The Secret Plan to Weaponize the Kurds (Part 2) - with Nadav Eyal

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0:17You are listening to an ARK Media podcast. It's a story of infatuation. The Israelis saw the 12-day war was so successful, and the Iranians were so defenseless. And then a few months later, Venezuela happens, and the U.S. is so successful. And then there were these demonstrations and this open rebellion in Iran against the regime during war with Israel. And suddenly, for Israel, this is a moment like no other. And concept says, look, this problem will never be solved with Iran until the regime falls. We have an opportunity like no other. And the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action.

1:01And these are words uttered by the prime minister to President Trump in the final brief. And it's the prime minister who handles this, pushes this. And I think that to a certain degree, the IDF, they did play along, but they didn't really believe that it's going to actually happen.

1:28It's 7.30 a.m. on Tuesday, August 4th in New York City. It's 2.30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 4th in Israel. On our previous episode of Call Me Back, we ran part one of this series. It was my conversation with Itai Engel, who spent a month with Kurdish fighters, from the guerrilla flags of northern Syria to the caves on the Iraq-Iran border, trying to understand the people Israel was counting on to help bring down the Islamic Republic. Itai left us with a portrait of fighters who felt used, then abandoned, then used again, and then abandoned again. No friends but the mountains, as the Kurdish saying goes.

2:06Today, we get the other side of that story, the view from inside the rooms where the plan was hatched and where it fell apart. based on an investigation by ARK Media contributor Nadav Eyal. Nadav's investigation reconstructed for the first time in this much detail what Israel's actual war aim was in Operation Roaring Lion, a war aim that was never officially made public. It involved a Mossad-recruited Ahmadinejad waiting in the wings, a 15 ,000-strong Kurdish force meant to swell to 200 ,000 marching on Tehran under Israeli air cover, flying the flag of the Shah, not the flag of Kurdistan, and a set of internal, quote, 10 commandments governing what that army could and could not do once it crossed the border.

2:56Then, according to Nadav's sourcing, it all came apart, not just because of Erdogan, but because the Mossad, the IDF, and Israel's own war cabinet cannot agree, even now, on what the plan actually was, whether anyone even objected to it or who is responsible for how it ended. Today, Nadav walks us through that failure and what it may have cost Israel going forward. My conversation with Nadav right after this message. As Israel heads towards the October 27th election, Call Me Back listeners know that the stakes could not be higher. Shifting political alliances, debates over religion and state, and competing visions for Israel's future are reshaping the national conversation.

3:42Join the Shalom Hartman Institute, home of the For Heaven's Sake podcast, on Tuesday, September 8th at 1 p.m. Eastern for the Road to the Israeli Elections, Understanding the Political Landscape. It's a virtual session. Hear from Tani Frank, Director of the Judaism and State Policy Center, in conversation with senior faculty member Masua Sagiv. They'll unpack the key issues, parties, and political forces driving this pivotal election. Register today for this timely virtual briefing and gain essential insight into one of the most consequential moments in Israeli politics at shalomhartman.org.

4:28Nadav, good to be with you. Good to be here again, Dan. So in your report, which was detailed in your newsletter, and I know you did a lot of the writing and reporting with sources on the ground in Israel, you wrote, and I quote here, the war aims of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published, close quote. And that, after talking to more than a dozen sources, you reconstructed it as roughly, and I quote here again, creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. So spell that out for us. What did that actually mean operationally? And why, I was just very struck by that, why was it never said publicly?

5:06Why did we never hear that? I think it's a great question why the Israeli public and the entire world didn't hear that war aim. Usually these war aims are public. So for instance, Israel's war in Gaza, the war aims were made public at the time, not in this case. And the reason, Dan, is mostly because it's the first time that the Israeli cabinet took a decision to try and topple a regime formally, and not only a regime, but the government, the totalitarian government, of a country with about 100 million people, very far away, thousands of kilometers away from Israel, a country that has a robust security establishment.

5:49And the Israelis, I think, knew that if they published this war aim, that could actually hinder the possibility of the plan being implemented. Now, the goal was to deeply degrade or remove the threats Iran poses to Israel by creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. And the reason I mentioned the first half of the sentence, to deeply degrade or remove the threats Iran poses to Israel, is because if you think about that first half of the sentence, you understand the conflict that ensued between the military, the Mossad, and the cabinet ministers. So it was never talked about.

