Israel and the US have scored another surprise on Iran’s military establishment. Will enough of these force it into collapse as its rank-and-file get the message?
Just a day after killing Iran’s de facto regime leader Ali Larijani, master of its security apparatus, the IDF took out the regime’s eyes and ears. Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib died in a targeted air strike just a few hours ago, Israel’s defense minister announced – and pledged that more targeted strikes would come, in Iran and Lebanon:
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Defense Minister Israel Katz says Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmaeil Khatib, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Tehran overnight, adding that “significant surprises” are expected today.
“On this day, significant surprises are expected across all arenas that will escalate the war we are conducting against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon,” he says during a security assessment, according to remarks provided by his office.
“The intensity of the strikes in Iran is increasing. The Iranian intelligence minister Khatib was also eliminated overnight,” he says.
Who was Esmail Khatib? Reportedly, Khatib not only ran the regime’s intelligence-collection functions, but also its covert ops, such as sleeper cells in enemy countries. Khatib also took part in internal suppression activities:
The military says the Intelligence Ministry is “the Iranian terrorist regime’s primary intelligence organization, which also played a key role in supporting the regime’s repression and terrorist activities.”
The ministry “possesses advanced intelligence capabilities, overseeing surveillance, espionage, and the execution of covert operations worldwide, particularly against the State of Israel and Iranian citizens,” the IDF says.
As the intelligence minister, the IDF says Khatib “played a significant role during the recent protests throughout Iran, both with regards to the arrests and killing of protesters, as well as shaping the regime’s intelligence assessment,” and during protests in 2022-2023 over the killing of Mahsa Amini.
The IDF says Khatib also led the ministry’s “terror activities against Israeli and American targets around the world, as well as activities directed against targets within Israel” during the current war.
The Washington Post notes that the US had him on our own list. Khatib ran cyberwarfare efforts aimed at the US, which landed him a spot on our sanctions list. The Washington Examiner expands the case against Khatib in the US more significantly:
Khatib has been Iran’s intelligence minister since August 2021, according to the Jerusalem Post. He was an integral member of Iran’s government leadership who spent many years in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s intelligence unit. He was reportedly a valued member of the government by former Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khatib was also on the radar of U.S. government officials for years. In 2022, he was one of the Iranian officials sanctioned by the Treasury Department on the basis of “engaging in malicious cyber activities” and as a “human rights offender.” Under Khatib’s leadership, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security initiated crackdowns against “activists, journalists, and members of religious minority communities,” according to the nonprofit and non-partisan policy group, United Against Nuclear Iran.
In other words, Khatib was a bad dude, as Donald Trump might say. More importantly, though, he was a top level figure – inner circle, with decades of ties and experience within the regime. Like Larijani, Khatib was a hard-liner connected directly to the Supreme Leader, and like both Larijani and Khamenei, the Israelis knew how to find him.
That sets up a real confidence crisis within what’s left of the regime. Israel and the US haven’t just killed low-level security forces and targeted military units, although they have done plenty of that when it comes to the Basij and IRGC units connected to population control. They have targeted and successfully killed the people at the very top – Khamenei, Larijani, Khatib, top Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani, and many if not most of their lieutenants. They tracked down Soleimani in a tent when he began avoiding buildings during the war in a strike that took out a number of his direct reports.
The Israelis are not just getting lucky with bomb strikes on regime targets. The most recent kills have clearly aimed at these leaders specifically and succeeded in killing them without massive collateral damage. The Israelis are inside the regime’s communications, inside the regime itself, and are still getting actionable real-time intelligence. In some ways, Khatib’s death is poetic justice for being proven so inept at counter-intelligence.
At some point, this produces two reactions that will eventually collapse the regime. First, the vacuum(s) at the top will create confusion and competition among those still left, which means that infighting will paralyze the leadership caste. Second, the now-obvious incompetence of that leadership caste will create panic and a confidence collapse among the lower-level IRGC forces, as well as an opportunity for the people they have oppressed to accelerate both reactions.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the latter reaction has already materialized, even before the deaths of the three leaders this week. In fact, that’s how Israel tracked down the leader of the despised Basij:
Israeli and American leaders said at the outset that the war with Iran would create the conditions for Iranians to topple their regime. The killings early Tuesday——followed by the Israeli announcement a day later that Iranian Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib had also been killed—were milestones in that campaign made possible by the fast-accumulating damage from airstrikes and a growing harvest of intelligence about possible targets.
With thousands of regime members killed—from top leaders to street-level grunts—Iranians are reporting that a sense of disorder is starting to take hold. Security forces are under stress and on the run as they threaten protesters to stay off the streets and direct strikes at the U.S., Israel and Arab neighbors across the Persian Gulf.
The Mossad has begun psy-ops against Iranian security forces, the WSJ continues, to gain more intel and to encourage desertions. That campaign has paid off, clearly:
The Journal reviewed the contents of one call between a senior Iranian police commander and an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service.
“Can you hear me?” a Mossad agent can be heard, speaking in Farsi. “We know everything about you. You are on our blacklist, and we have all the information about you.”
“OK,” the commander said in the recording.
“I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people’s side,” the Mossad agent said. “And if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader. Do you hear me?”
“Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the commander said. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”
The only way this effort works is by establishing the superiority of Israel’s operations and demonstrating the incompetence of regime leadership. Killing them one at a time, deliberately and specifically, makes this point land even harder. It may take a while for the IRGC to collapse, but this decapitation strategy has set a potential collapse in motion from the top down and from the bottom up.
Editor’s Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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