Israel’s Spies Have Hit Iran Hard. In Tehran, Some Big Names Paid the Price.

Before he was removed from his post last week, Hossein Taeb presided over a vast and feared intelligence apparatus in Iran. Credit: Hamed Malekpour/Agence France-Presse, via Tasnim News/Afp Via Getty Images
Before he was removed from his post last week, Hossein Taeb presided over a vast and feared intelligence apparatus in Iran. Credit: Hamed Malekpour/Agence France-Presse, via Tasnim News/Afp Via Getty Images
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Israel’s Spies Have Hit Iran Hard. In Tehran, Some Big Names Paid the Price.

Before he was removed from his post last week, Hossein Taeb presided over a vast and feared intelligence apparatus in Iran. Credit: Hamed Malekpour/Agence France-Presse, via Tasnim News/Afp Via Getty Images
Before he was removed from his post last week, Hossein Taeb presided over a vast and feared intelligence apparatus in Iran. Credit: Hamed Malekpour/Agence France-Presse, via Tasnim News/Afp Via Getty Images

For more than a decade, he was a feared presence in Iran, presiding over a vast intelligence apparatus. He crushed domestic dissent and political rivals, and expanded covert operations beyond Iran’s borders to target dissidents and enemies abroad.

Hossein Taeb, a 59-year-old cleric and chief of intelligence for the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, seemed untouchable.

That was until he was abruptly removed from his position last week, a casualty of a relentless campaign by Israel to undermine Iran’s security by targeting its officials and military sites, according to officials and analysts in both countries.

A botched Iranian effort to target Israeli citizens in Turkey, which caused an embarrassing diplomatic crisis with Ankara, a regional ally of Tehran, eventually tipped the balance, according to Israeli intelligence officials briefed on the Iranian plot who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive operations and intelligence topics.

The removal of Taeb was an acknowledgment by Tehran that confronting the threat from Israel required new leadership and a reset of strategies and protocols, according to Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist former vice president of Iran and cleric who was ousted by conservatives in 2009 but has maintained close ties to top officials.

“The security breaches inside Iran and the vast scope of operations by Israel have really undermined our most powerful intelligence organization,” Abtahi said by telephone from Tehran. “The strength of our security has always been the bedrock of the Islamic Republic and it has been damaged in the past year.”

Calls to purge Taeb appeared amid a growing climate of mistrust within the Iranian leadership after a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Ali Nasiri, was secretly arrested on allegations of spying for Israel, according to a person with close ties to top officials in the Revolutionary Guards and another with knowledge of the arrest. They and other Iranian officials quoted in this article requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about internal discussions.

General Nasiri’s detention came two months after several dozen employees of the Ministry of Defense’s missile development program were arrested on suspicion of leaking classified military information, including design blueprints of missiles, to Israel, according to an Iranian official familiar with the raid.
During the past year, Israel has intensified the scope and frequency of its attacks inside Iran, including on the nuclear and military sites that Taeb’s organization was responsible for protecting.

One of the Israeli officials said that part of the strategy entailed exposing failures by the Revolutionary Guards in their covert war with Israel in the hope that it would create conflict between political leaders and the defense and intelligence establishment.

Israel’s spy network has infiltrated deep into the rank and file of Iran’s security circles, Iranian officials have acknowledged, with Iran’s former minister of intelligence warning last year that officials should fear for their lives, according to Iranian media reports.

Israeli agents have carried out assassinations with remote-controlled robots and in drive-by shootings, flown drones into sensitive missile and nuclear facilities, and kidnapped and interrogated an agent of the Revolutionary Guards inside Iran. Tehran also suspects that Israel killed two of its scientists in May.

Taeb was appointed the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence organization in 2009 after nationwide unrest over disputed presidential elections. He had previously served as the chief of the Basij, a plainclothes militia notorious for attacking and sometimes killing protesters.

Taeb enforced systematic crackdowns with a brutality that elevated the intelligence organization from an obscure security unit to the most feared spying operation in the country.

Taeb, a trusted ally of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, placed opposition leaders under house arrest, dismantled many civil society groups, arrested activists and dual nationals and kidnapped dissidents in neighboring countries. In at least one incident, one of the dissidents was executed after being forcibly returned to Iran. In a video praising Taeb released by the Revolutionary Guards this week, those actions were cited among other “accomplishments.”

More recently, Taeb had been under pressure to root out Israel’s network of spies in Iran and to strike back, according to an adviser to the government and another person affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.

General Nasiri, who was arrested in June, served as a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guards’ Protection of Information Unit, tasked with oversight and supervision of the organization’s work.

His arrest, combined with the repeated attacks by Israel, rattled the leadership in Tehran, according to the Iranian officials with knowledge of the situation. Some began quietly calling for Taeb to resign or be removed, the officials said.

Taeb requested one more year in his post to rectify the security breaches, the person affiliated with the Guards said.

Then came the plot to target Israelis in Turkey.

On June 18, an Israeli intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose the intelligence data, said that Mossad believed Iran was planning attacks against Israeli tourists and citizens.

