Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Iran From Within — ProPublica

Within the early morning hours of June 13, a commando crew 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 shield 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 making 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 towards a repressive, clerical regime that had imposed strict limits on political expression and day by 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 keeping with Hezbollah, the blasts killed 30 fighters and 12 civilians, together with two youngsters, and injured greater than 3,500.

At 3 a.m. on June 13, S.T. and a international legion of roughly 70 commandos opened fireplace with drones and missiles on a rigorously chosen listing of anti-aircraft batteries and ballistic missile launchers. (His handlers within the Mossad would solely inform us his initials.) The following 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 stated the commando assaults had been pivotal in June’s airstrikes, permitting Israel’s air drive to hold out wave after wave of bombing runs with out dropping a single aircraft. Knowledgeable by intelligence gathered by the Mossad’s brokers on the bottom, Israeli warplanes pounded nuclear services, 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 they’d with the pagers, Israeli spies took benefit of their capability 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 workers.

The strategic map of the area has been dramatically redrawn because the Oct. 7, 2023, assaults during which Hamas killed greater than 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages. Public consideration, significantly in latest weeks, has targeted on Israel’s retaliation towards Gaza, which has brought on scores of hundreds 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, information, laptop 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 stated it proved Iran had been mendacity about its nuclear intentions.

Two years later, the Mossad killed one of Iran’s top 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 line with Israeli planners, they organized for unwitting truck drivers to smuggle into Iran tons of “metallic gear” — the elements for the weapons utilized by the commando groups.

Israeli officers stated these operations mirror a elementary shift within the Mossad’s strategy 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’ residences weren’t Israelis. All had been both Iranians or residents of third nations, in line 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 stated the rising unpopularity of the Iranian regime has made it a lot simpler to draw brokers.

S.T. was certainly one of them. Israeli officers stated he grew up in a working-class household in a small city close to Tehran. He enrolled in school and was dwelling a seemingly bizarre scholar life, when he and a number of 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 crushed.

S.T. and his mates had been in the end launched, however the expertise left him enraged and longing for revenge. Quickly after, a relative dwelling abroad offered his title to an Israeli spy whose job was to establish disaffected Iranians. Messages had been exchanged through an encrypted telephone 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 towards Iran. He agreed, asking solely that Israel pledge to maintain his household if something went flawed. (Iran summarily executes anybody caught spying for international nations, particularly Israel.)

He was educated for months outdoors of Iran by Israeli weapons specialists. Simply earlier than the assault was to start, he and his small crew 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 Battle

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

Israel had lengthy had a sophisticated 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 ought 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 drive destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor below development 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’t enable a second Holocaust,” he stated.

A couple of 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, stated 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 advised us in an interview earlier than his dying in 2023. “If we had identified, I’d have ordered my combatants to kill him. I imagine that might have reversed the course of historical past.”

In keeping with United Nations nuclear inspectors, the Iranians used blueprints offered 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 generally 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, advised President Invoice Clinton he would rein in Khan’s world actions.

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 stated that operatives — possible Israelis posing as Europeans putting in or servicing gear — walked round Natanz sporting footwear with double soles that collected mud and soil samples. Testing ultimately revealed that the Iranian-made centrifuges had been enriching uranium effectively 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 certainly one of his favourite generals, Meir Dagan, as director of the Mossad. Each had a popularity 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 foremost purpose.

Like Start, who was born in Poland, Dagan was haunted by the Holocaust. Heads of international intelligence companies 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 stated: “I swore that that may by no means occur once more. I hope and imagine that I’ve accomplished every part in my energy to maintain that promise.”

Below 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 automobiles in site visitors.

The Artwork of Recruitment

Dagan took satisfaction within the Mossad’s rising capability 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 advised us that “the very 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 stated Dagan championed the shift to counting on foreign-born brokers. Within the early years of the trouble to penetrate Iran, the spy company had relied totally on Israelis, identified to Mossad insiders as “blue and white” — a reference to the colours of Israel’s flag.

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

Current and former officers stated 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 danger of abstract execution, many had preliminary doubts.

“Convincing somebody to betray their nation is not any small feat,” stated a former senior Mossad officer who oversaw models dealing with international brokers. “It’s a means 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 effectively, you assign them one thing bigger, extra significant. And in the event that they refuse — effectively, by then you have got leverage: stress, threats, even blackmail.”

Spymasters, he stated, 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 stated.

Probably the most vital factor is belief. “Your agent should be loyal and emotionally tied to you. Like a soldier who expenses 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 duty towards him.”

The general public who agreed to work for Israel anticipated fee for the dangers they had been taking. However the current and former officers stated the driving drive for individuals who comply with spy on their very own nation is commonly extra primal.

