Arash
At 3:00 AM on June 13, 2025, a man Israeli media identified only as “Arash” received a launch order on his phone. He was somewhere in Iran — the precise location remains classified. He had been waiting for this moment for years.
Arash was Iranian. As a young man, he had been brutalized by the Basij — the regime’s paramilitary volunteer force that enforces morality codes, beats protesters, and fills the gap between the IRGC’s professional soldiers and the population they control. The details of what happened to him have not been made public. What is known is that Mossad recruited him through an overseas relative, trained him in a neighboring country, and returned him to Iran with a singular assignment.1
When the order came, he pressed a button. A concealed weapon system — positioned near a mobile ballistic missile launcher worth ten million dollars or more — fired. The launcher was destroyed before it could send a single missile toward Israel.
In a post-war interview broadcast on Israeli television, Arash described the moment without emotion. He was one of roughly one hundred operatives — most of them Iranian citizens, not inserted Israeli agents — who activated simultaneously in the opening hours of Operation Rising Lion. Together, they destroyed air defense batteries, sabotaged communications nodes, and launched drones from concealed positions that Mossad had prepared inside Iran over a period of years.2
Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan had explained the recruitment logic years earlier: “The best pool for recruiting agents inside Iran lies within the country’s ethnic and human mosaic.” Approximately forty percent of Iran’s ninety million citizens belong to ethnic minorities — Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds — many of whom have been systematically marginalized by the regime. Mossad exploited this fracture with precision. Former deputy Mossad director Ram Ben Barak credited the success to something simpler: “a very, very disliked regime, even hated by most of the public.”3
These were not mercenaries. They were Iranians who loved their country enough to act against the men who had stolen it. The distinction matters. Arash did not work for Israel because he admired Israel. He worked against the regime because it had brutalized him, his family, and his community — and because no internal mechanism for change existed. The regime had closed every door. Mossad offered a window.
The story of how Israel penetrated the Islamic Republic is not primarily a story about technology, though the technology was extraordinary. It is a story about a regime so despised by its own people that its enemies could recruit agents from within its most sensitive institutions — and maintain those networks for decades without detection.
The Archive
The foundation of everything that followed was laid on the night of January 31, 2018, in a warehouse in Shorabad, a southern suburb of Tehran.
Fewer than twenty-four agents — none of them Israeli nationals, according to former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen — broke into a facility that contained the Islamic Republic’s most closely guarded nuclear secrets. The warehouse had been under Mossad surveillance for two years. The team cut open six of thirty-two safes using torches at two thousand to thirty-six hundred degrees Celsius. In six hours and twenty-nine minutes, they extracted one hundred thousand documents — fifty thousand paper pages and fifty-five thousand on 183 CD-ROMs — loaded them into vehicles, and drove across the Iranian border before dawn.4
The material documented the full scope of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, known internally as Project Amad. But the archive’s strategic value extended far beyond proliferation intelligence. It contained organizational charts, personnel records, technical specializations, home addresses, and institutional affiliations of the scientists and engineers who had built the program.
Seven years later, that personnel data became a targeting list.
The Cameras
The intelligence preparation for the 2025 and 2026 strikes was the most extensive penetration of a sovereign state’s security infrastructure in modern history.
