Israel and US spent years hacking Iran to assassinate Khamenei

Israel deployed a massive array of cyber warfare technology to kill Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei. The genocidal settler state prepared for years, hacking and penetrating Iranian systems ahead of its assault on the country.

The US and Israel attacked Iran first on 28 February without provocation. Iran was offering unprecedented concessions at the time. The Pentagon has since stated there was no imminent threat from Iran. And the UN’s atomic watchdog, the IAEA, has said there is no evidence Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.

An investigation by the Financial Times explains the staggering power and reach of the technology involved. A caveat: anything unnamed intelligence sources willingly tell the press must be taken with extreme caution.

The spooks hacked traffic cameras:

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.

Once information was gathered:

Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.

The years-long operation allowed Mossad and the CIA:

to determine exactly what time 86-year-old Khamenei would be in his offices this fateful Saturday morning and who would be joining him.

Mobile phone towers

Spies took over mobile phone towers. The (presumably Israeli) sources said they were:

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.

One bragged:

we knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem.

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’s signals intelligence outfit, Unit 8200 were central to the operation:

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.

You can read some of our reporting on this shadowy unit here.

Israel and the US attacked first

The reporting highlighted how Israel and the US were the aggressors in the rapidly expanding war. One section explains:

When the CIA and Israel determined that Khamenei would be holding a meeting on Saturday morning [28 February] at his offices near Pasteur Street, the chance to kill him alongside so much of Iran’s senior leadership was especially opportune.

The report continues:

They assessed that hunting them down after a war had properly begun would have been much harder, since the Iranians would quickly embark on evasive practices, including heading underground to bunkers immune to Israeli bombs.

On 2 March defence secretary Pete Hegseth, who believes Jesus wants him to attack Iran, bizarrely claimed:

We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.

Notwithstanding the fact that claim is chronologically false, the Financial Times reports shows that the attack was the result of a “years”-long process. The US and Israel wanted a regional war. Now they have one. And they seem to have no plan for what to do next.

Featured image via Aljazeera