Israel Targeted Top Iranian Leaders by Tracing their Bodyguards’ Phones
Iranian security guards’ careless use of mobile phones over several years played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders, The New York Times said on Sunday quoting Iranian and Israeli officials.
Israel had been tracking senior Iranian nuclear scientists since the end of 2022 and had weighed killing them as early as last October but held off to avoid a clash with the Biden administration, the Israeli officials told the newspaper.
The Times said 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.
It noted that the meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.
The account of Israel’s strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.
The newspaper said the officials, who included President Masoud Pezeshkian, the heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived at the meeting in separate cars. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them, NYT wrote.