Israeli operatives had compromised nearly all of Tehran’s traffic cameras — not weeks or months before the war, but years. The footage was encrypted and transmitted in real time to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel. One camera near the Pasteur Street government compound — where Khamenei maintained his offices — showed where his bodyguards and drivers parked their vehicles. Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence service, processed the data through AI-driven algorithms that “did not exist a few years ago,” building what intelligence professionals call “pattern of life” profiles: home addresses, duty schedules, commuting routes, bodyguard assignments, meeting frequencies.5
An Israeli intelligence official told the Financial Times the result in a single sentence: “We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem.”6
The penetration extended deeper than surveillance. Mossad had been hacking the electronic devices of Khamenei’s inner circle for what ORF Online reported as “nearly two decades.” On the morning of June 13, 2025, Israeli intelligence knew which rooms their targets slept in.7
The mobile phone infrastructure was weaponized in a different direction during the February 2026 campaign. Approximately twelve phone towers near Pasteur Street were disabled moments before the strike — causing lines to appear busy rather than dead, delaying any alarm. The BadeSaba prayer app — a calendar application with over five million Google Play downloads and thirty-seven million total installations — was compromised through what cybersecurity analysts assessed as supply chain infiltration. Because the app calibrated prayer times using location data, it had been collecting precise GPS coordinates from millions of users — including Basij and IRGC personnel who represented its most devout user base. At 9:52 AM on February 28, as bombs were already falling, the app pushed a notification to millions of phones: “Help Has Arrived.”8
Five messages followed over the next thirty minutes, escalating from general statements to direct defection appeals. The regime’s most pious enforcers received their call to surrender through the same app they used to know when to pray.
There is a theological irony here that the Islamic Republic cannot afford to examine. A state that claims divine authority — that wraps its security apparatus in the language of sacred duty — had weaponized prayer itself as a surveillance tool. The app collected location data under the cover of religious devotion. When that same mechanism was turned against the regime, it exposed the transaction at the heart of the theocracy: faith was never the point. Control was the point. And when control was lost, the sacred language had nothing left underneath it.
Red Wedding
The intelligence infrastructure enabled something that had no precedent in modern warfare: the simultaneous assassination of an entire military command.
At approximately 4:00 AM on June 13, 2025 — three hours before the Israeli Air Force’s two hundred jets crossed into Iranian airspace — the covert campaign began. Roughly seventy commandos, recruited from Iranian dissidents and third-country nationals, attacked air defense installations from within. Modified civilian vehicles with concealed weapon systems launched munitions against SAM batteries. Small drones hidden in trucks and trailers launched attacks on radar systems. Pre-positioned Spike NLOS anti-tank guided missiles — some literally hidden inside fake rocks scattered across the Iranian landscape — fired at air defense positions.9
ProPublica reported the result: “One hundred percent of the anti-aircraft batteries marked for the Mossad by the air force were destroyed. Most were near Tehran.”10
Simultaneously, the IAF struck the homes and command posts of over thirty IRGC generals using coordinates derived from the traffic camera surveillance, phone intercepts, and the nuclear archive’s personnel data. Each squadron was assigned specific coordinates for individual commanders.
IRGC Commander-in-Chief Hossein Salami was killed at IRGC headquarters. Armed Forces Chief of Staff Mohammad Hossein Bagheri was killed at his residence. Khatam al-Anbiya commander Gholam Ali Rashid was killed alongside his young son. IRGC Aerospace Force commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh — the man responsible for Iran’s ballistic missile program — was lured to an underground command center by what appears to have been a cyber-generated fake message, and killed with his entire leadership team.11
Within forty-eight hours, IRGC Intelligence chief Mohammad Kazemi and his deputy Hassan Mohaqeq were also dead. Ali Shadmani, appointed to replace Rashid, was killed within five days of his appointment — his daughter described an “Israeli hit team” conducting a car chase. The succession protocols that were supposed to ensure continuity meant nothing when the adversary could track and kill replacements in near-real time.12
Israeli media named the operation “Red Wedding” — a reference to the mass assassination in Game of Thrones. The real-world version killed more senior military leaders in a single night than any covert operation in recorded history.
Operation Narnia
While jets struck generals, a parallel campaign — codenamed Operation Narnia, still under Israeli military censorship — targeted the people who knew how to build a nuclear weapon.
Eleven of Iran’s top nuclear scientists were killed on the first night — nine simultaneously in their homes while they slept using a weapon system that remains classified, and two more by other means before dawn. Israeli Channel 12 reported: “These scientists believed their homes were safe zones. They never imagined they would be reached in their bedrooms.”13
Among the dead: Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, a UN-sanctioned member of the original Amad weapons program, and the designer of Iran’s neutron initiator — the trigger mechanism for a nuclear weapon. He had survived a previous assassination attempt in 2010. Fifteen years later, they reached him. Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, who led the unit focused on high explosives for nuclear warheads, was killed the same night.14
Israel sent a public message to the scientists who survived. Social media posts — attributed to Israeli intelligence — warned that “death awaits them.” The message was not subtle. It did not need to be. The men who could rebuild the program now knew that their homes were not safe and their bedrooms were not private.