6:32Fine. What does that actually mean? Was it never talked about with the administration? Oh, no, of course. The U.S. administration. The administration and the president got a full brief. And as far as the Israelis are concerned, and I want to underline that, as far as the Israelis are concerned, greenlighted the plan. And this was reported by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on The New York Times. The New York Times is also the media group that reported about the recruitment of Ahmadinejad and the Kurdish forces. This was out there, Dan, while the war was still going on and before the U.S. or Israel gave the stand down order to the Kurdish forces.

7:13So the U.S. and Israel were very much in deliberations as to this plan. Now, there's a big difference between what Israeli sources are saying as to the green light that they received from Washington, D.C. and what was reported in the U.S. As far as the Israeli sources are concerned, mainly Mossad sources, the president authorized the entire plan to topple the regime. This is how they see it. As far as the reporting in the U.S. is concerned, the Mossad plan was a part of the war. What I add in my reporting is that this was not part of the war. This was not a Mossad plan. This was the war as far as the Israeli cabinet was concerned.

7:56However, this is not how the Israeli military saw that. And these kind of discrepancies are maybe the reason that we are where we are today. Okay, that's kind of jarring. So in your newsletter, you report the Kurdish force started at roughly 15 ,000 fighters and was projected to swell to 150 ,000 to 200 ,000 marching in Tehran under Israeli air cover. And that Israel required them to follow a set of internal, what they called, Ten Commandments. And these commandments were against looting, against retribution, reprisals. So this, to me, would be illustrative of a lot of preparation. So how much preparation actually was there before anyone said go, before anyone pulled the trigger?

8:43So one needs to assume that the Mossad and Israel have some sort of connections with the Iraqi Kurds and the Kurds across the region for many years. There were books written about that. Itai Engel, my colleague, has just been on your show, Dan. I know Itai for many years. I admire his work. A master journalist, a dean of everything, of field reporting in Israel. And he risks his life for that. And he knows how the Kurds and Israel built this relationship for many, many years. It actually began right after the establishment of the state of Israel. And since then, there were security relations between the Kurds and between the Israelis.

9:25However, and I think this would surprise you, a senior associate of the prime minister has told me that, for instance, at the beginning of 2025, there was no actual idea as far as he was concerned. and this is a senior person, to deploy the Kurds in a war with Iran. So this has not been a plan that's been devised for like two or three years, which you would expect considering the enormous task here of toppling the Iranian regime. The truth is that the Israelis got convinced that the regime should and could fall basically after the June of 2025 war. It's then, after the 12-day war, that plans that were made but never were seen in actual terms as plausible were put into force.

10:15Before that, and it's part of my reporting, the IDF and most of the security establishment said that they don't think that trying to have a regime change in Iran is something that is reasonable for Israel to achieve, or even for Israel and the United States to achieve. Actually, the classic notion of the Mossad and the IDF and consecutive Israeli prime ministers were that Israel needs to slow down the nuclear project to create the diplomatic pressure on Iran to try to stop it through force or diplomatic means. But they didn't think it's plausible to expect that they could lead to the regime actually disintegrating.

10:59Okay, in part one of this conversation with Itai, he brought up the early January secret deal, early January 2026, between Israel, Syria, Turkey, and the U.S. to prioritize the Druze in southern Syria over the Kurds in northern Syria, which the Kurds, understandably, one could argue, interpreted as a betrayal. So considering how central the Kurds were to Israel's plans in Iran, why was there the sense that Israel sold them out? So as to the interpretation that Israel deserted the Kurds in Syria, the Israelis don't see it this way. It's not the way it's seen in Jerusalem. It's seen in Jerusalem as a decision that wasn't made by the Israelis.

11:45They wanted the Kurds to remain the force that they were in northern Syria, also because it's countering Turkey. So it was the Israeli interest. It wasn't a deal as far as the Israelis are concerned with the U.S. and other countries. They didn't make any deals there. They tried to safeguard the Kurds' position in Syria and they failed. But the Kurds, as you mentioned in your opening, Dan, have this notion that they're always being sold out in the Middle East, that they are the Middle East scapegoats and that they've been constantly betrayed by every party that they try to align themselves with.

12:22And the last example is, of course, Syria. It's the Kurds in northern Syria that held those prisons and fought against the Islamic State. And these prisons and prison camps in which Islamic State prisoners are held were held by the Kurds in northern Syria. So this was an essential part of what Israel saw as its interest to prevent regional terrorism. By the way, it was an interest not only for the Israelis, but also for the U.S. and the West. And when they complained, they complained in general about the West and complained about the United States and also about Israel. So here, the idea was, as far as the Kurdish forces were concerned, that the disintegration of the Islamic Republic might lead to a change also in the border between Iraq and Iran in the Kurdistan area there, where, as you know, Kurds have some sort of an autonomy in Iraq these days.

