. Iranian state broadcaster IRIB portrayed launch footage as current, but Fox News reported that the video was over seven months old, recycled from a failed launch in January of that year.
In 2020, a device was unveiled in Iran “that purportedly uses magnetic waves to detect coronavirus infections up to 100 meters away,’ which
“was staged as a moment of triumph for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC),” reported Radio Free Europe.
“This is an amazing scientific technique that has been tested across various hospitals,” said IRGC commander Major General Hosseini Salami said at the televised unveiling.
“Critics on social media quickly pointed to its resemblance to a bogus bomb detector once sold by British fraudsters who were convicted and jailed for their scam nearly a decade ago,” added the report. “Their fake device was bought and used in Iraq and other countries, the BBC reported.”
Whether there is any validity to Iran’s claims on Saturday that it arrested an Israeli spy sell remains to be seen.