Israel's cell-phone assassinations in Iran
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Israel's cell-phone assassinations in Iran is John Kiriakou's account of how Israel destroyed Iran's military leadership. It killed all 12 of Iran's top generals by targeting their cell phones, and gathered the intelligence by recruiting some of the two million undocumented Afghan refugees living destitute in Iran, paying $50 to $100 a month to learn when each general left his apartment and which way he went. When Iran realized what was happening and forbade its generals to carry phones, Israel targeted the bodyguards' phones instead, killing the next wave of leaders. In a later telling Kiriakou supplies the omission that made the workaround possible: the Iranian order covered generals and nuclear scientists and nobody else, and "they realized that the Iranians never told the bodyguards that they can't carry cell phones." Kiriakou says Israel similarly eliminates Iranian nuclear scientists, recruiting them or, if they refuse, killing them by drone or by assassins abroad.

Kiriakou has repeated and expanded on this account elsewhere. He says Mossad has effectively blanket coverage of Iran, intercepting all Iranian communications, including military and leadership traffic, and has infiltrated the country on the ground using Farsi-native Iranian Jewish emigres who moved to the West and were sent back. He gives a more specific mechanism for the phone-tracking recruitment: because Iran, itself strained by sanctions, offers Afghan refugees no state benefits, no free food, housing, or medical care, Israel approached them directly, paying $300 to $500 a month for a general's or scientist's home address, departure time, and daily route. In another telling, Kiriakou describes Israel successfully recruiting desperate, deported Afghan illegal aliens inside Iran for around $50 a tip to identify the same locations. He also says Israel uses Iranian-born Jews who speak fluent, accentless Farsi to identify the specific apartment blocks where Iranian nuclear scientists live, before striking with a rocket, killing everyone in the building if necessary. Kiriakou adds that Israeli hackers separately broke into Tehran's traffic cameras, letting them watch generals and scientists driving through the city and know exactly where they would be at what time, "and that's when you rocket them. It's good tradecraft is what it is." Separately, Kiriakou says Israeli intelligence can break encryption faster than the United States, and that the FBI will sometimes contract encryption-breaking work out to Israel, which retains the intercepted data.

The recruitment as tradecraft

Asked to walk through how the refugee spotters were actually approached, Kiriakou classes the operation as unremarkable: "This is an easy recruitment that any brand new case officer can do. It's essentially a cold pitch." What makes it easy is not skill but the target's condition, the Afghans hold no love for Iran, which has given them nothing, and no particular hatred of Israel, so the pitch need only reach someone "so desperate that they'll do anything." Because of that, he notes, the recruiter need never identify himself: the approach can be made in the name of the MEK, of Iraq, of Pakistan, "they don't have to say we're Israeli intelligence officers."

He also describes an escalation beyond street observation. The easiest recruits begin as "street type taskers", stand on this corner, note when this general drives past, transmit it back, here is $100, and the productive ones are then worked into the generals' households as a chaiwala, a tea boy, or a driver washing the car. "Then you get the general's cell phone number." Consistent with his account of Iranian-Jewish emigres above, he adds that almost none of the agents Israel runs inside Iran are native Israelis: they are Iranians recruited abroad, and best of all from Israel's point of view, Iranian Jews who emigrated and can be sent back.

The seminar circuit

Kiriakou's account of why the Iranian nuclear programme proved so penetrable is that its people left the country. "The Iranian nuclear programme was rather easy for them to target, because many of those scientists would travel overseas for seminars, academic seminars. And the Israelis would knock on the hotel door, say: we're with Mossad. You're going to either work for us, or you're going to die."

His assumption about the outcome is not optimistic: "I'm going to assume some said, okay, I'll take the deal. But most others died."

See also

- Reza Pahlavi
- Iran's 2024 drone retaliation
