July 22 (UPI) — Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence said Monday it dismantled a CIA spy ring, capturing 17 agents working with the U.S. agency, according to Iranian media.
State-run Fars News reported that the director general of the Ministry of Intelligence said that the agents were captured within the country and that some of them had been sentenced to death.
“The rulings for these spies have been issued and a number of them will be executed as corruptors on Earth,” the ministry official is quoted as saying during a news conference in the capital of Tehran.
The agents were employed in important private organizations and institutes in the nuclear, military and cyber sectors where they collected classified information, the ministry said in a statement, Iran’s state-run IRNA reported.
The director general said the CIA recruits Iranians to work as agents over the internet.
The announcement comes amid tensions between the United States and Iran that have been on the rise since last May when the Trump administration tightened sanctions on the Middle Eastern country while pulling out of a multinational accord aimed at preventing Tehran from gaining a nuclear weapon.
In May, Iran said that it would also be pulling out of some conditions of the nuclear deal and in early July it announced it had surpassed a uranium stockpile limit set out in the accord.
There have been several skirmishes between the United States and Iran, both of which say they have downed the other’s drone.
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