Mossad’s Iran Uprising Gambit: A Miscalculation That Fueled Regional War
According to the International Desk of Webangah News Agency, The New York Times has published an analytical report detailing how Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, purportedly misled then-President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a flawed strategy centered on inciting an internal uprising in Iran, a miscalculation that contributed to the current regional war.
The report states that as the United States and Israel prepared for military action against Iran, David Barnea, the head of Mossad, presented a plan to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Barnea claimed that within days of the war’s commencement, his agency could potentially instigate Iranian dissidents, igniting riots and other insurgent activities that could even lead to the collapse of the Iranian regime.
Barnea reportedly presented this proposal to senior officials in the Trump administration during a visit to Washington in mid-January. Despite doubts from some high-ranking American officials and within other Israeli intelligence agencies regarding the plan’s feasibility, Netanyahu embraced it. Both he and Trump appeared to adopt an optimistic outlook, believing that assassinating Iranian officials at the war’s outset, followed by a series of intelligence operations aimed at promoting regime change, could trigger widespread revolt and potentially end the war quickly.
In his initial war address, after advising Iranians to seek shelter from bombing, Trump urged them to ‘take over your government: this government is yours and take it.’ However, three weeks into the conflict, there have been no indications of internal unrest in Iran. U.S. and Israeli intelligence assessments now conclude that the Iranian regime remains stable. Widespread fear of the Iranian military and law enforcement’s authority, coupled with the threat of attacks by separatist militias on Iran’s borders, has diminished the prospects for an uprising.
The belief that Israel and the U.S. could assist in provoking a large-scale revolt in Iran was a fundamental flaw in the preparations for a war that has now spread throughout the Middle East. While Netanyahu’s rhetoric has softened, he still maintains that American and Israeli airstrikes will be complemented by ground forces. Behind the scenes, however, Netanyahu has expressed disappointment over Mossad’s failure to deliver on its promises of igniting an uprising in Iran. In a security meeting days after the war began, he reportedly stated that Trump might decide to end the war at any moment and that Mossad’s operations had yet to yield results.
Current and former U.S. and Israeli officials indicated that on the eve of the war, Netanyahu leveraged Mossad’s optimism about a potential Iranian revolt to persuade Trump that overthrowing the Iranian regime was a realistic objective. This occurred even as many senior American officials and intelligence analysts within the Israel Defense Forces’ Intelligence Directorate (Aman) viewed Israel’s plan for unrest during the conflict with skepticism. U.S. military officials had informed Trump that Iranians would not protest while the U.S. and Israel were bombing. Intelligence officials assessed the likelihood of an uprising threatening the Iranian government as low and doubted that an American and Israeli attack would ignite any form of civil war.
Mossad has a long-standing relationship with Kurdish separatist groups based in northern Iraq. American officials have stated that both the CIA and Mossad have provided weapons and other support to Kurdish forces in recent years. The CIA, possessing prior authorization to support Kurdish separatist groups, had been supplying them with weapons and advice long before the current conflict.
In the initial days of the war, Israeli fighter jets and bombers targeted military and police installations in northwestern Iran, allegedly to pave the way for Kurdish forces. In a March 4th phone briefing, an Israeli military spokesperson was asked if Israel was conducting intense bombings in western Iran to aid a Kurdish offensive. Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shushani, the military spokesperson, responded by stating, ‘We have conducted very significant operations in western Iran to weaken the capabilities of the Iranian regime and open the way to Tehran and create freedom of action. That has been our focus there.’
However, other American officials have lost interest in their earlier pre-war idea of utilizing Kurdish groups as proxy forces, a shift that has created tension with their Israeli counterparts. U.S. officials, briefed on intelligence assessments before the war, reported that the CIA had been evaluating various potential developments within Iran after the conflict began. Intelligence agencies considered the collapse of the Iranian regime a relatively unlikely outcome.
Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence agencies had long considered the possibility of provoking an uprising within Iran as part of their operations or shortly after the commencement of military action, but had until recently dismissed this prospect. Mossad, as Israel’s primary external operations service, was responsible for planning. Shahar Kaufman, former head of the Iran desk in the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, stated that Israel had explored various ideas to weaken or overthrow the Iranian government, but he believed these ideas were doomed from the outset. He did not consider the overthrow of the Iranian regime an achievable goal in the current conflict.
Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad before Barnea, had decided that attempting to instigate an uprising within Iran was a waste of time and ordered the resources allocated to this effort to be minimized. During Cohen’s tenure at Mossad, which concluded in 2021, the agency calculated the number of citizens required to participate in protests to genuinely threaten the Iranian regime, comparing these estimates to the size of actual protests since Iran’s 1979 revolution. Cohen remarked in 2018, ‘We asked ourselves if we could bridge this gap, and we concluded that we could not.’
Over the past year, as the likelihood of Israeli military action against Iran increased, Barnea shifted Mossad’s approach, dedicating agency resources to plans that could lead to the overthrow of the Tehran government in the event of war. According to officials, in recent months, Barnea had become convinced that Mossad could potentially ignite uprisings across Iran following several days of intense Israeli and American airstrikes and the assassination of top Iranian leaders. However, following the attacks and assassinations in the initial days of the war, no uprising occurred within Iran.
