Since the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, while he was in Tehran for the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, on Wednesday, July 31, criticism of the intelligence services has multiplied in Iran. In Parliament, MP Hossein-Ali Haji-Deligani said that the attack resulted from the infiltration of the country by agents in Israel's pockets: "The Zionist regime [Israel] can, by paying American dollars to ignorant people or sell-outs, recruit them to obtain information or to carry out terrorist operations. This has been the case in the deaths of some of our country's nuclear and military scientists."

In Iran, in addition to the Ministry of Intelligence, the Revolutionary Guard, the regime's ideological army, has its own spy service, creating a form of competition between them. "The secret services in Iran work in silos, which creates a security vacuum," said Hamidreza Azizi, a researcher at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a research institute in Berlin. What's more, in 2009, when Iran was shaken by a wave of protests following the fraudulent re-election of the ultraconservative former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013), "a purge took place within the Ministry of Intelligence, during which employees deemed close to the reformers were fired, adding to the loopholes," said Arman Mahmoudian, a researcher at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida.

A businessman speaking on condition of anonymity from Tehran blamed these shortcomings on the commercial activities of various officials in these services, particularly among the Guards, who have become the country's biggest economic force. "Instead of doing their real job, they're in Dubai or elsewhere, negotiating the sale of Iranian oil," he said. Many Iranians pointed out online that these services, which are highly effective in repressing dissent, are much less effective in countering Israeli activity.

As the criticism grows, an old video, dated 2021, surfaced on social media. It shows former intelligence minister Ali Younesi (2000-2005) expressing alarm at Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, infiltration of Iran. "In the last 10 years, Mossad infiltration in different parts of the country has been such that the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran should be worried for their lives," he had added, referring to the last two years of Ahmadinejad's presidency and the two terms of his successor, Hassan Rohani (2013-2021).

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