In Iran, many Afghans said they lived in constant fear and were staying home. Farah, 35, a computer engineer in Tehran, said in a telephone interview that neighborhood youth attacked her and her 4-year-old son as they were walking home one day last week and repeatedly kicked the child.

Last week, Farah, who like others interviewed by The Times asked that her last name not be published out of fear of retribution, saw an Afghan woman being beaten while riding the metro. “I sat there paralyzed and shaking because I knew if I said a word I would be also beaten,” she said.

Even Afghans who are legal residents say security guards have ripped their documents and deported them anyway. Ali, a 36-year-old who said he had been born and raised in Iran and had legal status, was stopped at a checkpoint along with an Iranian friend recently.

“He told me, ‘I’m going to tear up your residency card, what are you going to do? You are going to a deportation camp,’ ” Ali said. “I was shaking with fear. I begged and argued with them, saying all my life I have lived in Iran, please don’t do this to me.”

It began last summer with an unsolicited message via Telegram with an offer to make some easy money. Vladislav Victorson, 31, an Israeli living in a suburb east of Tel Aviv, took the bait.

His first job, according to Israeli court documents, involved spray painting antigovernment slogans around his neighborhood, including one comparing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler.

Mr. Victorson and his partner, Anya Bernstein, who was also accused of carrying out tasks, had soon earned $600 between them, the documents showed.

The employer, it turned out, was an Iranian agent, according to the police and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. Mr. Victorson and Ms. Bernstein, who were arrested in October 2024, were part of a wave of Israelis lured through the internet into working for Iran, according to Israeli authorities.

On June 15, just two days after Israel launched its attack on Iran’s nuclear program, police arrested two young men in Tiberias based on a tip from the Shin Bet security agency.

Yoni Segal, 18, and Omri Mizrahi, 20, allegedly planned to fly abroad, possibly to Cyprus, en route to undergo weapons training in Iran. Their mission, according to a state prosecutor’s indictment: to assassinate a top Israeli scientist in exchange for NIS 200,000 ($60,000) each.

In an indictment filed in early July, prosecutors alleged that the defendants’ handlers promised to grant them and their families safe haven in Iran, “where all their needs would be met and the defendants would comfortably live out the rest of their lives.”

The plot marked one of Iran’s most dramatic recruitment attempts uncovered in Israel in recent months — but by no means the only one.

Since the outbreak of the war with Hamas in Gaza, Israeli authorities say they have ferreted out dozens of their own citizens allegedly recruited by Iran for espionage and other activities, from plotting assassinations to spray-painting pro-Iran slogans on cars.

Get The Times of Israel’s Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Newsletter email address Get it By signing up, you agree to the terms

The growing number of alleged Iranian agents has even prompted Israel to open up a new wing for them in Haifa’s Damon prison.

As of July, law enforcement had arrested at least 45 suspects involved in 25 separate cases since October 7, 2023, an Israel Police spokesman told The Times of Israel. Charges have been filed against 40 of them, according to a security official.

The only conviction so far has been of an Israeli businessman who was likely targeted rather than recruited randomly, as many of the others appear to have been.

Advertisement

The unlikely operatives, from diverse walks of life, are usually ordinary civilians contacted by Iranian intelligence officers online. The effort appears to be part of a mass recruitment scheme by Tehran to gather intelligence on Israel’s alleged nuclear and military sites, as well as key Israeli figures such as defense officials and top scientists.

“Iran tries to recruit as many [spies] as possible. Maybe most of them are small fish, but they’re hoping eventually to catch a big shark, recruit a quality agent — that’s their way,” explained reporter and spycraft expert Yossi Melman in an interview with The Times of Israel.

The suspects in Israel, state prosecutors’ indictments show, come from all corners of the country’s society. Among those charged with espionage are Russian-Israeli soldiers from the Haifa suburbs, a Haredi man from Bnei Brak, a West Bank settler and an Arab Israeli college student.

The common thread linking these suspects is not ideology but the promise of quick cash. Spies usually begin by carrying out seemingly innocuous tasks for small sums of money, which quickly escalate into severe offenses such as intelligence gathering and even assassination plots, the indictments show.

The Shin Bet has not responded to requests for comment.

