Tehran, January 14th, 2023.
4:00 in the morning.
No cameras.
No crowd at the gates.
Just a single line on a state news wire pushed out before the city woke.
Former Deputy Defense Minister Ali Reza Akbari had been executed by hanging.
But inside that sentence [music] sat something that should have sent a cold wave through every general and every intelligence officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Because this was not some mid-level official caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This was a man with access to nuclear program briefings.
A man who knew the movement schedules of Iran’s highest commanders.
A man who had been feeding everything he knew to British intelligence for over a decade without being caught.
The most protected system in the Middle East had been opened from the inside.
How does a spy last over 10 years at the heart of the very institution built to find him? And which of Iran’s top intelligence commanders is already bought by Mossad and feeding them everything right now? This is the story of how you turn the most feared military organization in the Middle East into your best intelligence source without firing a single shot.
And what you are about to hear will shock you.
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Rewind to 1979.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution sweeps the Shah from power.
Ayatollah Khomeini takes control of a nation with enormous oil wealth and enemies on every side.
The United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, which launches a full-scale invasion in 1980.
Eight years of grinding war follow.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers die.
Chemical weapons kill troops in [music] the trenches, while the international community looks the other way.
No tribunal convenes.
No one is held accountable.
[music] The lesson the Islamic Republic’s leadership draws from those eight years is permanent and simple.
In this world, you are alone.
The only real guarantee of survival is a weapon so catastrophic that no enemy will ever dare to strike you directly.
The nuclear program does not start with the mullahs.
It starts with the Shah in the 1950s, backed by American technology under President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace Initiative.
After the revolution, it goes underground, literally and figuratively.
A civilian energy program slowly transforms into something far more dangerous.
Scientists are recruited and sent abroad for specialized training, then quietly returned.
Equipment is procured through networks of front companies registered across Europe and Asia.
Documents are classified at the very highest levels of the [music] state, visible only to the innermost circle of the regime.
By the mid-1990s, Western intelligence agencies begin picking up fragments.
Unusual purchases of specialized steel alloys used in high-speed rotating machinery.
Procurement requests [music] for vacuum pumps and precision measuring instruments associated with uranium enrichment.
Pakistan’s rogue nuclear scientist [music] A.
Q.
Khan, who has already sold weapons technology to North Korea and Libya, is in active contact [music] with Iranian officials.
The picture assembling itself in intelligence files is deeply alarming.
In 2002, an Iranian opposition group reveals at a Washington press conference that Iran is secretly building a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz [music] and a heavy water reactor at Arak, neither declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran is not building a civilian energy infrastructure.
Iran is building the path to a bomb.
Natanz, Isfahan [music] province, central Iran.
From the surface, it looks like almost nothing.
Flat desert, low administrative buildings, a parking lot, security fencing, unremarkable in every visible way.
But beneath the ground lies one of the most hardened industrial complexes ever constructed.
[music] The fuel enrichment plant is buried under layers of reinforced concrete and packed earth, engineered to survive a conventional airstrike.
Inside, thousands of centrifuges spin, slender metal cylinders rotating at more than 60,000 revolutions per minute, slowly concentrating fissile uranium 235 [music] toward weapons-grade purity.
The centrifuges are the beating heart of the entire program.
By 2008, Iran is approaching 5,000 centrifuges operating simultaneously.
International inspectors visit regularly.
Iran cooperates minimally, just enough to prevent a formal crisis, just [music] enough to keep the machines spinning.
In Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts calculate the timeline with precision.
[music] At the current pace, Iran is 3 to 5 years from enough material for a nuclear device.
A military strike is theoretically possible.
Israeli aircraft could reach the target.
But the underground facility might survive conventional bombs entirely and even a successful strike would hand the regime a massive propaganda victory, unify the Iranian public behind the government, and almost [music] certainly accelerate the very program that aimed to destroy.
There is another option.
One that exists in the space between conventional war and diplomatic negotiation.
A weapon with no explosive charge, no aircraft, no soldiers crossing any border.
A weapon made of mathematics.
The project [music] that becomes Stuxnet begins around 2006 in the classified briefing rooms of the United States National Security Agency and Israeli Unit 8200.
The Israeli military’s elite signals intelligence directorate.
[music] The challenge is elegant to state and nearly impossible to solve.
Can you physically destroy a machine using only software? The centrifuges at Natanz run on a completely isolated system.
No internet connection.
No external network of any kind.
Engineers call this an air gap.
A deliberate physical severance from the outside digital world.
You cannot send a virus through a wire that does not exist.
The Iranians engineered this separation on purpose.
The air gap is their armor.
The solution is patient and ruthless.
If the network cannot be reached electronically, reach it through human beings.
Every technician entering Natanz carry something.
A laptop, [music] a USB drive, a software update on a thumb drive slipped through the checkpoint in a shirt pocket.
Every one of these people is a potential bridge across [music] the gap.
The code they construct is unlike anything previously written.
Not one exploit, but four separate zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows operating systems.
Weaknesses Microsoft itself had not yet discovered.
A single zero-day sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars on intelligence markets.
Stuxnet deploys four simultaneously.
It scans its environment carefully, checks specific software versions, and exact hardware configurations.
And if the fingerprint does not match Natanz precisely, it does absolutely nothing.
