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Home – U.S. Intelligence Agency News – SPY WARS: Former CIA Covert Operations Officer Explains How Intelligence Is Influencing the Iran War

SPY WARS: Former CIA Covert Operations Officer Explains How Intelligence Is Influencing the Iran War

Former CIA covert operations officer Mike Baker gives an inside look at how the CIA, Mossad, and other intelligence agencies are influencing the Iran War, and where the contest between America and China is heading, in this preview from the latest “Signal Sitdown” podcast with Bradley Devlin.

Bradley Devlin: One of the big reporting pieces that we’ve seen kinda come out over the course of the Iran war is not only the differences in the assessments between the Mossad and the CIA or the ODNI, but also the Mossad thought they were going to be much more capable of creating the pressure for regime collapse. 

There was that story that the CIA was preparing the Iraqi Kurds to invade from the west. I don’t know if that was a double bluff from the CIA or not, but, you know, you have all of these different wheels churning.

And, you know, [Benjamin] Netanyahu comes in early February and says, “I think we can go forward with this.” 

The Mossad chief was in Washington five days after that, or no, somewhere around that time. Point being, weeks later, we’re in the war. 

And background quotes reported in The New York Times—so again, for people at home, take it as you will—but [JD] Vance, [Marco] Rubio, [John] Ratcliffe, they were skeptical of what the Israelis were saying about their capacities to actually create kind of a regime collapse.

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How do you work out those types of issues, and what’s your read on that entire situation? 

Mike Baker: Yeah. The answer is sometimes you don’t, so whoever’s the bigger dog, you know, gets to say. Sometimes you, again, you fall back on, “OK, well, why do you think that?” 

Let’s, you know, bring the analysts in. Explain your intelligence, right? And they’ll walk through in gruesome detail, oftentimes what they’ve got, particularly in sort of that environment where the stakes are obviously very high. So you’ll fall back on, again, the quality of the intelligence. And that will help guide those conversations.

Now obviously, you know, someone like Ratcliffe or anybody who’s the agency director will spend more time at giving weight to the intel credibility than perhaps somebody sitting in the White House. You know, they’re gonna be thinking a little bit more on the geopolitical terms or, you know, there’s a gut feeling maybe, whatever it might be. 

But there’s no doubt that Netanyahu came into this with regime change as a primary driver, right? That’s what they wanted. The White House, I think Washington in general, is spooked by the phrase “regime change”, right? Nobody likes to talk about it. No one wants to bring it up, right? 

It conjures up all sorts of problems from the past.

I think the White House was perhaps a little, in their own way, optimistic or overly optimistic because of the Venezuela experience, right? And I think there were some people that were willing to think that they could lay that same template over Iran and, “Oh my God, look, we’re gonna get, you know … 

Maybe we’re not gonna get, call it regime change, you know, but we’re gonna reshuffle the deck chairs and we’re gonna get a government we can work with, right? And that’s just bull—-,  

Bradley Devlin: And now you have to know that the guy on the ground in Iran working for the CIA does not think that at all.  

Mike Baker:  No. No, no, there’s no way. And I think if you had, again, if you had pulled in guys who had spent their careers dealing in that part of the world and with Iran, that would’ve said, “No.” You know, you can kill a lot of these guys— 

Bradley Devlin: You’re gonna kill the cleric and the IRGC is not gonna become more powerful? 

Mike Baker: Yeah, yeah.........

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