MOSSAD IN IRAN: CAN CIA DO THE SAME?

Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, was an essential part of the Israeli Defense Force attack on Iran. The question for the CIA is, “Could you do what Mossad did?”

In the early hours of Friday the 13^th, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacked Iran in “Operation Rising Lion.” The targets were nuclear facilities, military officers and personnel dedicated to creating nuclear weapons. The 5-wave attack was a resounding success. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, "We struck the senior command, we struck senior scientists that advance development of nuclear weapons, we struck nuclear installations."

Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, played a vital role in a raid that ran like clockwork. What did Mossad do?

1. Mossad built a drone factory in Iran and smuggled weaponized vehicles into Iran.

2. Then they disabled key parts of Iran’s antiaircraft defenses by placing those remotely controlled vehicles near air defense sites and equipment. The vehicles contained suicide drones that were released before the attack began and, as a result, no IDF aircraft were lost.

To see videos on X of Mossad suicide drones hitting antiaircraft vehicles, a ballistic missile, and Mossad officers in the field directing their drones, click here.

3. They identified the apartments of key generals, government officials, and scientists running Iran’s nuclear development program. They probably marked those apartments with radar beacons that enabled IDF pilots to attack them with minimum collateral damage.

4. As a result, the IDF air force confirmed that they had eliminated several top Iranian military leaders in the attack including:

· Major General Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the most senior official killed,

· Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the Iranian armed forces’ general staff and a key figure in military operations and intelligence.

· Major General Gholam Ali Rashid, head of the Khatam al-Anbia Central Headquarters, Iran’s highest strategic command post.

· Major General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the IRGC’s Air Defense and central to Iran’s drone and missile development programs.

5. Among the senior Iranian nuclear scientists tracked by Mossad for months before they were killed in their apartments by drones, aircraft, or by other means during the air strikes were: Fereydoun Abbasi, former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran; Mohammad-Mehdi Tehranci, theoretical physicist and former university president involved in Iran’s nuclear development; Akbar Motalebi Zadeh, expert in chemical engineering; Saeed Barji, expert in materials engineering; Amir Hassan Fakhahi, expert in physics; Abd al-Hamid Minoushehr, expert in reactor physics; Mansour Asgari, expert in physics; Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari Daryani, expert in nuclear engineering; and Ali Bakhouei Katirimi, expert in mechanics.

6. Tehran has not confirmed their deaths or the deaths of other scientists, however Israeli journalist Amit Segal quoted a senior Israeli official as saying, "Most of Iran’s top nuclear scientists are no longer alive."

7. Adding to the target list, Mossad found and confirmed other targets that Iran boasted they had hidden.

How did Mossad accomplish all those missions, despite reports of having only about 1,000 active agents in the entire world?

The force multiplier for Mossad is the community of Iranian Jews.

During the time of the last Shah, there were more Jews in Iran than there were in Israel, but after the rise of the mullahs in 1979 the majority of Jews fled the country. Israel now has more than 200,000 Iranian Jews and the U.S. has about 60,000. Today, sources estimate there are approximately 8,300 to 15,000 Jews left in Iran – with care, that is enough of a manpower pool for a few Mossad helper agents.

In this era of Iranian mullahs calling Israel “Little Satan,” life is difficult for Iranian Jews. Nevertheless, the Jewish community says they can deal with systemic discrimination, restrictions on public expression of their religious identity and avoiding open support for Israel. Then, if they adopt Iran’s morality code, they can safely practice their religion and have access to Jewish facilities like synagogues, schools, and kosher restaurants. This is due to the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the grand ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, labeling Jews as “people of the book.” Jews in Iran often have jobs requiring skills and education, so they become doctors, engineers, and technicians -- all useful talents for Mossad.

In the months before Operation Rising Lion, Mossad case officers were tasked with supporting the air raid by smuggling vehicles and equipment into Iran, identifying and localizing key military and nuclear program personnel, and activating their force multiplier of Iranian Jews – and with no one getting caught doing it.

Can The CIA Do What Mossad Did?

Judging by results of intelligence that guided the recent U.S. Navy strikes on Houthi tribesmen in Yemen, the CIA could not even begin to match Mossad successes in their support of the IDF air raid on Iran. Intelligence supplied to the attacking U.S. aircraft was likely generated from satellite photographs and “best estimates.” As a result, Houthi missile and drone attacks on shipping in the Red Sea continued after bombs stopped falling.