It waits.
It is searching for one place on Earth.
But crossing the air gap requires a human being who does not know they are carrying a weapon.
And Mossad already knew exactly who that person would be.
The bridge across the gap was a USB [music] drive.
Not one specific drive.
A strategy built around the reality that human beings carry things.
Contractors who maintain industrial equipment, engineers who update software, technicians who run diagnostic checks on Siemens programmable controllers.
None of them are spies.
None of them know what they are carrying.
But somewhere along the supply chain, at a factory, at a distribution point, at a moment when a technician receives a drive with a routine firmware update, Stuxnet finds its first host.
The exact entry point has never been officially confirmed.
Investigators who later reconstructed the operation believe the worm was seeded into networks of companies supplying equipment to Natanz, Iranian contractors who regularly brought laptops and storage devices through the checkpoints.
Once the worm reaches one machine inside the perimeter, [music] it spreads automatically, moving from device to device, always checking the same question.
Is this the right hardware configuration? Is this the Siemens S7-315 controller? The one connected to the specific [music] centrifuge cascade that engineers in the United States and Tel Aviv spent months carefully mapping.
If the answer is no, >> [music] >> Stuxnet does nothing visible.
It hides, waits, passes itself to the next machine.
If the answer is yes, it activates.
The centrifuge rotors at Natanz spin at a precise operating frequency, approximately 1,064 hertz.
This specific speed is not arbitrary.
It [music] is the optimal frequency for separating uranium isotopes efficiently.
Too slow and the separation is incomplete.
Too fast and the mechanical stress destroys the [music] rotor.
Stuxnet knows this.
It was built by people who spent months studying centrifuge physics in a test laboratory.
The attack has two components working simultaneously.
First, it sends commands to the centrifuge motors, pushing them to spin at roughly 1,400 hertz, far beyond safe operating parameters for intervals of approximately 15 minutes.
The rotors operate under extreme stress.
The mechanical tolerances, already at the absolute edge of physical limits, begin to fail.
Second, and this is what makes Stuxnet unlike any weapon built before it, it simultaneously transmits false data to the monitoring systems.
Every screen the Iranian engineers watch shows normal readings, normal speed, normal temperature, normal pressure.
The alarms stay silent.
The technicians see green indicators across every display.
The machines are tearing themselves apart.
Nobody in the control room knows.
Then Stuxnet slows the centrifuges down to well below operating speed, approximately 2 hertz, for long intervals.
The process swings between violent over speed and near complete shutdown.
The rotors, already stressed, begin failing.
Some crack.
Some shatter.
When a rotor fails at operating speed, >> [music] >> it does not simply stop.
It disintegrates, sending shrapnel through adjacent machines in the same cascade.
One failure triggers several more.
For months, Iranian engineers at Natanz watch their centrifuges fail at a rate that makes no sense.
The machines are new.
Uranium hexafluoride feed is within specifications.
The facility was built to exacting standards.
And yet the failure rate climbs 10% above normal, then 20, [music] then higher.
They check the uranium feed purity.
They inspect the rotor bearings.
They examine the vacuum systems.
They find [music] nothing.
The monitoring data shows no anomalies.
The Siemens controllers report normal operation.
The actual cause is invisible because the instrument measuring it has been compromised.
The thermometer has been replaced with a painting of a thermometer.
Between 2009 and 2010, an estimated 1,000 centrifuges are destroyed or taken offline.
Roughly 1/5 of the entire operational capacity at Natanz.
The program does not collapse, but it is set back significantly.
In June 2010, a small Belarusian cybersecurity company called Virus Blokhada is investigating a client’s computer in Iran, a machine that keeps crashing and rebooting without explanation.
Their researchers find something they have never seen before, a piece of malware of extraordinary complexity.
Within weeks, the world’s major cybersecurity firms, Symantec, Kaspersky Lab, F-Secure, begin tearing the code apart.
Stuxnet is not criminal software.
It is not designed to steal data or extort [music] money.
It is a precision weapon targeting one specific industrial configuration on Earth.
The press calls it the world’s first digital weapon designed to cause physical destruction.
Iran confirms it has detected the virus.
It denies any significant damage.
Both sides know the denial is false.
The centrifuge failure rates in IAEA inspection reports tell a different [music] story entirely.
But Iran cannot admit the full scale of what happened.
To admit it would mean acknowledging that an enemy penetrated the most secure facility in the Islamic Republic without firing a single shot, without a single agent being caught, without leaving a single piece of physical evidence.
The silence [music] is its own kind of humiliation.
The operation was called Olympic Games.
It began under President George W.
Bush and continued under Barack Obama.
Analysts estimate Stuxnet delayed Iran’s program by 1 to 2 years, but it did not stop it.
Iran accelerates the program in response.
More centrifuges, more facilities, more secrecy.
The worm bought time, and time was all it was ever going to buy.
So, the men in Tel Aviv made a decision.
If software alone cannot stop the program, something else will have to.
Not a virus this time.
A name on a list.
Stuxnet bought time.
It did not buy victory.
By 2011, Iran had replaced the destroyed centrifuges, reinforced its security protocols, and accelerated procurement through new supply chains designed to avoid compromised contractors.
The program had already been expanding in a direction that no cyber attack could reach.