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

That is how S.T. was recruited.

His handlers stated he was consumed by hatred towards the regime and what had been accomplished to him by the Basij militia. However what lastly pushed him to cooperate was the Mossad’s supply to rearrange medical therapy 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 medical doctors and clinics in a number of nations, 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 aimed toward Iranians that provide to assist individuals affected by life-threatening diseases similar to most cancers. These posts embody telephone numbers or encrypted contact choices.

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

One other incentive used to entice potential spies is greater schooling abroad. Based mostly on years of analysis and expertise, Mossad recruiters know that Iranians crave entry to high quality schooling. Even the fundamentalist spiritual regime of the present supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, encourages educational development. This makes gives 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 — usually in neighboring nations similar to Turkey, Armenia or Azerbaijan, that are comparatively simple 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 habits, usually 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 recurrently 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 substantiate continued loyalty.

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

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

The purpose is to construct a bond so sturdy that the agent feels secure 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 might be helpful to the Mossad, both as a purple flag marking a possible vulnerability to Iran’s secret police or one other side of the agent’s life that the handlers can put to make use of. Among the many key questions: Who’s within the individual’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 obtained intensive 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 a minimum of 4 scientists and barely missed one other.

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

Operation Rising Lion

Over time, the Mossad and Israel’s army repeatedly drew up plans to halt Iran’s nuclear program by bombing its key services. Israel’s political leaders all the time drew again below stress 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 hundreds of missiles, sufficient to overwhelm Israel’s air defenses and hit its largest cities.

These calculations shifted dramatically prior to now yr.

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

The Israeli army had begun planning a bombing marketing campaign towards 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 attenuate the possibilities of detection.

One nuclear goal in Iran, nevertheless, was thought-about so formidable that the Israeli air drive had no plan for destroying it. The Iranians had constructed a uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo and buried it inside a mountain — practically 300 ft beneath the floor. Iran tried to maintain Fordo a secret, however the Mossad and American and British intelligence had been capable of observe 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.

Solely america had a bomb highly effective sufficient to pierce a mountain: the GBU-57 Large Ordnance Penetrator, the world’s largest standard bomb generally 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. Below the plan, elite commandos had been to be smuggled to the Fordo web site with out being detected. Then they’d storm the constructing, profiting from the factor 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, generally known as Dadi, had lengthy pushed for aggressive actions towards 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 fearful 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 because the 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 organize 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 stated 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 international legion with Israel’s most refined gear for paramilitary operations and communications. The duvet tales for every agent, generally known as their legends, had been checked and rechecked for inconsistencies.

The Mossad’s espionage efforts had been helped by a geographic truth. Iran is bordered by Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Smuggling is a lifestyle within the area, as hundreds of individuals earn their dwelling utilizing donkeys, camels, automobiles 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 companies — in all seven nations.

“Bringing gear out and in is comparatively simple,” stated 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 by way of border crossings.”

The fabric was delivered to “infrastructure brokers,” Mossad operatives inside Iran who retailer the fabric till it’s wanted. Mossad veterans stated the gear might be hidden in secure homes for years, up to date as know-how evolves or upkeep is required.

Officers stated the Mossad educated 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 follow runs. Others rehearsed their missions in third nations the place they met Israeli consultants.

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 hanging Iranian air defenses from a listing of targets offered by the Israeli air drive.

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

On the evening of June 12, the groups arrived at their positions as orchestrated. The Israelis in command of the covert operations directed the brokers to depart little or no gear behind. (Iranian media reviews after the assault asserted that the infiltrators had missed their targets and fled with out their gear; Israeli officers stated what the Iranians discovered had been insignificant elements — the equal of gum wrappers.)

“A hundred percent of the anti-aircraft batteries marked for the Mossad by the air drive had been destroyed,” a senior Israeli intelligence official stated. Most had been close to Tehran in areas the place the Israeli air drive 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 affect, inflicting Iran to delay its retaliatory salvo towards 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 drive, which hit greater than a thousand targets over the 11 days of airstrikes. However officers agree that the Mossad contributed key intelligence for one side of Rising Lion: the assassinations of senior Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists.

The Mossad compiled detailed info 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 drive 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 by way of did appreciable injury. Israel reported 30 civilian deaths and estimated its reconstruction prices at $12 billion. Iran’s state media put the dying toll of their nation at greater than 600.

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,” stated a former head of Aman, Gen. Tamir Hayman. “Iran is now 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, stated it’s doable the assault may need the other of its meant impact, if Iran turns into much more keen to construct a bomb that might deter future Israeli assaults.