Mossad must cut Iran’s Asia supply lines

Southeast Asia emerges as a particular area of interest as Iran exploits its extensive networks there to facilitate transfers of technology, personnel, and commerce.

By Jose Lee Alvarez, Middle East Forum

In June 2026, Roman Gofman assumed the role of Mossad chief with a clear mandate from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ensure that Iran no longer can threaten Israel.

Under previous leadership, the agency took on a much more offensive role. The Tzomet division divided into smaller groups responsible for recruiting new agents and planning and executing operations.

In several key areas, Mossad’s technology surpassed that of some Western intelligence agencies. Teams specializing in infiltration and psychological warfare joined.

The results were significant. During Operation Rising Lion in June 2025, Mossad operatives working inside Iran funneled attack drones through commercial traffic and delivered them to sites near Iranian surface-to-air missile batteries.

The operation enabled more than 200 Israeli Air Force aircraft to strike over 100 targets with more than 330 munitions.

During the April 2026 commendations, Mossad Director David Barnea noted that ten operations had penetrated Iranian and Lebanese defenses, fundamentally improving Israel’s strategic position in wartime consultations with the Israel Defense Forces.

Gofman must employ the same intelligence and military resources to continue exerting pressure until the Iranian government ceases to be an existential threat.

Barnea himself cautioned that the Iranian government retains its intent to rebuild its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, despite suffering military setbacks.

Therefore, strategic patience is required to maintain human intelligence presence in Iran and other regional centers while supplementing it with the technological expertise Israel has brought to bear to monitor and disrupt nuclear, missile, and proxy group reconstitution efforts.

Israel, however, must begin to prioritize other regions whose supply chains enable attacks on Israeli territory.

Southeast Asia emerges as a particular area of interest as Iran exploits its extensive networks there to facilitate transfers of technology, personnel, and commerce.

Recent tracking data on illicit oil show more than 500 ship-to-ship transfers off the coast of Malaysia since early 2025.

Iranian oil shipments through these channels continue to sustain the Islamic Republic’s economy and include front companies registered in Singapore and Malaysia that have received hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit revenues.

In 2025, Iran’s shadow fleet averaged nearly 1.6 million barrels of oil per day, largely destined for China, generating $48 billion.

Chinese manufacturers have been instrumental in supplying critical components to Shahed drones, including engines, microchips, batteries, fiber optics, and navigation systems.

Taiwan can be a problem due to its role in the microchip manufacturing industry, but the Mossad could potentially combine its intelligence on Iran’s procurement channels with Taiwan’s knowledge of the global semiconductor supply chain to identify and neutralize critical nodes.

Gofman should consider creating a Shadow Fleet Sentinel program by allocating Israeli long-range unmanned vessels, equipped with artificial intelligence-enhanced signal receivers, to patrol critical maritime chokepoints in Southeast Asia and Malaysia’s coastal waters.

This initiative would seek to complement the Rising Lion operation by adapting its surveillance and preemptive military-action model to address weak points in the existing naval defense coverage of open waters.

By combining data from commercial satellites, private and state surveillance sources, and human intelligence operatives embedded within the shipping industry, Shadow Fleet Sentinels could track and report on vessels carrying oil revenues or technology shipments to Iran.

Meanwhile, human intelligence operatives at coastal entry points could provide further insight and facilitate direct disruption, denying Iran both financial and industrial resources to fund its attacks on the Jewish state.

The reality is that this will maximize the defensive effect of the 2025 and 2026 campaigns by disrupting the proximate financial and technological enablers of the assaults.

The combined on-time pressure would generate greater strategic benefits than the static surveillance measures currently used to monitor and score limited naval traffic through regional straits.

A second initiative would be the creation of a Proliferation Mapping and Denial Cell that would operate in coordination with counterparts in Taiwan to interdict Iranian access to critical electronics and manufacturing inputs.

Unlike traditional Mossad front companies, the new cell would employ generative artificial intelligence to create thousands of unique business identities and trade lanes to obscure and deny Iran’s access to strategic suppliers in Southeast Asia’s commercial free-trade zones.

These operations would be conducted at scale and would shift between potential targets to avoid scrutiny, with minimal long-term exposure for operatives.

By combining Mossad’s supply-chain interdiction expertise, demonstrated in the successful years-long campaign to prevent Iran from obtaining sensitive technologies after the 2018 document smuggling mission in Tehran, and the Taiwanese capabilities to observe and analyze the movement of semiconductors across supply chains, Gofman’s cell could create a sustained and broad-based campaign of denying Iran’s proxies and economy critical inputs.

Barnea’s example of concentrating intelligence and military resources to undermine Iran’s core military capabilities and its external enablers produced considerable strategic gains.

Now Gofman should follow his predecessor’s lead by applying similar pressure to other critical regional arteries that support Iran’s war-fighting potential.

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