For Iran, the recruitment effort may be its way of trying to even the score after years of successful espionage and sabotage activities attributed to Israel, including assassinations of nuclear scientists and damaging attacks on nuclear sites.

Advertisement

During the opening of the 12-day Israel-Iran conflict, Israel deployed an extensive spy network it had cultivated in Iran, with attacks on scientists and secret meetings of military officials giving a window into the depth and breadth of its intelligence on Tehran’s inner sanctums.

In the weeks since, Iran has arrested some 700 alleged spies and collaborators working with Israel’s Mossad spy agency, according to Iran’s semi-official Fars news outlet. On Monday, the head of the country’s judiciary called for the cases to be expedited, the official Mizan news outlet reported.

Despite the effort, Tehran hasn’t yet succeeded in taking out any of the Israeli targets in its crosshairs, though there have been several close calls. There are also suspicions that intelligence gathered by spies could have helped Iran target key sites during the war in June, in which the Islamic Republic fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel.

Among other targets, Iranian missiles hit the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba and, an Israeli official told Reuters, a number of military sites. The barrages were in response to Israel’s sweeping assault on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missiles programs. Israel said the attack was necessary to eliminate the “existential threat” posed by the Islamic Republic, which openly calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Iranian state media claimed in early June that Iran had obtained a vast trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence, including files related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans, but no evidence was provided to support the claims.

Casting a wide net

Iranian espionage in Israel is not a new phenomenon. But in the past, Melman said, it was usually targeted toward recruiting Arab citizens of Israel seen as more likely to be sympathetic to the cause, and complemented by efforts by Palestinians and the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon.

“It was very few and far between, continuous throughout the years but minimal,” he noted.

Over the past two and a half years, though, Iran has been trying to build up an espionage network within Israel through what Melman called a “spray-and-pray” approach — agents casting a wide net across all parts of society in hopes of stumbling upon a few quality recruits.

Advertisement

This involves Iranians reaching out to Israelis through social media — most recent cases have been through the Telegram messaging app, which has relatively lax content moderation rules — with offers of money in exchange for carrying out missions of escalating severity.

According to police, recruits have vandalized bus stops, photographed and filmed the Iron Dome air defense system batteries and army bases, stalked public figures and, in extreme cases, even set in motion assassination plots. They normally receive payments in the form of cryptocurrency.

The accused spies are a diverse crowd, varying drastically in age, ethnicity and religious observance. While the suspects are all seemingly lured by the promise of easy money, Iranian recruiters also appear to be trying to take advantage of rising disaffection with Israel’s leadership among wide swaths of the public.

Many recent espionage incidents uncovered by the Shin Bet have involved young Israelis, often university students or recently released IDF soldiers.

“There’s no ideology here, it’s only the money,” said Melman. But it’s also evident that Iranian agents pay careful attention to Israel’s political contours and appear to exploit surging polarization to reel in potential recruits.

At least one Iranian handler has specifically sought out Haredi and Muslim recruits, according to an indictment filed against 22-year-old Bashar Musa, a Ben-Gurion University student arrested in June.

According to prosecutors, Musa was instructed to invite his Iranian handler to additional Telegram groups specifically geared toward the ultra-Orthodox and Muslim communities.

Advertisement

His lawyer did not responded to a request for comment.

In many cases, including the recent assassination plot, agents reached out to Israelis under a political pretense, describing themselves as acting “on behalf of Kaplanist leftists” — a reference to anti-government protesters who regularly demonstrate in Tel Aviv — and similar phrases.

The two would-be assassins from Tiberias had allegedly started out with minute tasks — scrawling “Bibi is a dictator” on slips of paper and banknotes, then filming videos of themselves burning the messages.

To Melman, the spy cases show the degree to which Iranians have been able to exploit a deep malaise plaguing Israeli society. He painted a picture of a fragmented, war-weary Israel, in which citizens are quickly losing trust in elected officials amid rampant polarization, and appear increasingly motivated by their personal finances.

“Israelis were never ready to spy, except for a small fraction of them. If they did, it was typically ideological missions for the USSR,” he said. “But to spy for an enemy country? This is the deterioration of society, there’s no other word for it.”

Spies who know too much?

According to Melman, in some cases Iranian agents reaching out to potential recruits are not bothering to conceal their identity.

