When the Mossad took the stunning move of publishing multiple videos in real time of its agents acting against the regime within Iran in June 2025, one of the main reasons was to overwhelm and confuse the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), former Mossad chief David Barnea has revealed.
Leaked on Sunday from comments he made to a closed audience at the Priority Summit this past Thursday.
On June 13, 2025, the Mossad released sensational and rare video footage of its co-lead role with the air force in Israel’s preemptive strike on Iran’s ballistic missiles and air defenses.
Three videos showed the Mossad targeting ballistic missile targets, air defense targets, and general preparations for the attacks (with the agents’ faces covered up).
From the perspective of the videos, it appeared that the Mossad used drones from inside Iran to attack various targets.
Iran had previously accused the Mossad of using drones to attack the Karaj facility in June 2021 as well as other operations.
Mossad's warehouse of drones used to sabotage Iran
It was later confirmed that the Mossad used an entire warehouse of drones to attack and sabotage Iran, along with helping with a large number of remote-controlled vehicles attacking regime targets, and a significant number of human agents on the ground also assisting in assassinations.
Although far more information was quickly publicized about the IDF’s actions, these videos gave readers a rare front-row and real-time seat into what normally were entirely clandestine operations which the Mossad would not even admit to.
Barnea said at the Priority Summit that the video was deliberately published to trigger mass arrests and make it more difficult for the IRGC to identify actual Israeli agents.
“One of the reasons we immediately released an official video on the morning of Operation Rising Lion, with the Mossad logo, was to protect the agents who were there,” Barnea said in a video which Yediot Ahronot shared, and regarding which the Jerusalem Post confirmed the authenticity. “We wanted to make sure they arrested so many people in Iran that they wouldn’t be able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff and would eventually release everyone,” adding that Iran did release all of the detainees.
IRGC arrested over 20,000 people on second day of war
The former Mossad chief said that the IRGC arrested 21,000 people on the second day of the fighting.
“You have to imagine that when you arrest 21,000 people, even if you’ve caught an agent or two, eventually you have to release them because everyone’s story will be the same: I was walking down the street, I was driving a car, they arrested me,” he said, emphasizing that the IRGC would have no way of knowing who was a real agent with such a vast number of detainees,
Barnea added that many of those arrested or executed by the IRGC as “Mossad agents” had nothing to do with the agency.
In addition, he said that nearly all of the Mossad agents were never caught, and at the end of the June 2025 operation, he even publicly taunted the IRGC, issuing a statement, “We will [continue to] be there, like we have been there.”
His explanation may close the book on the unexplained mystery of why the Mossad would have risked broadcasting some of its agents’ actions in real time during the June 2025 operation.
In September 2025, the Post reported exclusively that dozens of Mossad women penetrated Iran and were on the ground performing a variety of kinds of operations during Israel’s attacks on Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs in June 2025.
While the Mossad does not want to bring too much attention to any one sub-group of potential spies, the Post’s impression was that the Mossad women of 2025 were doing more of every kind of spy role as compared to their sisters of yesterday.
In that same September report, the Post noted that Barnea sent hundreds of Mossad agents, or individuals being run by agents, into operations in Iran simultaneously. All of the varying groups of staff were highly coordinated.
The spy chief directed a project leading to a diverse spectrum of all of the different kinds of agents and backgrounds of those agents one could imagine.
On top of actual Israeli Mossad agents, the spy service has reached new levels in recruiting and training local dissident Iranian agents to act against the ayatollahs’ regime, the Post reported at the time.
While the early 2026 war with Iran is viewed by many as a mixed bag, the June 2025 war was viewed as the most successful Israeli operation of the last three years, along with the exploding beepers used against Hezbollah.