For outsiders watching Iran from afar, the question always sounds the same: Why hasn’t the regime fallen yet?

The protests are real. The anger is real. The brutality is undeniable. And yet the regime survives — not because it’s strong, but because it is methodical, patient, and ruthless in ways democracies often underestimate.

On a special episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, former CIA Iranian targets officer Reuel Marc Gerecht explained why regime change in Iran is possible — and why anyone expecting a quick collapse is misunderstanding how power actually works inside the Islamic Republic.

This isn’t a story about speeches or slogans. It’s a story about time, fear, and control.

What an “Iranian Targets Officer” Actually Does

When Gerecht says he spent years as an Iranian targets officer for the CIA, he’s not talking about abstract analysis or desk work.

His job was operational.

He overwhelmingly focused on identifying Iranians overseas who had access to valuable information — and attempting to recruit them to return to Iran as intelligence assets. That is the slow, high-risk work of espionage: finding people, building trust, and hoping they survive long enough to matter.

It’s also why regime change doesn’t happen on demand.

“You can’t turn this on like a light switch,” Gerecht explained.

Why There Has Never Been a U.S. Regime-Change Program for Iran

Despite decades of hostility, Gerecht noted that the United States has never formally launched a regime-change program for Iran.

Doing so would require:

  • Presidential authorization

  • Buy-in from intelligence committees

  • Years of planning

  • Acceptance that mistakes are inevitable

And most importantly — patience.

Israel, by contrast, has long run covert operations against Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Only recently, according to Gerecht, has Mossad begun developing a regime-change effort — and even that is in its infancy.

The reason is simple: covert action is frustrating, slow, and impossible to evaluate in real time.

You don’t know what worked until years later.

The Cold War Lesson Washington Keeps Forgetting

Gerecht pointed to Cold War-era CIA programs — including clandestine book and magazine publishing in Poland — that seemed ineffective at the time.

In 1980, the agency nearly shut them down.

Only in hindsight did officials realize how powerful those efforts had been in weakening communist control and shaping resistance movements.

Iran is no different.

Success cannot be measured week to week. It can only be assessed retrospectively — long after the hardest decisions have already been made.

What the U.S. Can Do Right Now

Absent military intervention, Gerecht outlined practical steps the United States could take immediately to support the Iranian people:

  • Distribute secure communication tools

  • Disrupt regime communications through cyber capabilities

  • Help Iranians evade surveillance

  • Quietly develop opposition networks

None of this is flashy. None of it guarantees success. But it creates space — and space is what authoritarian regimes fear most.

Why the Regime’s Killings Are So Strategic

One of the most chilling moments of the conversation came when Sam Stone connected Gerecht’s analysis to reports from earlier in the episode: thousands of Iranians eliminated in a matter of days.

That brutality isn’t random.

It’s targeted.

The regime excels at identifying individuals with charisma, leadership potential, and organizing ability — and neutralizing them before they can form networks.

Iran’s opposition is large.

But it is deliberately kept leaderless.

“Yes,” Gerecht said. Those eliminations have likely removed many of the people who could have pushed the movement forward.

The Reality No One Wants to Admit

Regime change in Iran won’t come from a single protest wave, a viral video, or a dramatic announcement.

It will come — if it comes at all — through years of quiet pressure, failed attempts, partial successes, and unseen sacrifices.

The tragedy unfolding in Iran today isn’t just the brutality of the regime.

It’s the world’s impatience — and its unwillingness to commit to the kind of long fight real change requires.

Transcript

Sam Stone: Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. Continuing on now with our Iranian special, our next guest up, Reuel Marc Gerecht, is a former Iranian targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, a resident scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, previously a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of the Middle East Initiative at the Project for the New American Century. Reuel, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the program.

Reuel Marc Gerecht: My pleasure.

Chuck Warren: Reuel, so tell our audience what exactly you being a former Iranian targets officer for the CIA entails. What does that job do that you can tell publicly?

Reuel Marc Gerecht: Well I mean the director of operations uh... you know has different targets. You can have a Russian targets officer. In my case I overwhelmingly spent my time going after Iranians overseas who might have valuable information and attempting to recruit them and send them back into Iran so they would be spies.

Essentially that’s what an Iranian targets officer does in the central intelligence agencies. There’s a variety of ways you do that but in a nutshell that’s what that’s what espionage for for Iranian is about.

Chuck Warren: So that being said, what can the United States and Israel do, know, via clandestine maneuvers to help facilitate regime change in Iran right now? Is there anything we can really do?

Reuel Marc Gerecht: Well I think the answer to that is yes but it takes a while to get those things up and running. To my knowledge the agency has never had a regime change program for Iran. That would require you know the president and the intelligence committees in the house and senate to be of one mind and to develop that that program it takes a lot of time.

You have to expect a lot of mistakes. The Israelis certainly have developed a covert action program on Iran not aimed at regime change, but at the nuclear and the missile programs. I understand that the Israelis now do have a regime change program in its infant stages at Mossad, but you can’t turn this on like a light switch.

So you have to think about it. You have to start working at it. You have no guarantee of success. And it will be, I guarantee you, frustrating. I did also covert action when I was in the agency on Iran. And it’s just needless to say, it’s very frustrating. So you can have some successes. You don’t really know whether your successes, how significant they might be.

I mean if you look back at the cold war and you looked at say clandestine book and magazine publishing that the agency was involved with in Poland especially after 1980 and before at the time you would not have been able to tell how successful it was. The agency wanted to kill that program in 1980 and was only saved by mister brudensky later we know that that program was quite important so all these things can only be assessed in retrospect. You can’t do it live time.

**Sam Stone: **Well, given that this is a kind of a slow build process and it is going to be, regardless of how anybody goes about it, really difficult to remove this regime, what can the United States be doing right now to support the Iranian people and help protect this movement until those kind of aims could be achieved if that’s what they decide to do?

Reuel Marc Gerecht: Well, I mean, on a small scale, not talking about the use of the US military, on a small scale, you could get the US government more aggressively involved in having secure communication devices. You could get them involved with more aggressively using our cyber capacities to thwart the regime’s communications.

There are a lot of little things you can do along the edges. Now we have a significant problem in that the Iranian opposition is quite large but it’s leaderless. So and the regime is excellent at finding individuals who have charisma and neutralizing them. And again It that can’t be understated and it’s overstated in its importance because you need to have someone to work with. And so you would have to go through the process of finding and developing folks who could then develop networks on their own inside of the country.

**Sam Stone: **And that makes what our previous guest was talking about, the fact that they have in the last few days eliminated several thousand people, even more nefarious, because what you’re saying is those eliminations have targeted and probably very effectively removed a lot of the people who could have furthered this movement.

**Reuel Marc Gerecht: **Yes, I think that’s fair to say.

Listen to the full episode of Breaking Battlegrounds anywhere you stream your podcasts!