Financial Times:

By Mehul Srivastava in London, Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv and John Paul Rathbone in Istanbul

Last year, an Israeli telecoms executive working in Europe had a call from an old friend back in Tel Aviv: could he help design a phone that looked like a cheap Android but could transmit encrypted data that mimicked social media traffic?

Around the same time, a reservist working at an Israeli health start-up got a call from Unit 9900, a tiny part of the Israeli military that seeks clues in vast data sets. Could he tweak an algorithm he had worked on during his military service, so a dedicated server could sift through satellite images of fuel trucks and separate those carrying petrol from those with missile propellant?

Neither was told exactly how their efforts shaped last week’s opening salvo in Israel’s aerial assault on Iran, which stunned the country with both its depth and precision. More than a dozen security chiefs and nuclear scientists were assassinated nearly simultaneously; entire aerial defence arrays were destroyed before they could fire off a single interception; and a large number of missile launcher sites were identified and destroyed.

How Israel’s security services pulled off parallel operations combining the work of its military intelligence arm Aman, with the foreign spy service Mossad into such an effective assault may never fully become public. But early hints are trickling out — some from authorised leaks aiming to embarrass Iran, others from people familiar with the operations speaking to the Financial Times on the condition of anonymity.

They describe a sprawling, multiyear operation that leaned on every possible asset from which Israeli intelligence could draw — commercial satellites, hacked phones, deep-cover agents recruited locally, covert warehouses to assemble drones and even miniaturised weapons systems fitted into everyday vehicles.

The goal, the people said, was to create a densely populated bank of targets to take out in the first hours of a military operation. One called it the Israeli version of “shock and awe”; another said it aimed to embrace the “audacious”.

A former Israeli official described the project as the result of “millions of dollars and years of efforts” to address what Israel considers an existential threat. “When you work for so many years, investing everything you have — human intelligence, open source intelligence, money — you eventually get an outcome” like this, they said.

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