The Mossad, the CIA and the day Tehran starts to fall

The article argues that the primary intelligence challenge for the CIA and Mossad regarding Iran is not predicting the Islamic Republic's collapse, but preparing for the aftermath. It highlights that regimes rarely provide advance notice of their disintegration, and the current ambiguity within the Iranian state, coupled with economic exhaustion and internal repression, suggests a potential for institutional rupture.

• The author emphasizes that a failure of political imagination, similar to the U.S. experience in 1979, would be to assume the only alternatives are the regime's survival or uncontrollable chaos.
• A key concern is the potential for state institutions like intelligence services and military commands to fragment during a collapse, creating a security vacuum that could be exploited by militias and terrorist organizations.
• The article suggests that a future Iranian government will need to construct a professional national intelligence service, subordinate to law and civilian authority, a process that requires intellectual work and planning before a political transition.
• It proposes that the CIA and Mossad could eventually assist in professionalizing such institutions, recognizing that "legitimate security-sector reconstruction will be one of the central challenges facing any future Iranian government."

The core lesson from 1979 is not for Washington to choose Iran's future, but to understand the country well enough to avoid improvisation when Iranians make those choices themselves. For Israel, a stable Iran that no longer defines itself through revolutionary hostility would fundamentally alter regional security, necessitating intellectual preparedness for such a possibility.