3 An excerpt from a terrific 2024 essay in @TheAtlantic by @KMooreGilbert-who spent several years as an Australian hostage in Tehran-illustrates the link between the regime's unpopularity and incompetence and its repeated intelligence failures: "Iranian security agencies have had little success in thwarting Israeli activities inside their country in part because authoritarian regimes prioritize loyalty over competence. IRGC intelligence officials tend to owe their positions to either ideological conformity or to strong family or personal ties within the organization. If you weren’t a true believer (or at least good at pretending to be one) and didn’t have other IRGC members to vouch for you, you didn’t have a hope of becoming even a lowly prison official in a Revolutionary Guard detention facility. As one guard boasted to me, “Our positions aren’t advertised.” In such a system, aptitude, skill, and even security training are much lower priorities. The least suitable people can attain high ranks, while better-qualified candidates who are deemed insufficiently ideologically committed miss out. Selected for ideological orthodoxy, the Revolutionary Guards I interacted with bought into all manner of conspiracy theories, which undoubtedly distorted their understanding of geopolitics and hamstrung their ability to interrogate suspects. I was regularly forced to listen to lengthy tirades about secretive Zionists pulling the levers of the global economy, or Israeli plots to poison the sperm counts of Muslim men in a scheme to achieve demographic supremacy. My handlers admitted to watching spy shows involving the Middle East, such as Fauda, Tehran, and Homeland. These seemed to reinforce their tendency to see the hand of Mossad behind every calamity that befell Iran, man-made or otherwise. Such paranoia helps explain the shockingly high numbers of innocent people, most of them Iranian, imprisoned on charges of working for Israel. Sadly, many of these people make false confessions under duress, which in turn gives the authorities the impression that they are catching real spies. Institutional incompetence is not the sole reason Iran’s agencies have been losing the shadow intelligence war with Israel. Like all brutal authoritarian regimes, the Islamic Republic knows no language other than intimidation and the threat of violence. It has proved unable to offer positive incentives or rewards to those who might be in a position to assist it. The population, including the Islamic Republic’s traditional religious constituency, broadly loathes the regime; even the most disinterested and self-serving opportunist is reluctant to gather information on its behalf. The IRGC in turn distrusts the people it rules over and believes that cooperation can only be forcibly coerced.... From what I came to understand, Israel has been able to capitalize on the Islamic Republic’s record of poor governance, economic mismanagement, poverty, and political repression to offer would-be collaborators valuable ways out. These could take the form of bundles of cash or offers of permanent residency, not only for Iranians who assist their operations, but for their family members as well. In this respect as in many others, the Islamic Republic has become its own greatest adversary: Having shown itself over the decades to be impervious to ideological moderation or reform from within, it has become so hated that its own people—its biggest victims—are willing to embrace the possibility that the enemy of their enemy is their friend." theatlantic.com/international/…
