FT: Inside the plan to kill Ali Khamenei

A portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Photo: Reuters

Israel spent years hacking Tehran’s traffic cameras and monitoring bodyguards ahead of the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, ‘Financial Times’ revealed.

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, said 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.

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.”

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.

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.

Khamenei expected to be “martyred”

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.

But killing Khamenei was a political decision, not simply a technological achievement, said more than half a dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officials interviewed for this story.

Khamenei had mused in public about the possibility of being killed, dismissing his own life as inconsequential to the fate of the Islamic republic — in fact, some Iran experts said he expected to be martyred.

In this instance, according to two people familiar with the matter, Israeli intelligence had information from signals intelligence, such as the hacked traffic cameras and deeply penetrated mobile phone networks. One of the people said it showed that the meeting with Khamenei was on schedule, with senior officials heading to the location.

The Iranians were meeting for breakfast when they were killed, Trump told Fox News.

“Two separate events…”

The tactical success was the culmination of two separate events, more than 20 years apart, Sima Shine, a former official at Mossad who had a focus on Iran, said.

The first was a directive given in 2001 from former prime minister Ariel Sharon to Meir Dagan, the then head of Mossad — preoccupied with Syria, Palestinian militants, Hizbollah in Lebanon and others — to make Iran a priority.

“‘All the things the Mossad is doing is well and fine,’” Sharon told Dagan, according to Shine. “‘What I need is Iran. That’s your target’.”

“And since then, that is the target,” she said.

Israel had sabotaged Iran’s nuclear programme, killed its scientists, fought back its proxies and even destroyed the military infrastructure of its crucial ally Syria in the days after Bashar al-Assad was ousted.

The second event, Shine added, was the October 7 2023 cross-border attack from Hamas, which Israel claims was backed by Iran and changed a longstanding calculus in Israel (but Hamas is a Israeli creation!): that despite having penetrated the circles of several enemy heads of state, from Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, their killings were off-limits even at times of war.

Killing foreign leaders is not just taboo but operationally fraught.

But, said Shine, Israel’s string of intelligence coups — including the 2024 assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, and a $300mn multiyear clandestine project to booby trap thousands of Hizbollah pagers and radios — has its own seductive powers.

“In Hebrew, we say, ‘With the food comes the appetite’,” she said. “In other words, the more you have, the more you want.”

...This is a very interesting admission that Israel is a killer of VIPs abroad. It seems Israel has now opened Pandora's box, and now no world leader, including Netanyahu and Trump themselves, will be protected by the unwritten international law: “You cannot assassinate heads of state!”

Israel, with its terrorist actions, has violated this unspoken agreement. Do Israelis think they are immortal? - they could in return be punished for their crimes.

Even US Vice President Vance told FOX News: "I said this before the conflict started, I'll repeat it again, there's simply no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective... I think that means we're not going to get into the problems we've had with Iraq and Afghanistan”.

While the Americans are unwilling to defend Israel indefinitely Iran is ready for revenge.

This is what Israel has done with its short-sighted assassinations of Iranians.

And most importantly for the whole world -  international law has been thrown into the trash by Netanyahu...

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