Targeting Iran’s Leaders, Israel Found a Weak Link: Their Bodyguards
Targeting Iran’s Leaders, Israel Found a Weak Link: Their Bodyguards
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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 speaker of parliament, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei and the ministers of the interior, defense and intelligence and military commanders, arrived in separate cars. Some were brand-new to their jobs after their bosses had been killed in previous strikes. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.
The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.
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 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 General 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.
“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.