The massive media network, as identified by the Intelligence Ministry, is “one of the largest media networks affiliated to the global arrogance”, whose main task was to execute a new “sedition” ahead of the upcoming presidential and city councils’ elections on June 14 in Iran.
The BBC-affiliated network was being monitored by the ministry for one year and a half, according to Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi, before a crackdown was launched in January to arrest its domestic agents after acquiring legal permissions from the Judiciary.
The ministry said the main goal of the network was to “exploit what they learned during the sedition period” after the 2009 presidential election, which was incited by the West and its media apparatuses, particularly the BBC.
Britain and the U.S. established Persian services for their media outlets, including the BBC Persian, the Voice of America and Radio Farda - which is a U.S-funded Prague-based Persian radio, to especially incite ethnic rifts among the Iranian nation and prepare the ground for their hostile actions in the Islamic Middle Eastern country.
The British Foreign Office in Iran launched the BBC Persian radio on December 29, 1940 as its main propaganda arm preaching discord and sedition in the country.
BBC Persian radio, known in Iran as Radio London, stayed on waves for 50 years before the BBC launched a Persian TV broadcast in 2008.
Radio London, was one of the first foreign-language services of the British state broadcaster and began its work to counter Germany’s Radio Berlin, which aired Persian broadcasts for Iranians, during the First World War.
Radio London also played a key role in accomplishing a plot hatched by the U.S. spying apparatus, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the early 1950s to topple the democratically-elected government of late Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in the aftermath of the nationalization of Iranian oil industry, which was formerly dominated by the UK government.
After the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, BBC Persian began distorting news about the Iraqi-imposed war on Iran in a desperate attempt to depict that the newly-formed Islamic Republic was unable to work.
Later on, six months before the 2009 presidential elections in Iran, the British Foreign Office launched BBC Persian TV news channel to effectively replace the so-called Radio London as the UK government’s propaganda apparatus against the Islamic Republic.
The channel focused on the presidential election from the very onset and effectively waged a proxy war on Iran on behalf of the British Foreign Office, and its spying apparatus MI6 in the aftermath of the vote, better known as the 2009 sedition in Iran.
BBC Persian is now focused on depicting Iran as miserable, undermining the Islamic system in the country, through employing deceived journalists and some so-called open-minded foreign educated people as well as anti-revolutionary escapees.
The Iranian Intelligence Ministry has now detained dozens of people who where members of a network serving BBC Persian interests in Iran.
The ministry later announced that most of the detainees were producing footage, news and secret reports for the British channel aimed at blackening the country’s image and to spread hate among the public.
It stressed that the information about the connection of the arrested individuals with the BBC is totally substantiated and solid.
In a recent statement, the Iranian Intelligence Ministry described the nature of the BBC-affiliated network and its destructive activities aimed at destabilizing Iran.
“In continuation of the research process, several other individuals related to the network were summoned and investigated, and several other related individuals who were unaware of the nature of the network were invited, and while they provided information and explanations, they were briefed about the hidden goals and the malicious intent of the network,” the statement said.
“Several individuals identified in the network requested to re-tell and publish their information and experiences from this network in order to provide a warning for others,” it added.