Sanctions create hardship. Legitimate protests are hijacked and turned violent. The inevitable state crack down is used to justify intervention and regime change. It’s psychological warfare and this time it’s happening in plain sight.
Mossad Spycraft: Engineered Protests in Tehran: Psychological Warfare
By Rima Najjar, Global Research, January 13, 2026
There is something deeply disorienting about an intelligence service addressing a foreign population in the middle of live unrest, in their own language, telling them to take to the streets, and then casually implying it is there among them. Mossad’s recent message on X does exactly that. It is chutzpah of an obscene order.
In late December 2025, as street protests were unfolding across Iran, Mossad posted a message in Farsi on its official account.
The Jerusalem Post immediately amplified it, quoting its central lines urging Iranians to “go out together into the streets” and asserting that Mossad agents were “among you in the streets.”
Through that amplification, the message acquired international reach and functioned as a deliberate act of psychological pressure on the Iranian state.
The protests in Iran erupted amid genuine economic collapse: the rial had fallen to roughly 1.42–1.445 million per dollar, inflation approached 42 percent, and basic necessities had moved beyond reach for large segments of the population. What began with shopkeepers shuttering stores in Tehran quickly spread nationwide. Into this volatile reality, an Israeli intelligence service — long practiced in the shadow theater of security alerts and covert murderous actions — inserted itself as a public political actor.
Such behavior signals a shift in statecraft that demands a name.
Public intelligence messaging describes the new doctrine now on display. Under this model, an intelligence service abandons both diplomatic distance and covert restraint. It addresses a foreign population directly — in its own language, during live unrest — while openly asserting its identity as a spy agency and even claiming physical proximity to demonstrators. Psychological warfare moves from the back channel to the main stage.
The consequences follow a rigid script.
Historically, external political influence traveled along two primary paths: classical propaganda and covert intervention. Both preserved a critical principle — shielding domestic movements from visible foreign control. Public intelligence messaging demolishes that barrier. Its purpose lies not in persuasion but escalation: signaling regime penetration, encouraging protesters to assume greater risk, destabilizing ruling elites, and provoking an aggressive security response. Protest legitimacy collapses. Authorities acquire immediate justification for securitized repression. Political space contracts. Civilians pay the price.
Iran’s response unfolded exactly along this script. Long subjected to external pressure — most notably U.S. sanctions, reimposed and intensified through the September 2025 UN snapback mechanism and widely recognized as the primary driver of the currency crisis — and facing documented efforts at Israeli infiltration aimed at destabilizing the regime, Iranian authorities recognized Mossad’s unusually overt Farsi message for what it was: further confirmation of foreign incitement and active penetration. The result followed predictably — mass arrests, sweeping internet restrictions, and violent crowd dispersals. Precisely the outcome Mossad’s intervention sought to provoke.
The same dynamic unfolded in Venezuela. A bolívar that lost roughly 80 percent of its value in 2025, projected triple-digit inflation, and widening black-market exchange gaps produced acute social hardship. Against that backdrop, President Maduro explicitly framed sectors of the opposition as vehicles of Zionist influence, alongside invoking U.S. sanctions, alleged CIA drone strikes on Venezuelan territory, and public authorizations for U.S. operations. Those claims supplied justification for military deployments, mass detentions of opposition figures, and systematic criminalization of dissent as foreign conspiracy — a near mirror of the script now playing out in Iran.
Across both cases, the intervening power incurred no meaningful cost. The target society absorbed the damage — economically, politically, and in human lives.
The same pattern recurs across the region, at scale — and Mossad’s intervention in Iran exposes the governing logic behind it. Syria’s 2011 uprising fell quickly under regional intelligence competition and proxy warfare, converting a popular revolt into a prolonged national catastrophe whose humanitarian consequences persist long after regime change in 2024. Iraq’s 2019 Tishreen movement — a mass youth uprising against corruption, unemployment, and foreign domination — encountered lethal repression after foreign intelligence penetration, including Israeli and American operations, contaminated its political space and supplied the state with pretext for securitized suppression. Yemen’s internal conflict became the foundation of an externally driven war in which Israeli and Western intelligence coordination with Saudi and Emirati forces transformed domestic fracture into mass displacement, systemic hunger, and new 2025 escalations blocking political settlement. Lebanon’s economic collapse, compounded by the 2023–2024 war with Israel, now undergoes steady reshaping through near-daily Israeli strikes, U.S.-backed disarmament demands, and sustained Israeli intelligence activity suffocating what remains of domestic political space.
Across each case, the same mechanism governs the outcome. Authentic popular movements collide with external intelligence agendas that penetrate protest space, contaminate legitimacy, and convert civic mobilization into geopolitical theater. Mossad’s public incitement in Iran renders visible a system that ordinarily operates behind the curtain.
Foreign intelligence “support” for protest movements produces the inverse of its declared purpose. It strips movements of credibility, supplies authoritarian rulers with the architecture of justification for repression, and accelerates the collapse of political space. Where Mossad’s message claims solidarity, it delivers exposure; where it promises empowerment, it generates isolation; where it gestures toward freedom, it manufactures the preconditions of crackdown. International rhetoric circulates in the language of democracy and solidarity; lived political reality delivers exhaustion, fragmentation, and despair.
This cycle emerges directly from the post–Cold War regional order. The United States and Israel preside over a system treating popular sovereignty across the Arab and Persian worlds as disposable. Palestine exposes the governing logic of that system. Its denied sovereignty — rooted in the singular post–WWI British Mandate that embedded the Balfour Declaration without any path to independence — functions as the cornerstone of permanent regional asymmetry. Israel’s central strategic objective follows with clarity: prevent any cohesive political configuration capable of constraining Israeli military supremacy or consolidating resistance around Palestinian liberation. The systematic instrumentalization of other popular movements across the region serves that objective.
Within this architecture, The Jerusalem Post’s amplification of Mossad’s Farsi message loses any appearance of anomaly. The act becomes legible. As a Zionist outlet, the Post extends the psychological operation’s reach: projecting Israeli penetration and strength, reinforcing domestic morale, signaling deterrence to adversaries, and exploiting authentic economic grievances — currency collapse, inflation, daily hardship — to destabilize Iran while remaining insulated from consequences imposed on Iranian civilians.
The “support” offered in such messages converts civilian hope into collateral damage and protest movements into expendable instruments of regional power competition. What began as chutzpah of an obscene order resolves into governing doctrine: calculated, unaccountable, and devastating to popular sovereignty.
Modern empire no longer suppresses dissent solely through tanks and prisons. It governs dissent by contaminating it — by inserting intelligence power directly into civilian struggle, then watching repression follow inevitably.
That machine now operates in full view.
Source: Global Research
Featured image: You Tube sceenshots
Also see: Syrian Alawites and Christians Massacred After Overthrow of Assad