From The Australian, March 4:
A network of operatives infiltrated the supreme leader’s inner circle. After months of watching and listening, Mossad jammed his bodyguards’ phones and then the jets struck.
The meeting between Iran’s supreme leader and some 40 officials took place every Saturday morning at Ali Khamenei’s office and principal residence in Tehran. It gave Israel an hour-long window to close in for the kill before he returned to one of his two bunkers deep beneath the ground.
At about 6am on Saturday (local time) – a symbolic day and time as this was when Hamas launched its October 7 attack – Israel enacted a plan that was years in the making. It was made possible by a network of intelligence officials that built a near-omnipresent picture of where the 86-year-old was and who he was with at all times.
Michael Bar-Zohar is an Israeli historian and former defence official who is writing a book on the Mossad intelligence operations in Iran.
“We had a very important source in Khamenei’s vicinity,” he said. “But most of the time, contrary to what has been published, he was not out in the open. He was deep underground in one of his bunkers. We knew all of this during the 12-day war [in June last year], and way before, but his killing was not the goal at that time.”
Whoever gave the exact time and place that Khamenei was above ground was probably “sunning himself on a beach in Thailand or Brazil, with a lot of money in his pocket”, he added.
It took months, if not years, of watching and listening to pinpoint Khamenei. Israel hacked all the traffic cameras in the capital, according to a report in the Financial Times, encrypting and transmitting the comings and goings of the bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials around Pasteur Street to servers inside Israel.
Citing people familiar with the operation, the report said one camera showed where they parked their cars, “providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of their closely guarded compounds”.
Dossiers were compiled with the personal information and work schedules of the employees surrounding officials, stitching a tapestry of intelligence that led to Khamenei’s assassination.
At the same time, Israel jammed the mobile phone towers around the compound so his bodyguards could not receive any possible leaks or warnings....
....MUCH MORE
As has been pointed out by many people on social media, Iran apparently thought it was more secure to have everyone face-to-face rather than doing some sort of Zoom meeting.
But if the Israelis were hacking the traffic cameras it is probable they could hack anything that was even web-adjacent, much less something running on the internet.