The Knowledge That Died
By the war’s end, between fourteen and seventeen nuclear scientists were dead. ISIS, the Institute for Science and International Security, analyzed the losses.15
Scientists killed opening night 11 Of those, former Project Amad members 9 Affiliated with SPND (weapons org) All 11 Senior managers 6 Average age 60 Years to train a replacement 15-25 Annual brain drain from Iran 150,000-180,000 specialists Return rate 1% ISIS assessed that “full knowledge of the most sensitive, most current developments… existed only in the heads of a few.” The knowledge that built the program left Iran in body bags. The knowledge that could rebuild it is leaving on commercial flights — 150,000 to 180,000 specialists a year, with only one percent returning.16
The Purge That Ate Itself
The regime’s response to the intelligence catastrophe was, in many ways, more damaging than the catastrophe itself.
During and immediately after the Twelve-Day War, Iranian authorities swept through entire provinces, arresting people whose only crime was belonging to the wrong ethnic group in the wrong place. The regime’s response followed the oldest playbook in authoritarian crisis management: when you cannot find the actual threat, punish an entire category of people and call it security.
The arrests concentrated in Kurdish, Baluchi, and Arab-majority provinces — Kermanshah, Isfahan, Khuzestan — the same ethnic minorities that Mossad had identified as its primary recruitment pool. By October 2025, new legislation made espionage for Israel or the United States automatically punishable by death. The purge did not target intelligence threats. It targeted identity categories.17
The Purge in Numbers
Total detained 21,000 Suspected of espionage 261 (1.2%) Accused of filming military sites 172 Not suspected of any intelligence activity 98.8% Executed on espionage charges 12+ Total executions in 2025 1,500+ (highest in 35 years) Police spokesperson General Saeed Montazerolmahdi confirmed the 21,000 figure on state television.18
The most devastating revelation came not from Israel but from a former Iranian president. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly disclosed that the head of Iran’s unit specifically created to counter Mossad operations — the anti-Mossad unit — was himself a Mossad double agent. The man tasked with finding Israeli spies was an Israeli spy.19
Former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Younesi confirmed the depth of the problem: “The Mossad has infiltrated many government departments in the last ten years, to such a degree that all the country’s top officials should fear for their lives.”20
Iranian analyst Saeed Leilaz, who had contacts throughout the security establishment, delivered the most quoted assessment: “I no longer trust any military or security personnel — whether from the Revolutionary Guards, the Ministry of Intelligence, or the army — unless proven otherwise. From a security standpoint, it can easily be said that the Islamic Republic of Iran was brought to its knees.”21
The paranoid response — mass arrests, executions, the ban on internet-connected smartphones for officials, the order for citizens to report “strangers wearing masks, hats, and sunglasses, even at night” — destroyed organizational capacity faster than the strikes themselves. Senior armed forces official Shekarchi inadvertently confirmed the damage when he stated that rebuilding intelligence networks “requires years of time and cost.” The regime was admitting, in public, that its own counter-intelligence had been gutted.22
A regime that cannot distinguish its enemies from its defenders has already lost the intelligence war. The bombs that followed were a formality.
The Honest Part
The intelligence triumph demands honest accounting of what it cost.
Gholam Ali Rashid — a legitimate military target — was killed alongside his young son. The boy’s name has not been made public. His death was not an accident of war but a consequence of the deliberate decision to strike a commander at home rather than at a military installation.23
Rouzbeh Vadi was a nuclear scientist at Iran’s Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute. He was not killed by Israel. He was arrested by the Islamic Republic on suspicion of passing information about the Fordow and Natanz facilities to Mossad, and executed on August 5-6, 2025. His family alleged that he was tortured — broken ribs, a broken leg, threats against his mother. Whether his information actually contributed to the strikes, or whether he was an innocent man killed in the paranoid purge, may never be known.24
Of the twenty-one thousand detained, the vast majority were released without charges — but “released” from an Iranian detention facility does not mean unharmed. The purge destroyed careers, families, and communities on the basis of ethnicity and geography rather than evidence.
