The footage is grainy and blurred, camera jolting all over the place. Fleeting silhouettes of trees on a hectic horizon. Nineteen seconds in, the unmistakable figure of a man on the run appears. He's being hunted; his predators are closing in.
The prey sidesteps wildly to the left, then he's down, tackled, wrestled, pinned and cuffed. He's frog-marched off, then forced to his knees, grabbed by his hair, head pushed down. We don't know this fugitive's name, but you get the sense from the two-minute video that this wasn't going to end well for him. It didn't.
Having reportedly tried to bite into a cyanide capsule during his arrest, his capture by Iran's state security forces was recounted on pro-regime media platforms under the headline: "Mossad agent commits suicide."
Whether or not this unidentified man was actually linked to Israel's intelligence service, he may, by reportedly taking his own life, have saved himself from the indignity of a televised forced confession — and the gallows.
"No country, no nation allows betrayal. And betrayal during wartime is not forgiven," Esmaeil Baghaei, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, told Foreign Correspondent. There's a hard edge to his tone. The regime is furious: stunned by the reach of Israeli intelligence and embarrassed by the extent of its infiltration, as evidenced during the 12-day war in June.
"We had to deal with those spies, those who provided information to our enemies, very harshly," said Baghaei.
Israel's primary targets were Iran's nuclear sites — bombed with the help of US bunker-busters. But the Israelis also managed to decapitate Iran's military command structure, sometimes in simultaneous strikes.
That required precise, real-time intelligence, as did the killing of 14 nuclear scientists. They knew where they were at the right moment to strike, which suggests highly placed sources. On one occasion, a general was killed and replaced, only to have his replacement taken out within days.
The infiltration debacle triggered panic. The mistrust and paranoia which has long characterised this autocracy reached dizzy heights. The regime went into survival mode, with the Supreme Leader in hiding. During the 12-day-long war alone, state media reported 21,000 arrests. Opposition sources reported a brutal crackdown with more than 1,000 checkpoints set up across the country in the hunt for spies.
The grainy footage of the man who killed himself ends with a stark warning: "Traitors repent and turn yourself in before it's too late."
Suspects accused of espionage were paraded on TV in their blue-striped prison uniforms. Their "confessions" — which international human rights groups say are often forced or false (or both) — were broadcast in prime-time. Some of those reportedly arrested included senior officials and military officers.
Espionage trials have been fast-tracked, with speedy executions. Nine individuals convicted of spying for Israel's Mossad have already been hanged since the war.
Traitors and 'martyrs' in Iran's nuclear program
By the time we arrived in Tehran — and we were the only foreign journalists in the country at that time — the atmosphere was febrile. State media had just announced the execution of Roozbeh Vadi, a nuclear scientist accused of spying for the Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency.
He'd "confessed" on state TV to having been paid in crypto to inform on a fellow nuclear scientist, Abdolhamid Minouchehr, with whom he'd collaborated on academic papers. Minouchehr was killed in one of the first air strikes of the war, at 3:20am on June 13. Vadi "confessed" to having met with Mossad agents in Vienna on five occasions.
Minouchehr's portrait depicts a middle-aged man with glasses and, rather unexpectedly, a ponytail. He had been laid to rest at a big Tehran Shia shrine where other "martyred" nuclear scientists were buried under marble slabs.
Iran must be the only country in the world where previously unheard-of nuclear scientists have achieved posthumous celebrity. The faithful mumble prayers as they run their fingers over their names, engraved in the black marble.
Across from Minouchehr's grave lay Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, dubbed "Iran's Oppenheimer," the alleged father of Iran's covert nuclear weapons program. He had been assassinated five years earlier while driving on a country road. An autonomous, satellite-operated machine gun had opened up on him. The Mossad: the usual suspects.
Our Iranian government minders permitted us to film the ruins of Minouchehr's apartment block. The scientist — clearly suspected by Israel of moving Iran ever-closer to building a nuclear bomb — had been killed with his wife and daughter and eight other people in the block of 10 apartments.
Morteza, a neighbour, had found "the doctor's" severed torso 100 metres from the wrecked apartment and was clearly traumatised. "He was an incredible person," he said. "Kind, quiet, harmless," in marked contrast to the Israeli view. Those we spoke to in the presence of our government minder proved predictably loyal to the regime.
But in today's Iran, they're in the minority. During the war, videos emerged on social media of young Iranians partying and cheering as Israeli air strikes targeted Tehran. In undercover interviews conducted for us by Iranian filmmakers we commissioned, one young woman said: "People were hoping that Israel could finally finish the job."
'This place is like Swiss cheese'
Among Western diplomats, there's broad consensus that as many as 80 per cent of Iran's 92 million people can't wait to see the back of their repressive rulers. Around three-quarters of Iranians weren't even born when the Islamic Revolution put their country on its ruinous trajectory.
