A report by the American website The Intercept revealed a crisis within the Mossad agency against the backdrop of the results of the war and secret operations against Iran, considering that the overthrow of senior officials in the agency reflects the failure of Israeli bets aimed at transforming military strikes and intelligence breakthroughs into a collapse in the Iranian governance structure and a widespread popular uprising.
The site described the result as “a crushing defeat created by the Mossad itself,” in an analytical assessment of the site and not an official Israeli description, based on the recent dismissals and the results of the plans that were attributed to the agency during the confrontation with Tehran.
According to the report, the new director of the Mossad, Roman Goffman, earlier in August, removed the head of the Intelligence Directorate and the head of the Iran department from their positions. They are two officials whose identities were not revealed and the report limited themselves to referring to them with the letters “K” and “J.”
The step is important because of the nature of the agency, which keeps leadership changes within it very secret. The Intercept considered that the announcement of the removal of officials of this rank represents a rare event compared to the way disputes and failures are usually managed within the Mossad.
About two weeks ago, Israeli Channel 12 revealed that Goffman removed the two officials after they were among the most prominent authors of an operational plan aimed at contributing to the overthrow of the Iranian regime by taking advantage of minorities inside Iran and encouraging new mass protests, as part of a move that coincides with military strikes.
But the Israeli story included an important detail, as security sources reported that the two men would remain within the Mossad in other jobs, and that the move was also presented within the framework of a broader reorganization of the agency, despite its connection to the dispute over the Iranian plan. Therefore, describing what happened as “dismissals” from the entire apparatus does not accurately reflect all the Israeli narratives circulating.
According to The Intercept, the Israeli bet went beyond weakening Iran’s military or nuclear facilities, and led to achieving broad internal change after the American and Israeli strikes that began on February 28.
Targeting the head of the Iranian leadership was the most prominent of these strikes, after Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was martyred in the first American-Israeli attack, along with a number of senior military and security leaders. However, the Iranian regime reshaped its leadership, and the Leadership Council of Experts elected Mojtaba Khamenei in March to succeed his father, while the state institutions and security services continued to function despite the great losses they suffered.
Here, The Intercept lays out one of the main points of failure: the assassination of figures at the top of the regime did not turn into a collapse of institutions, nor did it result in a wave of protests of a size that would allow the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
The issue of regime change was present from the first days of the war. After the attacks began, US President Donald Trump called on the Iranians to seize the moment and “reclaim their country,” while Reuters at the time quoted American officials as skeptical that the strikes, even after the killing of Khamenei, would lead to the rapid collapse of the regime.
According to Israeli reports that preceded The Intercept’s report, one of the plans relied on mobilizing Iranian minority groups, including Kurdish groups, and encouraging them to move from the border region with Iraq, in conjunction with an attempt to ignite protests within Iranian cities.
The Intercept indicated that the role of the Mossad was to weaken the security structure of the Islamic Republic, allowing Kurdish groups to be armed and mobilized from Iraq, and then to transform this pressure into a broader mass uprising.
But this scenario, according to the site, did not materialize; The Iranian security services did not collapse, nor did a mass protest movement begin on the scale that Israeli plans were betting on, while the Kurdish groups themselves were subjected to Iranian military pressure.
In June, a former senior Mossad official gave a different explanation for the result, when he told Channel 12 that the plan was not implemented to its end and that the United States’ decision to stop the war at an earlier stage prevented it from completing its stages, stressing that the project was multi-staged and included the use of “Kurdish partners.”
This discrepancy has become part of the battle within the apparatus itself: Did the plan fail because it was unrealistic from the beginning, or because it did not obtain the American time and support necessary to complete it?
The disagreement was directly reflected in Goffman’s decision. Media outlets quoted current and former Mossad officials accusing its leadership of trying to hold lower-ranking officials responsible for an outcome for which the political level also bears responsibility.
Reports quoted a Mossad official as saying that the plan “did not fail, but was not implemented” due to not obtaining Trump’s approval, considering that Netanyahu and Goffman, who was then the prime minister’s military secretary, were supporters of the project before Goffman moved to head the agency.
