Western and Zionist reports are attempting to reconstruct future warfare as a story of ordinary individuals and covert operations; yet what has actually unfolded on the ground is the tightening of security rings and the end of the operational viability of infiltration networks.
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A recent Wall Street Journal report titled “Local Spies with Deadly Equipment: How Israel and Ukraine Reinvented Covert Operations” appears, on the surface, to be a journalistic narrative of developments on contemporary battlefields. At a deeper level, however, it should be assessed as part of a multilayered and targeted cognitive operation. This report was produced not merely to inform, but to redefine the nature of war, normalize covert operations, and transmit encoded security messages to specific audiences—including the Iranian audience.
Redefining Modern War: Shifting the Battlefield into Society
At the media level, the Wall Street Journal seeks to present a new image of twenty-first-century warfare—one in which:
the main actors are not necessarily conventional military forces,
low-cost, precise, and accessible technologies replace heavy military systems,
and the “target society” itself becomes part of the battlefield.
The use of story-driven narratives, non-military and “non-heroic” characters, and a focus on small yet impactful operations is a deliberate effort to remove sabotage, targeted assassinations, and intelligence penetration from an exceptional status and transform them into a natural model of modern warfare. Within this framework, covert violence is portrayed not only as legitimate, but as “smart,” “low-cost,” and even “more humanitarian” than conventional war.
The Israeli Function of the Narrative: Soft Deterrence and Perceptual Erosion
From a strategic perspective, this report effectively serves Israel’s intelligence and security apparatus and the regime’s soft deterrence strategy. The repeated emphasis on local agents, ordinary individuals, minorities, or marginal actors conveys a key message: the security threat against Iran is not necessarily external; insecurity can be generated from within society itself.
Rather than highlighting Israel’s hard power, this narrative targets perception and psychology—creating a sense of control, invulnerability, and security confidence on one side, while increasing Iran’s cognitive security costs and fostering the perception that social and security structures are potentially penetrable and exploitable.
The American Objective: Normalizing Intelligence Operations Instead of Diplomacy
For American and Western audiences, the report serves a broader function: normalizing and legitimizing intelligence operations as a substitute for diplomacy, and promoting the superiority of an American–Zionist intelligence-security paradigm. In this framework, assassination, sabotage, and infiltration are portrayed:
not as violations of state sovereignty,
but as tools of “crisis management,”
and even as support for “dissenting societies.”
This analytical framing aligns the Zionist regime’s terrorist actions with the logic of U.S. security institutions—institutions that, instead of pursuing political agreements with Iran, focus on intelligence pressure, covert operations, and the gradual erosion of national power.
Israel–Ukraine Comparison: Geopolitical Legitimation
Placing Israel and Ukraine within a single analytical frame is a fully deliberate choice. This comparison constructs a binary in which:
Israel and Ukraine are depicted as “defensive, technological, and victimized” actors,
while Iran and Russia are framed as “large yet vulnerable” powers.
This narrative both reinforces Western public support for Ukraine and renders covert and sabotage operations deep inside Russian territory or against Iran morally and politically justifiable.
A Direct Signal to the “Potential Spy”
The most important message of the report lies not in the technical details of operations, but in the signal sent to individuals predisposed to espionage within the target society. By highlighting the role of ordinary individuals, the Wall Street Journal conveys the notion that:
espionage and security cooperation are accessible and low-cost,
and that a local agent can play a decisive role.
From this perspective, the report is part of the narrative battlefield of the new security order—a battlefield in which media outlets have assumed a function equivalent to operational tools.
Strategic Conclusion: The Realities on the Ground in the Intelligence and Security War
Despite the report’s deliberate effort to promote the notion of “structural penetrability” within the security system of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its implicit message in fact reflects disruptions within espionage networks and the growing difficulty of enemy operational access. Field data, operational trends, and accumulated evidence over recent years—particularly in recent months—point to the emergence of an inverse and stabilizing trajectory.
Iran’s intelligence and security structure has not only reached a high level of maturity and operational cohesion in counterintelligence and in identifying and dismantling infiltration networks, but has also, through layered threat control, preemptive intelligence dominance, and active penetration of the enemy’s decision-making cycle, systematically redefined the security equation to the adversary’s disadvantage and significantly constrained the enemy’s operational maneuverability.
The intensification of multi-level surveillance, enhanced institutional synergy among intelligence bodies, and the implementation of a policy of “raising the cost of security cooperation with the enemy” have rendered the operational environment of susceptible or activated agents severely restricted, fragile, and high-risk. In this framework, any attempt at espionage, sabotage, or covert collaboration with the enemy is no longer a low-cost or manageable act, but a high-risk move with certain and irreversible consequences—such that its security cost has risen to the threshold of complete operational destruction.
At the same time, the expansion of infiltration and intelligence dominance deep within the occupied territories indicates Iran’s transition from a purely defensive posture to a stage of active intelligence deterrence—one in which the opposing side is compelled to bear escalating costs to protect its security infrastructure, human assets, and social capital.
As a result, the real strategic message for the Iranian audience is clear:
Future wars will be hybrid, networked, and multilayered in nature;
society, public opinion, and narrative are as important as the military battlefield;
yet simultaneously, the rise in intelligence oversight and the tightening of internal security rings have transformed any covert cooperation with the enemy into an inherently “self-destructive” act—one in which the local agent is eliminated, while the enemy gains nothing more than short-lived propaganda value rather than sustainable strategic achievement.
Ultimately, real power is defined not by media propaganda nor by exaggerated Western–Zionist narratives, but by social cohesion, mutual trust between society and governance, and perceptual superiority rooted in national identity—factors that have played a decisive role in neutralizing enemy objectives and consolidating deterrence, including during the recent twelve-day war experience.
