By Tal Shalev, Jeremy Diamond, CNN
Tel Aviv (CNN) — The traffic cameras on the streets of Tehran provided a real-time view of the targets.
Hacked years ago, the cameras allowed Israel to map the city in detail, establish patterns of movement, and build an intricate complex picture of what was happening inside an enemy capital, according to an Israeli official.
The cameras were only one part of a much more complex system, some of whose details were first reported by The Financial Times, that allowed Israel to build one what one Israeli source familiar with the matter called an AI-powered “target production machine” capable of processing massive amounts of data.
In went visual intelligence, human intelligence, signals intelligence, intercepted communications, satellite imagery and more. Out came a pinpoint location in the form of a 14-digit grid coordinate. The sheer quantity of information required powerful computers to process, sort, and analyze the data to draw out what Israel wanted: targets.
The system, created over the past decade, requires a team of people to validate the strike recommendations and fine-tune the processes, the source said, including technologists, data analysts, and engineers.
It has added to what Israel has repeatedly shown to be a longstanding penetration of Iran’s inner circles, which has enabled it to assassinate scores of Iran’s top nuclear scientists and officials over the years, steal the country’s nuclear archive, and kill Hamas’ political leader in Tehran.
For Israel, the system has proven itself before.
At the beginning of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June last year, the Israel Defense Forces unleashed the same capabilities in the opening strike, according to a second Israeli source, killing Iran’s highest-ranking military officer, the head of its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a close aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among others.
On Saturday morning, as the US and Israel launched a massive joint strike against Iran, the system was put to use once again.
The primary target was Iran’s now deceased supreme leader Ali Khamanei, who Israeli officials believe felt less vulnerable during daylight hours. Defense Minister Israel Katz previously said that Israel did not have the opportunity to target the supreme leader in June, as he likely took shelter in underground bunkers and went silent.
Now the opportunity had arisen to take out not just Khamenei, but also Iran’s top security and military leaders, several of whom were replacements for those Israel had killed in June.
Although the US and Iran were engaged in negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed the talks were doomed to fail. The Trump administration offered shifting answers about what it wanted out of the talks, but Israel made clear it felt there was never going to be enough common ground to reach a deal, and certainly not one Netanyahu — who had lobbied vociferously against the previous Iran nuclear agreement — would find acceptable.
For Israel’s longest-serving leader, who has spent much of his political career preaching to the world about the dangers of a nuclear Iran, the time to strike was at hand. Netanyahu met with President Donald Trump at the White House on February 11. The private discussion between the two leaders lasted nearly three hours, and they released only a single photo.
As CNN previously reported, the talk was not about the ongoing Iran negotiations. Instead, it was about what happened when those talks failed. Netanyahu presented Trump with fresh intelligence about Iran’s military capabilities. The meeting followed a series of high-level military and intelligence discussions between the US and Israel as the plans for a joint US-Israel attack came into focus.
On Friday afternoon at 3:38 p.m. Eastern Time, Trump gave the order that set the opening strikes in motion. The message said, “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck,” according to the top US officer, Gen. Dan Caine.
“This was a daylight strike based on a trigger event conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces, enabled by the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Caine told reporters in a briefing on Monday. Although he didn’t provide any more specifics, it’s likely he was referring to Israel’s salvo that killed Khamenei and many of Iran’s top leaders, which reportedly also drew onused American intelligence to pinpoint the location of Iran’s supreme leader in his compound.
Within hours, Israel was growing optimistic about the results of the strike, even without knowing for sure that Khamenei was dead.
That confirmation came early Sunday morning, when Iran’s state broadcaster announced: “The Supreme Leader of Iran has Reached Martyrdom.”
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