Months before Stuxnet was even publicly discovered, Western intelligence learned that Iran had been secretly constructing a second enrichment facility at Fordow, a site carved into a mountain near the city of Qom, so deep underground and so heavily reinforced that even the most powerful conventional bunker-busting bombs in the American arsenal could not guarantee its destruction.
President Obama revealed Fordow’s existence to the world in September 2009.
Iran had been building it in secret for years.
The Islamic Republic was not planning to stop.
It was planning to become unstoppable.
In Tel Aviv, [music] the calculation shifted.
The centrifuges could be replaced.
The knowledge that drove the program could not.
Iran’s nuclear weapons effort did not [music] exist in machines alone.
It existed in the minds of a small group of men, scientists, [music] engineers, and military officers who’d spent decades accumulating expertise that no amount of cyber attacks or international sanctions could simply erase.
Remove the machines and Iran rebuilds them.
Remove the men who know how to run them and the timeline changes in ways that cannot be fixed with procurement budgets.
The decision to move to targeted elimination of nuclear scientists was not made lightly.
It required infrastructure inside Iran that had taken years to build.
Safe houses, local assets, surveillance networks, escape routes.
People living ordinary lives in Tehran who, when given a signal, would activate [music] and execute an operation with no margin for error.
The first publicly attributed killing came on January 12th, 2010.
Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a Tehran University physics professor, walked out of his home in the Qeytariyeh neighborhood of northern Tehran on his way to work.
A remote-controlled bomb hidden on a motorcycle parked near his house detonated as he passed.
He died at the scene.
Iranian officials immediately accused the United States and Israel.
Neither confirmed involvement.
Mohammadi’s precise role in the weapons program was debated among analysts.
Some Western assessments suggested his direct contribution to weapons-grade enrichment was limited.
But his death [music] sent a message that reverberated through every laboratory and research facility in the Islamic Republic.
No one is invisible.
10 months later, on November 29th, 2010, two vehicles carrying magnetic bombs were attached to the cars [music] of two different scientists simultaneously in separate parts of Tehran at nearly [music] the same moment.
A display of operational coordination that demonstrated the depth of the network inside the city.
Majid Shahriari, a senior nuclear engineer directly involved in managing centrifuge cascades, was killed >> [music] >> when his bomb detonated.
The second target, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, survived.
His driver spotted the man on the motorcycle attaching the device and accelerated away before it detonated.
Abbasi-Davani was wounded but lived.
He was later appointed head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
A bitter irony that placed a man who had survived a Mossad assassination attempt >> [music] >> in charge of the program Mossad was trying to destroy.
On July 23rd, 2011, Daryoush Rezaeinejad was shot dead outside his daughter’s kindergarten in eastern Tehran.
Gunmen on a motorcycle fired multiple rounds as he arrived to pick her [music] up.
He was a specialist in high-voltage switches, components used in the triggering mechanisms of nuclear warheads.
Iranian officials initially denied his connection to the nuclear program.
Documents later obtained by western intelligence confirmed his role.
On January 11th, 2012, Mostafa Ahmadi [clears throat] Roshan was killed by a magnetic bomb attached to his car in the Seyed Khandan neighborhood of northern Tehran.
He was a deputy director at the Natanz facility itself, a man who worked daily inside the most sensitive enrichment complex in the country.
His death brought the total of scientists killed in direct connection to the program to four in just over 2 years.
Each operation followed a recognizable pattern.
Extended surveillance of the target, weeks or months to map routes, [music] schedules, and security arrangements.
Local assets performing the physical approach, reducing the operational footprint.
A motorcycle as the primary platform, allowing rapid approach and immediate disappearance into Tehran’s dense traffic.
Withdrawal completed before security services could establish a perimeter.
Iran’s response to each killing was fury, denial of vulnerability, and intensive internal investigation.
After every assassination, the Ministry of Intelligence and IRGC counterintelligence launched urgent hunts for the local collaborators who had enabled the operation.
Some were found.
Some were executed.
But the operations continued regardless.
For every cell that was rolled up, another had already been in place long enough to be trusted.
Iranian security architects faced a problem with no clean solution.
They could add more bodyguards to every scientist.
They could randomize routes and schedules.
They could restrict movement entirely.
But a scientist who cannot travel or access multiple facilities cannot do science.
Tighten security enough to guarantee protection and you paralyze the program.
Leave enough operational freedom for the program to function and you leave the window open.
The killings created something beyond their immediate tactical impact.
They created fear.
Brilliant men and women who had devoted their careers to this program began to wonder whether their expertise had made them targets.
Colleagues stopped discussing their work openly.
Trust inside [music] the institutions eroded.
Some scientists quietly sought reassignment to less sensitive roles.
But every method used so far shared one critical limitation.
It required a human being in proximity to the target.
Someone attaching a bomb.
Someone on a motorcycle.
Someone close enough to pull a trigger or press a detonator.
Every operation left a local trail.
Every local trail was a potential thread that, if pulled, could unravel an entire network.
The men planning these operations in Tel Aviv had already begun working on something that would remove that limitation entirely.
No motorcycle.
No operative within a kilometer of the moment of death.
No human fingerprint on the trigger.
They were building a weapon that killed by satellite.
By 2012, the window for close proximity operations was closing.
Iranian counterintelligence was learning.