Iranians have used this tactic more and more in recent months, Melman said, on the assumption that an increasing number of Israelis “are willing and ready” to defect to the Islamic Republic.

Fadi Hamdan, a lawyer for Segal, argued that his client had no clue he was in contact with an Iranian agent. He later dropped the case and it was taken up by Avi Moskowitz, a lawyer in the Public Defender’s Office. He told Ynet that his client is a “young, Zionist, normative individual who had no intention of harming national security.”

But the indictment indicates that Segal indeed knew he was chatting with an Iranian agent. The charges detail that he saw that his handler was located in Tehran after the two exchanged locations over an encrypted messaging app.

Yuval Zolti, the lawyer for Mizrahi, said he could only give a statement on his client’s innocence once provided the legal documents detailing the alleged offenses.

Even when handlers aren’t completely upfront about their motives, many accused spies seem to have understood that an Iranian agent was sitting behind the keyboard. Such was the case with 33-year-old Mark Morgain, a West Bank settler arrested in late June.

According to an indictment, Morgain had been contacted earlier that month by an Iranian agent under the alias “Alex” who offered to pay him a daily retainer to do his bidding, including transporting an explosive and filming a missile interception.

Prosecutors say Morgain suspected his handler was Iranian, but told Alex that he “doesn’t want to know” whether he was working on behalf of the enemy country, calling the prospect “irrelevant.”

The Times of Israel was unable to reach Morgain’s lawyer for comment.

Some suspects, however, indeed seem to have fallen prey to subterfuge, as in the case of a 13-year-old boy from Tel Aviv who was arrested on suspicion of vandalizing bus stops at the behest of an Iranian agent.

The suspect, who has since been released to house arrest, had also been asked to take photos of the Iron Dome missile defense system, but refused, authorities said.

His lawyer told The Times of Israel that the boy blocked the contact before his arrest. He predicted that an indictment was unlikely, due to both the suspect’s age and his lack of awareness.

Real threats

In the early 2010s, Iranian agents managed to turn former government minister Gonen Segev into one of its spies, running him for some six years until he was caught and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

In April, an Israeli businessman with ties to Turkish and Iranian figures was sentenced to 10 years in a plot that saw him smuggled twice into Iran, where he negotiated prices for hiring hitmen to assassinate senior officials, according to prosecutors.

With such assets hard to come by, though, Iranian intelligence operatives are also casting a wide recruitment net in the hopes that they will chance upon “a quality agent” with access to the upper echelons of Israeli society, Melman said. They do not appear to have yet succeeded.

To vet the potential agents, handlers often demand their new recruits send “verification videos” displaying their faces and identity cards, then task them with minor criminal violations in exchange for money.

These smaller tasks ensure the recruits’ commitment, and “chains them” early on to their operator, said Melman. “You’re in their hands now, you’ve already committed one crime.”

In many cases, according to court papers and reports, recruits have been willing to do these smaller tasks like vandalism or taking picture, but balk when asked to take more serious actions, like tracking targets or killing high-ranking officials.

The closest the Iranian operation has come to murder so far appears to have been an assassination attempt on a Israeli physicist who formerly held a prominent position in the Weizmann Institute of Science. A group of young men from Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa were recruited to kill him.

The men were intercepted by security services at the research center’s entrance on the night of September 15, and soon gave up on their plan. They were later arrested and charged.

So agents turned to another recruit, 24-year-old Bnei Brak resident Asher Binyamin Weiss, asking him to assassinate the scientist and his family, and then to torch his house, according to court papers and media reports. Weiss took photos of the physicist’s home and car, but in the end declined to harm his target.

Iran did, however, succeed in targeting the esteemed research center during its war with Israel, seemingly using the same level of precision it employs in its spy campaign.

On June 15, the Islamic Republic fired a volley of ballistic missiles at the Rehovot university. One missile managed to find its target, destroying two empty buildings, damaging dozens more, and wrecking some 45 labs. But others rained on residential parts of the city at random, destroying apartments and wounding dozens of uninvolved civilians, including a Filipina caregiver who died of her wounds on Sunday.

At his confirmation hearing for a judgeship, Senate Democrats asked Emil Bove III about a claim that he and Trump administration officials were willing to defy rulings regarding deportation.

