By: Fern Sidman

When the Israeli Air Force struck a heavily fortified bunker carved into a mountainside outside Tehran on June 16, Iran’s leadership came perilously close to annihilation. The attack, carried out during the fourth day of open war between Israel and Iran, targeted the heart of the regime’s decision-making structure: a secret emergency meeting of the Supreme National Security Council. Inside were President Masoud Pezeshkian, the speaker of parliament, the heads of the judiciary and intelligence ministry, and a cadre of Revolutionary Guard generals responsible for safeguarding the state.

Six precision bombs detonated at the two entrances of the underground complex, collapsing steel doors, killing guards stationed outside, and trapping Iran’s most powerful men in darkness and smoke. Against extraordinary odds, all of them survived. Yet, as The New York Times reported on Saturday, the near-catastrophe revealed something even more devastating than the airstrike itself: Israel had penetrated Iran’s most tightly guarded circles not with bombs but with bytes, exploiting the careless mobile phone habits of bodyguards and drivers.

The episode, pieced together through interviews with Iranian and Israeli officials, underscores how Israel’s technological dominance and Iran’s lax operational discipline have turned a decades-long shadow war into an asymmetric battle that Tehran seems unable to control.

According to the information provided in The New York Times report, the June 16 meeting was convened under extraordinary precautions. The attendees—Pezeshkian, parliamentary speaker Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, and the ministers of defense, intelligence, and interior—arrived in separate vehicles, leaving their personal electronics behind. The location, a bunker dug 100 feet below a slope west of Tehran, was chosen precisely because it was thought to be immune from satellite surveillance or airborne detection.

Yet the Israelis struck within minutes of the meeting’s commencement. Interviews with Iranian officials later revealed how the breach had occurred: the bodyguards outside had carried mobile phones, and some even posted routine updates on social media. Israeli intelligence units, exploiting years of accumulated metadata, geolocation trails, and hacked applications, were able to identify the congregation point and feed coordinates to warplanes already circling Iranian airspace.

As one Iranian analyst, Sasan Karimi, told local media: “Senior commanders never carried phones. But their guards and drivers did, and they did not take precautions seriously. This is how Israel traced them.”

The revelation, according to the information in The New York Times report, has thrown Iran’s intelligence community into chaos. Since June, dozens of suspected operatives have been arrested or placed under house arrest, including high-ranking officials. In one chilling move, the government executed Roozbeh Vadi, a nuclear scientist accused of spying for Israel, after alleging he facilitated the assassination of another scientist.

Former vice president Mostafa Hashemi Taba went further, warning that infiltration had “reached the highest echelons” of government. That grim assessment echoed what Israeli defense officials themselves acknowledged: that the overuse of mobile technology by Iran’s security brigades had become both a weakness and a target.

The head of the Revolutionary Guard’s protective detail, Gen. Mohamad Javad Assadi, had repeatedly cautioned his men about Israel’s tracking capabilities. According to Iranian sources cited in The New York Times report, Assadi personally warned commanders and scientists in May that Israel was preparing assassinations. But those warnings were inconsistently heeded. Cellphone bans applied to scientists and top brass, but not to the guards protecting them. The oversight proved fatal when Israeli warplanes launched their “decapitation” strikes.

The strike on June 16 was not an isolated gambit but part of a broader Israeli campaign, one that military planners dubbed Operation Red Wedding—a reference to the bloody massacre in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Israeli officials told The New York Times that the objective was simple: neutralize 20 to 25 key Iranian figures in the opening week of the war, knowing that once alerted, the targets would become harder to track.

Parallel to this was Operation Narnia, focused on Iran’s most prized assets: the nuclear scientists thought to be working on weaponization triggers. Mossad operatives had been compiling dossiers since 2018, when agents spirited away Iran’s secret nuclear archive. By 2023, Israeli planners had narrowed a list of 400 scientists down to 100, and then to a lethal dozen.

In June, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 13 nuclear scientists, including Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi and former nuclear chief Fereydoun Abbasi. All had been tracked via the digital signatures of their guards.

As The New York Times report noted, Israeli officials believe that sabotage alone—blowing up centrifuge facilities or cyberattacks like Stuxnet—could only delay Iran’s nuclear advances. Killing the human capital, the so-called “weapon group,” was judged to be the only way to meaningfully cripple Iran’s program.

Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, newly appointed head of the Revolutionary Guards, admitted publicly that Israel’s superiority in surveillance technology posed a near existential challenge. “The enemy gets the majority of its intelligence through satellites and electronic data,” he said in an interview. “They can capture voices, images, zoom in precisely, and track movements.”

But as Israeli defense officials countered to The New York Times, the real breakthrough lay not in technology alone but in exploiting human weakness. By requiring commanders to surround themselves with dozens of guards, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had inadvertently created a surveillance liability. The more phones Israel could monitor, the greater the probability of locating the principals.

One Israeli official put it bluntly: “Using so many bodyguards is a weakness we imposed on them—and we exploited it.”

The Iranian regime has since launched a sweeping counterintelligence purge. In July, the intelligence ministry announced it had foiled 13 Israeli plots to kill 35 senior officials and had arrested 21 operatives allegedly working for Mossad. But skepticism remains.

Iranian officials privately acknowledge, according to the information contained in The New York Times report, that dozens of arrests have netted not only genuine collaborators but also innocent officials caught up in paranoia. This wave of purges has eroded morale within the Revolutionary Guard and ministries, creating a climate of suspicion that threatens to paralyze decision-making.

Hamzeh Safavi, son of a top military adviser to Khamenei, described Israel’s technological edge as “an existential threat,” urging a “total security overhaul” even at the cost of prosecuting high-ranking insiders.

Israel’s decision to unleash this campaign in June was deliberate. Officials confided to The New York Times that plans to target Iranian scientists had been shelved in late 2023 to avoid straining relations with the Biden administration. But by mid-2025, with U.S. policy shifting and after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks ignited a regional conflagration, Israel seized the moment to strike with overwhelming force.

The early days of the war were devastating. Airstrikes killed Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Guards’ Aerospace Force, when Israeli jets targeted his underground command bunker. Other strikes eliminated 30 senior commanders across Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad. In nearly all cases, Israeli forces followed the trail of compromised mobile devices.

President Pezeshkian later described the bunker attack in harrowing terms. With power cut and oxygen dwindling, he clawed through debris with his bare hands, opening a small passage for colleagues to crawl through. Wounded by shrapnel, he limped out into daylight, where dead guards lay near collapsed doors.

“If Israel had succeeded in killing the country’s top officials, chaos would have ensued,” he told clerics weeks later. “People would have lost hope.”

His words, reported by Iranian media and cited in The New York Times report, highlight the razor-thin margin between survival and collapse that day.

The June strikes were merely the most visible chapter in a shadow conflict stretching back decades. Israel and Iran have fought each other through assassinations, cyberattacks, sabotage, and proxy wars. But the events of June 2025, as chronicled by The New York Times, suggest Israel has vaulted ahead, combining technological innovation with human intelligence to decimate Iran’s upper ranks.

Tehran, meanwhile, has sought to retaliate by recruiting spies inside Israel. Shin Bet has arrested dozens of Israeli citizens accused of working for Iran, though most were low-level operatives gathering open-source data. Still, the arrests reveal Iran’s determination to strike back, however unevenly matched.

For Iran, the path forward is fraught. The regime must balance internal purges with the need to maintain continuity of governance. It must also reassure a public already disillusioned by economic collapse and repression. For Israel, the strategy of preemptive strikes carries risks of escalation, potentially drawing in Hezbollah, Iraq-based militias, or even a direct clash with U.S. policy interests.

Yet the June 16 bunker strike crystallized a new reality: even in its most secret sanctuaries, Iran cannot shield its leaders from Israel’s gaze.

The near-decapitation of Iran’s leadership this summer revealed not only Israel’s lethal precision but also the vulnerabilities of authoritarian regimes that depend on secrecy yet cannot control their own protectors. As The New York Times has reported, the war between Israel and Iran is no longer fought solely on battlefields or in covert operations. It is fought in the metadata of smartphones, in the carelessness of a guard posting to social media, and in the satellites silently circling above.

For now, Israel appears to hold the upper hand. But the shadow war is far from over. Tehran’s vow to root out spies and reassert control ensures that the cycle of infiltration, assassination, and reprisal will continue — with consequences not just for the Middle East, but for global stability.