Israeli Press
Bergman pins the failed Iran regime-change plan on Netanyahu himself
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The dismissals sweeping the Mossad's top ranks cannot bury the question of who owns the failure of Israel's plan to topple Iran's government — and the answer, the intelligence journalist Ronen Bergman wrote Thursday in Yedioth Ahronoth, is Benjamin Netanyahu first.
Three senior officials tied to the regime-change plan have left within weeks of Roman Gofman taking over the agency, Bergman reported: the deputy chief days after Gofman's arrival, and now the intelligence directorate head and the Iran division chief, both eased out "by agreement" with no negligence inquiry.
In Bergman's telling, the entire campaign that Israelis call the second Iran war was planned, built and executed for one goal — bringing down the government in Tehran — a goal Netanyahu has never publicly owned, which spares him declaring its failure.
The plan for toppling a state of 90 million rested on restraint it never had, Bergman argued, and lost what coherence remained when Donald Trump's surprise move forced Israel into the campaign in February instead of June, then halted the Kurdish incursion the design depended on.
Netanyahu understood the risks and chose them, the piece concluded, and with Trump led both countries into a failure that has shaken the region and the markets since.
The new Mossad chief's task, Bergman wrote, is the reckoning his predecessors escaped: examining how an agency operating outside any statute convinced itself the plan could work.
