This is utterly fascinating. Mossad is scary.
Israel spent years hacking Tehran’s traffic cameras and monitoring bodyguards ahead of the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader
When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street in Tehran — where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday — the Israelis were watching.
Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.
One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, according to one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.
Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.
The capabilities were part of a years-long intelligence campaign that helped pave the way for the ayatollah’s assassination. This source of real-time data — one of hundreds of different streams of intelligence — was not the only way Israel and the CIA were able to determine exactly what time 86-year-old Khamenei would be in his offices this fateful Saturday morning and who would be joining him.
Nor was the fact that Israel was also able to disrupt single components of roughly a dozen or so mobile phone towers near Pasteur Street, making the phones seem as if they were busy when called and stopping Khamenei’s protection detail from receiving possible warnings.
Long before the bombs fell, “we knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem”, said one current Israeli intelligence official. “And when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place.”
The dense, intelligence picture of the arch-enemy’s capital was the result of laborious data collection, made possible by Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, the human assets recruited by its foreign intelligence agency Mossad and the mountains of data digested by military intelligence into daily briefs.
Israel used a mathematical method known as social network analysis to parse billions of data points to unearth unlikely centres of decision-making gravity and identify fresh targets to surveil and kill, said a person familiar with its use. All this fed an assembly line with a single product: targets.
“In Israeli intelligence culture, targeting intelligence is the most essential tactical issue — it is designed to enable a strategy,” said Itai Shapira, a brigadier general in the Israeli military reserves and 25-year veteran of its intelligence directorate. “If the decision maker decides that someone has to be assassinated, in Israel the culture is: ‘We will provide the targeting intelligence.’”
Israel has assassinated hundreds of people overseas, including militant leaders, nuclear scientists, chemical engineers — and many innocent bystanders. But even with the killing of as prominent a political and religious leader as Khamenei, how much this aggressive, decades-long use of its technological and technical prowess has paved the way for major strategic gains is fiercely debated both within and outside Israel.
The country’s intelligence superiority was on full display in the 12-day war last June, when more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and high-ranking military officials were assassinated within minutes in an opening salvo.
That had been accompanied by an unprecedented disabling of Iran’s aerial defences through a combination of cyber attacks, low-range drones and precise munitions fired from outside Iran’s borders, destroying the radars of the Russian-built missile launchers.
“We took their eyes first,” said one intelligence official. Both in the June war and now, Israeli pilots have used a specific kind of missile called the
Sparrow, variants of which are able to hit a target as small as a dining table from more than 1,000km away — far from Iran and the reach of any of its aerial defence systems.
Not all of the details of the latest operation are known. Some may never be made public, in order to protect sources and methods still being used to track down other targets.