13:22But to begin with, I have to say that most experts around the world, when you speak to them about an invasion of Kurds that are Iraqi, actually, at least at the beginning, before they enter the country, in order to try and overthrow the Islamic Republic, it's sort of a non-brainer. And here we come to an amazing gap, Dan, between what experts around the world, real experts of Iran, people I really value their opinion, but also experts in the military intelligence of Israel think about the plausibility of such a plan and between what the Mossad actually said. The Mossad had a very different notion as to not only the Kurds, but also Ahmadinejad.

14:05It's just like day and night, black and white. And I, as a journalist, cannot reconcile between what the Mossad is saying is basically this is our field. We know Iran. We've worked Iran. We're conducting specific checks, tests. We feel the Iranian society. And we know what's plausible or less plausible more than the world's most renowned experts. Because it's our job to expand the horizons of possibilities. This is what the Mossad always does. it's always science fiction before the Mossad does it, right? So these words that I just uttered, Dan, were told to me by senior sources, trying to explain why they saw this as an extremely reasonable way.

14:52But I think, and this is a disclaimer that we need to remember, not all parts of the plan are published. I did not publish all parts of the plan. Israeli media cannot publish all parts of the plan, even if it knows about these parts. That's the truth of reporting in Israel. This plan had a multi-layered approach. There were steps around the way. So let's go to the first week of the war. We're talking late February, early March of this year. And there were reports that their Kurds were marching into Iran. Now, Itay, in our last conversation, his Kurdish contact said that the forces stayed put. No one was actually moving.

15:32There's this discrepancy. What did your sources say actually took place? So as far as all the sources concerned, the Kurds were ready to invade Iran and they were ready to do that in a 48 hours notice. By the way, the weapons that they had were weapons that some of them were transferred by the Israelis and they were taken from the Hezbollah front in Lebanon and transferred to the Kurds in Iraq so that they'll be able to have more ammunition when they invade Iran. and you can expect that you had probably assets on the ground, handlers by the Israelis. You had the Kurdish forces waiting for the order.

16:13First week of the war, the order never comes. That's the bottom line to your question there. The order never comes. Why? Well, it really depends. If you speak with sources close to the Mossad, they'll say it's because of the phone call that the president of Turkey made to President Trump, after which the president very clearly and openly said that the Kurds are not going to be part of this war. This is President Trump saying. And because of that, the entire plan fell apart. This is like the Mossad. But if you speak with other sources in Israel, what they're saying is that many other elements of the plan that needed to be implemented before the Kurds invaded didn't really happen.

16:55So the Mossad told the cabinet that certain things are going to happen. For instance, people in the streets at a certain point of time. And that didn't happen, too. The final blow was the fact that the Kurdish issue didn't happen because of the Erdogan involvement in it. Right. One of the key questions that one should ask is, knowing that President Erdogan is considered a friend, even a personal friend, of President Trump, and knowing what Erdogan thinks about the Kurds and about Kurd influence across the Middle East, one could ask, how was this not expected? Who should have handled this? Who should have made sure that this risk is being assessed?

17:36Was this even raised to the Israeli cabinet? The possibility that the Americans would say, you know what? No, we don't want to do that. And if that is the case, then the goal of the war to create the condition for regime change is unanswered. And I don't have good answers to the questions I just asked. I'm raising those questions. Okay, but Nadav, I will tell you in my circles, the go-to explanation for why the Kurdish plan didn't happen is Erdogan. Everyone I talk to, government officials, people who were involved from outside the government or outside of a formal role in the government, even in the media, the go-to is Erdogan.

18:16Erdogan, why didn't the Kurd operation happen? Erdogan. No, I completely agree. That's the reason the Kurdish element didn't happen. But the question is, were there other elements, Dan, that were, I don't want to say as important, but very important, that didn't take place on the ground in the field in Iran to the regime, maybe by the regime, before the stand down order was given by the Israelis or by the Americans to the Kurds? But there's this sense, though, that Erdogan could exercise that veto at any time. So did Israel just like not plan around that, that possibility that Erdogan had this option?

