The Mossad’s Long History of Operating Against Iran

By Sean Durns

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

 

‘A desk,” the famous spy novelist John le Carré, famously observed, “is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” Israeli spies haven’t just been operating from behind desks, however. Israel’s long history of operating in Iran is largely — but not completely — one of triumph.

 

In the early morning hours of June 13, Israel struck Iran, taking out key ballistic missile and drone sites and largely eliminating the Islamic Republic’s military leadership in one fell swoop. Israel allegedly lured Iran’s top military commanders into a meeting only to take them out with a precision strike. It was the largest decapitation strike in modern military history.

 

Israel also killed the regime’s top nuclear scientists, proving that you can, it turns out, kill an idea. The Islamic Republic’s dreams of destroying Israel and murdering Jews in a nuclear holocaust went with them. Subsequent U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites were enabled by Israeli intelligence, which had “boots on the ground beforehand” and had been monitoring multiple locations “for years,” according to the Times of London. The Pentagon recently assessed that the country’s nuclear program has been set back by two years or longer.

 

Many top Iranian officials were killed in their residences with precision strikes, indicating that Israel literally knew where they slept — often down to the very room. Some apparatchiks attempted to flee, only to be killed later in other hideouts that, unbeknownst to them, Israeli forces already knew about. While Israel was bombing key sites and officials, it also made menacing phone calls to lower-level Iranian military leaders. In every sense, Israel had Iran’s number.

 

Indeed, prior to the attack, Israel even built a covert drone base inside of Iran, which had been constructed over several months with parts smuggled into the country. One unnamed Israeli official told the Times of Israel that the operation relied on “groundbreaking thinking, bold planning and surgical operation of advanced technologies, special forces and agents operating in the heart of Iran while totally evading the eyes of local intelligence.” If this sounds a bit like bragging, it is well-deserved.

 

Israel, it seems, was able to operate with near impunity on Iranian soil. But its success didn’t happen overnight.

 

Indeed, the history of Israeli intelligence operations in Iran is filled with twists and turns and highs and lows. Iran’s support for terrorism, its attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, and its genocidal ambitions are the gravest threat to Israeli security in the tiny nation’s existence. But it was not always thus.

 

On March 13, 1978, two Israeli officials took a secret flight to Kish, an island ten miles off the Iranian shore in the Persian Gulf. The Mossad’s station chief in Iran, Reuven Merhav, was accompanied by Uri Lubrani, Israel’s ambassador to the country. Iran’s longtime ruler, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, faced mounting opposition.

 

Merhav and Lubrani gave a warning to Israel’s security establishment. The Shah’s grip on power was coming loose. His attempts at modernization were too far and too fast for many of the country’s influential clerics and retrograde elements, and both too slow and not enough for the secular establishment. The demise of the Pahlavi dynasty loomed.

 

Yet Israel’s foreign ministry and the Mossad, its premier intelligence service, were unreceptive. Nor were they alone. On the eve of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the CIA believed that there would be “no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.” They were soon proven wrong.

 

On January 16, 1979, the Shah left for Egypt, taking key aides and a box of Iranian soil with him. The next day, Shapour Bakhtiar, the secular prime minister now leading the country, asked the Mossad to kill Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the radical septuagenarian cleric who had been fomenting protests from his exile in Paris. The Mossad refused.

 

As the journalist Ronen Bergman recounts, one divisional head said: “Let Khomeini go back to Iran. He won’t last. The military and SAVAK [the Shah’s secret police] will handle him and his people protesting in the streets of the cities.” The official added that Khomeini “represents Iran’s past, not its future.”

 

But Khomeini was Iran’s future. The forces unleashed by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution would forever change the Middle East. The half-century of wars — the so-called Global War on Terror — are unthinkable absent the ascent of a radical theocracy with millenarian ambitions. Khomeini sought to fashion an Islamic epoch with himself at the forefront.

