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from https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2024/08/03/boom-contd-mole-hunt-raging-in-tehran-n3792644

Boom, Cont'd: Mole Hunt Raging in Tehran
ED MORRISSEY 2:30 PM | August 03, 2024

AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File
Call it the gift that keeps on giving.

Israel stunned the world and humiliated the Iranians in killing Hamas
chief Ismail Haniyeh this week while a guest in Tehran for the
presidential inauguration. The explanation of how they carried out the precision bombing rattled the Iranians even more. The Mossad
penetrated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's most trusted protective
service, hiring more than one of their agents to plant that bomb as well
as others in a compound considered the most secure in Tehran:

The Telegraph [link here, paywalled -- Ed] cited two Iranian officials
as saying that the initial plan was to assassinate Haniyeh when he was
in Tehran in May for the funeral of the late Iranian president Ebrahim
Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash. That operation was
reportedly called off due to the large number of people in the building
and the seemingly high possibility of failure.

Instead, according to the British daily, the agents went ahead and
planted explosives in three different rooms at the compound, and later
left Iran. The sources quoted in the report said surveillance footage
shows them moving discretely from room to room. They reportedly
detonated the bombs from abroad.

“They are now certain that Mossad hired agents from the Ansar al-Mahdi security unit,” an official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
told the newspaper, referring to a unit tasked with protecting senior officials.

Another IRGC official was quoted as saying: “It is a humiliation for
Iran and a huge security breach.” The IRGC runs the guesthouse in an upscale neighborhood of Tehran where Haniyeh and other dignitaries were staying.

Apparently, July was a bad month for protective services globally. Just
sayin'.

Anyway, the humiliation has produced one predictable result already. And
for Israel, it couldn't come at a better time, and perhaps also for the long-restive population under the thumb of the IRGC and the mullahs:

Iran has arrested more than two dozen people, including senior
intelligence officers, military officials and staff workers at a
military-run guesthouse in Tehran, in response to a huge and humiliating security breach that enabled the assassination of a top leader of Hamas, according to two Iranians familiar with the investigation.

The high-level arrests came after the killing in an explosion early
Wednesday of Ismail Haniyeh, who had led Hamas’s political office in Qatar and was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president and staying at the guesthouse in northern Tehran, Iran’s capital. ...

The Revolutionary Guards Corps’ specialized intelligence unit for espionage has taken over the investigation and is hunting down suspects
that it hopes will lead it to members of the assassin team that planned,
aided and carried out the killing, according to the two Iranian
officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of
the investigations.

The news of the sweeping arrests came after the Revolutionary Guards announced in a statement that “the scope and details of this
incident are under investigation and will be announced in due course.”

Is this a mole hunt? Or is it the start of a purge? It could be both,
and neither will make the IRGC or the regime more effective in the short
term. Mole hunts distract even the best intelligence and security
agencies, soaking up valuable resources that would normally focus
outward to look inward instead. And the process of mole hunts
necessarily derails efforts by those not investigating the breaches, by
sheer intimidation as well as misdirection from top officials in order
to trick their own agents into exposing themselves.

Purges are even worse, not just because of their usual scope. Purges in
regimes like Iran usually involve dominant factions exerting power to
get rid of their opponent factions while using the excuse of security.
In the most memorable example, Stalin infamously purged thousands of his officers from the military not long before Hitler invaded the Soviet
Union and nearly reached Moscow. The infighting could take years and
leave the IRGC without enough focus to suppress popular discontent --
and also signal to that restive population that the time is ripe for
change, not to mention add more dissenters to their mix.

Arresting a couple of dozen people in the immediate aftermath of the
Haniyeh hit isn't a purge ... yet. But consider another famous example
of a purge tied also to an assassination attempt: the 20 July 1944
Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler. The Nazis had rounded up nearly all of
the major Stauffenberg assassination plotters within a day, yet they
ended up purging thousands by the time they finished. Almost 5,000
people got executed, some as Berlin was falling to the Russians nine
months later. It doesn't take much for mole hunts to spin out of control
into outright purges, especially in paranoid regimes already riven with internal tensions.

Israel took real risks of escalation with this operation. However, it
may pay off in ways that will actually address the real danger they
face, which is not Hamas or Hezbollah but the radical-Islamist regime in Tehran. Radical regimes are fragile regimes, and that's especially true
of the mulllahs. They will have to choose whether to keep fighting
Israel or focus on internal strength, and that decision point could be
rapidly approaching.

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Quizzical
a day ago
They should arrest and execute all of the top officials in Iran, just to
be sure that they caught the mole.

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anon-onh5Â Quizzical
a day ago
Where is my heart emoji?

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American Deplorable ™ Quizzical
a day ago
....bomb every last snipe.

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Judge Smails Quizzical
15 minutes ago
BBQ the High Command.

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Friendly Fire Quizzical
21 hours ago
You mean the maid......

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T_Edward
a day ago
The saddest part of all of this is, none of it would be necessary if it
wasn't for Joe and Kamala. They enabled this war by taking Hamas off the terrorist list and funding them and also by funding Iran (under the
tutelage of Obama). If it wasn't for Democrat Presidents, Iran would
have fallen years ago!

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Vast Right Wing Conspirator T_Edward
a day ago
Don't forget Obama's glaring missed opportunity when millions of
Iranians took to the streets in the 2009 "The Green Revolution." They
begged for U.S. recognition, and instead got a bunch of "leading from
behind" BS lip service from Obama, who did nothing to help them.
Thousands were brave Iranians were jailed and killed... and when the
bleeding was over, Obama cozied up to the Mullahs.
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Loyal Nine Vast Right Wing Conspirator
a day ago
Caliph Obama clealy did not want a Muslim theocracy to be overthrown. He
made one hell of an effort to set up a Muslim government right here in
the U.S.

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