Trita Parsi

their behavior will likely be very different.

We framed it as an existential threat.

One of the things I think is also very interesting, and I don't know the answer to it exactly what happened, but the Israelis were remarkably successful in penetrating Iran intelligence-wise.

How did they do that?

Over the course of years, they had recruited a lot of Iranians.

They had flipped them essentially.

And this is something that the Islamic Republic absolutely needs to understand.

That game is a game of numbers.

If you have a lot of options, a lot of candidates that you could turn into a spy or to turn against their own country, to work for the Mossad, you will get a larger number of them successfully flipped.

What determines if there's a large number of candidates?

Well, part of it is the repression of the Islamic Republic itself.

Because it was so repressive, it actually created a very large pool of people that the Israelis could turn to and try to see which ones of them could they flip.

Three days before the war, those people started to, they had been extracted out of Iran, trained.

Three days before the war, they went back into Iran.

And they were conducting attacks from inside of Iranian territory, similar to the way that the Ukrainians have done it in Russia.

In fact, the methodology seems to be identical.

In this war, we saw none of that.

Whatever happened, either they expended all of their Mossad assets inside the country or something else happened because we just did not see that same repeat of a pattern in this war.

And again, I don't know the answer to it, but it is a very, very big question mark.

Exactly what happened?