"How did they do that?" is a question most of us have been asking about how Israel has been able to assassinate so many of the best-protected members of the Iranian government.
In my experience, no enemy has so thoroughly penetrated a state. What's left of the Iranian government, the forces of oppression, the military, clerical elites must be looking at each other with great suspicion.
Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when they meet, almost certainly remotely, to see the look on their faces?
As far back as 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "began recording short videos with Persian subtitles to communicate directly with the Iranian people," according to Eli Lake writing in The Free Press.
Further back, the former Mossad director, Meir Dagan, believed by 2011 that support for Iran’s democratic opposition was in the best interest of the West.
"Over time, Mossad’s focus expanded beyond Iran’s nuclear program and support for terrorism," Lake writes. "The agency’s operatives penetrated Iran’s regime and infrastructure with ruthless efficiency." And to an incredible depth. "Everything from Tehran’s traffic cameras to the country’s wireless networks have been hacked," says Lake.
Perhaps the best illustration of Mossad’s ubiquitous reach into Iranian society has been recent videos coming out of Tehran that show armed drones firing on members of the Basij, the pro-regime militia that has established checkpoints throughout Iran’s cities and helped to slaughter tens of thousands of Iranian citizens in January after the latest national uprising.
Mossad's human intelligence has to be beyond anything seen before. Someone (or more likely, several someones) very high up in the Iranian security state is feeding Israel real-time intelligence on the location of regime leaders.
The intelligence coup is paying off in big ways beyond giving Israel the ability to target the Iranian leadership. This video shows an Israeli drone hitting a Basij checkpoint.
Joel Rayburn, who served in the first Trump administration, told The Free Press, “The Israelis are demonstrating a capability to disrupt the internal security forces responsible for the massive crackdown in January."
He added, “They have not only attacked the infrastructure, they have been able to attack the leadership. This is very significant. They have used small drones to attack specific Basij checkpoints all over Tehran. If the Israelis can expand that capability, that may be a game changer.”
What exactly does Rayburn mean by a "game changer"?
Imagine hundreds of thousands of Iranians marching through Tehran to the Majles, the country’s parliament building. Buzzing overhead are armed drones controlled by operators a thousand miles away in Israel. The deadly checkpoints and dungeons where protesters were once slaughtered and tortured are now rubble. As the crowd approaches the legislature, the old flags of a sword-wielding lion and rising sun are unfurled.
Some may dismiss this scenario as wishcasting or neoconservative fan fiction. But as Theodor Herzl, the ideological father of modern Zionism, famously quipped: “If you will it, it is no dream.” As the war for Iran moves toward its fourth week, the Israelis are exerting their will to create the conditions for a revolution that Iranians have tried and failed to incept for more than a quarter century.
Meir Ben-Shabbat served as Israel’s national security adviser between 2017 and 2021. He told Eli Lake in an interview, “The idea is that the internal struggle that is supposed to bring about regime change will occur when the regime has been battered and destabilized, its command-and-control system reduced to only partial functioning, its mechanisms of repression damaged, its legitimacy at a low point, its proxies weak, and its economic hole deep."
"It is true that the outcome cannot be guaranteed," added Ben-Shabbat, "but it is clear that without these prior steps, there is no chance of it happening.”
The ground is being prepared, and all indications are that the soil is fertile. "The Wall Street Journal reports that Iranian citizens have helped to crowdsource targets for the Israeli drones, such as checkpoints or other hideouts for local commanders," writes Lake.
Lake asks, "Can the one country that Iran’s regime has tried for nearly 50 years to destroy end up saving the people trapped under its boot?"
If so, it would be one of modern history's richest ironies. And spectacular accomplishments.
