A 73-year-old Israeli businessman, Moti Maman, was arrested last month on charges of plotting the assassinations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar on behalf of Iran.
A joint statement released Thursday by Israeli intelligence and police said Maman had traveled to the Islamic Republic twice, where he had received instructions and payments to carry out missions in favor of Tehran.
Investigators discovered that Maman, a resident of Ashkelon, had lived in Turkiye for a long time and had established ties with Turkish and Iranian citizens close to the Pasdaran in the Eurasian country. In April, with the help of two Turkish mediators, Andrey Farouk Aslan and Junayd Aslan, Maman had agreed to meet an Iranian businessman named “Eddy” to discuss unspecified private business. The meeting, which took place a few days later in the Turkish city of Samandag, according to Shin Bet, laid the foundation for Maman’s collaboration with the theocratic regime.
After first contact with Iranian emissaries, Maman returned to Turkey in May, meeting again with his local middlemen and representatives sent by Eddy, and illegally entering Iran through the border near the Turkish city of Van. On Iranian soil, the 73-year-old Israeli met with Eddy and a man named Khwaja, who introduced himself as a member of the “Iranian security forces.”
On this occasion, Eddy asked Maman to carry out some missions on behalf of Iran, apparently low-level tasks, such as depositing money or a gun in specific locations in Israel, photographing crowded areas and threatening other Israeli citizens in Iran’s pay.
According to Shin Bet, Maman expressed full availability and, upon returning to Israel, got to work. A few months later, in August, he smuggled himself into Iran again, hidden inside a truck, to be given new tasks – this time of a much higher level: the assassination of Prime Minister Netanyahu, his defense minister Gallant, and Bar, the head of Shin Bet.
Due to the amount of work and the risk involved, Maman this time asked for an advance payment of one million dollars – effectively blocking the operation, due to the strong opposition of Iranian agents. But it wasn’t just the assassination plans that were being discussed. Maman was tasked with carrying out a whole series of other small errands – such as depositing money in Israel for other Iranian agents and recruiting members of the Mossad as double agents. And before leaving Iran for the second time, he received 5,000 euros in cash – with the promise to return to discuss the high-profile assassinations.
However, there was no new contact, because upon his return to Israel the police were already on his trail, ready to arrest him. “It’s a good thing you arrested me, I don’t know where I could have ended up,” Maman himself reportedly confessed during questioning. Maman’s lawyer, Eyal Besserglick, claims that his client made a simple “error of judgment” and that he is cooperating fully with the authorities. After all, the lawyer claims, his children serve in the Israeli security forces and he himself has always helped the country’s security services, without any intention of committing sensational acts.
This modus operandi is far from unusual. For decades, Iranian intelligence has been working tirelessly to recruit Israeli citizens (and vice versa). A senior Shin Bet official, quoted by The Times of Israel, called the affair “a very serious case” and stressed that even simple commercial contacts between Israeli citizens and elements close to Tehran represent a serious threat to national security.
Tensions are now higher than ever, with Tel Aviv on the brink of an all-out war with the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah, following the dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries in Lebanon from explosives packed into pagers and walkie-talkies used by the Shiite militia to communicate in secret, sabotaged and detonated by Israel. Just a few days ago, Tel Aviv denounced an alleged plot by Hezbollah to assassinate former high-ranking defense officials, including Moshe Ya’alon, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces.
