As of Wednesday, the Israeli operation to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and its ballistic missile capabilities continued apace, with launchers and production facilities becoming prime targets. 

In perhaps the most dominant, decisive show of military force this century, the IDF managed to gain air superiority in the first three days of strikes and has been able to loiter over Tehran without consequence. I’m not sure enough people truly appreciate how insane it is that the Israelis have not lost a single plane yet. Once again, the incredible gulf between American and Russian military technology is being laid bare. To say Iran was a paper tiger would be an insult to paper tigers. 

With that said, we are learning some stunning details about how things got to this point. In the early hours of the war, it was reported that dozens of top Iranian military leaders were taken out in a single strike, and how that strike came to be is just as incredible as the result. According to a new report, the subterfuge used to get all those IRGC generals into a single bunker is like something right out of a spy novel. 

This meant there was no one to give the order to fire the initial salvo of 1,000 ballistic missiles as Iran had previously threatened to do, he added.

The added bonus for the Israelis was that Iranian military leadership was essentially crippled from the moment of Israel’s first strike against the world’s top sponsor of terrorism.

As The Chronicle reported, Mossad had used “falsified communications through Iranian channels” to call the meeting — which successfully lured “the entire senior leadership of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, including Commander General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, his deputies, and key technical personnel, into a fortified bunker outside Tehran.”

Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, infiltrated Iranian backchannels and then placed 20 different fake phone calls to IRGC leaders. Those calls instructed them to all meet a reinforced bunker in Tehran, an order none of them questioned. It’s safe to speculate that Mossad agents were on the ground to confirm their arrival, and shortly after, the entire place was blown sky-high. 

It was a boon for Israel because Iran’s command and control structure was cripled. It took almost a day for the Mullahs to finally muster a military response, and by then, the IDF had severely hampered their ballistic missile capabilities. While initial barrages did cause damage, including tragically killing several civilians due to Iran’s indiscriminate salvos, in context, they were very ineffective counterstrikes, accomplishing nothing of military value for Iran.  

Still, as impressive as the nuts and bolts of the plot were, it’s how thought-out this all was that’s truly incredible. It’s one thing to place fake calls through Iranian back channels. It’s another to have every general who answered the phone fall for the ruse. 

How did that happen? The answer lies in how antiquated and authoritarian Iran’s military structure was and remains. When you serve at the behest of an Islamic dictator who tortures and kills people who step out of line, you aren’t exactly in a position to question an order. When the calls came in to head to the bunker, wondering if things seemed a little suspicious wasn’t an option. So all the generals blindly listened. 

But weren’t there just other leaders ready to step up and carry out the Mullahs’ decrees? Not really. Unlike the U.S. military structure, where junior officers are trained and placed in a defined, highly redundant chain of command, Iran’s top brass were insular loyalists. With them out of the way, chaos ensued. 

Every part of Israel’s strike was considered down to the most granular detail. They knew how to trick the generals, but they also knew what the effects would be with enough confidence to risk a full-scale air war with Iran, and all of this occurred on an incredibly tight, fluid timeline. If someone had written a spy novel with these same details, the publisher would have probably said it was too unrealistic.