>> [music] >> Security around the remaining senior figures was intensifying.
The next evolution was not incremental.
[music] It was a complete rethinking of what an assassination could be.
If the fundamental risk was human proximity, a person near the target who could be identified, [music] captured, or traced, then the solution was to remove the human from the equation entirely.
Not a sniper 800 m away, >> [music] >> not a bomb planted the night before.
A weapon that could be aimed, fired, and controlled from a location so remote that no operative needed to be anywhere near the target at the moment of the kill.
A weapon >> [music] >> that could distinguish one specific face from the faces of bodyguards, bystanders, and the target’s own family.
A weapon that could wait, watch, and fire only when it was certain.
Building such a weapon and placing it on a road inside one of the most surveilled countries in the Middle East was an operation of extraordinary complexity.
It would take years of planning, and it would require one specific target to justify that investment.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh had been on Mossad’s list for longer than almost any other [music] name.
He was not simply a nuclear scientist.
He was the architect.
A brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he had headed the AMAD program, Iran’s covert nuclear weapons development effort, since the 1990s.
When international pressure forced Iran to officially shut down AMAD in 2003, Fakhrizadeh did not stop working.
He continued under a new organizational structure, the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Persian acronym SPND, >> [music] >> which absorbed AMAD’s personnel and continued its research under military cover.
Western intelligence agencies and the IAEA identified him repeatedly as the single most important individual in Iran’s weaponization effort.
In 2007, the IAEA formally requested to interview him.
Iran refused.
He had not appeared in a public photograph in years.
His name was almost unknown inside Iran itself.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, >> [music] >> presenting the contents of the stolen Iranian nuclear archive in 2018, mentioned Fakhrizadeh by name on live television.
“Remember that name.
” Netanyahu said.
“Fakhrizadeh.
” Iran’s response was to tighten his security further.
Multiple armed escort vehicles, rotating routes, minimal public movement.
A personal security detail of trained IRGC protection officers.
By 2020, he was among the most protected individuals in the Islamic Republic.
None of it was enough.
>> On November 27th, 2020, Fakhrizadeh was traveling in a convoy on a road near the town of Absard in Damavand County, >> [music] >> approximately 60 km east of Tehran.
He was in a black Nissan Safir with his wife and several bodyguards.
An escort vehicle followed close behind.
It was a Friday afternoon.
The road was quiet.
A Nissan Zamyad pickup truck was parked on the side of the road ahead of the convoy.
The weapon mounted inside the truck bed had been transported into Iran in pieces, assembled inside the country, mounted onto the vehicle, and positioned on that specific road based [music] on precise intelligence about Fakhrizadeh’s expected route.
It was a remotely operated machine gun equipped with a camera system feeding real-time video via satellite to operators outside Iran.
It was guided by an artificial intelligence targeting system capable of identifying a specific individual and maintaining a weapon’s lock on that face [music] independently of vehicle movement and distance.
As Fakhrizadeh’s convoy passed, the system identified its target.
The machine gun opened fire.
Approximately 13 rounds were fired in a controlled burst lasting under a minute.
>> [music] >> Fakhrizadeh was struck multiple times.
His bodyguards exited their vehicles and returned fire immediately, but there was no one [music] to return fire at.
The weapon fired, adjusted, >> [music] >> and fired again without a human hand within range.
Within seconds of the final shot, the pickup truck exploded.
A remote detonation designed to destroy the weapon system and eliminate physical evidence.
Fakhrizadeh’s wife, sitting beside him in the vehicle, was unharmed.
The targeting system had locked on to one face only.
He was pronounced [music] dead at a hospital shortly after.
He was 59 years old.
The operation represented something the world of intelligence had never seen deployed at this level.
A satellite-guided, AI-assisted machine gun assembled inside a denied-access country and operated from outside its borders to execute a single targeted individual.
It eliminated the single greatest vulnerability of every previous operative, the local operative in proximity to the [music] target at the moment of the kill.
Iranian security services were left with almost nothing to investigate.
The weapon had destroyed itself.
The operators were outside Iranian jurisdiction.
The local network that had transported, assembled, and positioned the weapon had months to [music] disperse before the operation was executed.
The only physical evidence was a burned-out truck and a pattern of bullet impacts.
Iran officially blamed Israel and the United States.
Israel maintained its standard policy of neither confirming nor denying.
The United States denied involvement in this specific operation, but the question that consumed Iranian counterintelligence in the weeks and months that followed was not who had ordered it.
That was already assumed.
The question was how? How did anyone move a weapon system of that complexity into Iran, position it on the correct road on the correct day, and operate it without a single point of human failure producing a traceable lead? The answer reached into something Iran feared more than any virus or assassin’s
bomb.
It reached into the question of who, exactly, had been opening the doors from the inside? And that answer would take years and many more bodies >> [music] >> to begin to understand.
A remote-controlled machine gun does not appear on a road outside Tehran by accident.
It does not assemble itself.
It does not drive itself into position.
Every component, the weapon, the mounting system, the camera, the satellite communication hardware, the targeting software, had to be manufactured somewhere, packaged somewhere, shipped somewhere, [music] transported across at least one international border, moved through Iranian customs, driven to a safe location, assembled by people with technical training, and then positioned [music] on a specific road at a specific time based on precise intelligence about a specific man’s movements.