The Israeli Counter-Terrorism Headquarters raised its alert for Turkey to the highest level and told all Israelis in Istanbul to lock themselves in their hotel rooms.

The intelligence official said that Israel had informed Turkey and shared information showing that Taeb was behind the plot, which it said was in retaliation for the killing in May of Col. Sayad Khodayee, the deputy commander of another covert Revolutionary Guards unit.

Saeed Khatibzadeh, spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said last week that Israel’s allegations that Tehran had planned to attack Israelis in Turkey were “ridiculous” and “a precooked scenario to damage the relationship of two Muslim countries.”

Turkey arrested five Iranians and three Turkish nationals suspected of having been involved in the plot, seizing two pistols, two silencers and documents and digital material containing the identities and addresses of individuals said to be on the target list, Turkish news media reported.

Bennett, the Israeli prime minister, said last week that “cooperation is taking place at all levels” with Turkey and had yielded results. The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, at a news conference on Thursday with Yair Lapid, his Israeli counterpart, said that Turkey would not tolerate “score-settling” and “terror attacks” on its soil.

The crisis threatened to push Turkey, a key regional ally for Tehran, closer to the Israeli camp. The Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, was in Turkey on Monday for a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Cavusoglu to discuss the crisis.

Some conservative lawmakers in Iran have told news outlets that the replacement of Taeb was nothing out of the ordinary and that his term had simply come to an end. But one tweeted that Taeb’s removal was one of the most significant in the history of Iran.

Taeb was replaced by Gen. Mohammad Kazemi, the current head of the Revolutionary Guard Protection of Information Unit. Mr. Taeb has been moved to an advisory role to the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards and not to Ayatollah Khamenei, which would have been more typical for one of the ayatollah’s close confidants.

On Saturday, Iran also replaced the head of a Revolutionary Guards unit that provides security for Ayatollah Khamenei and his family, and on Monday, a new head for the Guards’ Protection Information Unit was announced. More reshuffling of senior commanders is expected, analysts say.

The New York Times



Huge Power Outage Paralyzes Parts of Spain and Portugal

This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)
This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)
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Huge Power Outage Paralyzes Parts of Spain and Portugal

This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)
This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)

A huge power outage hit large parts of Spain and Portugal on Monday, paralyzing traffic, grounding flights, trapping people in elevators and leaving power operators scrambling to restore power to millions of homes and businesses.

Some hospitals halted routine work and the two countries' governments convened emergency cabinet meetings, with officials initially saying a possible cyber-attack could not be ruled out. Outages on such a scale are extremely rare in Europe, and the cause could not immediately be established.

Reuters witnesses said power had started returning to the Basque country and Barcelona areas of Spain in the early afternoon, a few hours after the outage began. It was not clear when power might be more widely restored.

Hospitals in Madrid and Cataluna in Spain suspended all routine medical work but were still attending to critical patients, using backup generators. Several Spanish oil refineries were shut down and retail businesses shut.

The Bank of Spain said electronic banking was functioning "adequately" on backup systems, though residents also reported ATM screens had gone blank.

"I'm in a data center, and everything has gone off. All the alarms popped up, and now we're with the groups, waiting to find out what happened," said Barcelona resident and engineer Jose Maria Espejo, 40.

In a video posted on X, Madrid Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida urged city residents to minimize their journeys and stay where they were, adding: "It is essential that the emergency services can circulate."

In Portugal, water supplier EPAL said water supplies could also be disrupted, and queues formed at stores by people rushing to purchase emergency supplies like gaslights, generators and batteries.

The main Portuguese electricity utility, EDP, said it had told customers it had no forecast for when the energy supply would be "normalized", Publico newspaper said. It warned it could take several hours.

Parts of France also suffered a brief outage. RTE, the French grid operator, said it had moved to supplement power to some parts of northern Spain after the outage hit.

Play at the Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended, forcing 15th seed Grigor Dimitrov and British opponent Jacob Fearnley off the court as scoreboards went dark and overhead cameras lost power.

TRAFFIC JAMS

Spanish radio stations said part of the Madrid underground was being evacuated. There were traffic jams in Madrid city center as traffic lights stopped working, Cader Ser Radio station reported.

Hundreds of people stood outside office buildings on Madrid’s streets and there was a heavy police presence around key buildings, directing traffic as well as driving along central atriums with lights, according to a Reuters witness.

One of four tower buildings in Madrid that houses the British Embassy had been evacuated, the witness added.

Local radio reported people trapped in stalled metro cars and elevators.

Portuguese police said traffic lights were affected across the country, the metro was closed in Lisbon and Porto, and trains were not running.

Lisbon's subway transport operator Metropolitano de Lisboa said the subway was at a standstill with people still inside the trains, according to Publico newspaper.

A source at Portugal's TAP Air said Lisbon airport was running on back-up generators, while AENA, which manages 46 airports in Spain, reported flight delays around the country.

Such widespread outages are unusual in Europe. In 2003 a problem with a hydroelectric power line between Italy and Switzerland caused a major outage across the whole Italian peninsula for around 12 hours.

In 2006 an overloaded power network in Germany caused electricity cuts across parts of the country and in France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands and as far as Morocco.