18:52So I think that that's exactly the point. I really have spoken with many people and senior people involved in this story. No, I didn't hear from anyone that was part of these deliberations and answer a good answer to my question, which was exactly your question, Dan. Did you ever consider that considering Turkey's influence in Washington, D.C. these days, and it definitely has influence in D.C., and again, President Trump has personal relations with President Erdogan, which, to the credit of the president, of the U.S. president, also assisted in getting the hostage deal and getting Hamas to agree to the hostage deal, something nobody imagined will happen.

19:31Did you imagine, envision that he's just going to pick up the phone and say, you know what, I'm not going to allow this and convince President Trump. And we know this could happen. And again, the answer is that as far as I know, it was never raised. However, and that's to your question, the Israeli military intelligence, Amman, said that they cannot vouch for a continuous support by partners. They didn't say the United States, by partners to this plan. So here we go into, some could say that this is a blame game. It is, to a certain degree, within the Israeli intelligence community. But for me, and I think for the purposes of this conversation, it's just a factual debate.

20:16What the Israeli military intelligence that isn't the Mossad, right, they are two different bodies, they warned the Israeli cabinet, the ministers, and the Mossad, both as to the Kurds and the plausibility of the Kurds leading to a toppling of the regime as an invasion to begin with. It was the opinion within the military intelligence that you don't use Iraqi Kurds or Kurds at all if you want to strike down the Islamic Republic regime, that it's an impossibility to some degree. They didn't use the word an impossibility, but they used very pessimistic notions in that regard, and that they don't completely understand that partners, they didn't write the US, will be completely on board.

20:59Here I come to a very interesting intersection in which imagine that you're sitting with an extremely relevant sources to the story and you're just being told factually completely different images of the truth. So one side, the side of the Mossad and the ministers of cabinet, says, we heard no warnings. There were no warnings. We were all on board, including the IDF, the military intelligence. They were all on board. And the other side is saying, and that's the side of the IDF and the military intelligence. They're saying, well, that's not true. And we have this in writing. They won't give these reports.

21:40These are secret reports. But I'll give you one example for that report. And that is that the Israeli military intelligence research division warned that if this fails, it could lead Iran to break for a boom because they will see no other choice to safeguard the regime. That's an incredibly powerful warning since we know now that intelligence services in the West now are saying that Mujtaba Khamenei, the new leader of Iran, might be indeed considering breaking for a boom. We'll be right back. Some buildings witness history. Others hold it within their walls. While restoring a 1934 landmark on Hayarra Kunt Street in Tel Aviv, workers discovered a poster sealed behind the plaster.

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23:40And we're back with Nadav Ayal. Now, the Mossad says the IDF never objected to the Kurdish plan. The IDF says it documented every warning in writing. Ministers said they heard nothing. So how do we interpret what's accurate here and whose version is accurate? Well, as they say in Hebrew, that failure is always an orphan. They say it in English, too. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan. Yeah, so this is difficult in terms of decision making. Look, first of all, the Mossad really proved here an amazing success in the recruiting of an asset like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former president of the Islamic Republic, in its penetration into Iran on many different levels.

24:24And nobody can deny that this success also was partly responsible for the success in the 12-day war on the one hand. On the other hand, much of that success, I need to say, is actually to the credit of the military intelligence. And what's really happening here is that there is a possibility that all of these warnings were given, but they were given in forums of the prime minister, not the forums of what we call the small cabinet meetings or the cabinet meetings. And they were either diluted, reduced or not given powerfully enough. What I mean is there is a difference between saying these are the warnings and between climbing on a chair and shouting in the middle of the room and saying don't do that.

25:13And that difference is material. And I want to bring that example because I saw the difference between this and between the meeting that was held in the White House, again, according to the Swan Haberman reporting, right after the presentation given by the Mossad director, Barnea. And according to that reporting that I don't think was ever denied, Marco Rubio, for instance, said it was bullshit. He said that about the Israeli plan to topple the regime. and the head of the CIA said something in a similar line. Now, this is how you speak if you want to get your message actually there. So did the IDF just play along?

25:55And here we go to a very, I think, fascinating aspect of the entire story. When you speak with the IDF, and I spoke with the IDF during the war, from the beginning of the war, so this is not retroactive reporting, they told me we don't know how to topple the regime so they knew that the goal was to create the conditions for the fall of the regime but they said from the beginning of the war and this was almost an official briefing we don't know how to topple the regime it's not our brief talk to the what we do know is to degrade their ballistic abilities to hit their military industries to jeopardize their nuclear project, and this is what we're going to do.