Iran is not an easy country to move things through.
Its borders are monitored.
Its customs services are controlled by the Revolutionary Guard.
Its internal security apparatus, the Ministry of Intelligence and the IRGC Intelligence Organization, maintain surveillance networks in major cities.
Foreign nationals are watched.
Unusual shipments are flagged.
The Islamic Republic has spent decades [music] building systems designed to prevent exactly this kind of penetration.
And yet, the weapons got through.
Not once, repeatedly.
Over two decades of operations, Mossad moved equipment, personnel, and materials in and out of Iran with a consistency that points not to luck, but to infrastructure.
A permanent, layered logistical network built over years and maintained through a combination of human assets, commercial cover, and the exploitation of every gap the Islamic Republic’s security architecture could not close.
The foundation of that infrastructure is geography.
Iran shares land borders with seven countries: Turkey, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The mountainous border with Iraqi Kurdistan sees hundreds of smuggling crossings daily.
The border with Azerbaijan has historically been a corridor of significant intelligence activity.
>> And the United Arab Emirates, sitting [music] across the narrow Strait of Hormuz, hosts a vast Iranian commercial diaspora.
Businessmen and logistics intermediaries who move goods between Dubai and Iranian ports continuously, [music] creating a river of commerce that is almost impossible to fully inspect.
Components do not travel as weapons.
They travel as industrial equipment, replacement parts for manufacturing machinery, electronic components for civilian infrastructure, specialized tools for oil and gas maintenance.
Each item, examined individually by a customs inspector with no specific intelligence, >> [music] >> is unremarkable.
The weapon exists only when it is assembled.
Until that moment, its components are invisible inside the noise of ordinary commercial trade.
Assembly happens inside Iran.
This requires safe houses, properties rented through intermediaries with no visible connection to any intelligence service, located in ordinary neighborhoods where the presence of people coming and going attracts no attention.
Tehran is a city of over 9 million people.
>> [music] >> The people doing the assembly are not foreign agents moving through the city with false passports.
They are, in most cases, Iranians, [music] people with legitimate lives, legitimate documents, and years of established presence who have been recruited, trained, and activated only when needed.
The depth of this network became most visible not through an assassination, but through an operation of a completely different kind.
One that required not a weapon, but storage capacity.
Specifically, the ability to move 520 kg of documents, disks, and files out of a locked warehouse in the Shurabad district of Tehran in a single night.
The Iranian nuclear archive.
Decades of classified research, weapons design documents, test data, procurement records, and internal communications was stored in a facility that Iranian security services considered secure.
It was not a military base.
It was a nondescript warehouse in an ordinary part of the city, chosen precisely because it did not look like what it was.
The documents inside represented 30 years of Iran’s most sensitive nuclear weapons work.
>> [music] >> Everything from early design concepts to detailed engineering specifications for warhead components.
Mossad had known about the archive for some time.
Getting to it required assets who had mapped the facility in detail.
Its locks, its guard rotations, the precise location of the files inside.
On the night of January 31st, 2018, [music] a team moved on the warehouse.
They breached multiple safes.
They sorted through the contents under time pressure, taking the most significant materials.
They loaded the documents, the contents of 32 safes, into vehicles and moved them out of Tehran.
By the time Iranian security services understood what had happened, the archive was outside Iran.
The human challenge [music] was greater than the technical one.
Moving that volume of material through Iranian checkpoints and across a border required either an extraordinarily sophisticated concealment method or something simpler >> [music] >> and more disturbing.
Prior knowledge of which checkpoints to avoid, >> [music] >> which routes were unwatched, which moments in the security apparatus created windows of vulnerability.
Knowledge that could only come from inside the apparatus itself.
In April 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before cameras in Tel Aviv and presented the contents of the archive to the world.
55,000 pages of documents, 183 compact discs.
Proof, Netanyahu said, [music] that Iran had lied for years to the international community about the military dimensions of its nuclear program.
The IAEA confirmed the documents authenticity.
Iran called the presentation fabricated, but it could not explain how fabricated documents contained the precise internal terminology, the correct organizational structures, >> [music] >> and the accurate names of personnel that only someone with real access to the program would know.
The archive operation did something the assassinations and the cyber attack could not do alone.
It proved to the world [music] and to Iran’s own leadership that Mossad had been inside the most sensitive layer of the Islamic Republic’s secrets.
Not at the perimeter, [music] not at the edge.
At the center.
And if they had been at the center of the archive, the question that followed was inevitable.
Where else had they been? Who inside Iran’s own institutions had made all of it possible? The hunt for that answer would consume the Revolutionary Guard’s counterintelligence apparatus for years.
And the damage it caused was not limited to the agents it found.
The archive was gone.
The scientists were dead.
The centrifuges had destroyed themselves in silence.
And somewhere inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, inside the organization that controlled Iran’s most sensitive programs, its most classified facilities, its most protected personnel, someone had been helping.
This was the conclusion Iranian counterintelligence could not avoid.
The archive theft made it undeniable.
Assassins could theoretically work from external surveillance alone.
A cyber weapon could theoretically be delivered through an unwitting contractor.
But emptying 32 safes from a specific warehouse in a specific [music] district of Tehran in a single night and then moving 520 kg of material through every checkpoint between that warehouse and the Iranian border required someone who knew the system from the inside.
