Foreign Policy blog The Cable details:
Israeli media are reporting that a small and unconventional Iran office in the Israeli Ministry of Defense will be shut down. The 30-year-old office has been headed by 83-year-old Uri Lubrani, who was de facto Israeli ambassador to Iran in the 1970s and famously predicted the fall of the shah. While the closure of the office may seem a minor bureaucratic matter, it also speaks to the demise of an idea that gained currency in some Washington circles just a few years ago and then faded: that the United States might support a plan of regime change in Iran…
When I visited the unit in September 2006 to conduct an interview shortly after Israel’s war in Lebanon, Lubrani’s small warren of offices looked like something out of the 1970s — a bit dusty, low budget, and low tech. Lubrani and his staff spent their days thinking of ways to counter the Tehran regime by cultivating Iranian dissidents and Iranian ethnic minority groups and supporting efforts to encourage some sort of democratic regime change in Iran. They kept track of and sometimes provided assistance to Iranian dissidents who came out of Iran on their way to the West, stayed in touch with Iranian exiles in Europe and the United States (some who they had known in the shah’s day), and funded a Farsi-language Israel Radio program broadcast on shortwave into Iran. Lubrani’s office may have also conducted other small-scale propaganda and recruitment activities among the exiles, no doubt dwarfed by the efforts of Israel’s and its Western allies’ clandestine security services.