{"id":366673,"date":"2026-03-04T03:13:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T03:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/366673\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T03:13:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T03:13:14","slug":"inside-the-plan-to-kill-ayatollah-ali-khamenei-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/366673\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the plan to kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street in Tehran \u2013 where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei<\/a> was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday \u2013 the Israelis were watching.<\/p>\n

Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel<\/a>, according to two people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n

One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, one of the people said, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.<\/p>\n

Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport \u2013 building what intelligence officers call a \u201cpattern of life\u201d.<\/p>\n

The capabilities were part of a years-long intelligence campaign that helped pave the way for the ayatollah\u2019s assassination. <\/p>\n

\"AyatollahAyatollah Ali Khamenei, was confirmed to have been killed after the United States and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran on Saturday. Photograph: Majid Saeedi\/Getty <\/p>\n

This source of real-time data \u2013 one of hundreds of different streams of intelligence \u2013 was not the only way Israel and the CIA were able to determine exactly what time 86-year-old Khamenei would be in his offices this fateful Saturday morning and who would be joining him.<\/p>\n

Nor was the fact that Israel was also able to disrupt single components of roughly a dozen or so mobile phone towers near Pasteur Street, making the phones seem as if they were busy when called and stopping Khamenei\u2019s protection detail from receiving possible warnings.<\/p>\n

Long before the bombs fell \u201cwe knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem\u201d, said one Israeli intelligence official. \u201cAnd when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that\u2019s out of place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AA satellite image shows damage and destruction of buildings within the Khamenei compound in Tehran. Photograph: Vantor <\/p>\n

The dense, intelligence picture of the arch-enemy\u2019s capital was the result of laborious data collection, made possible by Israel\u2019s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, the human assets recruited by its foreign intelligence agency Mossad and the mountains of data digested by military intelligence into daily briefs.<\/p>\n

Israel used a mathematical method known as social network analysis to parse billions of data points to unearth unlikely centres of decision-making gravity and identify fresh targets to carry out surveillance and kill, said a person familiar with its use. All this fed an assembly line with a single product: targets.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Iran executes Khamenei\u2019s plan to spread regional war<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Israeli intelligence culture, targeting intelligence is the most essential tactical issue \u2013 it is designed to enable a strategy,\u201d said Itai Shapira, a brigadier general in the Israeli military reserves and 25-year veteran of its intelligence directorate. \u201cIf the decision-maker decides that someone has to be assassinated, in Israel the culture is \u2018we will provide the targeting intelligence\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel has assassinated hundreds of people overseas, including militant leaders, nuclear scientists, chemical engineers \u2013 and many innocent bystanders. <\/p>\n

But even with the killing of as prominent a political and religious leader as Khamenei, how much this aggressive, decades-long use of its technological and technical prowess has paved the way for big strategic gains is fiercely debated within and outside Israel.<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s intelligence superiority was on full display in the 12-day war last June, when more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and high-ranking military officials were assassinated within minutes in an opening salvo.<\/p>\n

That had been accompanied by an unprecedented disabling of Iran\u2019s<\/a> aerial defences through a combination of cyber attacks, low-range drones and precise munitions fired from outside Iran\u2019s borders, destroying the radars of the Russian-built missile launchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe took their eyes first,\u201d one intelligence official said. Both in the June war and now, Israeli pilots have used a specific kind of missile called the Sparrow, variants of which are able to hit a target as small as a dining table from more than 1,000km away \u2013 far from Iran and the reach of any of its aerial defence systems.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Not all of the details of the latest operation are known. Some may never be made public, in order to protect sources and methods still being used to track down other targets.<\/p>\n

But killing Khamenei was a political decision, not simply a technological achievement, said more than half a dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officials interviewed for this story.<\/p>\n

When the CIA and Israel determined that Khamenei would be holding a meeting on Saturday morning at his offices near Pasteur Street, the chance to kill him alongside so much of Iran\u2019s senior leadership was especially opportune.<\/p>\n

They assessed that hunting them down after a war had properly begun would have been much harder, since the Iranians would quickly embark on evasive practices, including heading underground to bunkers immune to Israeli bombs.<\/p>\n

Khamenei, unlike his ally Hizbullah<\/a> leader Hassan Nasrallah, did not live in hiding. Nasrallah had spent years of his life in underground bunkers, dodging several Israeli assassination attempts until September 2024 when Israeli fighter jets dropped as many as 80 bombs over his hideout in Beirut, killing him.<\/p>\n

Instead, Khamenei had mused in public about the possibility of being killed, dismissing his own life as inconsequential to the fate of the Islamic republic \u2013 indeed, some Iran experts said he expected to be martyred.<\/p>\n

But during wartime, said one of the people interviewed, he did take some precautions. \u201cIt was unusual for him to not be in his bunker \u2013 he had two bunkers \u2013 and if he had been, Israel wouldn\u2019t have been able to reach him with the bombs that they have,\u201d the person said.<\/p>\n

\"AA portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in central Tehran. Photograph: Majid Saeedi\/Getty <\/p>\n

Even last June, in the throes of a full-blown war, Israel made no known attempts to bomb Khamenei. It had instead targeted mostly the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, missile launchers and stockpiles and Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities and scientists.<\/p>\n

While Donald Trump<\/a> had repeatedly threatened to attack Iran in recent weeks, building up an \u201carmada\u201d off its shores, negotiations between the US and Iran over the Islamic republic\u2019s nuclear programme were meant to continue this week.<\/p>\n

