The Guys with the Phones
By 
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 heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived in separate cars. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.
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 attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.
Have to wonder how much this tactic also played out in the assassination of Hezbollah and Houthi officials, including the Yemeni Prime Minister. Over the past two years the Israelis have basically re-written the entire academic literature on the possibility and impact of leadership decapitation, a tactic that was once regarded as nearly impossible to pull off in a systematic manner.
Photo credit: By Deror Avi – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78890117