And the operational precedent raises questions that extend far beyond Iran. The hacking of civilian traffic cameras, the weaponization of a prayer app, the assassination of scientists in their beds, the use of AI for targeting — these capabilities, once demonstrated, do not remain in the hands of democracies. Former NSA officer Jake Williams warned that the cyber-kinetic fusion model — in which digital attacks prepare the battlefield for physical strikes — would be studied and replicated by every intelligence service on earth.25
The intelligence operation that penetrated the Islamic Republic was made possible by three factors: extraordinary Israeli technical capability, deep American institutional support, and a regime so hated by its own people that its enemies could recruit agents from within its inner circle for decades. The first two can be replicated by adversaries. The third cannot be manufactured — it can only be earned, through decades of the kind of governance the Islamic Republic has provided.
The regime built a surveillance state to watch ninety-three million people. It did not occur to them that someone might be watching back.
This article is part of Forty Seconds. For Iran’s military response and what it achieved, see Iran’s Counterpunch. For the unresolved nuclear question, see The 440 Kilograms.
Footnotes
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ProPublica, profile of recruited Mossad operative “S.T.,” March 2026; Israeli Channel 10 (Uvda), interview with operative “Arash” ↩
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Israeli Channel 13 reporting on ~100 Mossad operatives deployed inside Iran; Wall Street Journal, citing 18 US/Israeli officials ↩
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Meir Dagan, former Mossad director, on ethnic recruitment strategy; Ram Ben Barak, former deputy Mossad director, on regime unpopularity ↩
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Yossi Cohen, former Mossad chief, on-record account of Shorabad operation; confirmed via New York Times and Washington Post reporting ↩
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Financial Times, traffic camera compromise and AI-driven analysis; Unit 8200 operational methodology ↩
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Financial Times, unnamed Israeli intelligence official, March 2026 ↩
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ORF Online, access to electronic devices of Khamenei’s inner circle “for nearly two decades,” March 2026 ↩
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Hamid Kashfi, cybersecurity expert, on BadeSaba compromise; app download figures from Google Play Store ↩
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Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, and Israeli media on ground-based covert operations, June 2025 ↩
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ProPublica, “one hundred percent of the anti-aircraft batteries marked for the Mossad by the air force were destroyed” ↩
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IDF operational statements; Israeli Channel 12 reporting; FPRI analysis, October 2025 ↩
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Iran International on Shadmani killing; Ali Shadmani’s daughter’s account via Iranian media ↩
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Israeli Channel 12, reporting on Operation Narnia ↩
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ISIS (Institute for Science and International Security), analysis of nuclear scientist casualties, 2025 ↩
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ISIS, “Losing the Brains: Iran’s Nuclear Scientists After Operation Rising Lion,” assessment, August 2025 ↩
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IMF, Iranian brain drain statistics; ISIS on tacit knowledge and irreplaceability ↩
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General Saeed Montazerolmahdi, police spokesperson, statement on state television, August 2025 ↩
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Amnesty International, death penalty in Iran report, 2025; FPRI, post-war espionage legislation analysis ↩
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Ahmadinejad public disclosure on Mossad double agent, reported via Iranian media and Iran International ↩
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Ali Younesi, former Intelligence Minister, quoted in Israeli and Iranian media ↩
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Saeed Leilaz, Iranian analyst, quoted in Financial Times and Israeli media ↩
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Shekarchi, quoted via IRGC-affiliated media; Intelligence Ministry guidance on suspicious behavior ↩
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IDF operational records; Iranian media reporting on Rashid family casualties ↩
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Iran International and human rights organizations on Rouzbeh Vadi execution; family testimony via social media ↩
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Jake Williams, former NSA Tailored Access Operations, on cyber-kinetic fusion precedent ↩