Mossad’s Intelligence Gamble: When Civilians Become Pawns in the Secret War Against Iran

The former head of Israel’s intel service has admitted that Mossad deliberately exposed its clandestine operations in order to trigger a wave of arrests in Iran. What was intended to be a clever piece of intelligence work raises a far more troubling question as to how far a state will go in order to achieve its strategic aims when the inevitable outcome is to have completely innocent people arrested.

On 25 October 2026, The Jerusalem Post published a remarkable report of comments by former Mossad head David Barnea. At a closed session of the Priority Summit, Barnea is reported to have said that Mossad did, in fact, release videos of its operatives at work inside Iran during the June 2025 military operation. The point was not simply to show off the capabilities of Israeli intelligence. The intention was to get the Iranians to arrest so many people that they would be completely unable to tell the difference between a real Mossad agent and an innocent person.

An Intelligence Operation Designed to Overwhelm

On 13 June 2025, as Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran, Mossad released three videos of its covert operations targeting ballistic missile infrastructure, air defences and attack preparations. The agents’ faces were all covered up, but there was no doubt it was Mossad.

Barnea says the decision to release the footage was in part a move to protect the agents. The Iranian authorities would respond with a wave of arrests, which would create such confusion that it would be very difficult to work out who the real Israeli agents were.

Barnea reportedly said that the IRGC arrested some 21,000 people on the second day of the fighting. He went on to suggest that once you have that many people in custody, you’re going to end up with the situation where you can’t possibly tell who the actual agents are and who aren’t, and so you’re going to have to release them.

The former Mossad chief also admitted that a large number of those arrested or executed as alleged Israeli agents had absolutely no connection to the organisation whatsoever.

The 21,000 figure is Barnea’s figure, not an independently verified count of arrests as a result of the videos. It doesn’t in any way establish that every arrest or execution was a direct result of the Mossad’s publicity campaign. Nevertheless, his strategy does raise a very fundamental question: if an intelligence service........

© New Eastern Outlook