Mossad agents are believed to be working closely with their British counterparts to protect the Jewish community from threats linked to Iran, sources in Israel have told the JC.
The cooperation behind the scenes is a stark contrast with the diplomatic chill between London and Jerusalem since the launch of Operation Roaring Lion, the Israel-US joint air campaign against Iran.
Sources speaking to the JC have highlighted the continued professionalism of both nations’ intelligence services in combatting shared threats.
Israel’s National Security council has warned of an elevated worldwide threat to Jewish community targets following the launch of Operation Roaring Lion.
In Europe there has been a spate of attacks on the Jewish community, including synagogues in Liege in Belgium and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, as well as an explosion at a school in Amsterdam. Last week an armed terrorist drove into a shul in Michigan in the US.
Some of the attacks have been carried out by a new Iran-linked terror group, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, or ‘Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right’.
Dr Eran Lerman, who served as Israel’s Deputy National Security Advisor between 2006-2015, told the JC any Mossad operations in Europe would be “closely coordinated with the local authorities”.
Regarding the new terror group, he suggested Israeli intelligence has already learned who its members are.
Lerman, Vice President of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said: “I think the identity of their leadership is known to us, and … I wouldn’t take life insurance on them right now.”
However, he made clear that Israel would no longer carry out a campaign of assassinations on European soil, even against terrorists, as it did in hunting down the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre.
Lerman said: “We’ve been able to inform and warn authorities all over Europe in recent years against what we, as an Israeli intelligence community, has determined to be a pattern of mobilising and sometimes even hiring either Islamist hotheads or sometimes even paid thugs to carry out attacks against Jewish targets and Iranian dissidents.”
He said he believed the group was a front for the “Unit 840 of the Quds Force” of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the organisation’s branch that deals with “international terrorism” and had targeted Iranian dissidents abroad.
Speaking to the JC on the day it emerged that Israel assassinated senior Iranian security chief Ali Larijani and Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the Basij paramilitary force of the IRGC, Lerman stressed that his assessments were based on his understanding of open-source material. He emphasised he had not seen any classified documents in recent years and that even if he had, he would not disclose their contents.
A former head of the Counterterrorism Division in Mossad, Oded Ailam said that criminal gangs were being used by the Islamic Republic in attempts to carry out terrorist acts around the globe.
Ailam, now a researcher at the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs, suggested it was a way for Islamic Republic to have deniablity for terrorist acts.
He said: “They find some local gangsters, gangs, not necessarily on the ideological level, but more of money and drugs and so on. And they are using them in order to facilitate their acts without having a direct Iranian fingerprint on the matter.”
Speaking to the JC from Israel as he went back and forth from his safe room amid Iranian missile attacks, he said that combatting the combination of terrorism and criminality was a challenge for any security force: “You need to monitor quite a lot of data in order to trace such organisations”.
Ailiam said Mossad had been “very supportive in the way that it exchanges and provides information” to foreign allies, along with other Israeli agencies.
While he thought that British intelligence services were “doing their best to attack the Iranian threats”, he was hugely critical of what he saw as a “major problem with the British government and its attitude towards the threat of the Iranians”.
Despite Sir Keir Starmer describing the regime in Iran as “abhorrent”, the former Mossad official claimed that the reluctance of the government “to acknowledge that Iran is a direct threat to the United Kingdom”, could potentially hamper the abilities of Britain’s intelligence services to foil “terror acts initiated by the Iranian”.
He said that while “agencies are working very closely together in order to spoil any sort of an attack on the Jewish community” and that “the agencies are fully dedicated to protect and to be even proactive regarding any attempt on the Jewish community”, the attitude of the government and “restrictions potentially in the British law” needed to be changed to give an “Iron shield” to the Jewish community.
Former defence minister Lord Spellar told the JC that “British intelligence services are very alert to Iranian threats”.
Relations between Israel and Britain have been frosty since the Labour government’s decision to unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state and significant differences over Israel’s conduct of war in Gaza.
Without making direct reference to Mossad, Spellar said that intelligence agencies, including British ones, were able to carry out effective operations regardless of political pressures.
“The Five Eyes [the intelligence alliance comprising the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand], irrespective of differences between governments, have always operated very effectively between each other, because of the very useful information sharing and threat assessments. These are professionals. Faced with common threats, Intelligence agencies work together,” the Labour peer said.
Lerman said that while intelligence agencies were not “immune” to governmental frostiness, “where there’s a mutual interest – certainly is the case when it comes to terrorism on European soil – I think they know how to, let’s say, bridge over the difference the differences between the political views of their governments.”
He added: “And I think the Israeli services are very careful not to, in this respect, not to be drawn into a situation where they are perceived as doing a political job.”
In an interview with the JC in March last year, the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, suggested that the agency was “well aware” of the Iranian threats posed to British Jews, adding: “There is a threat, there is a problem … whether it’s the inspiration of radicals who are going to attack the Jewish community, or whether it’s organising demonstrations which intimidate the Jewish community and encouraging those.”
Earlier in the month, officials at Israel’s National Security Council said: “Since the start of Operation Roaring Lion, a surge in motivation and an increase in terrorist activity and threats by Iranian security bodies against Israeli and Jewish targets worldwide have been identified.
“In addition, there are Iranian kinetic attack efforts in countries in the region and around Iran, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan.”
The UK government has so far declined to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.
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