Julian E. Barnes, Ronen Bergman, Eric Schmitt and Tyler Pager
Washington: Shortly before the United States and Israel were poised to launch an attack on Iran, the CIA zeroed in on the location of perhaps the most important target: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
The CIA had been tracking Khamenei for months, gaining more confidence about his locations and his patterns, according to people familiar with the operation.
Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning (Iran time) at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically, the CIA learned that the supreme leader would be at the site.
The US and Israel decided to adjust the timing of their attack, in part to take advantage of the new intelligence, according to officials with knowledge of the decisions.
The information provided a window of opportunity for the two countries to achieve a critical and early victory: the elimination of top Iranian officials and the killing of Khamenei.
The remarkably swift removal of Iran’s supreme leader reflected the close co-ordination and intelligence sharing between the US and Israel in the run-up to the attack, and the deep intelligence the countries had developed on Iranian leadership, especially after last year’s 12-day war.
The operation also showed the failure of Iran’s leaders to take adequate precautions to avoid exposing themselves at a time when both Israel and the US sent clear signals that they were preparing for war.
The CIA passed its intelligence, which offered “high fidelity” on Khamenei’s position, to Israel, according to people briefed on the intelligence.
They and others who shared details about the operation spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence and military planning.
Israel, using US intelligence and its own, would execute an operation it had been planning for months: the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leaders.
The US and Israeli governments, which had originally planned to launch a strike at night under the cover of darkness, decided to adjust the timing to take advantage of the information about the gathering at the government compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.
The leaders were set to meet at the offices of the Iranian presidency, the supreme leader and Iran’s National Security Council.
Israel had determined that the gathering would include top Iranian defence officials, including Mohammad Pakpour, the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guard; Aziz Nasirzadeh, the minister of defense; Ali Shamkhani, the head of the Military Council; Seyyed Majid Mousavi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Aerospace Force; Mohammad Shirazi, the deputy intelligence minister; and others.
The operation began about 6am in Israel, as fighter jets took off from their bases. The strike required relatively few aircraft, but they were armed with long-range and highly accurate munitions.
Two hours and five minutes after the jets took off – about 9.40 am in Tehran – the long-range missiles struck the compound. At the time of the strike, senior Iranian national security officials were in one building at the compound. Khamenei was in another nearby building.
“This morning’s strike was carried out simultaneously at several locations in Tehran, in one of which senior figures of Iran’s political-security echelon had gathered,” an Israeli defence official wrote in a message reviewed by The New York Times.
The official said that despite Iranian preparations for war, Israel managed to achieve “tactical surprise” with its attack on the compound.
The White House and the CIA declined to comment.
On Sunday, Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, confirmed the deaths of two high-level military leaders Israel said it had killed Saturday: Shamkhani and Pakpour.
People briefed on the operation described it as a product of good intelligence and months of preparation.
Last June, with planning underway to strike Iran’s nuclear targets, US President Donald Trump asserted that the US knew where Khamenei was hiding and could have killed him.
That intelligence, a former US official said, was based on the same network that the US relied on Saturday.
But since then, the information the US has been able to gather has only improved, according to the former official and others briefed on the intelligence.
During that 12-day war, the US learned even more about how the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guard communicated and moved while under pressure, the former official said. The US used that knowledge to hone its ability to track Khamenei and predict his movements.
The US and Israel had also gathered specifics about the locations of key Iranian intelligence officers.
In follow-on strikes after the attack on the leadership compound on Saturday, locations where intelligence leaders were staying were hit, according to people familiar with the operation.
Iran’s top intelligence officer escaped, but the senior ranks of Iran’s intelligence agencies were decimated, according to people briefed on the operation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.