A former Justice Department lawyer accused the Trump administration of “thumbing its nose at the courts,” saying his former colleagues were being forced to choose between the president’s agenda and their ethical obligations as attorneys.

In an interview with The New York Times, the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who filed a detailed whistle-blower claim to the Senate last month, shared his growing sense of alarm as he defended the administration’s aggressive deportation agenda. He said he was willing to testify to Congress or in court about what he described as an intentional effort by the administration to ignore judges and the due process rights of hundreds of migrants.

Mr. Reuveni, speaking publicly for the first time about his experiences, was fired in April after he appeared in court to defend the administration’s mistaken deportation of a man in Maryland, accused of refusing a superior’s directive.

He pointed to the planes of immigrants rapidly flown to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador on March 15, warning that it offered a distressing example of the administration’s disregard for facts and the law. The flights that took off that day also included the Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was initially detained at the prison, known as CECOT.

“If they can do this sort of thing to Abrego Garcia, to 238 people that nobody knows, and send them to CECOT forever with no due process, they can do that to anyone,” said Mr. Reuveni. “It should be deeply, deeply worrisome to anyone who cares about their safety and their liberty, that the government can, without showing evidence to anyone of anything, spirit you away on a plane to wherever, forever.”

He filed his complaint shortly before Emil Bove III, a senior department official, appeared before lawmakers over his nomination to become a federal appeals court judge. Although the administration’s approach has been broadly clear, Mr. Bove and his boss have denied the thrust of Mr. Reuveni’s account. But text messages, phone records and emails viewed by The Times appear to bolster the whistle-blower’s version of events, offering a behind-the-scenes recounting of private meetings and conversations that show Justice Department leaders pressing to take audacious legal risks.

Image A guard watched an inmate at the prison known as CECOT in El Salvador. Credit… Fred Ramos for The New York Times

“The Department of Justice is thumbing its nose at the courts, and putting Justice Department attorneys in an impossible position where they have to choose between loyalty to the agenda of the president and their duty to the court,” Mr. Reuveni added.

Attorney General Pam Bondi denied his account on social media on Thursday. “This disgruntled employee is not a whistle-blower — he’s a leaker asserting false claims seeking five minutes of fame, conveniently timed just before a confirmation hearing and a committee vote,” she wrote.

Ms. Bondi insisted no one at the department was ever asked to defy a court order. “As Mr. Bove testified and as the department has made clear, there was no court order to defy, as we successfully argued” to a federal appeals court, she added.

In his whistle-blower complaint, Mr. Reuveni chronicled the lengths the administration appeared willing to go, describing a particularly shocking moment that crystallized its approach. As the officials prepared to invoke a rarely used wartime law to send immigrants to the Salvadoran prison, the complaint said, Mr. Bove told subordinates at a meeting on March 14 that the Justice Department may end up ignoring court orders, using an expletive to underscore his point.

Since those disclosures, Democrats have argued Mr. Bove is unfit to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, a lifetime appointment one rung below the Supreme Court. Republicans have tried to blunt Mr. Reuveni’s claims by characterizing him as a politically motivated saboteur.

In addition to the confirmation process for Mr. Bove, two federal judges have weighed contempt proceedings into the administration’s handling of the cases cited by Mr. Reuveni.

“I can’t control what they do, but if they wanted to hear from me, I would answer,” Mr. Reuveni said.

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, has denied Mr. Reuveni’s account, asserting he was at the same meeting and never heard Mr. Bove suggest the department disregard court orders.

“The claims about Department of Justice leadership are utterly false,” Mr. Blanche has said.

Mr. Reuveni disputed Mr. Blanche’s account. The deputy attorney general, he said, briefly entered the conference room during the March 14 meeting, but only to speak privately with Mr. Bove. Mr. Blanche then left and did not participate in the meeting, Mr. Reuveni said.

Only after the one-on-one discussion between Mr. Bove and Mr. Blanche did Mr. Bove use an expletive to suggest the Justice Department might choose to ignore court orders, Mr. Reuveni said.

In his written answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Bove did not claim that Mr. Blanche was there, but rather said that Mr. Blanche said that he was there.

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Bove denied the thrust of Mr. Reuveni’s allegations.

