This is how Israel dismantled Iran from within.
The psychological warfare element — that the strike had come from Iranian soil — amplified the attack’s kinetic effects, leaving Tehran paralyzed.
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This is a guest essay written by Zineb Riboua, a research fellow for Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. This report was originally published by Hudson Institute.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
On June 13th, the Islamic Republic of Iran experienced a strategic collapse that altered the balance of power in the Middle East.
Israel eliminated key Iranian military and scientific personnel, degraded the country’s missile infrastructure, and neutralized its early-warning systems. But more consequentially, Israel’s strike — dubbed Operation Rising Lion — shattered the Iranian regime’s confidence in its own security apparatus.
This outcome was the result of years of sustained intelligence preparation; real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance dominance; and deep operational infiltration. Israeli planners achieved full-spectrum disruption by dismantling Iran’s command and control networks, severing high-level communications, and injecting uncertainty into the regime’s decision-making processes.
By the time Tehran could react, the damage was already done. Its upper command was dead, its defensive systems were disabled, and its internal threat assessments were in disarray. Crucially, Israel did not rely on cross-border operations. It had pre-positioned remote-activated strike platforms inside Iran and deployed them with surgical precision.
Israel’s operational concept combined a decapitation strike with cognitive disruption. The psychological warfare element — that the strike had come from Iranian soil — amplified the attack’s kinetic effects, leaving Tehran paralyzed. Unable to determine whether it had been infiltrated or outmaneuvered, the regime’s ability to respond collapsed before it could launch a single countermeasure.
The first two warnings came in July 2024 and September 2024.
In July, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas’ top political official and a guest of the Islamic Republic) in the heart of Tehran, demonstrating its ability to penetrate Iran’s capital, bypass multiple layers of security, and execute a precision strike without visible attribution.
The second warning followed in September, when Israel conducted a sophisticated attack using explosive pagers against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, killing dozens and injuring thousands. This showcased its capacity to infiltrate and disrupt enemy networks. These operations sent a strategic message and served as rehearsals for something much larger.
Tehran failed to grasp the significance. The regime dismissed the assassinations as internal sabotage or factional violence, refusing to entertain the possibility that a hostile state actor had executed the operation within its own territory. That misjudgment exposed a structural flaw in the Iranian regime: Tehran’s national security establishment could no longer detect or interpret threats emerging from its core.
Iran’s failure to anticipate Operation Rising Lion demonstrates a pattern of strategic miscalculations rooted in flawed assumptions about Israel, the United States, and the nature of contemporary conflict.
Iran’s miscalculations were reinforced by its belief that it could rely on Beijing. Since the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), China has steadily deepened its strategic ties with Iran. What began as an economic alignment soon evolved into political and diplomatic coordination. China presented itself not merely as a trading partner but as a guarantor of Iran’s internal stability.
In 2021, China and Iran institutionalized their partnership with a 25-year strategic agreement valued at $400 billion. Chinese companies embedded themselves across Iran’s critical sectors, from energy and telecommunications to transport and logistics. Beijing extracted tangible strategic and economic leverage, a relationship that Iran mistakenly believed would grant it geopolitical protection.
This misreading extended into Tehran’s nuclear posture. Iranian officials interpreted Chinese backing as an effective shield from geopolitical consequences. As nuclear negotiations resumed in 2025, Chinese diplomats publicly reaffirmed the 25-year pact and emphasized multipolarity, integration into BRICS (a China-led anti-Western alliance structure that Iran joined in 2024), and cooperation with Russia. Tehran viewed this not only as validation of its international alignment but as evidence that it could defy U.S. and Israeli pressure without consequences.
Iran was further emboldened by its belief that the China-brokered normalization deal it signed with Saudi Arabia in early 2023 had silenced the most vocal regional opponent of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Tehran assumed Riyadh’s opposition to its nuclear program had been politically neutralized and that, with Saudi Arabia out of the equation, Washington would have less incentive to support Israeli preemptive strikes. This was a fundamental miscalculation. The Riyadh-Tehran normalization produced optics, not a strategic shift.
The convergence of flawed assumptions — Chinese support as a deterrent, Saudi normalization as a shield, and U.S. diplomacy as a tactical delay — fomented strategic complacency in Tehran. When Washington and its allies issued a 60-day ultimatum to curb uranium enrichment, Iran dismissed it as empty signaling. It believed it still had time. It believed Israel would hold back. It believed the regional alignments would endure. It miscalculated, gravely.
Operation Rising Lion’s success hinged on Israel’s mastery of deception and psychological warfare. Deception in modern warfare involves crafting false narratives to mislead adversaries and inducing them to misjudge intentions, capabilities, or timing. Israel’s campaign was a textbook example, paralyzing Iran’s decision-making through a carefully orchestrated web of misdirection.
In the weeks preceding the strike, Israel saturated global media, diplomatic channels, and public discourse with false cues designed to lull Tehran into complacency.
The Israeli security cabinet meeting that green-lit the operation was disguised as a routine discussion on Gaza hostage negotiations. Ministers were briefed only within a secure forum, signing stringent nondisclosure agreements known as shomer sod, or “guardian of the secret.” Even senior government officials believed no major action was imminent.
