Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Assault Iran From Inside — ProPublica

Within the early morning hours of June 13, a commando group led by a younger Iranian, S.T., settled into place on the outskirts of Tehran. The goal was an anti-aircraft battery, a part of the umbrella of radars and missiles set as much as defend the capital and its army installations from aerial assault.

Throughout the nation, groups of Israeli-trained commandos recruited from Iran and neighboring nations had been getting ready to assault Iranian defenses from inside.

As described by their handlers, their motives had been a mixture of private and political. Some had been looking for revenge in opposition to a repressive, clerical regime that had imposed strict limits on political expression and each day life. Others had been enticed by money, the promise of medical take care of relations or alternatives to attend school abroad.

The assault had been deliberate for greater than a yr by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Simply 9 months earlier, the spy company had shocked the world with its technical prowess — executing a plot hatched in 2014 by its director on the time, Tamir Pardo, that crippled Hezbollah by detonating pagers booby-trapped with tiny however deadly quantities of explosives. In accordance with Hezbollah, the blasts killed 30 fighters and 12 civilians, together with two kids, and injured greater than 3,500.

At 3 a.m. on June 13, S.T. and a overseas legion of roughly 70 commandos opened hearth with drones and missiles on a fastidiously chosen listing of anti-aircraft batteries and ballistic missile launchers. (His handlers within the Mossad would solely inform us his initials.) The subsequent day, one other group of Iranians and others recruited from the area launched a second wave of assaults inside Iran.

In detailed interviews, 10 current and former Israeli intelligence officers described the commando raids and a wealth of beforehand undisclosed particulars of the nation’s decadeslong covert effort to stop Iran from constructing a nuclear bomb. They requested anonymity so they may converse freely.

The officers mentioned the commando assaults had been pivotal in June’s airstrikes, permitting Israel’s air pressure to hold out wave after wave of bombing runs with out dropping a single airplane. Knowledgeable by intelligence gathered by the Mossad’s brokers on the bottom, Israeli warplanes pounded nuclear amenities, destroyed round half of Iran’s 3,000 ballistic missiles and 80% of its launchers, and fired missiles on the bedrooms of Iranian nuclear scientists and army commanders.

As that they had with the pagers, Israeli spies took benefit of their potential to penetrate their adversary’s communications programs. Early within the aerial assault, Israeli cyberwarriors despatched a faux message to Iran’s prime army leaders, luring them to a phantom assembly in an underground bunker that was then demolished in a precision strike. Twenty had been killed, together with three chiefs of employees.

The strategic map of the area has been dramatically redrawn for the reason that Oct. 7, 2023, assaults during which Hamas killed greater than 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages. Public consideration, significantly in current weeks, has targeted on Israel’s retaliation in opposition to Gaza, which has induced scores of 1000’s of deaths and a deepening famine that has been globally condemned.

The key battle between Israel and Iran has attracted far much less public consideration however has additionally performed a big position within the area’s altering steadiness of energy.

In 2018, Israeli-trained operatives broke into an unguarded Tehran warehouse and used high-temperature plasma cutters to crack safes containing drawings, knowledge, pc disks and planning books. The fabric, weighing over 1,000 kilos, was loaded onto two vehicles and pushed into neighboring Azerbaijan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed the fabric at a press convention in Tel Aviv and mentioned it proved Iran had been mendacity about its nuclear intentions.

Two years later, the Mossad killed one among Iran’s prime physicists, utilizing synthetic intelligence-enhanced facial recognition to direct a remotely operated machine gun parked on a roadside close to his weekend home.

Within the lead-up to June’s air assaults, in keeping with Israeli planners, they organized for unwitting truck drivers to smuggle into Iran tons of “metallic tools” — the elements for the weapons utilized by the commando groups.

Israeli officers mentioned these operations replicate a basic shift within the Mossad’s method that started about 15 years in the past. The brokers in Iran who broke into the safes, arrange the machine weapons, blasted the air defenses and watched the scientists’ flats weren’t Israelis. All had been both Iranians or residents of third international locations, in keeping with senior Israeli officers with direct information of the operations. For years, such missions in Iran had been the unique work of Israeli discipline operatives. However officers mentioned the rising unpopularity of the Iranian regime has made it a lot simpler to draw brokers.

S.T. was one among them. Israeli officers mentioned he grew up in a working-class household in a small city close to Tehran. He enrolled in school and was residing a seemingly strange pupil life, when he and several other classmates had been arrested by Iran’s feared Basij militia and brought to a detention middle the place they had been tortured with electrical shocks and brutally overwhelmed.

