Newly appointed Mossad director Roman Gofman has removed two senior officials who designed a failed operation to overthrow Iran’s government, according to reporters. One had led the agency’s intelligence directorate since December; the other headed its Iran division. Security sources say Gofman and the pair clashed from the outset, though the departures are being framed publicly as a mutual agreement amid a wider organizational restructuring. Both officers are reportedly expected to stay on at the agency in unspecified roles.
The shelved plan reportedly called for coordinating Israeli strikes on Revolutionary Guard positions in Iranian Kurdistan with Kurdish fighters crossing into Iran from the north. The aim was to trigger mass Kurdish recruitment, then spark popular protests that would spread toward Tehran and destabilize the regime from within. According to New York Times reporting, the strategy also included efforts to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader.
Israel and the United States did carry out heavy strikes on Iranian security forces in the northwest. But the wider effort unraveled. Media leaks exposed the plan, Turkey opposed operations near its border, and Kurdish fighters hesitated to commit. Washington ultimately abandoned the initiative before it could reach its intended second phase.
Source: Times of Israel, New York Times
So What
An internal crackdown after a failure this large is unsurprising. Had it worked, the plan could have reshaped the region for a generation, so accountability at the top was likely always coming. What makes this notable is less the personnel change and more what it signals: a new director drawing a hard line against the previous leadership’s highest-risk bets. Details are likely to stay scarce, and the full scope of the operation may never be public. But this episode will almost certainly be studied inside the agency for years as a lesson in the limits of engineered regime change, and a warning about the cost of overreach.
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