For years, Israeli intelligence quietly tracked the movements of Iran's most powerful man -- Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Now, in one of the most dramatic military operations in recent history, Iran’s Supreme Leader of more than three decades has been killed in coordinated US-Israeli strikes. The mission was ambitious, long in the making and, according to Financial Times reports, built on years of patient surveillance, data gathering and political calculation.
Watching Tehran, camera by camera
When the bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials arrived for work near Pasteur Street in Tehran, the area where Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday, they likely had no idea they were being watched.
According to a report by the Financial Times, nearly all traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked years ago. Their feeds were allegedly encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to people familiar with the matter.
One camera angle proved especially valuable. It showed where security personnel parked their personal cars and offered insight into daily routines inside the heavily guarded compound.
Over time, complex algorithms built detailed profiles, or what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life.” These dossiers included home addresses, duty hours, commuting routes and, crucially, which officials each guard was assigned to protect.
This was just one stream of intelligence. There were hundreds more.
Disrupting communications before the strike
Israeli and US intelligence reportedly also penetrated mobile phone networks near Pasteur Street. At key moments, some phone towers were disrupted, making devices appear busy and preventing protection teams from receiving possible warnings.
Long before bombs were dropped, Israeli intelligence had built what one official described as near-total familiarity with Tehran.
We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem.
Israeli intelligence official
“And when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place,” Israeli intelligence official added.
This intelligence dominance was the result of years of work by Israel’s signals intelligence Unit 8200, human sources recruited by Mossad, and vast data analysis by military intelligence teams.
Israel also used social network analysis, a mathematical method that studies relationships and influence patterns, to sift through billions of data points and identify new targets.
“In Israeli intelligence culture, targeting intelligence is the most essential tactical issue — it is designed to enable a strategy,” said Itai Shapira, a brigadier general in the Israeli military reserves and 25-year veteran of its intelligence directorate. “If the decision maker decides that someone has to be assassinated, in Israel the culture is: ‘We will provide the targeting intelligence.’”
A political decision, not just a military one
Even with such technological sophistication, officials say killing Khamenei was ultimately a political choice.
For years, Israel avoided directly targeting him. During the 12-day war last June, Israeli strikes killed more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and senior military officials and disabled air defence systems. But Khamenei was not attacked.
This time was different.
When US and Israeli intelligence determined that Khamenei would hold a Saturday morning meeting at his compound, they saw a rare opportunity. Senior Iranian officials would be gathered in one place. If war formally began, they would likely move into underground bunkers beyond Israel’s reach.
“It was unusual for him to not be in his bunker — he had two bunkers — and if he had been, Israel wouldn’t have been able to reach him with the bombs that they have,” one person familiar with the situation told FT.
Unlike his ally Hassan Nasrallah, who spent years hiding underground before being killed in Beirut in 2024, Khamenei did not live in constant concealment. He had publicly spoken about the possibility of being killed and reportedly believed martyrdom was possible.
Still, striking him in daylight was a calculated move. The Israeli military later said that attacking in the morning allowed tactical surprise, despite Iran’s preparedness.
The American role
Behind the scenes, Washington played a critical part.
While Israel had signals intelligence from hacked cameras and mobile networks, the Americans reportedly had a human source who confirmed that the meeting was proceeding as planned. The CIA declined to comment.
Israeli doctrine requires two senior officers working independently to confirm a target’s presence before a strike. For a figure as high-profile as Khamenei, failure was not an option.
Israeli jets reportedly flew for hours before firing as many as 30 precision munitions. Some of the missiles used were variants of the Sparrow system, capable of striking a target as small as a dining table from more than 1,000km away.
How Trump moved toward war
The decision to escalate did not happen overnight.
In early February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. For weeks, the two sides had discussed possible military action against Iran, even as US officials were publicly engaged in nuclear negotiations with Tehran.
Trump expressed frustration with diplomacy.
He dismissed the history of talks with Iran as years of "talking and talking and talking."
Asked whether he supported regime change, Trump said it "seems like that would be the best thing that could happen."
Two weeks later, he authorized a large-scale bombardment alongside Israel. The strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, hit nuclear and military sites and triggered violence across the region.
In public, Trump appeared to waver between negotiation and confrontation. But behind closed doors, according to people familiar with the discussions, his shift toward military action gathered momentum, encouraged by Netanyahu and strengthened by Trump’s own confidence after previous overseas operations.
According to the NYT, Trump’s move toward war gathered momentum behind the scenes, driven by allies such as Netanyahu and by his own confidence following earlier US operations abroad.
The decision, the newspaper reported, was based on accounts from officials with direct knowledge of the deliberations, many of whom spoke anonymously due to the sensitivity of the discussions.
For Netanyahu, the US entry into war marked a strategic victory. Months earlier, at a meeting in Florida, he had sought approval to strike Iranian missile sites. Instead, he secured something larger, a full American partner in a campaign that reshaped the Middle East overnight.
Not all details of the operation may ever emerge. Intelligence methods remain closely guarded. But what is clear is that the strike on Khamenei was the culmination of years of surveillance, technological precision and political resolve, a moment when intelligence, timing and power converged with historic consequences.