The last Mossad station chief in Tehran dies at 92

Eliezer “Geizi” Tzafrir, a former senior official of the Shin Bet and Mossad who is best known for his role as the last Mossad station chief in Tehran during the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution, died this weekend at 92.

After his retirement, Tzafrir published several books about his service in places such as Kurdistan and Iran, and gave in-depth interviews to Israeli outlets, saying he had advised “senior figures” in Israel on Iran until recently. His later remarks gained renewed relevance amid ongoing protests in Iran, which some see as the start of a counter-revolution, and rising regional tensions, including US threats to intervene in the crisis.

For instance, in one of his most recent interviews for Zman in 2023, he prophesied Israel’s policy in the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June 2025, based on his conversations with these anonymous Israeli officials.

“I have the impression that Israel will bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities at some point. Assuming that happens, I think that the bombings must include not only nuclear facilities but also regime’s governmental targets. It is clear to me that this will greatly weaken the regime and allow the Iranian people to take over and seize power”, he told.

Over the years, Tzafrir consistently advocated for a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, stressing that the radical ideology of the Iranian regime will ultimately lead them to use the weapons against Israel. “They ask me at the highest levels, as one who knows Iran: if they have nuclear weapons, will they use this capability against us? I respond that they would. We are the chief target for Iran. [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, when he was president, prepared a gate in Qom for the coming of the Mahdi [an eschatological messianic figure]. There is an insanity there of extremism and hatred of Israel”, he said in a 2021 interview with the Jerusalem Post.

In a 2010 filmed interview by the charity Toldot Israel, he said that “the Iranians are clever people, but the Ayatollahs who rule Iran have a completely wacky perception about Israel and the West. It is clear today to all the intelligence community that they lead a decisive policy to achieve a nuclear bomb, while deceiving the West”. Tzafrir claimed Iran’s foreign policy is guided by khud’a — an Arabic loanword for strategic deception, used to buy time from a weaker position until leverage improves. “The US president Barack Obama fell for them from the sky [in this regard]”, he added, noting that Ayatollahs grasp the West as “a losing, rotten and impotent society, that won’t do anything [against them]. Unfortunately, they are partly right”.

In a 2022 interview with Makor Rishon, he highlighted that a regime change in Iran can only come from within. “After I returned to Israel [in 1979], I met with politicians and generals who had fled Iran, and I tried to understand whether a counter-revolution and restore of [the Israel-Iran] relations are possible. Our assessment, which holds to this day, is that only an internal uprising could bring about change. Every appointment of a new prime minister or president in Iran opens a tense period, and we witness the sight of hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets and shouting ‘down with the dictator’. The day will come, and it will be ripened into a coup”, Tzafrir claimed.

After the Woman Life Freedom protests in 2022, Tzafrir stressed that the regime is “very troubled” by the fact that the leaders of the protests were women. “This puts the ayatollahs in a very sensitive and problematic place… Removing the hijab has become a symbol of rebellion and it threatens something very fundamental at the roots of the revolution, the religious component”, he said to Zman.

In several interviews, Tzafrir, who was posted as Mossad Chief in Tehran only seven months before the beginning of the Islamic revolution, described the dramatic collapse of the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Before he arrived in Tehran, Mossad was already aware of “the bad underground currents” in Iran and estimated that the Shah’s regime might fall within a few years. As the revolution began and the mobs were targeting Israelis, Tzafrir managed to create a secret plan and evacuate all the 1,300 Israelis who lived and worked in Iran, that used to be one of Israel’s closest allies.

Shortly before the collapse of the Shah’s regime, Tzafrir was unusually summoned to meet Pahlavi himself. “The Shah was very direct: He asked me to have Israel eliminate Ruhollah Khomeini in Paris”, he said to Zman. Khomeini, the revolutionary cleric who eventually founded the Islamic Republic of Iran and served as its first supreme leader, was in exile in Iraq and later in France, from where he continues to fuel a revolution. Apparently, a French official came to Tehran to update the Shah that France would ‘look the other way’ if Iran decided to assassinate Khomeini.

“I passed the message on to the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv and pretty quickly I received a reply: ‘We are not the world’s police, and may blessings be upon the heads of the Iranians.’ Thus, with a sharp and short message, the matter was dropped from the agenda”, per Tzafrir.

In the 2010 interview, he reflected on it more intimately. “A friend once stopped me and asked: what does it mean, ‘we are not the world’s police’? If we could eliminate Hitler before he came to power, would we say that too? My jaw dropped, and I walked away without an answer. There is no doubt this is a regret for generations. I have no doubt we should not have done it, but there is no doubt the Iranians should have done the work”.

He also claimed that the Shah’s air force chief was ready to personally shoot down Khomeini’s plane when he returned from his exile, but once the Shah had left the country, no one could give such an order.

“In my book ‘Big Satan, Little Satan’, I have a short philosophical chapter about this: there are things in history that, if you do them, the world never knows what you have saved it from. Who would have known what a mess the world could have been spared? That is the wisdom of hindsight”.