Someone who knew which doors to open and which guards to avoid.
Counterintelligence investigations of this kind operate on a logic that is inherently self-defeating.
>> [music] >> When you cannot identify the source of a leak with certainty, suspicion spreads outward from the known facts until it covers everyone who could theoretically have had access.
Every officer who knew Fakhrizadeh’s route becomes a suspect.
Every technician who worked near the archive becomes [music] a suspect.
Every IRGC official who attended briefings where the compromised information was discussed becomes a suspect.
The circle of suspicion expands faster than the circle of confirmed guilt.
People are interrogated, removed from their positions, placed under surveillance.
Careers are destroyed on the basis of proximity rather than evidence.
The most capable officers, those with the broadest access and the deepest knowledge, exactly the people an intelligence service most needs, become, by definition, the most suspect.
Mossad understands this dynamic and exploits it deliberately.
An intelligence service hunting moles cannot focus on external threats.
An officer under internal investigation cannot perform his operational duties.
A leadership that trusts no one cannot make coherent decisions.
The paranoia itself becomes a weapon, one that costs nothing to maintain once the initial operations have demonstrated that penetration is real.
The human beings who enabled these operations made their decisions for reasons as varied as the people themselves.
Money is the simplest motivator.
Iran’s economy has been strangled by decades of international sanctions.
The rial has lost the overwhelming majority of its value.
An officer earning the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a month, watching his savings collapse and his family standard of living fall year after year, is a fundamentally different security risk than the same officer in a stable economy.
Ideology works differently, quieter, harder to detect.
Iran is not a monolithic society and the Islamic Republic is not universally loved by those who serve it.
There are officers inside the IRGC who joined because joining was the path to a career, not because they shared the regime’s worldview.
And then, there is revenge.
The most personal and the most unpredictable motivator of all.
An officer whose family member was imprisoned without cause.
A scientist whose career was destroyed [music] by a politically motivated superior.
A technician who watched a colleague tortured on false charges.
These motivations do not announce themselves.
They accumulate [music] in silence over years.
And they produce people who are, by the time they are approached, already looking for a way to act.
The network Mossad built inside Iran was not assembled overnight.
It was constructed over decades through patient identification, careful approach, and gradual trust building.
Some agents go years between activations, living entirely normal lives, maintaining their positions, building credibility inside the institutions they will eventually help to compromise.
They are not burning with secret knowledge.
They are waiting.
When the signal comes, they act.
When it does not, they continue to exist as exactly what they appear to be.
This patience is perhaps the most [music] difficult aspect for Iranian counterintelligence to combat.
A well-managed long-term asset leaves almost no trail.
The standard indicators of compromise, unexplained wealth, unusual communications patterns, [music] behavioral changes, are precisely the things a professionally managed asset is trained to suppress.
By the time the indicators appear, the damage has already been done.
Often, years of it.
But the network had a vulnerability.
Not in its structure, not in its tradecraft.
In its scale.
Because as the operations multiplied and the years accumulated, the sheer number of people who had been touched by this architecture, recruited, activated, paid, blackmailed, or simply asked a single question by the wrong person at the wrong moment, grew beyond [music] what any counterintelligence apparatus could quietly contain.
And in 2019, >> [music] >> the Islamic Republic decided it was no longer going to try to contain it quietly.
The purges began not with a public announcement, but with a series of quiet disappearances.
Officers who had been present at sensitive briefings stopped appearing at their posts.
Senior IRGC intelligence officials were summoned for internal reviews and did not return.
Some were arrested.
Some were executed after closed military trials, [music] whose verdicts were never published.
The Islamic Republic does not advertise the scale of its internal failures, but the pattern was visible to anyone watching from the outside.
>> [music] >> And Mossad was watching very carefully.
Between 2019 and 2022, Iranian state media confirmed the execution of at least a dozen individuals on espionage charges connected to foreign intelligence services.
The actual number, according to assessments by Western intelligence agencies, was significantly higher.
The public announcements were selective, designed to signal vigilance rather than reveal the true extent of the damage.
Each execution was presented as a victory.
Each one was, in reality, a confession.
The system had been penetrated, and the penetration had gone on long enough to require this level of response.
But the purges created a problem that no internal security review could solve.
Because the men best qualified to identify foreign agents inside the IRGC, the experienced counterintelligence officers who understood how recruitment worked, who knew the behavioral indicators of compromise, who had spent careers learning to distinguish loyalty from performance, were themselves among the most exposed.
They had the broadest access.
They had attended the most sensitive briefings.
They knew the most names.
In a system where suspicion was now the default, the most capable were also the most suspect.
One by one, they were removed.
What replaced them were officers chosen primarily for loyalty rather than competence.
Men whose careers had been built on ideological reliability, on closeness to the right factions, on the ability to navigate internal politics rather than external threats.
They understood the regime.
They did not >> [music] >> understand the adversary.
And the adversary understood this perfectly.
The vacuum the purges created was not merely institutional.
It was operational.
The IRGC’s ability to detect and neutralize foreign penetration, already under strain from the cumulative damage of two decades of Mossad operations, began to degrade [music] at precisely the moment it was needed most.
The apparatus built to protect [music] the Islamic Republic’s secrets had consumed the people who knew how to run it.
