Interesting stuff

Defector spied on Iran for years-News-World-Middle East-TimesOnline

There are quite a few interesting nuggets in this one:

A Revolutionary Guard commander in Lebanon during the training and organization of Hezbollah.

Asgari’s escape has provoked alarm in the Iranian regime. “Asgari is a gold mine for western intelligence,” said an Israeli defence source. “We have been following him for years, especially since the late 1980s when he was commander of the Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon.”

The possibility that he was recruited by Israeli Intelligence but believed he had been recruited by some other Western service.

It is unclear which intelligence organisation he was spying for. “He probably was working for Mossad but believed he was working for a European intelligence agency,” said an Israeli defence source.

The daring escape.

A daring getaway via Damascus was organised by western intelligence agencies after it became clear that his cover was about to be blown. Iran’s notorious secret service, the Vavak, is believed to have suspected that he was a high-level mole.

I guess the more important question will become just how much did he know about Iran's connections to foreign terror cells - and how recent is his information. If he's been operationally marginalized since making the mistake of pointing out corruption within the Rev Guards, his information might not be any more current than what Israel has been tracking already.

For some reason this one feels more unique than the sort of spy vs. spy operations that punctuated the Cold War years. Here we're talking about a deeper cultural/religious divide between entities - or at least most of us imagine that to be so. For an Iranian to defect to the West - outside his region, his religion, and his culture seems very unusual.