Netanyahu’s office leaked a story that he was attending his son Avner Netanyahu’s wedding in the Galilee (northern Israel). The illusion that Israel’s leader was preoccupied with personal matters reinforced Iran’s complacency.
Mossad Director David Barnea and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer claimed to be on a trip to Washington via Oman for a “sixth round” of nuclear talks. These negotiations were fictitious, but their announcement suggested diplomatic progress, diverting attention from military preparations.
Netanyahu’s team allowed rumors of a rift with Trump over a potential Iran strike to circulate in the media, fostering perceptions of political disunity within Israel’s leadership.
Israel designed this cognitive warfare campaign to neutralize Iran’s command and control structure before kinetic operations began. For Israel, deception is a central force multiplier in operational planning. Against a highly centralized, ideologically rigid and hierarchical regime like Iran, disrupting perception at the leadership level produces disproportionate strategic effects.
Deception has assumed growing operational significance for Israel in 21st-century conflict environments for three reasons:
The modern battlefield is saturated with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets. Denying the adversary real-time situational awareness is essential for maintaining operational security and preserving the initiative.
In regimes like Iran, where political control and military command are tightly fused, disrupting perception at the top disables coordination throughout the chain of command.
Deception enables strategic surprise, a condition wherein the enemy not only fails to anticipate the strike but also fails to understand its purpose until after the fact. This degrades morale, imposes psychological paralysis, and prevents timely countermeasures.
Israel’s operation applied all these principles. It exploited Iran’s doctrinal assumptions — namely, that threats would come externally, be preceded by escalation, and require observable force buildup.
By shaping the information environment, Israel ensured that Iran would not trigger emergency protocols, disperse its senior personnel, or adopt an elevated defense posture until it was too late. Israel did not kinetically disable Tehran’s early-warning systems; it cognitively bypassed them. The effect of surprise was decisive: By the time Israeli drones activated from pre-positioned launch nodes inside Iranian territory, the regime’s national command authority had already lost the initiative.
The Islamic Republic relies on projecting strength — on appearing untouchable and firmly in control from the top down. Its deterrence is psychological as much as material. Therefore even minor disruptions to this image can have outsized effects.
The strategic purpose of deception, in this context, is to undermine that perception before a single missile is fired. By distorting the enemy’s sense of reality (through misdirection, covert infiltration, and psychological manipulation), Israel erodes the regime’s belief in its own control and security. This breeds hesitation, miscalculation, and internal confusion at the highest levels.
Israel understands this well. It doesn’t just aim to win on the battlefield; it seeks to unravel the system’s confidence, creating paralysis through doubt, fragmentation, and disorientation.
The level of Israeli infiltration exposed during Operation Rising Lion has immediate and long-term consequences for the Iranian regime.
Penetration of Iran’s air defense systems, intelligence networks, and internal military infrastructure indicates a loss of control at the core of the state. This not only compromises operational security, but also undermines institutional trust within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Quds Force, and the broader intelligence establishment.
When command structures can no longer distinguish between internal loyalty and external manipulation, decision-making slows, risk tolerance narrows, and factionalism grows.
Over time, this environment fosters paranoia, internal purges, and bureaucratic paralysis — conditions that steadily degrade the regime’s capacity to project power, manage crises, and maintain cohesion.
First, despite its threats of a forceful response, Tehran has failed to impose meaningful costs on a technologically and operationally superior adversary. What was billed as a major reprisal has largely amounted to symbolic gestures aimed at domestic audiences rather than tangible battlefield outcomes.
Second, the limitations of Iran’s response are raising doubts among its regional partners (particularly the Houthis and Hezbollah) about Tehran’s reliability as the core of the anti-Israel axis. If Iran cannot effectively retaliate when directly targeted, its credibility as a deterrent umbrella weakens across the region.
Third, the growing disconnect between Khamenei’s rhetoric and Iran’s operational reality is eroding internal cohesion. In a regime where legitimacy depends heavily on projecting strength, visible failure — especially in the face of Israeli dominance — risks deepening public skepticism and unsettling elite consensus.
If these trends continue, a deeper strategic unraveling is possible. The erosion of deterrence abroad and legitimacy at home could trigger fragmentation within Iran’s security institutions, elite defection, and increased pressure from peripheral regions. What begins as a military failure may evolve into political instability — and, over time, the disintegration of the centralized system that has held the Islamic Republic together for over four decades.
Israel, by contrast, has demonstrated control over both the military and psychological dimensions of the conflict. It has absorbed Iranian strikes with minimal disruption, maintained national composure, and reinforced its dominance in both the air and information domains.
The broader message is unmistakable: Israel sets the tempo and terms. Iran is reacting, and falling behind.
 | A guest post by
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WOW! My question would be, how did all these people keep this a secret? The planning that went into this dismantling of Iran's nuclear capabilities is mind blowing! Thank you for putting this into an easy to read, succinct article. Am Yisrael Chai!!!
Kudos to Israel!
Viva Israel!