Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) has dismantled a team of 7 Mossad agents in a network of 56 agents spread across 9 cells, with operations run from Tel Aviv. Mossad’s espionage activity involves foreign nationals and operates internationally and in some countries in the Middle East, using Arabic extensively.
Turkish media quoted security sources as saying that after months of surveillance, the intelligence unit in Istanbul had identified a cell of 56 agents spying on foreign citizens in the country on behalf of the Mossad.
Sources reported that the MIT operation was carried out in cooperation with the Istanbul Police Department’s Anti-Terror Branch and that the 7-person cell that was broken up all confessed to spying for the Mossad.
He also said that the 7 men worked under 9 Israeli intelligence officers, each supervised by the Mossad in Tel Aviv, and were capable of working on an international scale.
The 7 spies include two Turks, Alperen Erkut and Ahmet Koray Özgür, as well as Arabs Khaled Alnebhen, Gizyan Amori, Khaled Nijim, Nizar Daaddeddin and Mohammed Muri.
GPS tracking
Sources said the cell created fake websites in Arabic to collect biographical information about people, used fake cell phone numbers from European and East Asian countries such as Spain, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Malaysia, Indonesia and Belgium, and posted fake job advertisements to gather intelligence information about people.
According to information published by Turkish media citing intelligence documents, Arabic-language websites were used to obtain biographical information on foreigners, track vehicles with GPS devices, identify address-based Wi-Fi devices and crack their passwords, and determine their residential addresses.
Targeting Hezbollah
fikrikadim quoted sources as saying that spies assigned to work for the Mossad were sent to areas in Lebanon and Syria for reconnaissance and intelligence purposes. It was also noted that Lebanese and Syrian agents were sent to the Haret Hreik area in Beirut for reconnaissance and intelligence purposes.
It has been revealed that the Mossad sent its spies of Arab origin to Istanbul to gather intelligence information and identify locations to be hit by Israeli drones, particularly in Lebanon and Syria.
Mossad agents were also found to have carried out international activities, such as obtaining the exact coordinates of a building where Lebanese Hezbollah was located and identifying senior military and political figures belonging to Hezbollah on the third floor of the target building.
Fake websites
MİT concluded that the cell, composed of citizens from various countries in the Middle East, used many fake websites in many languages, especially Arabic, to obtain technical websites and real IP addresses.
It was determined that all the contacts made from abroad with the elements in Turkey were made through hundreds of single-use internet data lines belonging to fake individuals in Spain, England, Germany, Sweden, Malaysia, Indonesia and Belgium. In addition, a Mossad operative with the fake code name “Shirin Alayan”, whose real identity could not be determined, encouraged a Palestinian named “Khaled Nijim” to create fake platforms via a German phone line.
In this way, it was learned that the phones of the targeted people were infiltrated by making them click on infected links on fake websites.
In this context, remote cyber training and technical support services were provided to intelligence officers working on behalf of Israel in Istanbul by 24-year-old Priyanshi Patel Kulhari, the manager of the Tel Aviv-based spyware company Cyberintellingence International Private Ltd. Kulhari was again determining how to infiltrate the phones of target individuals with spyware and which news links to make them click on.
One of the leaders of 9 different cells, a Mossad officer with the code name “Abdulla Qassem”, whose real identity has not been identified and who resides in Israel, introduced himself as a Jordanian Arab living in Sweden and assigned a person named Zayd Saadeddin to analyze the security level and take detailed photographs of a strategically important building in the Qudsiyah district of Damascus.
Study abroad
According to the Sabah daily, Mossad was using a three-step intelligence cloak-and-dagger method to send many spies, including Turks, on a secret touristic trip to Serbia in the first step, then to Dubai in the second step, and then to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, in the third step.
When the agents arrived in Bangkok, a Turkish man named Okan Albayrak, one of the fugitive spies taken to a secret Mossad training center in Thailand, was being given one-on-one technical and tactical intelligence training on how to write intelligence reports, how to conduct surveillance and surveillance, how to evade and evade MIT and other intelligence services within the framework of IKK measures, photo documentation, observation and analysis, and how to place satellite tracking GPS devices on vehicles.
The newspaper reported that intelligence concluded that the Mossad had developed sophisticated methods to avoid falling into the hands of Turkish intelligence and had organized several operations in Istanbul to test their effectiveness.
It was learned that Aleppo network members Mohammed Filli and Abdullah Fellaha, who work for Israel, carried out the reconnaissance of the office of Hisham Younis Yahya Qafisheh, the Syrian chairman of the board of directors of Trend GYO in Kağıthane, the planning of the extortion of the phone used by Qafisheh, and the theft of computers and documents from a residence in a complex in Başakşehir.
Filli and Fellaha were involved in the surveillance of an institution in Istanbul and a number of Egyptian citizens, including a journalist, a doctor and an exchange office employee.
According to Turkish security sources, Mossad had so-called offices in Malaysia, Indonesia and Sweden in various business lines, while all operations were conducted from Tel Aviv.
Operation Mossad
In recent years, Turkish intelligence has already revealed that the Mossad has dismantled several spy networks operating inside the country. Last May, 11 people, including two Turks, were arrested. The leader of the cell was allegedly Selçuk Küçükkaya, who was recruited by the Mossad through a FETÖ member.
On the other hand, last December, 44 Mossad agents operating under the name of consultancy and leaking information about Palestinians to Israel were arrested in Istanbul.