Into that vacuum, a market opened.
On December 25th, [music] 2023, a residence in the Sayyidah Zaynab district of Damascus was destroyed by a precision airstrike.
The strike was attributed to Israel.
The man killed inside was Razi Mousavi, a senior commander of the IRGC Quds Force, the senior IRGC coordinator in Syria, and one of the most operationally significant figures in the entire Axis of Resistance supply chain.
He had been in Syria for through every phase of the conflict, through every shift in the balance [music] of power across the Levant.
He knew the routes.
He knew the warehouses.
He knew which commanders in Hezbollah received which shipments on which roads at which times.
He was not a theorist of the Iranian [music] project in the Levant.
He was its logistics architecture.
The man who made the physical movement of weapons, money, and personnel from Iran through Iraq into Syria and Lebanon not just possible, but routine.
But Syria and Lebanon are not Iran.
The men who operate in those spaces, the local fixers, the security details, the checkpoint commanders, [music] the logistics coordinators who actually move the weapons and the cash are not IRGC officers bound by revolutionary ideology.
They are men who grew up in economies destroyed by war and sanctions, who work for the Islamic Republic because it pays, and whose loyalty to Tehran extends precisely as far as Tehran’s ability to remain the most attractive option available to them.
The moment a better offer appears, the calculation changes.
A precision strike on a fixed residential target requires one thing above all else, confirmed location data.
Not a general neighborhood, not a district, a specific address at a specific moment with a confirmed presence inside.
That data does not come from satellites alone.
It comes from a human being.
Someone in Musavi’s immediate environment.
Someone [music] in his security detail.
A local operative who knew his address.
>> A Syrian contact who had his schedule.
[music] Someone who at some point before December 25th received a message and replied with a location.
This is the market that the vacuum created by Iran’s internal purges had opened.
Not the market of ideological conversion, of men convinced to betray their country for political or moral reasons.
That market exists, but it is slow, expensive, and requires years of cultivation.
The market that Mossad and its partners [music] increasingly exploited was something faster, cheaper, and in many ways more dangerous.
The market of transactional intelligence.
No ideology required.
No years of patient cultivation.
Just the right encrypted message sent to the right person at the right time.
And the price was not beyond reach.
According to reporting on multiple Israeli operations in Syria and Lebanon, the cost of a senior commander’s location ranges from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand dollars.
For a man operating in a war-destroyed economy, working for an organization whose currency has lost over 90% of its value in a decade, the calculation is not complicated.
The risk is real.
The punishment, if caught, [music] is death.
But the probability of being caught in a system whose counterintelligence apparatus has just spent 2 years purging its own most capable officers, is lower than it has ever been.
The mechanism of payment left almost no trace.
Cryptocurrency wallets registered in Dubai, in Istanbul, in Kuala Lumpur.
Payments made in fragments across multiple transactions, each too small individually to trigger automated monitoring systems.
The entire architecture of modern financial surveillance, designed [music] to catch terrorists, turned inside out and used by the very people that surveillance was built to find.
This is what the self-destruction of the IRGC’s internal security infrastructure produced in practical terms.
Not just an organization that could no longer reliably find its own traitors, but a marketplace in which the cost of betrayal had dropped and the probability of survival had risen.
The Islamic Republic had, through its own institutional paranoia, subsidized the market for its own secrets.
Mousavi was not the only commander killed through this mechanism.
In the months that followed, a series of precision strikes across Syria and Lebanon eliminated figures at every level of the IRGC and Hezbollah command structure.
[music] From senior coordinators to mid-level logistics officers whose names never appeared in any public reporting.
Each strike had the same signature.
Timing too precise, location too specific, execution too clean to be explained by signals intelligence alone.
Each one required a source.
A person.
A transaction.
Iran understood what was happening.
It issued internal directives restricting the use of personal mobile devices by senior personnel.
>> [music] >> It changed movement protocols for commanders in Syria.
It conducted internal security reviews across its logistics [music] networks.
Each measure was sensible.
Each measure was too late.
Because the marketplace did not depend on any single source or any single channel.
It was distributed, redundant, and self-sustaining.
When one node was identified and removed, the network routed around the gap.
The market continued.
But money and location data, as lethal as they proved, represent only the outer layer of what Mossad had built.
Because you can buy a man’s location.
You can buy his schedule.
You can buy his silence.
But there is one thing that does not require any of that.
One tool that turns a loyal man into a permanent asset [music] without a single payment, without a single meeting, without a single moment he can point to as the one where he made a choice.
What if you don’t need to buy a man at all? What if all it takes is showing him a single photograph, and from that moment on, he is yours? The photograph does not need to [music] show anything dramatic.
It does not need to show a crime.
It needs to show only one thing.
Something the target cannot afford for anyone else to see.
A second wife kept secret from the first.
A meeting with someone he was never supposed to meet.
A transaction that bypassed the official channels.
A face that should not appear in the same frame as his.
In the Islamic Republic, where the distance between a private transgression and a public execution is measured not in evidence, but in political convenience, the photograph does not need to be proof of anything.
It only needs to exist.
This is the second layer of what Mossad built inside the IRGC and its allied networks during the decade before the assassinations began.
The first layer was transactional.
Cash for location, cryptocurrency for confirmation.
