Revolutionary Guards commander Esmail Qaani, commanding officer of Iran's crack Quds Force, has not been seen in public since the September 27 air strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Media sources in the Middle East have conflicting accounts of General Qaani's whereabouts. However, several sources report that he's under investigation for his ties to Israel. The Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.” Another report from Sky News says that Qaani suffered a heart attack while being questioned about the recent spate of intelligence failures in Iran.
“There is a great deal of paranoia in the leadership in Iran right now, so I find the report in the Middle East Eye plausible,” the policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, Jason Brodsky, tells the New York Sun.
“I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. It's possible, Sabti says, that one or more of Qaani's top aides had been recruited by Mossad. It's also possible that the whole business about Qaani being a double agent is a psyops program.
If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated. One of them is a former Iranian president who has turned into a frequent critic of the Tehran leadership, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Earlier this month Mr. Ahmadinejad alleged that the commander of an Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities was himself an Israeli spy. Up to 20 other members of the counter-intelligence team have also been compromised, the former president told Turkish television.
Ahmadinejad has been sidelined by the ruling clerics, so this could just be sour grapes on his part. But it would certainly explain the ease with which Israeli intelligence has penetrated the upper reaches of the Iranian state.
“The breach was 100 percent Iranian and there is no question about this part,” a source close to Hezbollah told Middle East Eye, with "Lebanese and Iraqi sources saying Qaani was 'under house arrest,'" and being "questioned by people under the direct supervision of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei," reports the Times of Israel.
“The Iranians have serious suspicions that the Israelis have infiltrated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially those working in the Lebanese arena, so everyone is currently under investigation,” a source told the Middle East Eye.
Suspicions that senior Iranian commanders may have been compromised were compounded when Nasrallah’s presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine, was apparently killed in another powerful Israeli strike on a secret subterranean Hezbollah base on 4 October.
Safieddine is believed to have been killed at a meeting of Hezbollah’s Shura Council, which includes the party’s most senior leaders, sources said. Within minutes of arriving, he was hit by a strike so powerful that it demolished four large residential buildings.
Qaani and his top aides are almost certainly under suspicion. Whether the general himself is in trouble is unknown.
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