26:37If you talk with these sources, with these military sources, they are still saying that the effort to take out the regime was actually not as material as for them the effort to take out military abilities of the Islamic Republic. That's the amazing thing here. The Mossad saw this, and the cabinet saw this as the center of what Israel is trying to do, The IDF basically said, and now I'm improvising that, but stay with me for just one second. I think the IDF said, look, we don't know how to topple the regime and we don't really believe in this plan. The military intelligence didn't believe this plan.

27:16This chief of staff didn't believe you can topple the regime. The previous chief of staff also argued with the prime minister that the regime cannot be toppled by Israel. But we do need to take out some of their military abilities significantly. And if we can do this with the U.S., let's do that with the U.S. And if at the end of the day, the regime actually falls apart, great. But if it doesn't fall apart, at least we took a significant part of the threatening abilities of Iran. And it sounds like it makes sense, right? But when you go to war like that, it really doesn't. So you report that while the Mossad chief, David Barnea, who was Mossad chief at the time, that he personally met with Ahmadinejad in Budapest to sort of develop him as an alternative power center inside Iran.

28:06You write, and I'm quoting here from your piece, foreign parties made sure the details of the Israeli plan leaked, including the Mossad asset, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is in your piece. Now, that's not like a minor slip, a minor leak. What do you think the motivations were behind that leak? The way I know the Israeli establishment, people speak, people brief all the time. But in Israel, people are signatory to specific notions of keeping specific secrets. There is a mechanism there to prevent leakage of Israel's most important secrets. And the recruitment of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad definitely falls within that.

28:48for people in Israel that are part of the security establishment, to expose a Mossad agent is something that you go to jail for for the rest of your life. And knowing what I know about the Israelis, the chances that it leaked from Israel are limited. I remind you that the Kurd invasion was first reported abroad in the U.S. and Ahmadinejad was first reported abroad. But if you leak other countries' secrets, it's not your own state secret. But in general, the assessment in Israel is that this leaked from those who want to make sure that Israel cannot reproduce these kind of presumptuous, as far as they are concerned, plans.

29:32I did want to write that the assessment in Israel is that it leaked from foreign sources and not from the security establishment. Not that the security establishment in Israel doesn't talk and brief and everything, as you can hear from this entire episode, they do. Right, of course, of course. From my experience, people won't risk like their entire life and freedom exposing a Mossad agent. The Mossad says Ahmadinejad is a great asset. He's a wonderful asset. You don't understand what kind of asset he is. Right. The Israeli military intelligence says, well, not so much. And of course, we don't know if Ahmadinejad is going to survive this.

30:09You mentioned military intelligence warned that a failed regime change attempt could push Iran toward a nuclear weapon, sort of like what you're talking about earlier in this conversation, that they may rush to nuclear breakout. If that's true, what does that tell us about the moment we're in? It's an extremely perilous moment. And the Iranians suspect that this is a moment of weakness for the US. They have seen, if we're bringing this back to the news this week, all of this talk about the possibility of another American strike, then the president deciding not to strike and to opt for negotiations.

30:44They're denying any negotiations right now. and at the same time they're extremely silent. The new leader could have said, look, we're not going to go for a bomb because there is a fatwa by Khomeini. We accept the fatwa, the Islamic edict that you can't develop nuclear weapons, that it's not non-Islamic. The previous leader, his father, accepted that and he took it seriously, according to intelligence sources. It wasn't only about ability, it was about his religious view of the world or his strategic notion. I don't know what his motivations are. He definitely wanted to destroy Israel, right? But maybe he wanted to do this in conventional means.

31:25At any rate, right now, there is a moment of change in Iran. That moment of change began with a previous leader, Hamid Naif, the father. I reported that at the time, that there are voices in Iran trying to push him to go to a breakout. There was a lot of argument within intelligence communities around the world. Did they start developing stuff without him knowing? Did he know some of the things that they were doing to begin with? Did they want deniability vis-a-vis the hierarchy of power in Iran? What was actually happening there? But now we have a new leader. His father was killed by Israel. His family was killed by Israel.

32:08They see President Trump is responsible. They are calling openly for the assassination of the president. and of course the assassination of multiple Israeli leaders. And because of that, there is definitely an opening there for the Iranians trying something. Western intelligence services think that they have a good grasp of where the enriched uranium is, and they don't believe that they'll be able to do so in the near future without having some sort of signals emerging from Iran. But as Don Ramsall once said, it's not in this case unknown unknowns, but the unknown gnomes that we need to worry about.

