Fire and smoke rise after a Saudi-led airstrike against Yemen's capital Sana'a in October 2016.       (Photo by AP)

New York, October 15 (RHC)-- A new investigative report has revealed how an American-Israeli spy cell tried to promote normalization of Yemen’s relations with the Israeli regime and gather intelligence for targeted Saudi airstrikes against the Arab Peninsula nation.

The report published on Monday by MintPress News, a U.S.-based news website, showed that the cell, enlisted by the CIA and the Israeli spy apparatus, ran “clandestine operations” in the country, through which it tried to “manipulate local dynamics, exploit religious divisions, and sow seeds of normalization with Israel.”

The cell, named Force 400, was broken in a complex operation conducted by Yemen’s Ansarullah popular resistance movement that began in 2021.

Before its exposure and arrest of its 20-plus members by Ansarullah, it would try to recruit collaborators within the Yemeni society “through psychological manipulation, sexual blackmail, and torture.”

According to MintPress, this “highlights the extent to which US and Israeli operatives bent moral boundaries to secure cooperation.”  The report identified the cell’s ringleader as Abdul Mohsen Hussein Ali Azzan, a high-level spy, who had worked for both the CIA and the Israeli regime’s Mossad spy agency for 15 years.

While working for the cell, he and his operatives would gather intelligence on Ansarullah targets and provide it to the CIA and Mossad.  Azzan was transferred to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in the Yemeni capital Sana’a as means of defusing speculations concerning his activities in the country.

“Leveraging the organization’s extensive reach in the Yemeni governorates, Azzan was able to provide his American intelligence contacts with high-value information” about the targets, the report noted.

The collaboration would contribute to a devastating war that Saudi Arabia began waging against Yemen in 2015 in cooperation with Riyadh’s Arab allies and with arms and logistical support from the US and other Western states.

The objective was to reinstall Yemen’s former Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and crush Ansarullah, which has been running state affairs in the absence of a functional government in Yemen.

The Saudi-led coalition, however, failed to meet the objective, but the war claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

[ SOURCE:  PRESS TV ]