When the Coup Plan Fails
Someone Has to Take the Fall
Regime change looks clean on a whiteboard. In the real world it dies in committee — and somebody's career dies with it. This week that somebody was two of Mossad's most senior officers, quietly pushed out of their posts after a plan to topple the Iranian government collapsed before it ever got off the ground.
According to the Times of Israel, citing Israel's Channel 12, Mossad Director Roman Gofman removed the chiefs of the agency's Intelligence Directorate and its Iran Division. Their plan: arm Kurdish factions inside Iran, open a corridor along the Iraq-Iran border with Israeli and U.S. airstrikes, and push them toward Tehran — all to install former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a replacement Israel and Washington could supposedly work with. Reporting from The National adds that Prime Minister Netanyahu leaned on the plan to help sell President Trump on February's war in the first place. It never survived contact with reality. Leaks, Turkish lobbying against an emboldened Kurdish force on its border, and the Kurds' own wariness of being used as kindling gave Washington the excuse to pull the plug.
"Gofman decided on the dismissals in order to help Netanyahu distance himself from responsibility for the fact that the Iranian government did not fall."
— The Times of Israel, August 2026Both officers are reportedly staying on at Mossad, just several pay grades quieter — and that tells you everything about how these purges actually work. Nobody gets frog-marched out in disgrace. They get reassigned, the agency gets a clean story for the Knesset, and the file gets closed. That's not incompetence. That's institutional self-preservation, and every intelligence service on earth has run this exact play at some point.
The real story here isn't the two officers — it's how easily a regime-change fantasy travels from a briefing slide to a war footing. Using a proxy plan to help talk a president into military action, then quietly disowning it the moment the proxies balk, is precisely the kind of decision that gets buried in memoirs decades from now. Today it's a paragraph in an Israeli newspaper and a very bad week for two men who thought they had a plan for Tehran.
Key Takeaways
- Mossad Director Roman Gofman removed the chiefs of the agency's Intelligence Directorate and Iran Division after a regime-change plan targeting Tehran collapsed.
- The scrapped plan called for arming Kurdish factions inside Iran, backed by Israeli/U.S. airstrikes, to install ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a replacement leader.
- Netanyahu reportedly used the plan to help persuade President Trump to back February's war against Iran.
- The plan collapsed after leaks, Turkish lobbying, and Kurdish reluctance — both dismissed officials remain at Mossad in lower-profile roles.
The Blake MacKay Connection
Blake has run more than one asset who turned out to be a bet the Agency wasn't ready to own in daylight. A regime-change plan that gets quietly disowned the moment it fails — while the officers who built it keep their clearances — is exactly the kind of institutional cover Blake spends half of the series untangling. Start the series free with Intercept and see how deniability actually works in the field.
Read the Full Article at The Times of Israel → ← Back to Intel Briefing