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Before the bombs fell, Israel knew Tehran like its own capital. The Financial Times has revealed a complex surveillance operation years in the making.

Israel spent years hacking nearly every traffic camera in Tehran to spy on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s bodyguards and senior officials.

The Financial Times has now revealed that surveillance operation as just one of hundreds of intelligence streams that converged for Saturday’s deadly strike on the compound of Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Encrypted footage from the hacked cameras was transmitted in real time to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel.

One camera angle was particularly valuable: it captured where Khamenei’s security guards parked their personal vehicles near the compound, allowing for detailed information gathering on their addresses, duty schedules, and the officials each man was assigned to protect.

Combined with deeply penetrated mobile phone networks, AI-driven data analysis, and a CIA human source inside Iran, the intelligence picture met the threshold Israeli military doctrine demands: two senior officers, working independently, must confirm a target’s location before a strike of this magnitude is authorised.

“We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem,” an Israeli intelligence official told the Financial Times. “And when you know a place as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place.”

Building the Target

The intelligence flowed from three sources — Unit 8200’s signals directorate, Mossad’s human assets, and military intelligence analysts — into what officers describe as an assembly line with a single product: high-profile Iranian targets.

To sort through the volume, Israel applied a mathematical method called social network analysis, parsing billions of data points to uncover decision-making centres, and to flag individuals for surveillance — and ultimately, assassination.

In the hours before the strike, Israel disrupted roughly a dozen mobile phone towers near Pasteur Street, making phones appear engaged when called, and cutting off the protection detail from possible warnings.

Israeli jets had been airborne for hours before firing up to 30 precision munitions on the compound in broad daylight.

The Israeli military said the morning timing “allowed Israel to achieve tactical surprise for the second time, despite heavy Iranian preparedness.”

According to the Telegraph, Operation Epic Fury also involved US cyber attacks that opened a corridor for Israeli jets to reach the compound.

General Dan Cainem, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the initial phase was “designed to daze and confuse” Iran, with “coordinated space and cyber operations” that left their adversary “without the ability to see, coordinate, or respond effectively.”

As The Daily Declaration reported when the strikes broke, the opening salvo killed more than 40 senior Iranian security and regime figures alongside Khamenei, including IRGC commander General Mohammad Pakpour, senior security adviser Ali Shamkhani, and several members of Khamenei’s immediate family.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was also killed.

The Daily Declaration also covered Iran’s long internal unrest in the months leading up to the weekend’s attack.

October 7 Changed the Calculus

The Israeli operation was the culmination of two decisions more than 20 years apart, former Mossad official Sima Shine told the Financial Times.

The first was a 2001 directive from then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Mossad chief Meir Dagan: make Iran the priority above all else. “What I need is Iran,” Sharon told Dagan. “That’s your target.”

The second was Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack — which Israel holds Iran responsible for backing — and it overturned a longstanding Israeli principle that even heads of state were off-limits for assassination.

Each successive coup made the next more conceivable: the 2024 killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, followed by Mossad’s booby-trapping of thousands of Hizbollah pagers and radios.

Then came last June’s 12-day war, in which more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and senior military officials were killed in the opening minutes as Iran’s Russian-built aerial defence radars were simultaneously destroyed.

“In Hebrew, we say, ‘With the food comes the appetite,’” Shine explained. “In other words, the more you have, the more you want.”

Khamenei had publicly mused about the possibility of his own death, dismissing it as inconsequential to the fate of the Islamic republic.

On Saturday morning, he was not in either of his two bunkers. He was in his offices — and the bombs found him there.