S.T. and his buddies had been in the end launched, however the expertise left him enraged and looking forward to revenge. Quickly after, a relative residing abroad supplied his title to an Israeli spy whose job was to determine disaffected Iranians. Messages had been exchanged by way of an encrypted cellphone app, and S.T. accepted a free journey to a neighboring nation.

A case officer from the Mossad invited him to work as a covert operative in opposition to Iran. He agreed, asking solely that Israel pledge to care for his household if something went fallacious. (Iran summarily executes anybody caught spying for overseas international locations, particularly Israel.)

He was skilled for months outdoors of Iran by Israeli weapons specialists. Simply earlier than the assault was to start, he and his small group slipped again into the nation to play their position in one of many largest and most advanced army operations in Israel’s historical past.

The Origins of a Secret Struggle

The Mossad made Iran its prime precedence in 1993 after Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords on the White Home garden, seemingly ending a long time of battle.

Credit score:
J. David Ake/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

Israel had lengthy had an advanced relationship with Iran. For many years, it maintained a strategic alliance with the shah of Iran. However Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Islamists who overthrew the monarch in 1979 described the Jewish state as a “cancerous tumor” that needs to be excised from the Center East.

Israel’s technique is, in impact, to guard its nuclear monopoly within the area. It doesn’t publicly acknowledge its arsenal, estimated at greater than 90 warheads. The Israeli air pressure destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor below building in 2007.

After the Iraq airstrike, Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Start, declared that his nation had a proper to stop neighbors from constructing their very own bomb. “We can not enable a second Holocaust,” he mentioned.

Credit score:
STF/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

Just a few years later, Iran started researching nuclear weapons, drawing on the experience of a Pakistani engineer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who had as soon as labored for a Dutch firm that produced enriched uranium.

Shabtai Shavit, the Mossad director whose time period led to 1996, mentioned Israel was conscious of Khan’s travels within the area however didn’t initially detect his essential position in Iran’s program. “We didn’t absolutely perceive his intentions,” Shavit informed us in an interview earlier than his demise in 2023. “If we had recognized, I might have ordered my combatants to kill him. I imagine that might have reversed the course of historical past.”

In accordance with United Nations nuclear inspectors, the Iranians used blueprints supplied by Khan to start constructing the centrifuges wanted to counterpoint uranium they bought from Pakistan, China and South Africa.

In 2000, Shavit’s successor drew up plans for the Mossad’s particular missions unit often known as Kidon — Hebrew for “bayonet” — to assassinate Khan whereas he was visiting what one official described as “a Southeast Asian nation.” The mission was shelved when Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, informed President Invoice Clinton he would rein in Khan’s international actions.

Credit score:
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Photographs

That promise wasn’t saved.

That very same yr, the Mossad found that the Iranians had been constructing a secret enrichment plant close to Natanz, a metropolis about 200 miles south of Tehran. The spy company tipped off an Iranian dissident group, which went public with the revelation two years later.

Mossad veterans mentioned that operatives — doubtless Israelis posing as Europeans putting in or servicing tools — walked round Natanz sporting footwear with double soles that collected mud and soil samples. Testing finally revealed that the Iranian-made centrifuges had been enriching uranium properly past the 5% degree wanted for a nuclear energy plant. (Medical isotopes use 20% enriched uranium; bombs want 90%.)

In 2001, Israel elected Gen. Ariel Sharon, well-known for his belligerent toughness, as prime minister. The next yr, Sharon named one among his favourite generals, Meir Dagan, as director of the Mossad. Each had a fame for pushing boundaries and defying norms.

Dagan, who led the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, determined to make stopping Iran’s nuclear program the spy company’s major aim.

Like Start, who was born in Poland, Dagan was haunted by the Holocaust. Heads of overseas intelligence businesses recalled visiting his workplace and seeing {a photograph} of Nazi troopers brutalizing Dagan’s grandfather on the wall. Explaining the picture’s which means at an anti-Netanyahu rally in 2015, he mentioned: “I swore that that may by no means occur once more. I hope and imagine that I’ve carried out all the things in my energy to maintain that promise.”

Credit score:
Yad Vashem

Beneath Dagan’s management, the Mossad organized an array of covert operations to gradual the Iranian program. Israeli brokers started assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists, sending operatives on bikes to connect small bombs to vehicles in visitors.

The Artwork of Recruitment

Dagan took delight within the Mossad’s rising potential to recruit Iranians and others for covert operations inside Iran.

