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JEDDAH: It has emerged that eight Saudi cities were scenes of large Iranian spy operations; the alleged spies are now on trial in Riyadh.
The spy cell, composed of 30 Saudi citizens, was run by the Iranian Embassy in Riyadh and supervised by Iran’s religious leader, Ali Khamenei, and the Revolutionary Guard.
Members of the spy cell reportedly sent 64 messages containing military, security and civilian information to Iran from seven different locations. The Iranian Embassy is alleged to have recruited the members of the cell.
Iran has targeted ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ and other GCC countries through spy activity, the exploitation of Haj and Umrah as well as the collection of information, security sources said.
During a workshop at the Shoura Council recently, Brig. Gen. Bassam bin Zaki Attiyah said the Iranian terrorism operations directed against the Kingdom came in different forms, including espionage.
Targeting the Kingdom is a sacred goal for Teheran in order to destabilize the region and turn it into a hotbed of conflict, Attiyah said.
He said Iran had adopted different forms of terrorism including Haj and diplomatic terrorism, sectarian sedition, smuggling explosives into the Kingdom, and the training of Daesh elements to carry out terror acts inside the Kingdom.
Attiyah gave a brief account of the history of the link between Iran and terrorism which, he said, began with the so-called Islamic Revolution of 1979.
He said the fall of the Shah in that year saw the beginning of the export of the ideas of the Iranian revolution and the emergence of the Iranian state which produced Hezbollah.
The strategy of the Iranian revolution has been based on the creation of a branch of Hezbollah everywhere in the world, he said.
He said the Iranian strategy was working on both short- and long-term bases. In the short term, it targets ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ, Iraq, and the Fertile Crescent to the west, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east.
In the long term, Iranian strategy seeks to reach Central Asia, Central and Southern Africa while the fall of Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan was a big incentive to the Iranian revolution, he said.