Sex as the nuclear core of Iranian politics

*A French-Jewish journalist allegedly seduced over 120 Iranian top officials to obtain classified information and exposed the Tehran regime’s hypocrisy on virtues.*

Catherine Perez-Shakdam. Paris Match

In the annals of modern warfare, the Twelve-Day War of June 2025 will be studied for its dazzling Israeli preemptive strikes, the destruction of Iran’s air defense, and the embarrassing sight of Iranian ballistic missiles failing to overwhelm Israel’s Arrow system.

The accuracy of Israeli strikes was astonishing.

But ask any Iranian security official off the record — after his third cup of black tea and a glance over his shoulder — and he’ll tell you the real weapon of mass destruction was a petite, cat-owning French journalist with Jewish roots, with a master’s in communications and a talent for… well, infiltration.

Her name is Catherine Perez-Shakdam. To her admirers in Tel Aviv, she’s a lioness. To the shocked mullahs in Qom, she’s “the Jewish woman who made fools of us all.” And according to an unsubstantiated, deliciously viral claim by former Iranian MP Mostafa Kavakebian — who now faces legal trouble for “disturbing public opinion” — she allegedly seduced “more than 120 high-ranking officials.”

How embarrassing for the Ayatollahs’ masculine discipline.

The number itself is a comic masterpiece: not 10, not 50, but more than 120. One imagines a Mossad Excel spreadsheet: “Target 117: Deputy Minister of Sewage. Status: Compromised. Notes: Bring baklava.”

Now, let’s be clear: Shakdam has denied the “120 lovers” claim with gleeful contempt — “Not true, not possible, completely absurd,” she told Iran International, adding, “I’ve got news for them — I do not give a shit. And you can quote me on this.” She’s also joked that if she were a spy, she’d be “00 Fluffy,” a nod to her many cats.

But Stanislav Belkovsky, a Russian publicist and political strategist with Jewish roots who reportedly advised the 2019 campaign of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and has moved to Israel as a result of repressions in Russia, says the allegation is grounded in truth.

During her work in Iran and the Middle East, she pretended to be a Muslim and a supporter of the Tehran regime. She had seduced more than 120 high-ranking officials in Iran, from whom she obtained highly-classified information, Belkovsky noted. That intel helped Israel plan and carry out very precise strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, military facilities, and residences of Iranian leadership during the Israel-Iran armed conflict on 13–24 June 2025, according to Belkovsky, who did not disclose his sources.

Shakdam interviews future Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Mashad in May 2017. Iran International

Iran’s false virtues

But humor aside, the story exposes a hypocritical fault line beneath the Islamic Republic’s chador of virtue. For decades, the regime has enforced mandatory hijab, jailed women for showing a strand of hair, and lectured the world on Western “moral decay.” Yet the same leadership — an all-male clergy that bans women from soccer stadiums and treats female testimony as half a man’s — apparently could not resist a charming, intelligent, available woman who showed up at their conferences pretending to be a Shia convert.

Let us pause to appreciate the strategic brilliance of Israel’s alleged operation (if it was an operation; Shakdam insists she acted alone, a “self-assigned” mission). Why deploy expensive Hermes drones when you can deploy a PhD in psychology with a talent for decolletage communication? Why hack the Natanz servers when you can hack the biological imperatives of 120 men who have spent decades pretending they don’t have any?

The Islamic Republic is built on a foundation of sexual repression. Its morality police, the Gasht-e-Ershad, roam the streets enforcing “modesty.” Public dancing is forbidden. Mixed-gender swimming is forbidden. Eye contact between unrelated men and women is heavily policed. The message is clear: Women are a walking fitna (temptation), and men are helpless goats before that temptation.

What the regime forgot is that by suppressing the natural, you do not eliminate it; you merely redirect it into a leaky, underground reservoir of desperation. Enter Catherine Perez-Shakdam: French, Jewish, articulate, and willing to listen to a senior IRGC commander complain about his subordinates over dinner. In a society where men rarely speak to unveiled women without suspicion, she was not just a journalist — she was a psychotropic event.

One can almost hear the internal monologue of a certain Quds Force officer: “She says she converted to Shi’ism! She writes for Khamenei.ir! She uses the word ‘resistance’ unironically! Surely it is Allah’s will that I tell her the location of the new centrifuge facility… after one more glass of pomegranate juice.”

Key to circumvent security protocols

The timing of Kavakebian’s allegation is as revealing as it is desperate. The MP made his claim on state TV after the Twelve-Day War, when Israel had assassinated top nuclear scientists, blown up the Arak reactor’s containment building, and reduced Tehran’s air defenses to scrap. The regime needed a scapegoat. And what better than a “foreign slut” (the word used in many Persian Telegram channels) who had “bewitched” their leaders?

