THE regime in Iran is “rotten” and deteriorating, former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove has said.
He told the Camilla Tominey Show on GB News: “It’s brilliant. But what it tells you is also that the regime in Iran is rotten from inside.
“When a regime is in that state of, let’s say, deterioration, it’s relatively straightforward and easy to recruit spies, to recruit agents to carry out this sort of activity. But having said that, these operations show a very high degree of operational sophistication in terms of their planning and their execution.
“They really are quite remarkable because of the dangers of the Iranians, who are not bad themselves at intelligence work, dismantling these organisations.
“Things have become so extreme with the regime in Iran that the Israelis, I’m not saying have a free hand, but what they’ve done is quite remarkable. And the penetration of Hezbollah, well, that was a classic, very clever operation, and took down the complete command structure of Hezbollah.”
He added: “I think regime change is on the cards. I think the Israelis will take out the supreme leader if they can, as they took out Nasrallah in Beirut.
“Look, this is the sort of last chapter in a shift of the tectonic plates in the Middle East, the taking down of Hezbollah, the diminution of Hamas. It’s a sequence of events, the collapse of the regime in Syria, and now this attack on the regime in Iran.
“What are the Saudis doing? What are the Egyptians doing? What are the Jordanians doing? They’re not saying anything. There was supposedly a rapprochement with the Iranians in recent months, which I’ve heard other commentators talk about, but I don’t think that really ultimately solved anything.
“This is still a war to the end between Sunni and Shia Islam and the Iranians, I think, are in a very, very bad and difficult position. Now, they’re running out of options.”
Asked if the nuclear threat from Iran has been neutralised, he said: “That’s too early to tell. I think they have diminished it in certain ways.
“What you have to understand is that these installations which enrich the uranium, the cascades that are used, are extremely delicate. They’re rather like grand pianos that have to be super tuned, so they can be very easily disrupted. But if the kit is still there, they can start again at some point in the future.
“The Israelis will continue this campaign for considerably longer, until maybe they’re closer to destruction. The problem is a lot of it’s very deep underground, and I think we’ve all understood that Israel probably doesn’t have the right sort of ordnance to destroy the actual installations. Maybe they can destroy the entrances and block them.
“But there’s a real problem there. If they’re going to carry this right out, I think that ultimately what the Israelis will be hoping for is regime change, and a regime eventually that will say Iran has no nuclear program, and that will change the dynamics and politics very significantly in the Middle East.”
He said the conflict could result in terror attacks in the UK: “You’ve got the lone wolf attack, which is a problem which is very difficult to deal with because there’s no conspiracy, there’s no organisation, there’s no opportunity to penetrate the coming incident.
“On the other hand, I think we’re probably reasonably well set up to deal with any sort of large scale, conspiratorial terrorist attack that Iran might try to mount. Frankly, I don’t expect that. I think it’s much more likely that it would be radicalised individuals that might create really pretty dreadful problems.
“But that’s something we have to accept in this current climate, which is unfortunate, but that’s the reality.”
