Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Israeli intelligence successfully “cultivated” influence inside Iran’s security and intelligence institutions by planting contacts and operatives at high levels. In his account, the effectiveness of Israel’s operations was not limited to individual missions, but tied to systematic penetration of Iran’s counter-espionage framework.

Ahmadinejad specifically argued that the senior officer responsible for identifying and stopping Mossad-linked activity turned out to be an Israeli agent. He presented this as the reason Israel was able to carry out covert actions inside Iran while Iranian security services struggled to prevent them. He also suggested that additional cooperation and information flows continued through the same network, enabling Israel to operate with advantage and Iran to suffer security breaches.

His comments drew attention again to a broader backdrop of espionage and sabotage accusations involving Israeli operations in Iran, including allegations around the theft of sensitive nuclear-related material and the broader pattern of intelligence “failures” and internal investigations that followed. Iranian officials, Ahmadinejad said, responded to incidents with detentions and public narratives that did not match what he believed had truly occurred—pointing to disinformation and concealment as part of the problem. Taken together, Ahmadinejad’s claims portray a scenario in which Israel’s “operation” is less about shaping a single person directly and more about creating conditions inside Iran’s intelligence ecosystem—by undermining trust, compromising counter-espionage leadership, and enabling access to information that can be acted on elsewhere