Blumenthal quoted the bold. I interpreted the following unbolded paragraph to mean that the riots they were hoping for never came to fruition.
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Mr. Barnea’s predecessor at Mossad, Yossi Cohen, decided that trying to foment rebellion inside Iran was a waste of time and ordered that the resources devoted to the matter be reduced to a minimum. During Mr. Cohen’s tenure, which ended in 2021, Mossad calculated how many of the country’s citizens would need to participate in protests for them to truly threaten the Iranian government, comparing the estimates to the size of actual protests since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
“We wondered if we could bridge this gap,” Mr. Cohen said in 2018, “and we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t.”
Instead, Mossad’s strategy during that period was to try to weaken the government until it essentially surrendered to Israeli and American demands — using a combination of crippling economic sanctions and operations to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders and sabotage nuclear facilities.
Over the past year, as the prospect of Israeli military action against Iran became more likely, Mr. Barnea reversed Mossad’s approach, devoting the agency’s resources to plans that could lead to toppling the government in Tehran in the event of a war.
In recent months, according to officials, Mr. Barnea came to believe that Mossad could potentially begin igniting riots around Iran after several days of intense Israeli and American airstrikes and the assassination of senior Iranian leaders.
After the strikes and assassinations of the war’s earliest days, the uprising did not come. But Israeli officials say they have yet to give up hope.
“I think that we need boots on the ground, but they’ve got to be Iranian boots,” Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said on CNN on Sunday, when asked how the war will end. “And I think they’re coming.”
www.theguardian.com