 

The Islamic Republic’s first target for exporting the revolution was Lebanon. In July 1982, Iran and Syria initiated a military agreement that allowed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to begin operating in the Levantine nation. Lebanon was a fitting choice — in the early 1970s, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operatives had trained the nucleus of the IRGC. Now the terror was coming full circle, with IRGC agents helping fashion what would become the jewel in Tehran’s crown: Hezbollah, the Party of God.

 

Israeli intelligence was slow to pick up the threat. On November 11, 1982, suicide bombers in Tyre, Lebanon, used vehicles packed with explosives to murder 76 members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent to the FBI. It was the first Islamist suicide terrorist attack outside of Iran. For years, Hezbollah hid its involvement. Other attacks followed, including an April 1983 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and an attack in October of that year that murdered 241 Marines and 58 French paratroopers who were part of a peacekeeping force.

 

By the mid-1980s, Israeli intelligence was belatedly grasping the threat. In the 1950s, Israeli spies had sent booby-trapped packages to their Egyptian counterparts who were sponsoring terror attacks against the Jewish state. They attempted to repeat the feat, sending an explosive package in early 1984 to Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, a Shiite cleric tasked by Khomeini with spreading the revolution to Lebanon and Syria. The blast cost him an eye, a hand, and one of his ears. But Mohtashamipur lived.

 

Israeli operatives continued to wage war on Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria, culminating in the 1992 assassination of Hezbollah head Hussein Abbas al-Musawi. It was a fateful choice. Musawi’s successor, Hassan Nasrallah, proved to be far more capable and far more charismatic. Under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah’s prowess grew by leaps and bounds.

 

For years the war between the Islamic Republic and Israel raged on, with Tehran using its proxies to open up new fronts as it sought to engulf Israel in a “ring of fire,” wearing the Jewish state down in a war of attrition while it simultaneously sought nuclear weapons. Consequently, many more wars followed. And new battle spaces, notably in cyber and ground-to-air capabilities such as drones, emerged. While it was initially caught flatfooted, Israeli intelligence soon gained ground in the long war against Tehran and its proxies.

 

The Global War on Terror that followed the September 11, 2001, terror attacks further demonstrated Israel’s value as a strategic ally. Intelligence and security cooperation between the two nations picked up steam. Jerusalem and Washington shared many of the same enemies — and targets. In 2008, a joint CIA-Mossad operation killed terror mastermind Imad Mughniyeh, a former PLO operative who had risen to become Hezbollah’s second in command.

 

With greater frequency, Israel began to take the fight directly to Iran, enabled by the advent of technology and domains that favored the qualitative edge held by the Jewish state. The inherent brittleness of the Islamic Republic — its history of brutally repressing its own people and its endemic corruption — gave Israel a growing roster of in-country assets to exploit. Indeed, the Mossad has been able to operate on the ground, in multiple Iranian provinces. Some evidence even suggests they’ve interrogated regime operatives on Iranian soil itself.

 

On January 31, 2018, the Mossad pulled off the “largest physical heist of intelligence materials from an enemy capital in the history of espionage,” reporters Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar noted in their book Target Tehran. Two dozen Mossad operatives and their spies in Iran managed to remove the regime’s nuclear archive. In six and a half hours, they extricated “the entire record of Iran’s strenuous effort to become a nuclear-armed power.” The archive, verified by Washington, demonstrated that the Islamic Republic not only had a hidden nuclear program but had been negotiating in bad faith with the U.S. and others. The daring operation was likely key to securing future American support for operations against Iran.

 

Israel also began targeting the regime’s nuclear scientists. Since the early 2000s, at the direction of then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the Mossad began prioritizing intelligence gathering inside Iran. Mossad head Meir Dagan put the agency on a “war footing” to take out key components of Iran’s nuclear program. Israel also increased cooperation with Arab states that feared Tehran’s getting nukes and whose intelligence services had a number of operational advantages over the Mossad.

 

Israel’s steady campaign of targeted assassinations and covert operations culminated in the nation’s stunning success in June. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was Israel’s intelligence victory against the Islamic Republic. But humility is also required. After all, it’s been a long war, and the fight will no doubt continue.