The former leader of Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says an intelligence group tasked primarily with spying on Israel was taken over by Israeli intelligence, which managed to recruit the head of the Iranian group — as well as most of his lieutenants — as a double agent. The goal of the Mossad operation, according to Mr. Ahmadinejad, was to steal information about Iran’s nuclear program. 

Mr. Ahmadinejad — who was barred from running in this year’s special presidential election following the death of President Raisi in a helicopter crash — made the claims during an interview with CNN Türk, CNN’s Istanbul-based, Turkish-language affiliate. 

Mr. Ahmadinejad told the outlet that “the highest person in charge of the counter-Israel unit at the Iranian Intelligence Ministry was an Israeli agent,” according to a translation of the CNN Türk report. The former president claims that Mossad infiltrated the intelligence services in order to conduct “complex operations,” including stealing “crucial nuclear documents.” 

He says that nearly two dozen Iranians were a part of the Mossad operation. 

It would not be the first time Israel has operated within Iran’s borders to obtain classified information about the country’s nuclear development program. In 2018, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that his country had obtained a trove of files related to Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon. He later delivered a presentation of those documents from a stage at Tel Aviv.

In a daring operation six years ago, Mossad agents infiltrated a warehouse at Tehran in the middle of the night and stole more than 100,000 documents detailing Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, according to the New York Times. Over the course of just six hours, more than two dozen agents cut through safes inside the warehouse to access the documents, which were later verified as authentic by the International Atomic Energy Agency. 

Mr. Netanyahu conducted a private briefing for President Trump after the documents were in his possession, which then motivated the American president to pull out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran.