07-08-2025
The Ayatollah's assassination: Mossad's missed chance to stop Iran's Islamic revolution
INTEL AFFAIRS: The Mossad's fateful refusal to eliminate Ayatollah Khomeini is a misjudgment with reprecrussions still felt today.
In mid-January 1979, as shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi fled Iran, Mossad station chief Eliezer Tsafrir navigated Tehran's collapsing SAVAK headquarters – the shah's feared secret police. Sandbags and machine guns lined the windows, as revolutionaries already patrolled streets with Kalashnikovs; a distraught general clung to Tsafrir, begging, 'Take me with you!'
Interim prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar had summoned Tsafrir to pass on a blunt request to Israel: assassinate Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at his exile residence near Paris. As several former Mossad officers testified further on camera in Duki Dror's 2018 documentary The Mossad: Imperfect Spies, this plea triggered a crisis meeting in Tel Aviv.
On January 28, Mossad director Yitzhak Hofi gathered senior officers, including Iran chief analyst Yossi Alpher. The dilemma echoed a critical precedent: just months earlier, Saddam Hussein had offered the shah a chance to eliminate Khomeini during his Iraqi exile – an offer rejected due to miscalculated risks, over fear of regional backlash. Now, Israel faced a similar choice.
Hofi opened the meeting by opposing the operation on moral principle. 'He rejected assassinating foreign political leaders,' Alpher wrote in his 2015 memoir, Periphery: Israel's Search for Middle East Allies. A veteran Mossad division chief – stationed for years in Iran – argued Khomeini posed no threat: 'Let him return to Tehran. He'll never last. The army and the SAVAK will deal with him and the clergy who are demonstrating in the streets. He represents Iran's past, not its future.'
Alpher then acknowledged critical intelligence gaps: 'We simply don't know enough about what Khomeini stands for to justify the risk.' Despite 1,500 Israelis working in Iran and deep security ties, the Mossad lacked expertise on opposition forces. A Caesarea secret senior operative stated that eliminating Khomeini near Paris 'was not a complicated matter from an organizational standpoint,' as reported by Ronen Bergman in Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (2018). However, diplomatic concerns dominated: Failure could shatter relations with France, trigger global Muslim outrage, turn Khomeini into a martyr, and strain ties with Moscow and Washington.
After hours of debate, Hofi ruled, 'We're not in.' Tsafrir informed Bakhtiar that Israel 'would not act as the world's police,' invoking noninterference principles.
On February 1, 1979, two weeks after the shah fled, Khomeini triumphantly boarded an Air France flight to Tehran, greeted by millions of supporters. Bakhtiar dissolved SAVAK – a symbolic gesture. By February 11, his secular moderate government collapsed. SAVAK's final director, Nasser Moghaddam, was executed weeks later, while Bakhtiar fled in turn to Paris, where Iranian agents assassinated him in 1991.
After returning, Khomeini wasted no time reshaping Iran into a theocratic state. He declared Israel the 'Little Satan' and America the 'Great Satan,' sparking the 444-day US Embassy hostage crisis and rupturing Iran's Western alliances. Soon after, Saddam Hussein sought to exploit the upheaval by launching a war against the new Islamic Republic, triggering a bloody eight-year conflict. Meanwhile, Iran began actively exporting its revolutionary ideology across the region. In a symbolic gesture, Iran handed the Israeli Embassy to Yasser Arafat's PLO, whose Lebanese camps, under IRGC oversight, would go on to train Hezbollah's founding cadre.
Over the decades, the survival of Khomeini's charismatic leadership created a new regional order. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps evolved into a paramilitary empire with proxies across the Middle East. Even one of its original founders, Mohsen Sazegara, later described to The Jerusalem Post the IRGC as 'a monster, not what we intended.' Through proxy groups, Tehran carried out a strategy of encirclement against Israel, challenged Western presence in the Gulf, and deepened sectarian conflict across Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. From the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires to its involvement in the war against Israel in support of Hamas after October 2023, echoes of that 1979 decision reverberate globally.
Israel's misjudgment stemmed from flawed assumptions underpinning its Periphery Doctrine. Forged in 1957 in David Ben-Gurion's office, the Periphery Doctrine aimed to ally with non-Arab regional forces (Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia, Kurdish Iraq...) against Arab nationalism. Intelligence sharing flourished; SAVAK was supplied with Israeli electronic warfare systems; Israeli engineers built energy infrastructure, while Iran supplied Israel with oil and funded half of the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline; Meir Amit (Mossad director 1963-68) attended the shah's 1971 Persepolis celebrations as Israel's envoy.
This proximity bred confidence. As Alpher noted, 'A long line of high-ranking Israeli officials were sure they knew Iran like the back of their hand.'
The Mossad focused on state actors and ignored the power of hardline ideology when Khomeini's estimated 600,000 sermon tapes flooded Iran from France. When Bakhtiar revealed he had also asked the US, UK, and France to kill Khomeini – all refused – Israel's isolation in misjudging the threat became clear.
Would do the Islamic Republic
WHAT IF Israel had accepted Bakhtiar's request and eliminated Khomeini in his Paris exile? Former officials remain divided. Some argue that his death could have derailed the revolution or allowed moderates to steer Iran toward a secular republic. Others contend that the revolutionary fervor had passed a point of no return, and Khomeini's martyrdom might have only accelerated the collapse of the monarchy.
Still, one thing is clear: the Islamic Republic was neither inevitable nor predicted – even by those closest to the scene.
The shah's 1978 rejection of Saddam's offer and the Mossad's 1979 refusal shared three fatal flaws. First, both overestimated military solutions. The shah believed SAVAK could crush dissent; Mossad trusted the army would contain Khomeini. Second, diplomatic caution prevailed; both Israel and the shah worried about regional instability. Third, intelligence agencies globally misread Khomeini's influence. The CIA, MI6, and SAVAK all deemed him a 'passing phase,' despite his 15-year exile mobilizing clerics. Bergman notes this reflected the Mossad's institutional restraint over eliminating foreign political or religious figures, even amid existential threats.
Israel was not alone in its misjudgment. France, Britain, and the US – each of which had intelligence capabilities inside Iran – also underestimated Khomeini's appeal. The French government allowed Khomeini to organize from his exile compound in Neauphle-le-Château with minimal oversight bordering on complacency. Western countries were also caught off guard by the speed of the Iranian Revolution and adopted a cautious approach to disengaging from their former ally. According to Alpher, Khomeini's aides had promised eager US emissaries that the ayatollah would ensure the flow of oil and that the army would remain pro-Western. In response, president Jimmy Carter's representatives gave their blessing, and UN ambassador Andrew Young reportedly called Khomeini 'a saint.'
'Had we eliminated Khomeini and been uncovered, would the world have understood what we saved them from?' Tsafrir later reflected.
Alpher admitted deep regrets: 'Given all the harm Khomeini caused, I'd have advised differently about Bakhtiar's request.'
