The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has sparked conflict across the Middle East. While intense escalation continues, a backdoor success is being hailed as one of the most impressive intelligence feats in recent history. The targeted air strikes that killed Khamenei were backed by extensive cooperation between the CIA and Mossad. Still, this effort was too narrowly focused on immediate tactical gains rather than the wider strategic objectives, showing how intelligence agencies often overlook the high risks and large-scale consequences.
The Foggy Mirror
Intelligence work can create foggy reflections of complex situations, making it hard to see the full picture. The operations in the Middle East by the CIA expose the pitfalls of concentrating only on tactical wins, which leads to short-term thinking and ultimately harms long-term US interests.
The infamous coup against the Iranian regime, orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence, codenamed Project Ajax, involved overthrowing elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was leaning toward the Soviets and nationalising the oil industry. The coup was planned as a spectacle through bribes, street thugs, and chaos, resulting in Mosaddegh’s arrest by the military, led by General Fazlollah Zahedi, during the second attempt, as the first attempt to launch the coup under Project Ajax had failed. The tactical success here was the change of regime, but what was missed was the need for long-term analysis of how US interests would be sustained after the regime change and the reaction on the ground.
The successful subversion by the CIA in Iran’s power circles was seen as an operational victory, and that success clouded the analytical aspect of intelligence. The CIA failed to evaluate the depth of Iranian nationalism, street power, and Islamic identity. Toppling a democratically elected Mossadegh led to a power vacuum and a psychological shift in the public, pushing them more toward Islamism and Iranian nationalism. This contributed to the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah’s regime, which had been installed by the CIA decades earlier, and sparked a wave of anti-Americanism, culminating in the 1979 hostage crisis, where 66 Americans, including diplomats and other civilian personnel, were held hostage at the United States Embassy in Tehran. The same success in subversion and on-ground intelligence supported by Human Intelligence was completely diminished when the CIA needed it most to rescue its people from the Embassy during Operation Eagle Claw, which resulted in one of the biggest American operational failures of history, further damaging President Jimmy Carter’s presidency, contributing to his landslide 1980 election loss.
The Saddamism And Regime Change
Similarly, in Iraq, when CIA-led operations quickly and accurately toppled Saddam Hussein during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, they also achieved significant tactical success for the agency. However, even here, the agency had a short-term perspective and a gap in analysing Iraq’s ground situation. After reaching the tactical goal of removing Hussein from power, the CIA expected a friendly and stable regime, but they made errors in ground assessment or paid little attention to the evolving and deeply divided Iraqi society. Post-Saddam, the US policy of disbanding the Iraqi military and removing the political power of the Ba’ath Party, which was responsible for running Iraq’s administration and political affairs, created a power vacuum.
This led to Shia-Sunni tensions that further escalated into civil war in Iraq in 2006, completely destabilising the country. The CIA failed to recognise that the Ba’ath Party was deeply embedded in Iraqi institutions and, more importantly, strongly connected to street power—promoting pan-Arabism and, especially in later years, incorporating Islamic themes to resonate with the population. The forceful removal of the party worsened those ideological divisions and tensions, resulting in complete instability and undermining the US’s long-term goals in Iraq. Most notably, the removal of Saddam and the civil war provided Iran with an opportunity to expand its influence, since one of Iran’s main regional rivals was eliminated, allowing Iran to further strengthen its influence through political and economic ties by leveraging Shia support in Iraq.
Gaddafi in Libya
CIA-led operations in Libya assessed that Gaddafi’s regime would fall quickly and that the transitional council would take over and maintain stability after the regime change. While the US achieved tactical success in ensuring Gaddafi’s fall, it failed to evaluate the deep divisions among tribes and the brewing power struggle, where Gaddafi often acted as a mediator to ease internal tensions. Since Gaddafi was killed, a power vacuum emerged that the council was unable to manage, leading to Libya’s collapse and subsequent insurgency. After a year of 2011 US-led intervention in Libya that toppled Gaddafi, Al-Qaeda-backed elements and radicals carried out an attack on the US consulate in Libya, killing CIA officials and the US Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. Neither US security nor strategic objectives were able to achieve political or security stability, failing in their long-term goals.
Intelligence Blinders
When tactical success or important, risky objectives are often within reach, they can impair the assessment process and create analytical gaps, leading to bias and conflict. In all three scenarios, the CIA underestimated the ground reality and the street power of society and religious influences, which could cause major setbacks to their celebrated tactical successes in the near future. In their effort to secure operational speed and precision, intelligence agencies like the CIA compromise sustainability. It’s not that the CIA ignored complexities in planning regime change in Iraq; some members did raise alarms about sectarian violence and instability, but those assessments were conflicted by analytical biases and gaps, arising from high rewards associated with objectives and the chances of success that begin to become visible on the horizon.
Such intelligent behaviour often overlooks the high risks linked to high rewards, and agencies don’t frequently consider managing risks once significant gains are achieved. The Iraqi gamble on weapons of mass destruction was also the result of distorted perception, similar to reading a foggy mirror as if it were clear or ignoring the risks of fog, despite the CIA suffering from analytical bias and groupthink, focusing more on potential rewards than on risks. This kind of intelligence work often lacks strong credibility but still receives approval under the guise of balancing risks and rewards, partly because of the agency’s long-standing reputation for taking risks, lethality, and overconfidence in a single scenario variable.
Questions on Epic Fury
CIA and Mossad conducted a long-term collective intelligence operation to weaken Iran’s power structure and monitor Khamenei’s movements, gathering the information needed to create a pattern of life for near-accurate assessments for operational planning. When both agencies obtained significant, precise intelligence for a targeted strike, they were blinded by a major tactical victory on the horizon and ignored the risks. According to some reports, the CIA believed that killing Khamenei would trigger regime change, with the IRGC most likely taking over. The Iranian people would probably rally in the streets to support regime change. However, none of the expected outcomes occurred. No regime change took place, no power vacuum appeared, the IRGC supported succession plans, and there was no street support. While the US may have achieved its tactical goal, the CIA failed in its strategic aim and faced major blowback by encountering an unexpected and surprising response from the Iranians. The reason remains the same: the CIA and Mossad were blinded by the potential success of such a large targeted strike and failed to assess the ground realities they overlooked before executing regime change operations in Iran decades earlier.
Perhaps the CIA needs to revisit its analytical frameworks and prioritise risk management over reward, as it did when planning Operation Neptune Spear to kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan by focusing more on risks than rewards and analysing every detail and probing every possibility of failure and managing them accordingly. However, when strategic and geopolitical interests are at stake or on a favourable horizon, intelligence work often gets compromised, and the high costs of high risk and high reward are underestimated.