There have been three popular rebellions in the past 16 years. Ordinary Iranians are weary of repression, corruption and runaway inflation, and the harsh sanctions brought on by their government's provocative enrichment of uranium.
The degree to which the Israeli and US attack set back Iran's nuclear program is unclear. In the fog of war, 408kg of highly enriched uranium went missing. The war also failed to bring about regime change, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had hoped to catalyse.
But it did expose the vulnerability of this deeply unpopular regime, whose ranks are riddled with spies. "This place is like a Swiss cheese," a Western diplomat told me.
"Many people were taken aback," admitted Massoumeh Ebtekar, a former vice president of Iran. "I was in the government and … had heard a lot of rumours about this infiltration," she said. "The alarms were on … but we were still taken by surprise, unfortunately."
Iran's Ministry of Intelligence has claimed it's engaged in "a relentless battle" against Western and Israeli intelligence networks. Ebtekar has a long association with that battle.
Forty-six years ago, in the chaotic wake of the Islamic Revolution that brought the Ayatollahs to power, a group of Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran, where they held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Massoumeh Ebetkar had been the hostage-takers' spokesperson. She famously described the embassy as "a den of espionage, where [the Americans] were plotting against the Iranian people."
We asked to visit the former embassy, now known, of course, as "The Den of Espionage Museum." Photographs of the dark days of the hostage crisis decorate walls festooned with ghoulish anti-American murals. Inside, the 70s-era shredders, typewriters and huge computers stand like guilty objets d'art, belonging to a bygone era.
But one room of the Den of Espionage Museum belongs to now. In the former US ambassador's grand office, there's a display paying homage to Iran's recently assassinated military elite. Large, formal portraits of top generals killed in the war stand on easels where visitors are meant to stand in quiet acts of contemplation at their exemplary sacrifice. Beneath each portrait, in red, these words appear: "A martyr of assassination by the Mossad in Iran."
At Friday Prayers, they still chant "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" If the slogans had begun to have a weary ring to them, that's changed. The "Great Satan" of old has now been conflated with what they all refer to as "The Zionist Regime." The two, now one; inseparable.
Before we left Iran, our minders wanted to take us to another museum. Not just any museum. This one proudly displayed the Islamic Republic's ballistic missiles, including the 20-tonne, 13m-long Khorramshahr — the workhorse of the recent war — which can carry a two-tonne warhead. Iran fired 550 missiles and more than one in 10 penetrated Israel's formidable defences.
In a display cabinet, there's a brass plaque emblazoned with a message in Persian, English and — for the benefit of unlikely Israeli visitors — Hebrew. It reads: "Seven minutes to Tel Aviv."
Meeting a former spy master in Israel
It took us rather longer to get to Tel Aviv, but there was a man we wanted to meet. Rami Igra had been a Mossad Station Chief around the world and risen to become the Institution's deputy director. I told him that even regime people there conceded they'd been shocked by the Mossad's reach. It hadn't surprised him in the slightest, he said.
"Iran is built of all kinds of people and [there's] big opposition to the current government or regime — not so different from Israel," said Igra. "Now this opposition in Iran is not only fuelled by hatred but also by poverty. And these two elements make it very easy for Israel to recruit agents through the internet, under all kinds of pretences."
Igra said the intelligence picture would have been built up over years, using data network analyses, satellite tracking and mobile phones. Espionage had changed, he said. It was no longer about having slow-burn, deep-cover agents.
"You don't need the Mataharis of this world," he said. "They don't exist anymore. What you need is an expendable person on the other side that is willing to work for a cause or for money. The rest is technological and it's easier than you think."
Igra's notion of "an expendable person" jarred. He wanted to explain. "Listen, every human being on this planet has a dream. And once you know what his dream is, whether it is to feed his children because he doesn't have money, or whether he wants to be the top nuclear physicist in the world, you have a way to recruit him. And the way to recruit him is make it seem like he's on his way to his dream. And while he's doing this, he's working for you."
Listening to Igra took me back to a suffocatingly hot afternoon interview inside Iran's Foreign Ministry, with its spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei. He'd talked contemptuously of what he called "Israel's cognitive war, the psychological war that has been accompanying their military warfare against Iran". Maybe this was what he'd meant. "They have been using all sorts of technologies," he seethed, "for this criminal behaviour."
Persians have long memories and centuries of historical scar tissue surrounding occupation, betrayal, siege and assault. A rich mythology surrounds its ancient fightbacks.
The Islamic Republic is today trapped in a cloak-and-dagger game of high-stakes nuclear brinkmanship with Israel and the West. The embattled regime's paranoia and terminal mistrust is now coupled with military humiliation. It's a lethal cocktail. No-one thinks this war is over.
Watch Unfinished Business tonight on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm on ABC TV and iview.