This is a classic maneuver of patriarchal regimes in crisis: blame the woman’s body for the men’s failures. In Iran, women are simultaneously the nation’s honor (to be protected and controlled) and its perennial scapegoat (to be accused of witchcraft, sedition, or espionage when things go wrong). Shakdam, who now writes for the *Jerusalem Post* and calls herself proudly Jewish, represents the ultimate nightmare: a woman who used the regime’s own sexist assumptions — “she’s just a silly European convert, let’s show her the missile silo” — to outmaneuver it.

Caption from Iran International.

Consider the mathematics: 120 officials. Even if we assume hyperbole, let’s say the real number was, hypothetically, 12. That’s still a stunning indictment of Iranian security protocols. Were there no background checks? No interviews with her ex-husband? No curiosity about why a French psychologist suddenly loved the Supreme Leader’s website? Apparently not — because her “French nationality and marriage to a Muslim man” was enough, as she herself noted.

The “slut” that saved Tel Aviv

Now we arrive at the title’s provocation. If we accept (for the sake of satire, not as confirmed fact) that Shakdam’s purported romantic liaisons yielded actionable intelligence — the kind that helped Israel locate underground facilities and time its strikes — then one could argue that a woman’s “sluttiness” (the regime’s term, not mine) became a national security asset for the Jewish state.

How deliciously ironic. The same regime that stones women for adultery was brought to its knees by a woman who, in its own narrative, committed a kind of geopolitical adultery with the enemy. The IRGC’s vaunted Ashoura missile batteries were useless against a weapon the mullahs had never learned to defend: their own unexamined lust.

This is not to reduce Shakdam’s decade of “pretending and playing the game” (her words) to a sexual farce. She risked her life, lived a double identity, and wrote books praising Shia Islam that she now admits were lies. That takes courage of a rare order.

But the public scandal — the one that has Iranian officials scrambling to delete her articles and prosecute Kavakebian — is the sexual panic. Because in Iran, sex is the nuclear core of politics. Control women’s bodies, control the state. And when that control fails, the state melts down.

What the crackdown on women really hides

The Islamic Republic’s relentless assault on women’s rights — from the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” massacres to the proposed hijab legislation threatening severe prison terms and sweeping punishments for merely showing hair — has never been about piety.

It’s about power.

The male clergy knows that if women taste freedom, the whole edifice of velayat-e faqih (rule by the jurist) crumbles. Women are the canaries in the coal mine of theocracy.

But the Shakdam affair reveals a deeper secret: the men in charge are not ascetic saints; they are exactly as weak as men everywhere. They gossip, they brag, they fall for charm, they trade state secrets for a few hours of feeling desired. The only difference is that Western men do this in bars and dating apps; Iranian officials do it in revolutionary committee meetings, surrounded by portraits of Khomeini.

One of the more tragicomic details: Shakdam claims she met Qasem Soleimani (before the U.S. drone strike that killed him) and had “a little chat.” The great spymaster, the “Shadow Commander,” the man who terrified Washington — and he sat down for tea with a woman who would later write for The Times of Israel that she “detested Islam’s disdain for women.” Either he was a terrible judge of character, or he, too, was distracted by something other than her analysis of Yemeni geopolitics.

A modest proposal for regime survival

If I were an advisor to Iran’s leadership, I would propose a few updates for its national security doctrine:

1. Establish a “Foreign Female Journalist Handling” course that includes, as its first module, “How to say ‘No, you may not see the uranium enrichment facility’.”

2. Require all officials who meet European women to submit a saliva sample for… actually, no, that’s too invasive. Instead, just make them watch a loop of Shakdam’s podcast interview with Winston Marshall, where she gleefully describes her “ten years of pretending.”

3. Admit — this is important — that the male libido is not a Zionist plot. It is a biological fact. Deal with it. Allow mixed bowling leagues. Let teenagers date. The resulting decrease in national sexual tension might even reduce the appeal of becoming a martyr to get 72 virgins (who, by the way, are also a form of male fantasy — but that’s another article).

But the regime will do none of this, of course. Because acknowledging male weakness would collapse the entire justification for clerical rule. If the mullahs are just regular horny humans, then why should they decide how many centimeters of a woman’s hair is visible? Why should they ban satellite TV when they themselves can’t resist a charming French accent?

The Twelve-Day War ended in a ceasefire brokered by the U.S. Iran’s nuclear program was set back years. And Catherine Perez-Shakdam is now a minor celebrity, giving interviews and writing op-eds about how “wokeness” enables Islamism.

As Shakdam herself told Iran International, with a shrug that should terrify Tehran: “I do not give a shit.” That’s the sound of a woman who has already won (“Mission accomplished. All pleasure is mine.”). The rest is just the mullahs tripping over their own robes, trying to explain why so many of their brightest minds were fooled by a “slutty” French Jew with a laptop and a mission.

The joke may be the most lasting damage to the Islamic Republic. Across Iran, in taxis and teahouses, people are whispering variations of the sex-for-intel story. The regime’s enemies are not just armed — they are laughing. And a theocracy that becomes a laughingstock is a theocracy on life support, because once people begin laughing at power, they stop fearing it.

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