A story told to me by a retired CIA case officer, who had been Chief of Station (COS) in a friendly country, will illuminate a major part of the problem. The friendly country was being harassed by foreign agents who were conducting sabotage operations and providing arms and explosives to anti-government sympathizers and they asked the U.S. government for help. The CIA was deployed.

Despite having about the same number of case officers in the field as Mossad, CIA officers in the friendly country were hard pressed for time and personnel. So when the message came from Langley headquarters that they were sending another case officer to the station, they rejoiced. The cheers subsided when they discovered the new case officer was incompetent. That meant that every time the new officer went into the field, another case officer had to accompany him lest he be killed. After six months the case officer was recalled to Langley and the COS rejoiced again.

His happiness evaporated when he discovered the inept case officer was now his boss because he had now had field “experience.” It seems the new boss of the COS was inept at fieldcraft but a master of office politics.

That, and other factors, leads to the conclusion that the CIA could still match Mossad capabilities – but only if the senior officers on Langley’s 7^th floor are retired and replaced by officers dedicated to creating intelligence officers with a warrior ethos.

What Could Iran Do Now

The collapse of the Soviet Union as a sovereign nation on 26 December, 1991, was so sudden that on the following day Kazakhstan officials found a nuclear weapon in the bottom of a test shaft and the test facility abandoned. Kazakhstan immediately called on Washington for assistance.

When a clandestine U.S. team arrived to recover the nuclear weapon, they also found shipping boxes of nuclear material at a port on the Caspian Sea marked for shipment to Iran. They also found large amounts of enriched Uranium and Plutonium in storage. Besides the Soviet nuclear weapons shipped to the United States, all nuclear material found in Kazakhstan was ultimately taken to a secret site in the steppes and buried under 24/7 guard. Similar events took place in Ukraine and Belarus, states that were also part of the defunct Soviet Union.

But how many nuclear weapons did Iran salvage from the chaos? How much enriched Uranium and Plutonium? How many “suitcase” nuclear weapons?

In any event, “dirty bombs” of enriched Uranium mixed with explosives are still well within Iran’s reach. They don’t produce a classic nuclear mushroom cloud, but they would be a terror-weapon in a ballistic missile warhead – one that could land in Tel Aviv. They are perfect asymmetric warfare weapons, spreading terror and disrupting Israeli cities and their economies.

More to the point, will Iran’s mullahs, or it’s proxies, decide to launch those “dirty bomb” missiles? Judging by the mullah’s rhetoric today, they will.

Israel’s raid on Iran has created exactly what they tried to avoid. Did they know that before they launched Operation Rising Lion? Did they assume the United States would join their war?

The War Continues

Operation Rising Lion continued during the past weekend. Israeli forces on the ground and in the air continued their attacks on Iran’s government infrastructure and economy. The IDF attacked Iran’s: Ministry of Oil; Ministry of Intelligence; Police Headquarters; IRGC Intelligence Headquarters and the Supreme Court.

These attacks impeded travel on the highways. Thousands of residents of Tehran, a city of some 15 million, tried to flee the city on the weekend only to find themselves in a monstrous nighttime traffic jam.

Israel asked President Trump to join the war, a request he sidestepped. The reason? Despite having have control of Iran’s airspace, the IDF does not have the American 30,000 pound bunker busters that they need to destroy the key enrichment facility at Fordo. That facility’s halls are carved out deep under a mountain that can only be breached by U.S. bunker busters. If the IDF does not destroy Fordo, Israel’s mission to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be a failure, Axios has reported the Trump administration has, so far, rejected the Israeli request. Instead, President Trump issued this statement on Sunday:

For its part, Iran has absorbed the initial shock and fights on, striking Israeli residential areas and the Haifa oil refinery. They have also launched hypersonic missiles that seem to be able to defeat the Iron Dome. Once such missile can be seen as a quick flash in a video. To see it click here.

The Israeli-Iran war is far from over.

Conclusion

Iran will not be able to launch dirty bomb missiles or develop a new nuclear program if the Iranian people rise up and destroy the mullahs by creating a constitutional republic.

Can they do it?