One key to the spy company’s success is the ethnic composition of Iran. Israeli officers famous in interviews that roughly 40% of the nation’s inhabitants of 90 million is made up of ethnic minorities: Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and others.

Shortly earlier than he died in 2016, Dagan informed us that “one of the best pool for recruiting brokers inside Iran lies throughout the nation’s ethnic and human mosaic. A lot of them oppose the regime. Some even hate it.”

Current and former officers mentioned Dagan championed the shift to counting on foreign-born brokers. Within the early years of the hassle to penetrate Iran, the spy company had relied totally on Israelis, recognized to Mossad insiders as “blue and white” — a reference to the colours of Israel’s flag.

Beneath Dagan, the Mossad’s management got here to imagine they may discover extremely efficient brokers in Iran or amongst Iranian exiles and others residing in one of many seven international locations that border it.

Credit score:
Yaakov Saar/GPO/Getty Photographs

Current and former officers mentioned the recruits fell into two classes. Some gravitated to the realm of conventional espionage, gathering intelligence and passing it on to their handler. Others expressed a willingness to hold out violent operations, together with assaults on nuclear scientists.

Not surprisingly, given the chance of abstract execution, many had preliminary doubts.

“Convincing somebody to betray their nation is not any small feat,” mentioned a former senior Mossad officer who oversaw items dealing with overseas brokers. “It’s a technique of gradual erosion. You begin with a minor request, an insignificant activity. Then one other. These are trial runs. In the event that they carry out properly, you assign them one thing bigger, extra significant. And in the event that they refuse — properly, by then you may have leverage: strain, threats, even blackmail.”

Spymasters, he mentioned, attempt to keep away from threats or coercion. “It’s higher to information them to a spot the place they act willingly — the place they take step one themselves,” the previous officer mentioned.

Essentially the most essential ingredient is belief. “Your agent have to be loyal and emotionally tied to you. Like a soldier who prices ahead regardless of the hazard, trusting his comrades, so it’s with brokers. He goes on the mission as a result of he trusts his handler and feels a deep sense of accountability towards him.”

Most people who agreed to work for Israel anticipated fee for the dangers they had been taking. However the current and former officers mentioned the driving pressure for individuals who conform to spy on their very own nation is commonly extra primal.

“Monetary reward is, in fact, essential,” the previous Mossad officer mentioned. “However persons are additionally pushed by emotion — hatred, love, dependence, revenge. But it at all times helps when the recruit’s motives are supported by some type of tangible profit: not essentially a direct fee however some sort of oblique assist.”

That is how S.T. was recruited.

His handlers mentioned he was consumed by hatred towards the regime and what had been carried out to him by the Basij militia. However what lastly pushed him to cooperate was the Mossad’s provide to rearrange medical remedy unavailable in Iran for a relative.

For many years, medical care has been one of many Mossad’s signature recruitment strategies. Israeli intelligence has hyperlinks with docs and clinics in a number of international locations, and arranging surgical procedure and varied therapies was additionally used to penetrate Palestinian extremist teams. It has featured much more in approaches to Iranians, within the hope of persuading them to assist Israel.

The Mossad additionally makes use of the web to draw brokers, creating web sites and publishing social media posts geared toward Iranians that provide to assist folks affected by life-threatening sicknesses comparable to most cancers. These posts embody cellphone numbers or encrypted contact choices.

Israeli intelligence can mobilize its worldwide community to search out trusted docs or clinics — locations that gained’t ask too many questions. The Mossad usually pays the payments straight and discreetly.

One other incentive used to entice potential spies is increased schooling out of the country. Primarily based on years of analysis and expertise, Mossad recruiters know that Iranians crave entry to high quality schooling. Even the fundamentalist non secular regime of the present supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, encourages educational development. This makes affords of placement in Western universities, or boarding colleges for youngsters, an particularly compelling device.

As soon as a candidate is recognized, the Mossad units up an preliminary assembly in an accessible location — typically in neighboring international locations comparable to Turkey, Armenia or Azerbaijan, that are comparatively straightforward for Iranians to enter. Different choices embody locations in Southeast Asia like Thailand and India that enable Iranian residents to use on-line for enterprise, medical or vacationer visas.

Candidates endure a sequence of conferences and psychological evaluations. Psychologists observe their conduct, typically from behind one-way mirrors. They fill out detailed questionnaires about their private historical past, together with intimate particulars about their household life, and are questioned by a polygraph examiner.

Brokers are frequently retested after they start working within the discipline. Each motion, whether or not minor or main, is adopted by one other lie detector check to verify continued loyalty.

