Intelligence services are trained to detect threats before they materialize: a missile being moved, a terrorist cell being activated, a clandestine nuclear facility taking shape. But history occasionally presents them with a harder problem—the slow disintegration of a political order.
Regimes rarely send advance notice of their collapse. Their ministries continue to function, generals continue to salute and diplomats continue to negotiate, until institutions that appeared permanent suddenly prove hollow. For the CIA and Mossad, this may become the defining intelligence question in Iran: not whether the Islamic Republic can survive another month of war, but whether the West understands what could follow if it cannot.
Six months of war have exposed an extraordinary ambiguity at the summit of the Iranian state. Mojtaba Khamenei remains largely removed from public scrutiny, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and security establishment exercise immense military, political and economic power. Iran increasingly resembles a system in which clerical authority provides ideological legitimacy while armed institutions provide the machinery of survival.
Add economic exhaustion, sanctions, internal repression and a society with a long memory of revolt, and the danger is no longer confined to the battlefield. The Islamic Republic may survive these pressures. Intelligence planning, however, exists precisely because governments cannot afford to prepare only for the outcome they consider most convenient.
Discussion of the country’s democratic future cannot be separated from discussion of its future security institutions.
The CIA should remember 1979 particularly well. Washington’s failure then was not simply that American intelligence misread Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or underestimated the revolutionary movement. It was a larger failure of political imagination: The United States did not adequately comprehend the institutional rupture that was about to transform one of the Middle East’s oldest states. Nearly half a century later, another failure of imagination would be to assume that the only alternatives are the survival of the Islamic Republic or uncontrollable chaos after it.
The danger in regime collapse is not confined to who occupies the presidential palace the following morning. Modern states are held together by institutions that rarely appear on television: intelligence services, counterterrorism units, border security, police, military commands, communications networks and the bureaucracies that protect critical infrastructure. When authoritarian systems disintegrate, those institutions can fragment with them. Weapons disappear. Archives are destroyed or stolen. Intelligence officers defect. Foreign services recruit abandoned assets. Militias rush into spaces vacated by the state. Terrorist organizations discover opportunities that did not exist the previous week.
Iran would present this danger on an enormous scale. It is a country of roughly 90 million people, positioned between the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Indian subcontinent, with sensitive military infrastructure and decades of accumulated intelligence networks. A political transition that preserves the Iranian state could open the door to regional stability. A security vacuum could produce precisely the opposite.
That is why discussion of Iran’s democratic future cannot be separated from discussion of its future security institutions. Elections matter. Civil liberties matter. Civilian government matters. But no democratic transition survives for long if the state cannot protect its borders, prevent terrorism, counter foreign penetration and maintain basic internal security. Democracy without the rule of law becomes vulnerable; security without the rule of law becomes another dictatorship. A post-Islamic Republic Iran would need both.
The CIA
This brings us to SAVAK, a patriotic name burdened by history and therefore requiring precision rather than nostalgia. The answer is not simply to resurrect the nationalistic organization that existed before 1979. Intelligence institutions cannot be preserved in amber for half a century and then restored unchanged. But neither should Iran discard every element of institutional memory associated with its pre-revolutionary security tradition.
The serious question is how a future Iranian government could construct a professional national intelligence service capable of counterterrorism and counterintelligence while remaining subordinate to law, civilian authority and constitutional oversight.
Such an institution cannot be invented on the morning after regime collapse. A dictatorship can fall in a week; a professional intelligence service capable of protecting the state without becoming the state takes years to build. The intellectual work therefore must precede the political transition—doctrines of civilian control, legal boundaries, institutional accountability, protection of archives, professional standards and mechanisms preventing intelligence power from again becoming an instrument of political repression.
This is where future cooperation with the United States and Israel could matter.
The CIA and Mossad possess decades of institutional experience in counterterrorism, counterintelligence and the protection of democratic states against external threats. Their appropriate role would not be to manufacture an Iranian secret police or choose the leadership of a future Iran. That would reproduce precisely the foreign interference that Iranians should reject. The strategic objective should instead be to recognize that legitimate security-sector reconstruction will be one of the central challenges facing any future Iranian government and that trusted international partnerships may eventually help professionalize institutions operating under Iranian law and democratic authority.
The distinction between preparing for transition and engineering it is essential. Iran’s next political order belongs to Iranians. Whether they choose a republic, a constitutional monarchy or another democratic arrangement must be decided through a legitimate national process. Foreign intelligence services should not determine that verdict. But they cannot afford ignorance about the political and institutional landscape from which that verdict will emerge.
Nor should every organization claiming to oppose the Islamic Republic automatically be treated as a credible partner. Intelligence analysis must distinguish democratic Iranian nationalism from Islamism, authoritarian Marxism, sectarian politics and separatist movements whose visions for the country differ fundamentally. It must understand which actors possess genuine constituencies, which accept Iran’s territorial integrity, which accept democratic civilian authority and which merely see regime collapse as an opportunity to capture a fragment of power. Those are intelligence questions long before they become diplomatic ones.
The central lesson of 1979 is therefore not that Washington should choose Iran’s future more intelligently next time. It is exactly the opposite. Washington should understand Iran well enough that it does not need to improvise when Iranians begin choosing that future themselves.
The Mossad
For the Mossad, the stakes are equally profound. Israel has spent decades confronting the Islamic Republic’s proxy networks, intelligence operations and military capabilities. Yet the strategic objective cannot simply be the perpetual weakening of an adversary. A stable Iran that no longer defines itself through revolutionary hostility would fundamentally alter the security architecture of the Middle East.
The question is whether Israel and the United States are intellectually prepared for that possibility—or whether their institutions have become so accustomed to managing the Islamic Republic that they have forgotten to imagine the region without it.
The greatest intelligence failures are not always failures to discover secrets. Sometimes, all the information is visible, yet governments remain imprisoned by assumptions built during an earlier age. Iran in 1978 offered warnings that were understood too late. Iran today may be offering a different set of warnings.
The CIA and Mossad should not decide when the Islamic Republic falls, who replaces it or what constitution Iranians eventually choose. But they should understand one hard truth before the moment arrives: The collapse of a regime does not automatically produce the security of a nation.
Iran’s political future belongs to its people. Protecting that future will require institutions capable of defending the state without owning it. Building such institutions takes law, legitimacy, professional culture, international cooperation, and, above all, time. The day Tehran starts to fall will be too late to begin thinking about the morning after.
