In the early hours of the 13th of June, 2025, something happened inside Iran that almost no Iranian general understood until it was too late.
From rocks scattered across the desert, missiles began to lift into the sky.
From parked civilian vehicles in suburbs of Tehran, more missiles fired upward.
From inside a small drone base nobody in Iranian intelligence knew existed, hundreds of quadcopter drones, assembled inside the country piece by piece, began their flights toward the air defense radars they were built to destroy.
None of these weapons came from Israel that night.
They had been there for years, hidden inside Iran, waiting for a single coordinated signal.
When it came, every Iranian officer who turned on a radar lost it within minutes.
The country’s first wave of retaliation, the missiles meant to launch automatically against Tel Aviv, never made it off their launchers.
Mossad operatives had quietly destroyed them from inside Iran before the Israeli Air Force even crossed the border.
What was officially announced in late April 2026, after the second war was over, has rewritten the public understanding of what intelligence services can actually do.
Inside Iran, a covert Mossad campaign had been running for at least a decade.
Outside Iran, a covert Iranian campaign had been running just as long.
30 Israeli embassies and diplomats were targeted across the world.
An entire IRGC unit named Unit 4000 was exposed and largely killed within a single 6-week window.
This is what we now know.
The first thing to understand is the scale of the Israeli infiltration.
For years, Mossad smuggled drone components into Iran inside ordinary cargo, suitcases, trucks, shipping containers labeled as commercial goods.
Nothing arrived as a complete weapon.
Each drone was disassembled into innocuous parts, plastic frames, battery cells, small motors, cameras.
These parts moved through Iranian customs, past Iranian inspectors, into warehouses inside the country.
Trained teams of operatives, almost all Iranian-born, reassembled the drones in workshops Mossad had quietly established across the country.
Some of these workshops, according to former Israeli officials speaking to Fox News and the Washington Jewish Week, functioned as a hidden Mossad drone base inside Iran itself.
The base produced weapons inside the territory of the regime they were going to be used against.
Iranian counterintelligence for years did not know it existed.
Alongside the drones, precision missiles were embedded in mobile platforms.
According to Israeli officials, missiles were placed on vehicles, hidden inside hollowed-out rocks scattered near Iranian air defense sites, and concealed in remote desert areas.
Each weapon had a remote activation system.
Each one was ready for a date that had not yet been set.
The date was set on the 13th of June, 2025.
Operation Rising Lion, the first major Israeli strike of the war.
In the opening seconds, the hidden weapons activated simultaneously across hundreds of locations inside Iran.
Drones that had been dormant inside the country for months took off and destroyed Iranian radar arrays.
Missiles fired from rocks blew apart surface-to-air installations that were meant to shoot down incoming Israeli jets.
Mobile launchers, parked among ordinary Iranian traffic, fired at ballistic missile sites before the Iranians could launch their own retaliation.
The Israeli Air Force, when it arrived, was flying through corridors that Mossad had already cleaned for them.
The same night in Tehran, something even more remarkable happened.
Israeli sources say Mossad had spent years mapping daily routines, communication patterns, and emergency protocols of the senior Iranian command.
They knew not only where the generals lived, they knew how the generals would react in a crisis.
So, they engineered the crisis.
Multiple Israeli reports say intelligence operatives manipulated meeting schedules of top IRGC officers, luring several of them into a single underground facility on the night of the strike.
When the bombs hit, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, the commander of IRGC, the head of its Aerospace Force, and the head of the Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters, were all in the same building, and all of them were killed in a single coordinated impact.
In one night, Iran lost the men who had spent decades building its military structure.
Many of them had no successors.
The chain of command in some sectors simply collapsed.
Stop here for a moment.
What you have just heard was the visible half of the war.
The drones, the rocks, the dead generals, the kinetic part, the part with smoke and satellite imagery and bodies pulled from rubble.
It was the half Israel was prepared to show on television.
The other half was running simultaneously in the opposite direction.
For more than 10 years, while Mossad and Shin Bet were tracking missiles inside Iran, an Iranian network was tracking Israelis everywhere else.
Embassies, consulates, diplomats, their families, their schools, their daily routes home.
This is the half almost nobody outside Israeli intelligence understood until April of 2026.
In April of 2026, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, announced publicly that since the 7th of October 2023, Israeli embassies and Israeli diplomats had been targeted approximately 30 times across the world.
Not threatened.
Targeted.
With operational planning, with surveillance teams, with weapons in some cases already purchased.
Targeted was the word he used.
The number itself is almost certainly an undercount.
In 2023, Mossad chief David Barnea revealed that 27 such Iranian terror plots had been thwarted in a single year.
By 2024, the figure had doubled, exceeding 50 plots disrupted globally.
The 30 disclosed by Saar refers specifically to plots against embassies and diplomats.
The full scope is wider.
The most successful of those 30, in the Iranian sense of success, happened in the United Arab Emirates.
On the 1st of March, 2026, an Iranian drone, intercepted but not fully neutralized, fell as debris on the Etihad Towers complex in Abu Dhabi.
The complex houses the Israeli embassy and several other diplomatic missions.
Among the fragments that hit the building was wreckage heavy enough to injure a woman and her young child.
They were not Israelis.
They were not diplomats.
They were civilians who happened to be in the wrong street at the wrong moment.
The mother and child survived.
Their names have not been released publicly, but they are part of this story now, whether they wanted to be or not.
