JERUSALEM: While Israeli fighter jets bomb targets across Iran, the country's Mossad spy agency has stepped up efforts to reach ordinary Iranians, in a push to identify people willing to help bring down the Islamic republic.
Israel and the United States launched a massive attack against Iran on February 28, killing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and igniting a regional war that has seen Tehran launch missiles and drones at Gulf countries and Israel.
Israel's intelligence prowess has proven instrumental in this war, with its military hunting down other key figures in the Iranian leadership over recent days.
While pounding the country alongside the US, Israeli leaders have repeatedly addressed the Iranian people, who just weeks before the war erupted had come together in a huge protest movement that authorities quelled with a brutal crackdown.
On December 24, weeks before the war began, a new Persian-language Mossad channel appeared on Telegram.
A link to the channel appears on the agency's official website, confirming its authenticity, alongside links to recruitment accounts on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn in Hebrew, English and Arabic.
A pinned message reads in Persian: "Welcome! If you have made it here, you probably want to get in touch with us. We are pleased about that. There is a good chance we can work together and achieve our common goals."
The message is followed by step-by-step instructions on how Iranians can safely contact the agency, via a Telegram post or Mossad's website.
Israel is also looking for assets elsewhere, with planes dropping propaganda leaflets over Lebanon during its war with Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran. Leaflet drops for asset recruitment and propaganda warfare has also been used in Gaza.
'Narrator of the truth'
Mossad's channel, which has around 48,000 subscribers, posted a message on March 6 encouraging Iranians to send intelligence information from inside the country. "Keep sending your field reports. You are the narrator of the truth. We will continue until victory!" it said.
The outreach is part of a longstanding strategy by the spy agency, according to experts. "They have been doing that kind of work for decades, according to the tools and technology that are available," Yossi Melman, an Israeli commentator on intelligence affairs, told AFP.
He said that in past decades, the agency allegedly financed publications and radio stations in enemy countries -- just like spy agencies elsewhere. "Mossad did not invent the wheel. The CIA has been doing it for years," Melman said.
About six months before the launch of the official Telegram channel, an account called "Mossad Farsi" appeared on X, though it lacked the hallmarks of an authentic account. It began posting on June 25, immediately after last year's Iran-Israel war ended.
Since then, the account has amassed more than 60,000 followers.
Its earliest posts featured a series of videos by Menashe Amir, a prominent Israeli radio broadcaster born in Tehran, who has spent more than six decades transmitting in Persian to audiences in Iran as part of Israel's outreach efforts.
In the initial videos, Amir pledged that Mossad would provide Iranian citizens with "every possible form of assistance."
Speaking to AFP, Amir confirmed that the intelligence agency operated the account. "The first (video) message that they published with me got 2.2 million views," he said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, which oversees Mossad, did not respond to a question from AFP on whether the spy agency was actually behind the account, though Israeli media regularly refer to it as official.
'King without a kingdom'
Since it was created, the account has fired off sarcastic broadsides at Iran's leaders, but also posted a wide range of other content.
That has included an offer for sick Iranians to consult Israeli medical specialists online, a cryptic sequence of numbers with no clear explanation, and even a poll asking who should lead Iran in order to solve its chronic water crisis.
The account took on a more urgent tone when mass protests erupted across Iran in late December. "Go out into the streets together. The time has come. We are with you," read a December 29 message from the account. "Not just from a distance or through words. We are also with you on the ground."
Days after Israel killed supreme leader Khamenei, his son Mojtaba was appointed to succeed him, and the Mossad Farsi account was quick to comment. "The clerical regime collapsed, and the prince turned into a king without a kingdom or future," it quipped.