BRIEF: Did Anyone Credibly Predict the June 13, 2025 Strikes on Iran?

Date: 2026-02-08 Classification: OPEN SOURCE Confidence: High (on the central finding); Medium (on completeness — classified and non-English sources not surveyed)

BLUF

No major think tank, OSINT practitioner, or Western intelligence analyst publicly predicted the specific timing of the June 13, 2025 strikes. The US-Israeli deception campaign — involving planted stories of bilateral tensions, fake diplomatic scheduling, and personal misdirection — achieved comprehensive strategic surprise against both Iran and the global analytical community. One Iranian academic, Ahmad Naghibzadeh, was broadly prescient three months in advance (predicting Israeli strikes, commander targeting, and domestic unrest), but did not forecast the specific date. Several structural indicators were visible in hindsight, but the strongest OSINT signal (US embassy evacuations) provided only ~36 hours of warning.

THE PREDICTION SCORECARD

Who Got Closest

Who Missed It Entirely

• Major Western think tanks (CSIS, Brookings, RAND, IISS, CFR, Crisis Group): No public pre-war prediction of imminent strikes identified from any of these institutions
• OSINT community: Entirely reactive. Daniel Rosehill's post-war GitHub project explicitly aims to learn lessons from the failure to detect pre-war signals
• Prediction markets: No evidence of active pre-war contracts on Israel/Iran strikes. Post-war, Polymarket now runs $188M+ in Iran strike contracts
• Iranian intelligence: Catastrophically penetrated. IRGC admitted post-war intelligence failures. 21,000 arrested on espionage suspicion. Mossad had 100+ armed agents inside Iran
• Iranian media and analysts: No credible pre-war warning from inside Iran has been identified

WHY NO ONE SAW IT COMING

The Deception Campaign

The US-Israeli deception was multi-layered and comprehensive:

1. Planted bilateral tensions: "All the reports about Bibi not being on the same page with Witkoff or Trump were not true. But it was good that this was the general perception." (Israeli official, post-war)

2. Fake diplomatic scheduling: A sixth round of Oman talks was announced for June 15 — two days after the strikes. The meeting was never actually planned.

3. Personal misdirection: Netanyahu's office announced he would not cancel his weekend vacation. Wedding preparations for his son continued publicly. A security cabinet meeting was disguised as a routine Gaza hostage discussion.

4. Peak false reassurance on June 12: Trump publicly stated he preferred negotiation. Ron Dermer and David Barnea were announced as meeting Witkoff to discuss "next steps." Maximum diplomatic signaling one day before strikes.

5. Compartmentalization: Even senior IDF regional commanders were unaware. "Shomer sod" (guardian of the secret) nondisclosure agreements were used.

Why Analysts Failed

The Doha Institute and Hudson Institute post-war studies identified specific cognitive failures:

• Anchoring bias: Analysts anchored to the diplomatic narrative (ongoing talks, scheduled June 15 round) rather than military indicators
• Confirmation bias: Reports of US-Israel tensions confirmed existing assumptions
• Precedent bias: Prior rounds of nuclear talks had not led to military action
• Signal-to-noise: The volume of deceptive signals overwhelmed genuine indicators (carrier deployments, Patriot repositioning, IAEA timeline)

The Indicators That Were Visible (In Hindsight)

IMPLICATIONS FOR FEBRUARY 2026

This track record has direct implications for the current analytical challenge:

1. The analytical community's detection capability is unproven. The June 2025 deception defeated the entire open-source analysis ecosystem. There is no evidence that the community has developed tools or methodologies that would perform better against a repeat.

2. Post-war corrections may create new vulnerabilities. Analysts have now "learned" to look for covert indicators (fake tensions, concealed planning). The red team on our current assessment argues that a learning adversary would adapt by making preparations overt — "hiding in plain sight." The lesson from June 2025 may itself be the vulnerability.

3. Naghibzadeh's method is notable. The most prescient analyst was not an OSINT practitioner or think tank researcher but a retired Iranian political scientist reasoning from strategic logic rather than tactical indicators. His approach — asking "what does the strategic situation require?" rather than "what do the indicators show?" — may be more robust against deception than indicator-based analysis.

4. The 36-hour OSINT window is the realistic warning time. The embassy evacuations were the actionable signal. Everything else was either structural (visible for months but not diagnostic) or deliberately deceptive. For February 2026, this means: when US embassies start evacuating from Gulf states, the clock is at ~36 hours regardless of what the diplomatic narrative says.

5. StrikeRadar and similar tools represent adaptation. The post-war creation of AI-powered prediction dashboards aggregating flight data, military movements, news, and weather shows the community learning. Whether these tools would have detected June 2025 is untested.

6. The absence of a "who predicted it" retrospective is itself significant. Unlike after Russia's 2022 Ukraine invasion (where the US IC's successful prediction was extensively documented), there is no similar narrative for June 2025 — because virtually no one got it right publicly.

KEY INFORMATION GAPS

• Classified US/allied intelligence assessments (did the IC predict it internally?)
• Hebrew and Persian-language pre-war analyses
• Subscription-only intelligence services (Janes, Stratfor, Eurasia Group)
• Pre-war prediction market data for the June 11-12 window
• Financial market pre-positioning (oil, defense stocks) that might indicate insider awareness
• Russian and Chinese intelligence assessments

Analysis based on open-source research. Supporting collection file: 2026-02-08-pre-war-prediction-track-record.md