Israeli intelligence tracked the movements of senior Iranian officials in Tehran for years before the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday. As bodyguards and drivers headed to work in the Iranian capital, Israeli operatives monitored them, according to two people familiar with the matter cited by the Financial Times.
Almost every traffic camera in Tehran had been hacked, the report said. The footage was encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to the two sources.
One camera provided a particularly useful angle, one of the sources said on condition of anonymity, allowing Israeli operatives to identify where bodyguards usually parked their personal vehicles.
Israeli services received real-time updates on addresses, working hours and the routes taken by Iranian bodyguards. Crucially, they also knew which officials they were protecting and transporting.
This long-running intelligence gathering helped pave the way for Khamenei’s killing. The real-time data stream was not the only method used by Israel and the Central Intelligence Agency to determine exactly when the 86-year-old leader would be in his office on Saturday and who would accompany him. Israel also managed to tamper with data from 12 mobile phone towers near Pasteur Street, making them appear busy when called and preventing Khamenei’s guards from receiving possible warning signals.
“Before the bombs fell, we knew Tehran as we know Jerusalem,” one Israeli intelligence official said. “And when you know a place as well as the neighbourhood you grew up in, you notice the slightest change.”
The detailed intelligence picture of its main adversary’s capital stemmed from years of data collection enabled by Israel’s signals unit 8200, human assets recruited by the Mossad and the volumes of information processed by military intelligence to compile daily reports.
Israel applied a mathematical technique known as social network analysis to process billions of data points, uncover unlikely decision-making hubs and identify new targets for surveillance and elimination.
The strength of Israeli intelligence was evident during the 12-day war last June, when Iranian nuclear scientists and senior military officials were assassinated within minutes in an initial strike.
That operation followed an unprecedented neutralisation of Iran’s air defences through a combination of cyberattacks, short-range drones and precision munitions launched from outside Iranian territory, destroying radar systems linked to Russian missile launchers.
“First we took out their eyes,” an intelligence official told the Financial Times. During both the June war and the latest operation, Israeli pilots used a specific type of missile known as the “Sparrow”, versions of which can strike a target as small as a dining table from more than 1,000 kilometres away — beyond Iran and outside the range of its air defence systems.
Not all details of the latest operation are known. Some may never be made public in order to protect sources and methods still used to monitor other targets. But Khamenei’s killing was a political decision, not merely a technological achievement.
When the CIA and Israel learned that Khamenei would attend a meeting on Saturday at his offices near Pasteur Street, the opportunity to kill him — along with several other senior Iranian officials — presented itself and could not be missed, as he was not inside either of the two shelters specially designed for him.
CIA officers said a human source played a critical role in the mission’s success and ensured the operation was carried out with precision.
