Targeting Iran's leaders, Israel found a weak link: Their bodyguards

The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.

It was June 16, the fourth day of Iran's war with Israel, and Iran's Supreme National Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting in a bunker 100 feet below a mountain slope in the western part of Tehran. For days, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign had destroyed military, government and nuclear sites around Iran, and had decimated the top echelon of Iran's military commanders and nuclear scientists.

The officials, who included President Masoud Pezeshkian, the heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived in separate cars. None carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.

Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.

The attack threw Iran's intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.

Israel's tracking of the guards has not been previously reported. It was one part of a larger effort to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles of Iran's security and intelligence apparatus that has had officials in Tehran chasing shadows for two months.

According to Iranian and Israeli officials, Iranian security guards' careless use of mobile phones over several years -- including posting on social media -- played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders and the Israeli air force to swoop in and kill them with missiles and bombs during the first week of the June war.

"We know senior officials and commanders did not carry phones, but their interlocutors, security guards and drivers had phones. They did not take precautions seriously, and this is how most of them were traced," said Sasan Karimi, who previously served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran's current government and is now a political analyst and lecturer at Tehran University.

The account of Israel's strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Revolutionary Guard and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.

The security breakdowns with the bodyguards are just one component of what Iranian officials acknowledge has been a long-running and often successful effort by Israel to use spies and operatives placed around the country as well as technology against Iran, sometimes with devastating effect.

Following the most recent conflict, Iran remains focused on hunting down operatives that it fears remain present in the country and the government.

"Infiltration has reached the highest echelons of our decision-making," Mostafa Hashemi Taba, a former vice president and minister, said in an interview with Iranian media in late June.

Earlier this month, Iran executed a nuclear scientist, Roozbeh Vadi, on allegations of spying for Israel and facilitating the assassination of another scientist. Three senior Iranian officials and a member of the Revolutionary Guard said Iran had quietly arrested or placed under house arrest dozens of people from the military, intelligence and government branches who were suspected of spying for Israel, some of them high-ranking. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a connection to those so accused.

Spy games between Iran and Israel have been a constant feature of a decades-long shadow war between the two countries, and Israel's success in June in killing so many important Iranian security figures shows just how much Israel has gained the upper hand.

Israel had been tracking senior Iranian nuclear scientists since the end of 2022 and had weighed killing them as early as last October, but held off to avoid a clash with the Biden administration, Israeli officials said.

From the end of last year until June, what the Israelis called a "decapitation team" reviewed the files of all the scientists in the Iranian nuclear project known to Israel, to decide which they would recommend to kill. The first list contained 400 names. That was reduced to 100, mainly based on material from an Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had stolen from Iran in 2018. In the end, Iran said the Israelis focused on and killed 13 scientists.

At the same time, Israel was building its capacity to target and kill senior Iranian military officials under a program called "Operation Red Wedding," a play on a bloody "Game of Thrones" episode. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard's aerospace force, was the first target, one Israeli official said.

Ultimately, Israeli officials said, the basic idea in both operations was to locate 20 to 25 human targets in Iran and hit all of them in the opening strike of the campaign, on the assumption that they would be more careful afterward, making them much harder to hit.

In a video interview with an Iranian journalist, the newly appointed head of the Revolutionary Guard, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said that although Israel had human operatives and spies in the country, it had tracked senior officials and scientists and discovered the location of sensitive meetings mostly through advanced technology.

"The enemy gets the majority of its intelligence through technology, satellites and electronic data," Vahidi said. "They can find people, get information, their voices, images and zoom in with precise satellites and find the locations."

From the Israeli side, Iran's growing awareness of the threat to senior figures came to be seen as an opportunity. Fearing more assassinations on the ground of the sort that Israel had pulled off successfully in the past, the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered extensive security measures including large contingents of bodyguards and warned against the use of mobile phones and messaging apps like WhatsApp, which is commonly used in Iran.

Those bodyguards, Israel discovered, were not only carrying cellphones but even posting from them on social media.

"Using so many bodyguards is a weakness that we imposed on them, and we were able to take advantage of that," one Israeli defense official said.

Iranian officials had long suspected that Israel was tracking the movements of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists through their mobile phones. Last year, after Israel detonated bombs hidden inside thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Iran banned many of its officials in particularly sensitive jobs from using smartphones, social media and messaging apps.

Smartphones are now completely off limits for senior military commanders, nuclear scientists and government officials.

The protection of senior officials, military commanders and nuclear scientists is the responsibility of an elite brigade within the Revolutionary Guard called Ansar al-Mehdi. The commander in chief of Ansar, appointed last August after the new government came into office, is Gen. Mohamad Javad Assadi, one of the youngest senior commanders in the Guard.

