Iran Faces Real Spies. Its Critics Get The Security Treatment.

Iran faces real foreign espionage. Its government’s answer increasingly treats that fact as a reason to suspect the people who report on the government. A security failure becomes an argument for inspecting the newspaper more closely.

Al Jazeera’s new reporting examines the boundary between genuine counterintelligence threats and the repression of dissent. Analysts interviewed for the piece do not deny that Iran has suffered serious infiltration. They point to the US-Israeli wars and the killing of senior figures as evidence of very real weaknesses.

Their criticism is that the authorities blur espionage with political opposition, independent reporting and ordinary civic activity. Finding a spy and silencing a critic may both improve the government’s afternoon. They do not accomplish the same public purpose.

The threat is not merely hypothetical. Former Mossad director David Barnea has described agents operating inside Iran and claimed that Israel deliberately released footage that encouraged Iranian authorities to arrest people unconnected to its networks, helping protect genuine assets. That is his account, not an independently established audit of who every arrested person was.

If the claim is accurate, indiscriminate suspicion did not simply harm innocent people. It also served the intelligence operation it was supposed to defeat. There is a particularly grim incompetence in letting a hostile service help choose your domestic arrest list.

Iranian officials describe a hybrid threat involving espionage, sabotage, hostile media and exploitation of economic and ethnic tensions. Judiciary leaders invoke wartime conditions to justify urgent action and faster punishment of alleged collaborators. The government’s rationale is therefore broader than chasing someone carrying a stolen document. It can encompass the information environment in which the government is criticised.

That breadth has consequences. A judiciary spokesman said earlier this month that active cases involved at least 1,895 people, including 94 media workers, accused of cooperation with Israel or other hostile states. Those are official allegations, not proof that the people accused are spies.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented coerced confessions, denial of effective defence and security charges applied to dissenters. The reporting also describes heavy penalties for sending material to outlets the authorities deem hostile, including BBC Persian. What somebody reports and whom they report it to can become the route from journalism into a national-security prosecution.

The distinction is not a luxury that expires during a war. Genuine espionage involves covert intelligence activity or assistance to foreign operations. Criticising official failures does not establish either. Treating every inconvenient account as the work of an enemy makes the state’s story harder to question without necessarily making the state safer.

Internet restrictions add another layer. Iran has imposed extensive shutdowns during war and unrest and continues severe filtering. Officials cite threats ranging from cyberattacks to hostile drones. But restricting a population’s access to information also restricts its ability to document what the authorities are doing in the name of protection.

Detention, prosecution and execution are the serious stakes behind these convenient definitions.

A government can have real enemies and still abuse its own people. A competent security system has to tell the difference between someone stealing state secrets and someone describing a state failure. If the difference disappears whenever the reporting is embarrassing, the system is protecting something other than the public.