Turkish media is reporting that the government's Türkiye’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) has exposed a "ghost" cell of 56 operatives spying on non-Turkish nationals in the country on behalf of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
According to the Daily Sabah, the agency’s counterintelligence unit, together with the Anti-Terrorism Branch of the Istanbul Police Department, apprehended seven people, who all confessed to working for Mossad in their testimonies.
According to the report, the suspects are among the 56 operatives linked to a total of nine networks, which are each overseen by nine Mossad agents based in Israel and have the ability to operate on an international scale.
Documents from MIT revealed that the spies were gathering biographical intelligence on foreign nationals through an online routing method, tracking vehicle movements via GPS, hacking into password-protected networks based on Wi-Fi devices, and finding private locations.
The operatives also physically followed certain targets determined by Mossad to surveil and photograph one-on-one meetings, an operation supervised by an Israeli of Arab origin, Soliman Agbaria.
The cell, consisting of citizens from various Middle Eastern countries, reportedly used several fake websites in multiple languages, chiefly Arabic, to obtain technical locations and real IP addresses, MIT discovered.
All communication between Mossad agents in Türkiye and abroad was done through single-use mobile phone lines owned by fake identities in Spain, England, Germany, Sweden, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Belgium.