They obtain in depth coaching and supervision. To keep away from arousing suspicion, they’re informed what to put on, the place to purchase their clothes, what vehicles to drive, and even how, when and the place to deposit the cash they obtain.

The agent-handler relationship is essential, as a former Mossad operative who “ran” brokers defined. In lots of instances, the handler is concurrently confessor, babysitter, psychologist, non secular mentor and surrogate member of the family.

The aim is to construct a bond so sturdy that the agent feels protected and supported — snug sufficient to share even their deepest private secrets and techniques, together with their sexual relationships.

Any and all details about the agent may be invaluable to the Mossad, both as a purple flag marking a possible vulnerability to Iran’s secret police or one other facet of the agent’s life that the handlers can put to make use of. Among the many key questions: Who’s within the particular person’s social circle? Can she or he use that relationship to the Mossad’s profit?

The operatives who had been assigned to assassinate nuclear scientists on the road acquired in depth coaching from Mossad case officers. They had been taught to journey bikes and both shoot their targets at shut vary or plant explosives on their autos.

The intent was each to deprive the Iranian program of experience and to discourage promising scientists from engaged on nuclear weapons. From 2010 to 2012 the Israelis killed at the least 4 scientists and barely missed one other.

The operations had been managed by Israelis, all the way down to the smallest particulars, typically from close by international locations or straight from Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv, and infrequently by Israeli intelligence officers who briefly entered Iran.

Operation Rising Lion

Through the years, the Mossad and Israel’s army repeatedly drew up plans to halt Iran’s nuclear program by bombing its key amenities. Israel’s political leaders at all times drew again below strain from American presidents who feared an assault would set off a regional battle, destabilizing the Center East. Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, had stockpiled tens of 1000’s of missiles, sufficient to overwhelm Israel’s air defenses and hit its largest cities.

These calculations shifted dramatically up to now yr.

In April and October of 2024, Iran fired missiles and drones straight at Israel. Almost all had been shot down with the assistance of america and allies. The Israeli air pressure responded with airstrikes that destroyed a lot of Iran’s air defenses.

Credit score:
Erik Marmor/Getty Photographs

The Israeli army had begun planning a bombing marketing campaign in opposition to Iran in mid-2024 that it hoped could be prepared inside a yr. With Donald Trump’s victory within the November election, and Hezbollah neutralized, Israeli officers noticed a window of alternative.

Israel’s American-trained pilots had been secretly flying over Iran since 2016 — studying the panorama and exploring varied routes to reduce the possibilities of detection.

One nuclear goal in Iran, nonetheless, was thought-about so formidable that the Israeli air pressure had no plan for destroying it. The Iranians had constructed a uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo and buried it inside a mountain — almost 300 ft beneath the floor. Iran tried to maintain Fordo a secret, however the Mossad and American and British intelligence had been in a position to monitor actions out and in of the mountain. President Barack Obama disclosed its existence in 2009, and United Nations inspectors who visited the positioning quickly after discovered that Iran was planning for as much as 3,000 extremely superior centrifuges to counterpoint uranium.

Credit score:
DigitalGlobe by way of Getty Photographs

Solely america had a bomb highly effective sufficient to pierce a mountain: the GBU-57 Huge Ordnance Penetrator, the world’s largest standard bomb often known as a “bunker buster.”

And so Israeli army planners drew up a plan for a extremely dangerous floor operation, particulars of that are disclosed right here for the primary time. Beneath the plan, elite commandos had been to be smuggled to the Fordo website with out being detected. Then they’d storm the constructing, making the most of the ingredient of shock. As soon as inside, their mission could be to explode the centrifuges, seize Iran’s enriched uranium and escape.

The brand new head of the Mossad was skeptical. David Barnea, often known as Dadi, had lengthy pushed for aggressive actions in opposition to Iran. He had overseen the remote-machine gun assault in 2020 simply earlier than being promoted to the highest job. But he thought the plans for a commando assault on Fordo had been far too dangerous. Barnea apprehensive that a few of Israel’s greatest troopers and spies could be killed or taken hostage, a nightmare for Israelis already deeply pained by the ordeal of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza for the reason that assault of Oct. 7, 2023.

Barnea and different Israeli officers got here to imagine that the Trump administration may be a part of an Israeli assault on Iran, with U.S. warplanes dropping the large “bunker busters” on Fordo. Trump had repeatedly and publicly declared that he wouldn’t enable Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb.