Assadi had personally warned several senior commanders and a top nuclear scientist, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, that Israel was planning to assassinate them at least a month before they were killed on the first day of the war, according to two senior Iranian officials with knowledge of the conversation. He had also called a meeting with the team leaders of security details asking them to take extra precautions, the officials said.

The cellphone ban initially did not extend to the security guards protecting the officials, scientists and commanders. That changed after Israel's wave of assassinations on the first day of the war. Guards are now supposed to carry only walkie-talkies. Only team leaders who do not travel with the officials can carry cellphones.

But despite the new rules, according to officials who have held meetings with Assadi about security, someone violated them and carried a phone to the National Security Council meeting, allowing the Israelis to carry out the pinpoint strike.

Hamzeh Safavi, a political and military analyst whose father is the top military adviser to Khamenei, said that Israel's technological superiority over Iran was an existential threat. He said Iran had no choice but to conduct a security shakedown, overhaul its protocols and make difficult decisions -- including arrests and prosecution of high-level spies.

"We must do whatever it takes to identify and address this threat; we have a major security and intelligence bug and nothing is more urgent than repairing this hole," Safavi said in a telephone interview.

Iran's minister of intelligence said in a statement this month that it had foiled an Israeli assassination attempt on 23 senior officials but did not provide their names or details of their positions and ranks. It said in the months leading up to the war, Iran had discovered and foiled 13 plots by Israel that aimed to kill 35 senior military and government officials. (An Israeli intelligence official disputed the Iranian account, saying that Israel had not been carrying out operations before the surprise attack in June that could have led to heightened alertness on the part of Iran.)

The statement also said that security forces had identified and arrested 21 people on charges of spying for the Mossad and working as field and support operators in at least 11 provinces around Iran.

Iran has also accelerated efforts to recruit its own spies in Israel since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in the Gaza Strip and triggered aggressive Israeli military operations in Iran and Lebanon.

Over the past year, Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, has arrested dozens of Israelis and charged them with being paid agents of Iran, accused of helping collect intelligence about potential targets for Iranian strikes on Israel.

Israel has made killing Iran's top nuclear scientists an urgent priority as a way to set back the nation's nuclear program, even poisoning two young, upcoming scientists.

As Iran made steady progress over the years toward enriching its uranium stockpile into near-weapons grade material, Israeli military and intelligence officials concluded that the campaign of sabotage and explosions in the enrichment apparatus, which the Mossad had been engaged in for many years, had only a marginal impact.

In 2021, according to three Israeli security officials, the focus turned to what Israeli officials called "the weapon group" -- a cadre of Iranian scientists who the Israelis believed met regularly to work on building a device to trigger the enriched uranium and cause a nuclear explosion. This is one of the most technologically difficult parts of a nuclear project. (Iran has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and the U.N.'s atomic watchdog and U.S. intelligence agencies have long assessed that Iran has not weaponized its nuclear project.)

It was this group of scientists that became the focus of what Israel called Operation Narnia, the military plan to kill off scientists during the war's early days this spring.

By the time of the June 16 national security meeting of top Iranian officials, Israel had already killed a number of high-profile figures associated with the nuclear program, including Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, another nuclear scientist, both killed just days earlier. The cellphones of their bodyguards helped Israel target all of them.

But Israel was also targeting a wide variety of Iranian leaders, including the heads of government branches present at the national security meeting, and killed at least 30 senior military commanders through strikes during the war.

Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's air force, assembled his leadership team, accompanied by their security units, at the very start of the war to monitor intelligence about possible Israeli strikes. Israeli warplanes swooped in and carried out a pinpoint strike on the bunker where Hajizadeh had taken refuge, killing him and other top commanders.

Hajizadeh's son Alireza has said that his father took extra caution with phones. On a video published on Iranian media, he said that "when my father wanted to discuss something important, he would tell us to take the phones and smart devices out of the room and place it far away."

The ability to track the bodyguards also helped lead the Israelis to the June 16 meeting. The attendees, in addition to Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, included the speaker of parliament, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, and the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Also on hand were the ministers of the interior, defense and intelligence and military commanders, some brand-new to their jobs after their bosses had been killed in previous strikes.

The attack destroyed the room, which soon filled with debris, smoke and dust, and the power was cut, according to accounts that emerged afterward. Pezeshkian found a narrow opening through the debris, where a sliver of light and oxygen was coming through, he has said publicly.

Three senior officials said the president dug through the debris with his bare hands, eventually making enough of a space for everyone to crawl out one by one. Pezeshkian had a minor leg injury from a shrapnel wound, and the minister of interior was taken to the hospital for respiratory distress, officials said.

"There was only one hole, and we saw there was air coming and we said, we won't suffocate. Life hinges on one second," Pezeshkian said recently, recounting the attack in a meeting with senior clerics, according to a video published in Iranian media. He said if Israel had succeeded in killing the country's top officials, it would have created chaos in the country.

"People," he said, "would have lost hope."