“I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order,” Mr. Bove told lawmakers, though when pressed on particulars he said he could not recall specific language that was used.

“I didn’t hear him deny anything unequivocally under oath,” Mr. Reuveni told The Times.

Mr. Reuveni said he came forward for reasons larger than Mr. Bove’s judicial nomination, concerned by what he described as a degradation of the principles of honesty to the courts that have long guided the Justice Department. He noted that he has never been a member of a political party, and spent the first Trump administration zealously defending its immigration policies in court.

But what the administration has sought to do in recent months was far different, he said, a deliberate strategy of deceiving and disregarding federal judges.

To buttress his account, Mr. Reuveni has turned over to Congress text messages, phone records and emails with his colleagues at the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, as they wrestled with the legal battle over Mr. Trump’s use of the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act.

The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said the documents “show that the Department of Justice misled a federal court and disregarded a court order.”

“Mr. Bove spearheaded this effort,” he added, “which demanded attorneys violate their ethical duty of candor to the court.”

Andrea Meza, one of Mr. Reuveni’s lawyers at the Government Accountability Project, added that the records demonstrated “why it is clearly in the public’s interest for the full truth to come out.”

In his complaint and in the interview with The Times, Mr. Reuveni said another Justice Department lawyer, Drew Ensign, misled a federal judge on March 15, when the administration sent several planes of migrants to El Salvador. Mr. Ensign, appearing at a hastily convened hearing, informed the judge that he did not know whether such removals were imminent.

The written communications, viewed by The Times and shared with Congress, appear to corroborate Mr. Reuveni’s account. A colleague listening to the hearing texted Mr. Reuveni an expletive, followed by: “That was just not true.” The same colleague added: “He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”

Mr. Reuveni replied, “Yes he does.”

The career lawyers trying to navigate the issue often engaged in gallows humor about their situation.

“Guess it’s find out time” on how the courts would respond to the administration, Mr. Reuveni texted a colleague that evening. “Yup, it was good working with you,” the colleague replied ruefully.

Later that evening, Mr. Reuveni sent another text, which referred to Mr. Bove’s expletive from the previous day.

“Guess we are going to say fuck you to the court,” Mr. Reuveni texted. “Super.”

His colleague responded, “Well, Pamela Jo Bondi is,” then added, “not you.”

A few days later, as Mr. Reuveni became more dismayed at the administration’s confrontational posture, he texted a colleague in frustration: “At this point, why don’t we just submit an emoji of a middle finger as our filing.”

The messages supplied by Mr. Reuveni paint a startling picture of an administration determined to send the men to a foreign prison without judicial review first, a decision that itself exposed major fissures within the ranks of government officials.

On multiple occasions, records he gave to Congress show, State Department officials offered to begin negotiations with the Salvadoran government to get Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, however, adamantly resisted, seeking instead to argue that the man was a dangerous gang member who could not be returned. Career lawyers at the Justice Department struggled to carry out ambiguous instructions from their superiors in apparent contradiction of judicial orders.

Those tensions escalated in late March and early April, as judges demanded information that Mr. Reuveni and other lawyers did not have.

“Neither D.H.S. nor D.O.J. leadership is willing to answer any of these questions right now,” Mr. Reuveni wrote in an email on April 1. “I am getting nowhere with anyone. Leadership appears committed on not answering anything until ordered to do so.”

Iran executed one of its nuclear scientists on Wednesday over allegations that he was a spy for Israel and had facilitated Israel’s assassination of another nuclear scientist during the two countries’ war in June, according to the judiciary’s news outlet, Mizan.

The judiciary said the scientist, Roozbeh Vadi, had worked at one of the country’s most sensitive and important nuclear sites and had access to the type of classified information sought by Iran’s enemies. Mr. Vadi was executed by hanging after he was found guilty of espionage and providing information to Israel, the judiciary said.

The execution follows a 12-day war with Israel and the United States in June, when Israel assassinated at least 30 Iranian senior military commanders and 11 nuclear scientists.

Iranian officials have acknowledged publicly that Israel’s widespread infiltration of its security and intelligence apparatuses enabled Israel to eliminate key parts of Iran’s military chain of command in the war’s first night and helped it launch drone attacks from inside Iran. Following the war, officials have blamed Israel for a series of explosions and fires around the country.