The recent arrests of Pakistani citizens planning to attack Israeli targets in Greece have highlighted a multifaceted spy game. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after thanking their Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis, praised the efficiency of the Greek Intelligence Service (ESI) and its cooperation with the Mossad. “K” contacted the former commander of the Mossad’s foreign operations and international relations department, Chaim Tomer, the man who for many years organized the activities of the Israeli service abroad. As director of his counterterrorism unit, Mr. Tomer explains the workings of the Iranian intelligence agencies, which are said to be behind attempts to set up terrorist cells.

The Iranians have several agencies connected to their secret services. They have Pasdaran (operational branch of the Iranian armed forces). They have subsidiaries that operate outside of Iran. However, the course of action could be characterized by four main lines. The first line is the possibility of negation. Iranians, since February 2008, first exposed in Azerbaijan, in an attempt to attack the Israeli embassy, ​​acted together with other nationalities, usually Lebanese and in many other cases, for example, in Cyprus, they recruited Lebanese living outside of Iran and Lebanon , with Swedish, Turkish and Pakistani passports. So they have what we call “denial capacity”, meaning the perpetrators are not Iranian citizens, so we are not responsible for their actions. In the second line, they look for what we call “available targets”. Targets that do not require very sophisticated operational means to attack, such as embassies, at times transport companies, and places like the Chabad site in Athens, which are protected but not heavily. In the third line, the idea is: “Let’s go to countries where, in case of exposure, no strategic interests of the Islamic Republic will suffer.” From this point of view, I think that Greece, Bulgaria and even Turkey are considered by the Iranians to be territories that would not cause much damage to their international interests if they were blamed for a successful attack. The point is to find countries with long borders, sea or land, into which their people and equipment can penetrate. In Thailand they made it through Indonesia. Now in Greece they have done it across the border with Turkey. In Bulgaria, the strike in Burgas was doing it at that time across the border with Greece. Later we learned that their people arrived in Bulgaria through Turkey and through Greece.

– When searching for agents, the fitness test is to find people who can go undercover. This is what I would call number 1. The second criterion is whether these people are capable of conducting covert operations. Some recruitment is carried out directly by Hezbollah militants, who operate as a kind of subordinate organization of the Iranian forces, the Quds forces. At the same time, there is a direct recruitment of Shiites from Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Sweden, and Germany. If you look at the last 20 years, you will see that they usually recruit Shia Muslims who live and work with dual identities.

In the last 25-30 years there has been very good cooperation between the governments of Israel and Greece.

“We know for sure that the Iranian authorities are putting constant pressure to carry out attacks on Israeli, Jewish facilities, which they see as a kind of revenge for what is happening to them in Iran. Thus, under the political or strategic dictates of the high levels, the middle levels are looking for potential targets. So the higher levels send their subordinates a kind of “dictation”: “give us goals and give us links.” Each of the agents in the field sends a potential target to their operator, and then someone in management decides that this target is better than the other. If you ask me about the type of target, it could be an embassy or a businessman. I’m talking about what has already happened. It could be a tourist area, as happened in Turkey. There, they tried to use pleasure boats to attack other pleasure boats, which they thought were full of Israeli tourists.

– I can say from my own experience that they use almost all possible ways of transferring money. All possible means. They pay in cash or use secret bank accounts, and at times they even use semi-official money transfer channels, such as through Hezbollah, as a filter between them and the recipient.

– In the last 25-30 years there has been very good cooperation between the governments of Israel and Greece, as well as between the Israeli secret services and the Greek services. We have common interests in the eastern Mediterranean basin, and we have common military cooperation, such as common intelligence cooperation. What I remember from my time is that our partnership was excellent and I think it remains excellent.