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Israel’s attacks on Iran to kill key military leaders and hobble the country’s nuclear programme were decades in the making, according to a new report.
On 13 June, Israel launched a direct assault on Iran claiming the Islamic state was “approaching the point of no return” in developing a nuclear weapon.
The attacks required elaborate tricks, according to 18 current and former Israeli and US security forces who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, and some of the plans dated back to the mid-1990s.
One operation, dubbed “Red Wedding” after the infamous Game of Thrones massacre that killed several of the show’s heroes in brutal fashion, left Iran’s top military commanders dead in the hours after Israel’s attack on Iran began.
The air force leaders gathered together in one place, allowing Israeli missiles to take them out all at once.
Another plot, called “Operation Narnia” because it was seen to be so fantastical, involved killing nine top Iranian nuclear scientists at their homes in Tehran almost simultaneously - a plan that was successfully carried out.
Over the 12-day war, at least 1,190 Iranians were killed in Israeli strikes, a Washington-based human rights group estimates, injuring another 4,475 people.
Iran struck back after the attacks, launching a wave of missiles at Israel targeting citings such as Beersheba and Tel Aviv. Those barrages killed 28 people and wounded more than 3,000, according to The Times of Israel.
Both Israel and Iran have claimed victory in the war after a fragile ceasefire was declared. In his first televised appearance in a week, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said his country had “emerged victorious” and threatened further action against the US if provoked.
“Should any aggression occur, the enemy will definitely pay a heavy price,” he said.
In Israel, the success of their two operations against military leaders and scientists - all over in just four hours - is said to have caught even the planners by surprise.
“When we started to plan this thing in detail, it was very difficult to know that this would work,” Major General Oded Basiuk, one of the operation’s key architects and head of the Israeli military Operations Directorate, told The WSJ.
Inside Iran, Israeli spy networks were so large they were able to track the country’s military leaders, the WSJ reports, while Mossad agents spent months using suitcases, shipping containers and trucks to smuggle in parts for hundreds of explosive-rigged drones to build drone bases that would help knock out Iran’s air defences.
But Israel’s targets were more than 1,000 miles from home, and as well as learning how to fly in tight formations of up to 10 aircraft around a tanker plane and taking turns refueling, they also had to learn how to position their plans so their missiles would all land within seconds of each other to maximise effectiveness.
That training began in 2008, in Operation Glorious Spartan, when more than 100 Israeli fighter jets flew more than 1,000 miles to Greece to practice. Those exercises became more frequent as time went on, the WSJ reports.
While Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was repeatedly voted down from launching the air attack on Iran several times over a span of years, the recent toppling of Syria’s regime cleared airspace for Israel, the WSJ reports.
Netanyahu decided on 9 June to launch the attack in four days, but planned to disguise their operation by announcing the prime minister would be taking time off work for a holiday weekend and the wedding of his eldest son, Avner, on 16 June.
But what not even Avner or Netanyahu’s wife knew was that the prime minister would delay the wedding, and plans continued as publicised so Iran would not be tipped off and scatter their scientists and top military brass.
In another ruse, Israeli officials also leaked reports to the media suggesting that Netanyahu and US president Donald Trump were split about whether they would launch an attack.
In reality, as Trump wrote on Truth Social “We remain committed to a Diplomatic Resolution to the Iran Nuclear Issue!” Israeli aircraft were preparing to launch.
Later, Trump launched America’s own assault against Iran, dropping bunker-busting bombs on its three nuclear facilities.
The US president claimed that assault had “obliterated” Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon and destroyed the sites, but experts are still assessing exactly how much damage those bombs caused to Iran’s atomic programme.
