New in SpyWeek: Intelligence Muddle Amid Trump Invasion Moves, Israeli Escalation
Late Mossad chief warned air attacks were “a gift” to Iran. Trump ignored intel consensus on Hormuz, ground invasion, need for allies
Dagan’s Warning: The legendary late Mossad boss Meir Dagan warned publicly back in 2011 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intent to launch a military campaign against Iranian nuclear sites was “a stupid idea” and risked “a regional war in which Iran and also Hezbollah will launch missiles.” Dagan, chiefly responsible for launching Mossad’s campaign of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists decades ago, added later that, “If Israel were to attack, [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei would thank Allah: It would unite the Iranian people behind the project and enable Khamenei to say that he must get himself an atom bomb to defend Iran against Israeli aggression.” The social scientist Tom Griffin, author of State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory: From Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism, reminded us of these previously reported remarks Sunday by way of revisiting last week’s New York Times report saying that the current Mossad chief, David Barnea, had forecast that “his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.” The surfacing of Barnea’s—let’s say, premature—prediction, wrote Griffin, appeared to be just another chapter in “the Washington blame game over the Iran War, [whose] recriminations have extended to Tel Aviv.” Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that Washington can only say “with certainty that it has destroyed about a third of Iran’s vast missile arsenal” after four weeks of bombing. Some 10,000 U.S. troops are now in the region for an impending sortie into Iran.
“I think we should not only give negotiations a chance, we should put our main effort right now on negotiations with Iran, knowing we’re going to have to compromise on some areas,” retired former senior CIA paramilitary officer and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Mick Mulroy said on the SpyTalk podcast. “If that’s the case, then we can end this conflict and of course have the Strait of Hormuz open.”
Intel Paradox: There’s been no shortage of intelligence on Iran, writes Yonatan Touval, a foreign-policy analyst and writer based in Tel Aviv. “The spy craft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive,” he noted Sunday in the New York Times. “Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered ‘target-production machine’ capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That,” he concluded, “is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.”
And yet: Trump and Netanyahu ignored all the warnings from the likes of Meir Dagan and countless experts since that a military campaign was unlikely to “obliterate” Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon (as Trump famously and falsely claimed last June), much less result in regime change. “[N]ever has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing.” Touval wrote. “They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.”