They are the two faces in this entire war of intelligence services and shell companies and hidden drones who actually took an Iranian weapon to the body.
Days after the incident, Israel evacuated all non-essential embassy staff from Abu Dhabi, citing two further concrete attempts to reach Israeli personnel that had been quietly disrupted in the same period.
Other targets included Israel’s embassy in Senegal, Israeli representatives in Uganda, and plots in Belgium, Sweden, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey.
It was a network covering, in operational terms, more than [music] four continents.
The most ambitious of these was uncovered in Azerbaijan in early 2026.
Iranian operatives smuggling explosive drones across the border had been preparing attacks on the Israeli embassy in Baku, on a synagogue in the city, on a leader of the local Mountain Jewish community, and perhaps most strategically, on the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan [music] oil pipeline.
That pipeline carries Caspian crude across Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean.
Its >> [music] >> destruction would have cascaded through European energy markets in ways nobody had publicly modeled.
Behind every one of these plots, Israeli intelligence found the same name, Unit 4000.
Unit 4000 is the special operations division of the IRGC Intelligence Organization.
Officially, it does not exist.
Unofficially, it has been running global terrorist operations against Israeli and Western targets for years.
Until April 2026, almost nothing about its internal structure was public.
Then, Israel released the names.
At the top of the structure, Majid Qademi, head of the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organization.
The man who ultimately signed off on Unit 4000’s overseas attacks, he was killed on the 28th of February, 2026, in the opening hours of the second war.
The United States Treasury had sanctioned him only 4 weeks earlier for his role in the violent repression of Iranian protesters.
Some analysts have since noted the timing of that sequence.
>> [music] >> Public sanctions designation followed by targeted strike as a pattern worth observing in the current campaign.
Whether that timing reflects coordination, parallel intelligence, >> [music] >> or coincidence is a question the two governments have not publicly answered.
Beneath Kademi, the operational chief of Unit 4000, Raman Mokhadam, sometimes spelled Moghadam, he was the man personally training, recruiting, and assigning the operatives who collected intelligence on Israeli officials around the world.
He was killed by the Israeli Air Force in the opening phase of Operation Rising Lion in June 2025.
Beneath Mokhadam, the man who traveled, Mohsen Souri, a career case officer whose function was to physically meet local terrorist cells in foreign countries.
He flew, he met, he directed.
He brought new groups into the network.
According to Israeli sources, it was Souri’s travel patterns that gave Mossad the seam they needed to map the entire structure.
He was killed in an emergency Iranian safe house during the war.
Mossad and Shin Bet had located it precisely.
Beneath Souri, the country handlers, Mehdi Yekke Degan, operating under the alias The Doctor, ran the unit’s effort across Azerbaijan and Turkey.
He had been quietly identified by Mossad in January 2026 after Turkish authorities arrested operatives running drones from Iran into Cyprus.
Within weeks, his network was rolled up.
In a single 6-week window, Israel physically eliminated the entire upper command structure of an Iranian intelligence directorate that had been operating for decades.
Kademi, Mokhadam, Souri, Yekke Degan, all confirmed killed or compromised.
The implication for everyone watching is uncomfortable.
It means that Israeli intelligence was not just inside Iran’s nuclear program.
It was inside Iran’s terror program, mapping it, watching it, cataloging the people who ran it, waiting for the moment to hit them.
In 2020, the Iranian intelligence minister, Ali Younesi, gave one of the most quietly devastating quotes of the modern intelligence era.
“Mossad,” he said, “is closer to us than our own ears.
” At the time, Western analysts treated the line as rhetorical, hyperbole, a regime official making excuses for failure.
After the events of 2025 and 2026, the line reads differently.
It now reads as the literal description of an Iranian state that had for years been talking to itself in rooms an enemy could already hear.
The former senior Mossad official, Sima Shine, put it more cleanly after the war.
“No one in Iran’s high command,” she said, “can be sure they are not already known to Israeli intelligence.
” “That uncertainty,” she added, “is itself a weapon.
It produces hesitation.
It corrodes decision-making.
It turns every meeting into a potential betrayal.
” What Israel revealed in April 2026 is therefore not a single operation.
It is the partial map of a war that had already been fought for years before the missiles flew.
The hidden drone bases, the rocks with weapons inside, the vehicles parked in Tehran with launchers concealed beneath their floors, the 30 embassies under threat, the IRGC commanders lured into a single room, the pipeline plot stopped weeks before detonation.
The mother and child in Abu Dhabi who lived to tell whatever it is they will eventually decide to tell.
All of it was running in parallel.
None of it was visible until the moment Israel chose to make it visible.
What is still not visible, what may not be visible for years, is what is currently being prepared.
Because the rules of this kind of warfare are clear.
You do not announce what you have.
You announce only what you are willing to lose.
Everything Israel has revealed about Unit 4000 was already burned.
Everything still useful, every drone base still hidden, every operative still inside Tehran, every name not yet published.
Those things are still in the dark.
Somebody tonight, in a small workshop somewhere in Iran, is assembling a drone from parts that arrived inside a shipping container nobody inspected.
Somebody in a different country is photographing an Israeli embassy and reporting the angles back to Tehran.
The two networks are still moving.
Only the dead names have stopped.
The next phase of the war is not happening on a battlefield.
It is happening in rooms neither side will admit to occupying.
And the people sitting in those rooms know now that nothing they say is private.
