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Iran's anxiety about plots and conspiracies is increasing, writes Robert Fisk from Beirut
When Iran announced last week that it had executed a convicted Iraqi agent and arrested three other men for spying for the CIA and Turkey, it represented a new phase in the battle between Iran's intelligence services and the militant opposition forces which still strive to overthrow the 17-year-old Islamic Republic.
For, although the almost routine report of the execution on Tehran radio referred only to three of the accused "passing military information in time of war to the CIA" it did not reveal that all four men were Iranians. Three were officers in the Iranian army and the fourth a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
All four, according to a source close to Iranian authorities, had been spying for Iraq since almost the start of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and had sold their country's secrets for money. In Iranian eyes, there is now little or no difference between the Iraqi-backed Mujahedin Qalq and the CIA; and Tehran's announcement last month that a $20m (pounds 13m) budget had been approved "to uncover and neutralise US government conspiracies" means that the intelligence war between the Iranian regime and its violent opponents is likely to get hotter in the coming months.
Iranian sources maintain that only those who oppose Tehran "militarily" - with bombs - or at the behest of Western intelligence services are targeted. Thus two members of the mujahedin living in Baghdad - Ifat Haddad, a member of the National Council of the Iranian resistance, and Fereshta Essendiani - were killed in...