Sources Briefed on Iran War Say U.S. Has No Plans for What Comes Next

The Trump administration’s war on Iran is reckless and ill-planned, four government officials briefed on the attacks told The Intercept.

Even in classified briefings, Trump administration officials laid out no clear vision for the U.S. war on Iran or its aftermath, the sources said.

“The administration doesn’t have a clue. They do not have an actual, real rationale, endgame, or plan for the aftermath of this,” one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, told The Intercept.

“There is no thought process into what any of this means long term,” said another. “It’s not coordinated regime change. It’s just ‘bomb them until they’re less of a threat.’”

Asked about the administration’s plan for Iran after the war, that official responded: “Whatever.”

Internal criticism of the attacks comes as President Donald Trump teased that the war could go on “forever” despite promising his administration would avoid Middle East “forever wars.” Trump has floated the idea of de facto American rule of Iran through a puppet regime, similar to the leaders who have run Venezuela since the U.S. attacked that country and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said on Sunday. “Leaders can be picked.”

“I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela,” Trump told Axios on Thursday.

Officials predicted that the war would have negative consequences for decades, echoing the results of the last U.S. ouster of an Iranian leader. One of the sources, who has experience in the Middle East and talked to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, likened this conflict to the 2003 Iraq War, which was also illegal, ill-planned, and resulted in decades of regional instability.

Trump has repeatedly called for an Iranian uprising in the wake of the U.S. attacks. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” he declared on Saturday. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” But behind closed doors, the U.S. has made it clear that support for would-be Iranian revolutionaries isn’t certain — or even likely. In classified briefings, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the U.S. might intervene to support the Iranian people if an opportunity for ushering in democracy presented itself, but that the U.S. was primarily focused on a discrete set of tactical goals to degrade Iran’s military power, two of the government officials told The Intercept.

One of the sources briefed on the attacks evoked the 1953 coup in which the U.S. and British governments toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The overthrow of Iran’s first and only democratically elected government ushered in more than two decades of dictatorship under U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his dreaded secret police, SAVAK. “Trump’s history only goes back as far as the revolution. But 1979 started in 1953. And this [war] goes back to that [coup],” the source told The Intercept, referencing the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Trump has also referenced the 1979 revolution, but not the anti-American backlash that fed it. “You go back 37 years, really 47 years, close to 50, look at what’s happened and all the death,” Trump said to CNN, referencing those killed by Iran since the revolution.

The U.S. official scoffed at Trump’s one-sided history, noting this war’s roots stretch back to the CIA’s coup almost 75 years ago. “It could be decades before we know how badly this will affect us. But you can bet it will,” the official said, referencing the lag between the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution. “People in Iran remember. We do not.”

The CIA was responsible for the 1953 coup that ousted Mossadegh. “The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads the agency’s postmortem.

The CIA was also behind the targeted killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the hard-line Shiite cleric who ruled Iran for nearly four decades. After tracking his movements, the CIA reportedly passed his location to Israel, which conducted the attack that killed him on Friday, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. has offered shifting explanations for the new war with Iran, including claims that Iran posed an “imminent” threat to America or that Israel effectively forced the U.S. into the conflict. In a legally mandated, unclassified letter submitted to Congress on Monday, Trump declared that the military operation was designed to “neutralize Iran’s malign activities.”

In a phone conversation with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, Trump also claimed that the killing of Khamenei was the latest salvo in dueling assassination attempts. “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first,” Trump told Karl, apparently referring to U.S. intelligence from the summer of 2024 that Iran was plotting to assassinate then-candidate Trump. That same summer, a gunman with no known ties to Iran attempted to kill Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Iran denied involvement in the attack.

After a 1970s congressional inquiry, known as the Church Committee investigation, brought to light the CIA’s role in numerous plots to kill foreign leaders, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order that banned “assassinations.” The ban is now part of Executive Order 12333, which states: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” 

The White House did not respond to questions of the legality of, and rationale, for the targeted killing of Khamenei.

President Barack Obama, speaking in Cairo, Egypt, in 2009, admitted the U.S. role in the “overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Four years later, the CIA officially acknowledged its role in the 1953 coup d’état when it released declassified documents on the operation.

CIA documents are also frank about the type of “blowback” — the unintended, often violent, consequences of covert operations and foreign policies that were kept secret from the American public — of which Trump is either ignorant or ignores. “Possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers involved in this type of operation,” noted the CIA lessons-learned report on Mossadegh’s ouster. “Few, if any, operations are as explosive as this type.”

In his 2013 book, “The Coup,” Iranian American historian Ervand Abrahamian wrote that Mossadegh’s removal by the CIA irreparably scarred Iran and “left a deep imprint on the country — not only on its polity and economy but also on its popular culture and what some would call mentality.” The Iranians who overthrew the shah in 1979 branded America “the Great Satan,” a moniker that endures to this day, as a result.

The Trump administration has overthrown two regimes in as many months this year with its killing of Khamenei last week and its kidnapping of Maduro in January. The Trump administration has been running Venezuela via a puppet regime ever since.

Trump said the U.S. had already killed the majority of those identified as potential Iranian quislings. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said on Tuesday. Trump also conceded that the war may yield a government little different than Khamenei’s. “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” he admitted. “It would probably be the worst, you go through this and in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.”

Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei has emerged as the front-runner to become his father’s successor. Experts say his selection indicates that the more extreme Revolutionary Guard faction of the regime has taken charge amid the power vacuum, suggesting Trump’s worst-case scenario may be realized. But on Wednesday, Trump seemed to suggest that the U.S. and Israel would continue to kill all would-be front-runners. “Their leadership is rapidly going,” he said. “Everyone that wants to be a leader ends up dead.”

U.S.–Israeli strikes have killed at least 787 people in Iran and wounded hundreds more since Friday, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. This includes more than 170 people, many of them children attending class at Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, in the town of Minab.

“Civilians are bearing the brunt of this conflict. With the extraordinary volume of U.S. and Israeli strikes in populated areas of Iran, coupled with internet blackouts, the civilian harm reports we are seeing so far likely represent just a fraction of the true civilian toll,” Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict told The Intercept. “This war is also putting civilians at risk across the region. Iranian strikes are impacting civilian infrastructure, killing civilians, closing airspace, and generally disrupting civilian life and livelihoods. The longer this goes on, the more these harms will compound.”

The first government official reiterated to The Intercept that the full reverberations of the current war would only be revealed in decades to come. “You and I will be gone,” the U.S. official said, also referring to this reporter, “and Trump, too, but this attack on Iran is going to have a super long half-life. Generations long.”