Mossad networks in Iran is John Kiriakou’s description of the Israeli human-intelligence apparatus uncovered inside Iran after the Israeli attacks — an operation he assesses, with professional detachment, as a success: “kudos first to the Israelis for this counterintelligence network that they had in Iran.” By all accounts, he says, it was “literally thousands of people reporting clandestinely back to the Mossad” — “bigger than anybody suspected.”[1][2]
Who was recruited
What the Iranian government has turned up, per Kiriakou, is that many of these thousands were Afghan refugees inside Iran illegally or without documentation. They were offered “the equivalent of $50 a month or $100 a month — money well spent” — to report where the nuclear scientists lived, where the generals lived, and what time the generals left their apartment buildings in the morning.[2][3]
Those fragments were assembled at headquarters by what Kiriakou names the mosaic concept, and it is what “made Israeli targeting so much easier.”[3]
Structure
The networks are compartmentalized and stovepiped: “one network doesn’t know what the other network is doing … because if one network is discovered and everybody is rounded up and arrested, they’ll never tell what the other network is doing, because they don’t have any idea.”[4][5]
The recruitment itself points to a permanent Israeli presence on Iranian soil. The Afghans “were not recruited by long-distance telephone call from Israel to Iran. They were recruited in person. There are people inside Iran today acting as spy masters and running these networks.”[4] Kiriakou adds that the effort is generational rather than opportunistic: “this isn’t something that you implement overnight. It’s a program that takes years to develop.”[6]
The roll-up, and what survives it
The Iranians have broken up a great deal of it — there have been executions, a handful of trials, imprisonments — but Kiriakou judges that “it’s impossible to get all of them.” Beyond the recruited locals there are Mossad officers who are ethnic Persians, speak Farsi without an accent, and blend into Iranian society.[3][7]
He frames the remaining task as very large: the Iranians have “a lot of work to do when it comes to trying to disrupt and dismantle this what appears to be an enormous Israeli intelligence operation on Iranian soil. We’re not talking just about recruiting the random Iranian nuclear scientist who goes to Europe for some seminar. We’re talking about giant networks on the ground all across Iran.”[8]
The recruiting pool, quantified
In a February 2026 telling, Kiriakou gave the scale of the population the networks were drawn from and a higher payment figure than in his earlier account. “One of the things that the Israelis have been very, very successful at vis-à-vis Iran is that they recruited hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Afghan refugees. There are 2 million Afghan refugees in Iran. And as refugees, they’re entitled to no government services at all — no food, no water, no medical care, no housing, no nothing. So they’re destitute.”[9][10]
The offer, in his reconstruction: “hey, we’ll give you $200 a month if you just stand on this street corner for 12 hours a day and look at that apartment, and tell me when the general comes out of his apartment onto his balcony — so that they can adjust their missile GPSs to take out the general’s apartment. They end up succeeding in that way.”[10]
The figure differs from the fifty to a hundred dollars a month he gives elsewhere; both are recorded rather than reconciled.[2][10]
The January 2026 demonstrations
Assessing the unrest of January 2026, Kiriakou read the geography as evidence of sponsorship rather than of grievance: the demonstrations “started in Kurdistan because reportedly that’s where the most Israeli agents are located,” before spreading to some of the major cities.[11]
He was equally sceptical of the casualty reporting. An Iranian inside the country, speaking to someone he is close to, told him that the reports of thousands dead were “just not happening”; the demonstrations were “isolated” and “small-scale,” with deaths caused by police and by demonstrators both.[12]
On attribution he says the confirmation came from the Israeli side — that these were “Mossad agitators,” that “they’re bragging about it in the Israeli papers,” and that Mike Pompeo posted on Twitter that it was the Israelis.[13]
The operational detail he uses as a signature is the treatment of the fire service: agitators going to fire stations and throwing Molotov cocktails at the fire trucks, so that buildings set alight afterwards cannot be saved. “That’s an Israeli tactic. It’s a well-known Israeli tactic” — and, he adds, “not the tactic of your standard uprising.”[13][14]
What he expects it to produce
Kiriakou does not read the unrest as a revolution in the making. He rejects the 1979 analogy explicitly, expecting instead “disintegration” and civil conflict “more looking like Libya,” for a structural reason: “There is no center.”[11]