“When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street in Tehran — where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday — the Israelis were watching.
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, according to two people familiar with the matter.
One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, according to one of the people, 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.
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 — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.
-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.
-But the Americans had something even more concrete — a human source, both people familiar with the situation said. The CIA declined to comment. That allowed Israeli jets, which had been flying for hours in order to arrive on time at the right location, to fire off as many as 30 precision munitions, the former senior Israeli intelligence official said.