The second layer was structural.
It did not require a willing seller.
It required only a man with a secret, and the knowledge that someone else now held it.
But not every secret is discovered through physical surveillance.
By the mid-2010s, the most efficient route into a man’s private life ran directly through his phone.
The methodology had a name in the intelligence community, spyware-enabled recruitment.
A target receives a message, a link, an attachment, [music] sometimes nothing more than a missed call.
In documented cases, he does not need to click anything.
He does not need to respond.
The infection, in the most sophisticated deployments, is already complete before he has read a single word.
Software of the kind developed by the NSO Group, known publicly as Pegasus, >> [music] >> gives its operator full access to a device within seconds of deployment.
Messages, photographs, call logs, location data in real time, recordings from the microphone, images from the camera.
The target does not know he has been compromised.
His phone continues to function normally.
It has simply become, simultaneously, a listening post [music] operated by someone else.
For a senior IRGC officer whose personal device contains years [music] of private correspondence, messages to a second family, financial transactions routed outside official channels, photographs that document a life lived at careful distance from revolutionary purity, [music] this is not merely surveillance.
It is the construction of a permanent archive of leverage.
Everything he has ever tried to hide now exists in a file somewhere, indexed and retrievable [music] on demand.
The approach, when it comes, is calibrated to the individual.
In some cases, it is direct.
[music] A stranger appears, shows what he knows, explains what he wants, and leaves a contact number.
In other cases, it is indirect.
An anonymous message arrives on a device the target believed was secure, containing just enough to make clear that whoever sent it knows things they should not know.
In both cases, the message is the same.
There is no demand for ideology.
There is only one concrete request.
>> [music] >> A location, a schedule, a name.
Something small, something that could be rationalized as almost nothing.
And then another request.
And another.
Each one slightly larger than the last.
By the time the target understands the full geometry of what has happened to him, he is too deep to exit.
>> [music] >> The records of his cooperation have been added to the original archive.
He is no longer being blackmailed into providing intelligence.
He has become an asset >> [music] >> who understands with perfect clarity that his only remaining option is to continue.
This is the crucial difference between a paid asset and a blackmailed one.
A man recruited for money can at some point decide the money is no longer worth the risk.
He can stop.
He can disappear.
He retains, at the margin, a choice.
A man recruited through blackmail has no such margin.
The archive does not expire.
The leverage does not diminish with time.
He works until he is caught or until he dies.
And the archive, in the meantime, grows.
This is the architecture that made November 27th, 2020 possible.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was the most protected scientist in the Islamic Republic.
The father of Iran’s nuclear weapons [music] program, the man who had survived multiple previous assassination attempts, who traveled in a convoy of armed vehicles, who changed his routes daily, whose precise location on any given day was known to fewer [music] than a dozen people inside the Iranian security apparatus.
He was killed on a highway near Absard, east of Tehran, by a remotely operated machine gun mounted in a Nissan pickup truck.
Aimed, fired, and controlled entirely by satellite uplink.
No shooter on the ground.
No extraction required.
No local operative whose nerve could fail at the critical moment.
The technical execution was extraordinary, but the technical execution was not the hard part.
The hard part [music] was knowing that Fakhrizadeh would be on that road, in that vehicle, at that time.
That knowledge [music] did not come from signals intelligence.
It came from someone in his immediate security environment.
Someone whose private life had at some prior point been reduced [music] to a file.
Someone for whom sending a final confirmation had become by then the only rational choice available.
Iran launched what it called Operation Divine Revenge.
The investigation consumed enormous resources.
>> [music] >> It produced arrests, interrogations, confessions.
It did not produce [music] the network.
Because the network had been designed from the beginning with exactly this investigation in mind.
Each node knew only what it needed to know.
The man who sent the final message did not know who received it.
But the investigation produced something else.
Something more dangerous than any arrest.
A list.
Names of officers suspected of compromise.
Officers placed under surveillance.
Officers quietly removed from sensitive postings.
Officers who, upon learning they were under suspicion, [music] faced exactly the same calculation that had made them useful in the first place.
And, in some cases, made the same choice again.
Faster.
With more urgency.
Passing everything they knew before the door [music] closed.
Each execution announced by the Islamic Republic is a public admission of penetration.
Each admission of penetration deepens the institutional paranoia.
Each wave of paranoia removes more capable counterintelligence officers, isolates more potential assets from their handlers, creates more men living with secrets, and fewer men capable of finding them.
The cycle does not slow down.
It accelerates.
A system built on fear and total control does not merely tolerate this dynamic.
It produces [music] it.
The revolutionary ideology that demands ideological purity makes personal transgression inevitable and lethal.
The security apparatus that punishes failure makes honest reporting impossible.
The purge culture that removes the disloyal creates the conditions in which disloyalty becomes rational.
This is not the weakness of individual men.
It is a structural [music] defect written into the architecture of the regime itself, and it cannot be corrected without dismantling the system that created it.
If tomorrow the world wakes to another headline from Iran, another commander gone, another facility destroyed, another operation that should have been impossible, remember that operation was planned and paid for months earlier in silence, in rooms where someone looked at what they stood to lose >> [music] >> and made a quiet calculation.
Not for ideology, not for conviction, simply because in the end the regime they served had made betrayal the most rational option available.