The mediator, Oman, said Iran was willing to make concessions that might help stave off a war and described the most recent meeting last Thursday as fruitful.<\/p>\n

In public, the US president grumbled that things were moving too slowly. But a person familiar with the matter said that, in private, Trump was \u201cdissatisfied with the Iranian responses\u201d, paving the way for war.<\/p>\n

A person briefed on the situation said the attack on Iran had been planned for months, but officials adjusted their operation after the US and Israeli intelligence confirmed that Khamenei and his senior officials would be meeting in his compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.<\/p>\n

Tracking individual targets used to be laborious work, requiring visual confirmations and parsing false confirmations, but Israel\u2019s vast algorithm-driven data collection had automated that task in recent years.<\/p>\n

But for a target as high-value as Khamenei, failure was not an option. Israeli military doctrine requires that two separate senior officers, working independently from each other, confirm with high certainty that a target is in the location that is to be attacked and who he is accompanied by.<\/p>\n

In this instance, according to two people familiar with the matter, Israeli intelligence had information from signals intelligence, such as the hacked traffic cameras and deeply penetrated mobile phone networks. One of the people said it showed that the meeting with Khamenei was on schedule, with senior officials heading to the location.<\/p>\n

But the Americans had something even more concrete \u2013 a human source, both people familiar with the situation said. The CIA declined to comment.<\/p>\n

\"AA US warplane prepares to launch from the USS Abraham Lincoln in support of Operation Epic Fury attack on Iran. Photograph: US Navy\/Reuters <\/p>\n

At 3.38pm United States<\/a> eastern time (8.35pm Irish time) on Friday, Trump, travelling on Air Force One to Texas, gave the order to proceed with Operation Epic Fury \u2013 the US-led strikes on Iran.<\/p>\n

The US military cleared the path for Israeli fighter jets to bomb Khamenei\u2019s compound by launching cyber attacks \u201cdisrupting, degrading and blinding Iran\u2019s ability to see, communicate and respond\u201d, according to General Dan Caine, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff.<\/p>\n

Caine said the strike on the compound took place in daylight based on a \u201ctrigger event\u201d the Israel Defense Forces<\/a> were able to carry out with help from US intelligence.<\/p>\n

The Israeli jets, which had been flying for hours in order to arrive on time at the right location, fired off as many as 30 precision munitions on Khamenei\u2019s complex, a former senior Israeli intelligence official said.<\/p>\n

The Iranians were meeting for breakfast when they were killed, Trump told Fox News.<\/p>\n

The Israeli military said that striking in daylight provided an advantage. \u201cThe decision to strike in the morning rather than at night allowed Israel to achieve tactical surprise for the second time, despite heavy Iranian preparedness,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

US military footage showing its strikes on Iran. Video: Reuters <\/p>\n

The tactical success was the culmination of two separate events, more than 20 years apart, said Sima Shine, a former official at Mossad who had a focus on Iran.<\/p>\n

The first was a directive given in 2001 from former prime minister Ariel Sharon to Meir Dagan, the then head of Mossad \u2013 preoccupied with Syria, Palestinian militants, Hizbullah in Lebanon and others \u2013 to make Iran a priority.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018All the things the Mossad is doing is well and fine,\u2019\u201d Sharon told Dagan, according to Shine. \u201c\u2018What I need is Iran. That\u2019s your target\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd since then, that is the target,\u201d she said. Israel had sabotaged Iran\u2019s nuclear programme, killed its scientists, fought back its proxies and even destroyed the military infrastructure of its crucial ally Syria<\/a> in the days after dictator Bashar al-Assad<\/a> was ousted.<\/p>\n

But Iranian intelligence agencies were formidable adversaries.<\/p>\n

In 2022, a group tied to Iranian security services released data purportedly siphoned from a phone belonging to the Mossad chief\u2019s wife. Iran also hacked CCTV cameras in Jerusalem during the 2025 war to get real-time damage assessments that the Israelis had censored from broadcast; it bought photographs of missile defences; and even mapped the jogging route of a big politician by bribing Israeli citizens, according to Israeli prosecutors.<\/p>\n

The second event, Shine said, was the October 7th, 2023, cross-border attack from Hamas, which Israel claims was backed by Iran and changed a long-standing calculus in Israel: that despite having penetrated the circles of several enemy heads of state, from Egypt\u2019s Gamal Abdel Nasser to Syria\u2019s Hafez al-Assad, their killings were off-limits even at times of war.<\/p>\n

Killing foreign leaders is not just taboo but operationally fraught. Failure only adds to their stature, as it did following the CIA\u2019s many botched attempts to kill Cuba\u2019s Fidel Castro, while success can set into motion unpredictable chaos.<\/p>\n

But, said Shine, Israel\u2019s string of intelligence coups \u2013 including the 2024 assassination of Hamas<\/a> leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, and a $300 million multiyear clandestine project to booby trap thousands of Hizbullah pagers and radios \u2013 has its own seductive powers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Hebrew, we say, \u2018With the food comes the appetite\u2019,\u201d she said. \u201cIn other words, the more you have, the more you want.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[138015,27169,9,10,356,13,14,69,6,21029,18929,71,6220,11,12,15,16,5,15516,7,8,384,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-366673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-ali-khamenei","tag-bashar-al-assad","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-donald-trump","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-hamas","tag-headlines","tag-hizbullah","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-israel-defence-forces","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-syria","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-united-states","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116168727234447228","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}