Goffman took over the leadership of the Mossad in June, succeeding David Barnea, after Netanyahu chose him for the position in December 2025, when he was serving as military secretary to the prime minister.
According to The Intercept, the Israeli influence plan was not limited to armed covert action, as the Mossad also launched a public campaign in the Persian language through accounts on the “X” and “Telegram” platforms, aimed at urging Iranians to protest, defect, and cooperate with the agency.
According to the report, the campaign used clips generated by artificial intelligence and propaganda messages trying to depict the collapse of security institutions, prisons, and divisions within Iran, but these materials did not turn into widespread mass mobilization on the ground, and some campaigns continued even after the ceasefire.
The report indicates that Israel moved to another formula after the uprising failed, by targeting police stations, checkpoints, and sites linked to the “Basij” forces, on the basis that weakening the internal control tools might encourage the street to take action.
However, according to the site’s assessment, these strikes did not produce the transformation that was planned, which made the gap large between Israel’s ability to carry out intelligence operations and attacks inside Iran and its ability to transform these breakthroughs into political change for the regime.
This assessment clearly differs from the official Israeli discourse, which focused on the extent of the damage caused by the war to Iranian military capabilities, while critics of the strategy inside and outside Israel believe that the survival of the governance structure and Tehran’s continued ability to respond means that the broader goals have not been achieved.
Another point appears in The Intercept’s report related to the Strait of Hormuz, as the site considers that one of the Israeli bets was that Iran’s ability to use the Strait as a pressure card would be limited and could be contained militarily.
However, subsequent developments made the Strait one of the most influential elements of the war on the global economy. Recent data confirms that ship traffic is still at very low levels, despite the disagreement between Washington and Tehran over whether the corridor is actually “open.”
Ship tracking data showed that only 7 commercial ships loaded with goods crossed Hormuz on Thursday, compared to 14 the previous day, without recording the crossing of giant crude oil tankers or liquefied natural gas tankers, in a direct reflection of the continued security risks in the corridor, which was crossed by a large part of the world’s energy supplies before the war.
Iranian oil exports also declined sharply as a result of the war and the US naval blockade, while shipping operations through Hormuz almost stopped. However, the disruption of the Strait, on the other hand, raised the cost of oil, shipping, and insurance, and had widespread impacts on countries and markets that have no direct relationship to the conflict.
In recent days, Tehran has insisted that the strait remains closed, while Trump has confirmed that it is open and safe, but actual shipping traffic numbers indicate that traffic is far from normal levels.
This reality is what prompted The Intercept to consider Hormuz an Iranian card whose influence Israel could not neutralize as it had hoped, despite the great military and economic losses suffered by Iran itself.
These developments come as Washington is currently moving more towards using economic pressure. US Treasury Secretary Scott Besent announced that the administration is preparing to impose what he described as “the harshest sanctions in history” on Iran, in an attempt to dry up Tehran’s sources of income and put pressure on it economically after the war did not lead to the overthrow of its regime.
As for inside Israel, the controversy over the previous plan did not lead to the closure of the Iran file. According to what was reported by The Intercept, citing Israeli reports, the military establishment and the Mossad received instructions to prepare for the possibility of a larger campaign against Iran if a widespread military confrontation returns.
This comes at a time when the war that began in February is still without a final settlement. An interim agreement was signed in June, but disagreements over sanctions, the blockade, the Strait of Hormuz, and other security issues have come back to blow the course, while Washington and Tehran currently confirm that there are no direct negotiations scheduled.
Thus, the importance of the dismissals within the Mossad lies not only in the fate of two officials, but in the controversy it opened about the Israeli bet itself: Israel succeeded in reaching highly sensitive targets and figures inside Iran and inflicting extensive damage to its military and security leadership, but the most ambitious goal, i.e. converting these strikes into the fall of the regime through internal protests and divisions, was not achieved.
Hence The Intercept’s harsh headline about a “crushing defeat”: not because the Mossad has lost its intelligence capabilities inside Iran, but because the scale of the infiltration, assassinations and strikes did not produce the major political result that, according to the report and Israeli sources, had been on the table since the beginning of the war.
