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secret agent — the prisoners still had to explain why they had hidden 15
kg of the military explosive RDX under bushes on a Mombasa golf
course.
Created to advance Iran’s interests clandestinely overseas, the Quds Force
has lately provided mostly embarrassment, stumbling in Azerbaijan,
Georgia, India, Kenya and most spectacularly in Thailand, where before
accidentally blowing up their Bangkok safe house, Iran’s secret agents
were photographed in the sex-tourism mecca of Pattaya, one arm around a
hookah, the other around a hooker. In its ongoing shadow war with Israel,
the Iranian side’s lone “success” was the July 18 bombing of a Bulgarian
bus carrying Israeli tourists — though European investigators last week
officially attributed that attack to Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hizballah. That
leaves the Islamic Republic itself with a failure rate hovering near 100%
abroad and an operational tempo — nine overseas plots uncovered in nine
months — that carries a whiff of desperation. A Tehran government long
branded by U.S. officials as the globe’s leading exporter of terrorism may
be cornering the market on haplessness.
Within Iran’s own borders, however, the story is different. Twice in the
past two years Iranian intelligence has cracked espionage rings working
with Israel’s Mossad, Western intelligence officials tell TIME. In both
cases, the arrests were the furthest thing from secret: announced at a news
conference, each was later followed up by televised confessions broadcast
on Iranian state television in prime time. Given Iran’s history of trumped-
up confessions, skepticism is more than justified. But the arrests appear to
be solid. One intelligence official said the captured Iranians provided
“support and logistics” to the Mossad operatives who carried out the
assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.
At least four scientists were killed on Tehran’s streets from 2010 to 2012,
when, as TIME has reported, Israel ratcheted back on covert operations
inside Iran. Officially, Israel has remained silent on the killings, though
government officials will coyly say they welcome the deaths. The Jewish
state maintains the same ambiguous posture on other “setbacks” to Iran’s
nuclear program widely — and correctly, Western intelligence officials
say — attributed to Mossad, from the Stuxnet computer virus, to

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