Former Mossad chief says agency released fake operation footage to trigger mass arrests in Iran

• Former Mossad chief David Barnea says the agency deliberately released footage of a covert operation in Iran during the June 2025 conflict to overwhelm Iranian counterintelligence.
• Barnea claims Iranian authorities arrested 21,000 people during the operation, while some individuals executed on accusations of spying for 'Israel' had no links to Mossad.

Former Mossad chief David Barnea has revealed that the agency deliberately publicized footage of its covert operations inside Iran during the June 2025 war to trigger mass arrests and protect its agents from detection, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Barnea made the remarks during a closed-door session at the Priority Summit, with excerpts from his comments subsequently reported by Israeli media.

He said the Mossad released an official video bearing its logo on the morning of Operation Rising Lion, the military campaign launched by 'Israel' against Iran on June 13, 2025.

"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.

"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," he added.

According to Barnea, Iranian authorities arrested 21,000 people on the second day of the fighting. He argued that the large-scale arrests overwhelmed Iranian security services and made it difficult to identify actual intelligence operatives among those detained.

He claimed that authorities eventually released the detainees because they could not distinguish genuine agents from ordinary citizens.

The figure of 21,000 arrests and Barnea's account of the subsequent releases could not be independently verified.

Barnea also acknowledged that some people executed in Iran on accusations of spying for 'Israel' had never worked for the Mossad or any other intelligence agency.

"Some of the people being hanged in Iran on accusations of being Mossad agents, I have to ask who they are. They tell me, 'Listen, we don't know either,'" he said.

He described them as people who had been wrongly identified as intelligence operatives, adding that they had no connection to the Mossad.

Barnea also claimed that nearly all the agency's operatives involved in the June 2025 operation escaped detection.

The disclosures offer an account of the intelligence strategy behind the Mossad's unusually public release of operational footage during the conflict.