In preparation for this weekend’s attacks, Israel had for several years hacked Tehran’s traffic cameras and surveilled bodyguards ahead of the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader. Long before the bombs fell, “we knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem,” an Israeli intelligence official said.

When the bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials arrived for work in Tehran—where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday—the Israelis were watching. Almost all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their footage encrypted and transmitted to servers in Israel, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who spoke to the Financial Times.

They were able to collect details about the security guards such as their addresses, working hours, the routes they took to work and—most importantly—who they usually were assigned to protect and transport. Israel could also disrupt individual components in a dozen cellphone towers in the area, making the phones appear busy when called and preventing Khamenei’s guards from receiving potential warnings.

The detailed intelligence picture of the arch-enemy’s capital was the result of painstaking data gathering made possible by Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence unit 8200, the resources recruited by its intelligence service Mossad, and the mountains of data processed by military intelligence into daily reports.

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A mathematical method known as social network analysis was also used to analyze billions of data points to discover unlikely centers of decision-making power and identify new targets to monitor and assassinate.

Not all details of the latest operation are known, and some may never be made public in order to protect sources and methods still in use to track other targets. Killing Khamenei was a political decision, not just a technological achievement, current and former Israeli intelligence officials say.

Happy Iranians thank Trump and Israel with the president’s distinct dance style:

30 Precision Weapons

When the CIA and Israel determined that Khamenei would be holding a meeting at his office on Saturday morning, the opportunity to kill him together with much of Iran’s top leadership was particularly opportune. It would have been far more difficult to carry out after a war had broken out.

At the same time, the Americans had something even more concrete in a human source—something the CIA declined to comment on. This enabled Israeli jets, which had flown for hours to arrive at the right place at the right time, to fire as many as 30 precision weapons.

Unlike Hassan Nasrallah, former leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah, Khamenei did not live in hiding. Nasrallah spent several years in underground bunkers until his death in 2024, when Israeli fighter jets dropped as many as 80 bombs on his hideout in Beirut.

Khamenei is said to have considered the possibility of being killed and dismissed his own life as unimportant for the destiny of the Islamic Republic, and some Iran experts claim he expected martyrdom.

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