Iran’s air defenses could be seen lighting up the night sky over Tehran on Saturday. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/Reuters
By the time Israel’s advanced F-35 jet fighters swooped in to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leadership, a lower-tech threat had already crossed the border and was in position to clear the way.
Israel had spent months smuggling in parts for hundreds of quadcopter drones rigged with explosives—in suitcases, trucks and shipping containers—as well as munitions that could be fired from unmanned platforms, people familiar with the operation said.
Small teams armed with the equipment set up near Iran’s air-defense emplacements and missile launch sites, the people said. When Israel’s attack began, some of the teams took out air defenses, while others hit missile launchers as they rolled out of their shelters and set up to fire, one of the people said.
The operation helps explain the limited nature of Iran’s response thus far to Israel’s attacks. It also offers further evidence of how off-the-shelf technology is changing the battlefield and creating dangerous new security challenges for governments.
The exploit came just weeks after Ukraine deployed similar tactics, using drones smuggled into Russia in the roofs of shipping containers to attack dozens of warplanes used by Moscow to attack Ukrainian cities. The intelligence operations showed how attackers are using creativity and low-cost drones to get past sophisticated air-defense systems to destroy valuable targets in ways that are hard to stop.
The operation by Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, was aimed at taking out threats to Israeli warplanes and knocking out missiles before they could be fired at cities. The teams on the ground hit dozens of missiles before they could be launched in the early hours of the attack, one of the people said. Israel’s air force also focused heavily on air defense and missiles in the first days of the campaign.
An excavator removed debris from a Tehran residential building on Friday following strikes by Israel. Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images
Iran ultimately fired around 200 missiles at Israel in four salvos Friday and overnight into Saturday, leaving three dead and property damaged around Tel Aviv. Israel had expected a much more severe response, said Sima Shine, a former senior intelligence officer in the Mossad and now head of the Iran program at the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank in Tel Aviv.
Iran, however, has vast resources it could muster for more severe attacks.
“We expected much more,” Shine said. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t have much more today or tomorrow.”
The attacks on Iranian air defenses were more decisive, helping Israel quickly establish dominance in the air, she said. Israel’s air force has also aggressively targeted those defenses.
Israeli military spokesperson Effie Defrin said Saturday that Israel overnight had attacked targets in Tehran with 70 fighter planes that spent more than two hours in the Iranian capital’s airspace.
Missiles fired by Iran into Israel this weekend damaged a residential neighborhood in Tel Aviv and killed at least three people. Photo: Abir Sultan/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
“This is the deepest distance that we have operated so far in Iran,” Defrin said. “We created aerial freedom of action.”
An advisory from Iran’s intelligence services circulating Saturday in some of the country’s newspapers, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked publication Tasnim, told people to be on watch for Israeli use of pickups and cargo trucks to launch drones.
Israel has deeply integrated ambitious intelligence operations into its warfighting. It kicked off a two-month campaign against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah last fall with an operation that caused thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies carried by its ranks to suddenly explode.
An image taken from video shows smoke in the aftermath of an Israeli strike in the western Iranian province of Kermanshah. Photo: UGC/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The country has also shown that its agents have deeply infiltrated Iran. Last summer, Israel killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh by sneaking a bomb into his heavily guarded room at a Revolutionary Guard guesthouse and detonating it when Haniyeh attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president.
In the current campaign, the Mossad’s operations inside Iran have included hunting for leadership targets in Tehran, one of the people familiar with the operations said.
Drones have been a regular feature of Israel’s operations in Iran. In 2022, it used explosive-laden quadcopters to strike an Iranian drone-production site in the western city of Kermanshah. A year later, it used drones to target an ammunition factory in Isfahan.
The spy agency began preparing for the current drone operation years ago, the people said. It knew where Iran kept missiles to be ready for launch but needed to be in a position to attack them given the country’s size and distance from Israel.
Mossad brought the quadcopters in through commercial channels using often unwitting business partners. Agents on the ground would collect the munitions and distribute them to the teams. Israel trained the team leaders in third countries, and they in turn trained the teams.
A banner displays portraits of Iranian generals and nuclear scientists killed in recent strikes by Israel. Photo: Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The teams watched as Iran rolled out missiles, then hit them before they could be erected for launch, the person said. Mossad knew the trucks that move the missiles from storage to the launch site were a bottleneck for Iran, which had four times as many missiles as trucks.
The teams took out dozens of trucks, one of the people said. They were still operating on the ground deep into Friday.
The operations—and making them public—have an important ancillary effect, said Shine, the former head of the Mossad’s Iran desk.
“No one in Iran in the high echelons can be sure he isn’t known to Israeli intelligence and won’t be the target,” she said. “It’s not just the damage caused but the nervousness it brings.”