32:46So you closed your piece, Nadav, by saying that Israel's National Security Council doesn't function. And you're just trying to understand where all these breakdowns were. The Defense Ministry's bureau, its decision-making body, is, quote, paralyzed. And that there's not an independent functioning staff around the prime minister. That would normally, I guess, be the National Security Council staff. So given everything you've just told us, The Kurds burned twice, the Mossad and IDF still contradicting each other, the broken processes. What happens the next time Israel decides it wants to finish the job, if it does, in Iran?

33:22First of all, I don't think that toppling the regime is something that is on the table right now as part of the previous plan. Israel still hopes that the regime will be overthrown. Israel still has assets and means it did not deploy because as far as the Mossad and also the IDF were concerned, the plan was stopped in its tracks. And I want to say this when we're ending. This is the speech for the defense. What the Israelis would say is, you cannot say if this failed because you didn't allow us to try. And I want to bring that message because to some degree, it's true. A material part of the plan was that Kurd invasion.

34:04Another part of a consecutive plan was to attack national infrastructure in Iran. Both were basically stopped, as far as the Israelis are concerned, by the U.S. I think, as far as the U.S. is concerned, maybe from good reasons. But the Mossad would say to you, Dan, look, don't judge us for a plan we didn't try to implement. Judge us if we would have tried to implement it and it would have failed. And they are also saying across the spectrum, not only the Mossad, but the entire intelligence community, the situation in Iran is dire. The Islamic Republic is defunct. People are miserable. Our expectancy wasn't that the regime would fall in a day because the Islamic revolution didn't happen in a day.

34:46It didn't even happen in a year. The cabinet ministers were told it's going to be between a year and three years. So let's talk in three years time. after they measured the hundreds of billions of dollars that they lost. I'm saying this because it's part of the reporting. I think that part of the reporting was only the exotic elements, right? Ahmadinejad and the Kurds. There were many, many other layers that were supposed to happen. There's a question as to the internet connections, for instance. If you want to have a revolution, you need to have complete internet connection across Iran. But to the question right now, the problem here is in order to change or topple kings, you need to understand kingdoms.

35:28The Israelis are master tacticians, really amazing operations with the Mossad. But changing a regime of a country of this size, President Kennedy failed in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. This was a superpower. This was attempted by the CIA in so many places around the world. And this usually did not succeed. And the Israeli military intelligence did look at these examples and probably brought these examples. So the thing is, how do you actually produce strategy? And one of the things that we're exposed to here is a deep crisis of decision making. People that should have been involved, that could have been given amazing insight.

36:12For instance, the foreign ministry in Israel. The foreign ministry in Israel has very good, experienced people that understand Turkey, understand the Kurds, understand the relationship between Erdogan and President Trump. They were never involved. So cabinet ministers responsible for transportation heard about this before officials in the foreign ministry because nobody thinks that the foreign ministry means anything in Israel these days. So if you want to do that, you need the entire system to be up to date in that. And here you had an operation that the IDF that is usually the body in Israel that does plan strategically, the IDF wasn't completely on board.

36:54And I think that shows. It's the IDF that has this strategic mind usually. And in this case, they didn't really believe in this. And again, we see the results, but we also need to say that the jury is still out as to what's going to happen in Iran. Yeah, I do accept that these things are very hard to predict when a regime falls and that with sustained pressure, you do know the pressure presumably makes the possibility of a regime falling for a variety of reasons higher, more likely. But predicting the timing, the when, what it takes from here to there is impossible. I mean, not impossible, very difficult.

37:31It's a story of infatuation. The Israelis saw the 12-day war was so successful and the Iranians were so defenseless. And then a few months later, Venezuela happens and the U.S. is so successful. And then there were these demonstrations and this open rebellion in Iran against the regime during war with Israel. And suddenly for Israel, this is a moment like no other. And there is one person that we didn't even name in this conversation that is responsible for the strategy, for the concept. And the concept says, look, this problem will never be solved with Iran until the regime falls. And we have an opportunity like no other.

38:14and the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. And these are words uttered by the prime minister to President Trump in the final brief. And it's the prime minister who handles this, who pushes this. And I think that to a certain degree, the IDF needs to sort of play along. And they did play along, but they didn't really believe that it's going to actually happen. Yeah. Okay, Nadav, we will leave it there. Thanks for doing this. Thank you, Dan.

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