The Anatomy of a Leaked Operation

Two essays today, which has never happened before. This one is the week’s Long View, for premium members as always: the purge at the Mossad, and what Israel’s role in ending the Islamic Republic actually is. The second, on Michigan and the DSA, went out free to every reader, one Sunday only; you will find it here. Read this one second. It is the argument the week was building toward.

The Spark and the Scalpel

The Mossad just reassigned the men who promised to topple Tehran. The mission stands. The instrument was wrong.

The Mossad does not hold press conferences when it wins, and it does not hold them when it loses. It moves chairs. On Thursday, Channel 12 reported that Director Roman Gofman had removed two of the agency’s most senior officials: the head of the intelligence directorate, in the job only since December, and the head of the Iran division. Both departures were described as mutual, part of a broader reorganization. Both men stay in the building, in other rooms.

They were, by every account, the architects of the most ambitious operational plan in the agency’s history: a written blueprint to bring down the Islamic Republic with the help of Iran’s minority populations and install a replacement leadership. It was presented to the President of the United States. It was never executed as designed. In June, days into his term, Gofman had already dismissed the deputy director, the man his predecessor wanted for the top job. Three senior chairs have emptied in nine weeks.

Amit Segal, in his newsletter, recalls Yitzhak Rabin’s line that Meir Dagan had a unique capacity to invent operations that look like movie thrillers, and asks the obvious question: what happens when the movie has no ending? Consequences for the writers. Segal calls this the Mossad’s most ambitious plan in its 76 years, and its greatest failure. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the second half is doing quiet, useful work. A service that reassigns the authors of a failed theory has stopped pretending the theory worked.

The question that matters, in Jerusalem and in Washington, is what replaces it.

The plan itself is no longer a secret; it is a genre. Nadav Eyal’s reconstruction, the Channel 12 investigation, and the American reporting agree on the outline. Kurdish forces, armed and organized with CIA involvement, would cross from Iraq in the war’s opening days under massive American and Israeli air cover. A first wave of some 15,000 fighters would take the Kurdish cities and swell, in the planners’ arithmetic, toward 150,000 or 200,000 marching on Tehran. Israeli strikes across the northwest would open the corridor; the IDF said so publicly at the time, that it was operating heavily in western Iran to open the way to Tehran. The armed periphery would reignite the mass protests of December and January. And at the end of the corridor, in the plan’s strangest clause, sat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cultivated as the replacement figure.

The planners understood at least one thing about Iran: they required the Kurdish factions to fly the old lion-and-sun flag, not Kurdish colors, and Israel arranged the flags. They understood a second thing too late: a plan with that many moving parts survives only in the dark. In the first days of March the operation surfaced in American media, with Fox News reporting an offensive underway. Tehran reinforced the northwest. Ankara weighed in hard; Erdogan told President Trump that Turkey would not tolerate armed Kurdish power anywhere in the region. Gulf capitals warned that carving Iran along ethnic lines would burn the whole neighborhood. The Kurds, watching their operational security evaporate, began asking for political guarantees. And Israel’s own Military Intelligence had graded the plan from the start as imaginary and full of holes.

Be fair to the President here. He leaned into the idea early and made the opening calls to Kurdish leaders himself. When the operation lost the only advantage that made it survivable, surprise, he declined to launch thousands of lightly armed fighters into a forewarned Iran. That is not lost nerve; that is a commander reading a changed board. The failure belongs to the leak, and to a design so brittle that one broadcast and one phone call could kill it.

A plan that dies of a news cycle was never a plan. It was a wish with a timetable.

“You cannot invade your way into someone else’s revolution.”

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