To arrange for what could be dubbed Operation Rising Lion, the Mossad and the army intelligence company, Aman, stepped up their monitoring of Iran’s army leaders and nuclear groups. A number of of the operation’s planners mentioned that Barnea considerably expanded the Mossad’s Tzomet, or Junction, division, which recruits and trains non-Israeli brokers. The choice was made to entrust this overseas legion with Israel’s most subtle tools for paramilitary operations and communications. The quilt tales for every agent, often known as their legends, had been checked and rechecked for inconsistencies.

The Mossad’s espionage efforts had been helped by a geographic reality. Iran is bordered by Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Smuggling is a lifestyle within the area, as 1000’s of individuals earn their residing utilizing donkeys, camels, vehicles and vehicles to hold medicine, gasoline and electronics throughout the borders.

The Mossad had developed contacts with smugglers — and sometimes with the federal government intelligence businesses — in all seven nations.

“Bringing tools out and in is comparatively straightforward,” mentioned an Israeli who has labored with Mossad on logistics, “and the Mossad additionally used entrance corporations that legally shipped packing containers and crates by sea and on vehicles pushed legitimately via border crossings.”

The fabric was delivered to “infrastructure brokers,” Mossad operatives inside Iran who retailer the fabric till it’s wanted. Mossad veterans mentioned the gear may be hidden in protected homes for years, up to date as expertise evolves or upkeep is required.

Officers mentioned the Mossad skilled the non-Israeli brokers who would assault Iranian targets for about 5 months. Some had been delivered to Israel, the place fashions had been constructed to allow apply runs. Others rehearsed their missions in third international locations the place they met Israeli specialists.

There have been two teams of commandos, every with 14 groups of 4 to 6 members. Some already lived in Iran. Others had been anti-regime exiles who slipped into the nation on the eve of the assault.

Every had their directions, however they had been additionally in contact with Israeli planners who may change or replace the assault plan. A lot of the groups had been tasked with placing Iranian air defenses from a listing of targets supplied by the Israeli air pressure.

The Mossad had code names for every of the groups and their assignments, which had been primarily based on mixtures of musical notes.

On the night time of June 12, the groups arrived at their positions as orchestrated. The Israelis accountable for the covert operations directed the brokers to depart little or no tools behind. (Iranian media studies after the assault asserted that the infiltrators had missed their targets and fled with out their gear; Israeli officers mentioned what the Iranians discovered had been insignificant parts — the equal of gum wrappers.)

“100% of the anti-aircraft batteries marked for the Mossad by the air pressure had been destroyed,” a senior Israeli intelligence official mentioned. Most had been close to Tehran in areas the place the Israeli air pressure had not beforehand operated.

Within the first hours of the battle, one of many commando groups struck an Iranian ballistic missile launcher. Israeli analysts imagine this mission had a disproportionate influence, inflicting Iran to delay its retaliatory salvo in opposition to Israel out of worry that different missile launchers had been susceptible to assaults from inside Iran.

Officers emphasised that the army logistics of the plan had been the work of Aman and the Israeli air pressure, which hit greater than a thousand targets over the 11 days of airstrikes. However officers agree that the Mossad contributed key intelligence for one facet of Rising Lion: the assassinations of senior Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists.

The Mossad compiled detailed data on the habits and whereabouts of 11 Iranian nuclear scientists. The dossiers even mapped the areas of the bedrooms within the males’s houses. On the morning of June 13, Israeli air pressure warplanes fired air-to-ground missiles at these coordinates, killing all 11.

After a delay, Iran retaliated with a barrage of missiles. Most had been intercepted, however the ones that obtained via did appreciable injury. Israel reported 30 civilian deaths and estimated its reconstruction prices at $12 billion. Iran’s state media put the demise toll of their nation at greater than 600.

Credit score:
Yair Palti/Anadolu by way of Getty Photographs

The query of how a lot Iran’s nuclear efforts had been set again stays in dispute. Trump has insisted the American airstrikes on Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan “obliterated” Iran’s program. Analysts in Israeli and American intelligence have been extra restrained.

“This battle considerably set them again,” mentioned a former head of Aman, Gen. Tamir Hayman. “Iran is not a nuclear threshold state, because it was on the eve of the battle. It may be capable of return to threshold standing in a single or two years on the earliest, assuming a call by the Supreme Chief to interrupt out towards a bomb.”

Hayman, who now heads the Institute for Nationwide Safety Research in Israel, mentioned it’s potential the assault might need the alternative of its meant impact, if Iran turns into much more keen to construct a bomb that might deter future Israeli assaults.