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Mossad Official: "We Are Not Done with Iran. We Are Just Getting Started."
(Israel Hayom) Itay Ilnai - Rostam Ghasemi joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1979 and served as a senior government minister and as an adviser to the defense minister. In November 2022, opposition news site Iran International published a photo taken during Ghasemi's visit to Malaysia showing him embracing a young woman who was not his wife and was not wearing a hijab. Within a few days, he was forced to submit his resignation and he died a few months later. Israel's Mossad was responsible for leaking the photo, said O., 51, who founded its influence operations branch and headed it until three months ago. "Carrying out an influence operation that ultimately gets rid of someone is much cheaper and simpler than an assassination operation.... Today, the Mossad has already been responsible for the dismissal of quite a few senior officials in Iran." Mossad officials argue that they never promised that the Iranian regime would fall during the war, and that they themselves have patience. "I have no doubt that in the future, [Israel's] Operation Rising Lion [in June 2025] will be remembered as a significant milestone on the road to the regime's fall," O. says. The Mossad has an operational branch which specializes in recruiting and running non-Israeli agents to carry out complex operations and replace Israeli Mossad agents, whose access to enemy countries had been blocked by the development of facial-recognition technology. In June 2025, the Mossad successfully activated dozens of cells of foreign agents on Iranian soil. From the ground, they struck Iranian air defense systems and missile launchers. The Iranian regime then arrested hundreds of "Israeli spies," but the Mossad claims none of those arrested was its agent. "We see very significant growth in the camp that opposes the regime," O. says. "More and more people do not believe in this regime, do not want it to exist." The influence branch established ties with online influencers, some of them inside Iran. The Mossad also created online influencers using AI. It has a clear view that only the regime's overthrow and replacement would prevent the Iranian vision of destroying Israel and a return to repeated rounds of fighting. The military campaign launched against Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, "was a very great success when you look at it as a station on the road to getting rid of the regime....The influence branch...is now beginning to work at very high intensity. Will it take three months, half a year or a year to overthrow the regime? No one knows. But I have no doubt that it will happen much faster than it would have without the influence branch and the Mossad."