They seem to have taken this to an entirely new level in warfare. I know human intelligence like double agents and spies play a role, but this tactic has always existed and I feel Israel is far better at targeting individuals than it was in the past.
In the 90s, Israel considered assassinating Saddam Hussein. They waited until an uncle he loved died and supposedly sent people to kill him but decided not to fulfill the mission. So a few decades ago they had to wait for someone to show up at a funeral, to now they are able to target individuals with extreme precision.
I wonder what they do differently now. I know technology plays a role but I’m wondering what technology. Israel recently said they hacked all the CCTV cameras in iran to track people, but if thats what they are willing to release publicly, then the real tools they use are probably more advanced.
I’m sure it’s just obsessive tracking, along with lots and lots of HUMINT. Probably something that many other nations could do too, but just something Israel takes to a more fanatical extent.
Agree with the others. Israel is top notch when it comes to their intelligence service. I’d easily place them well above the CIA in capability (I can’t think of anyone who is better). Israel knows they are a small country surrounded by enemies. Their best chance at survival is excellent intelligence so they have become very, very good at it.
I’d speculate that Iran is full of citizens with no love for their government and willing to share sensitive information to anyone that can relieve them of the burden of that government. In other words, HUMINT.
Also, I would expect that there was a lot of valuable Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to be had by just carefully monitoring and corrrelating social media reports from within Iran. Crowdsourcing can work intelligence wonders.
Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas is a particularly good book on the topic, showing even the depth of Israeli intel penetration of the United States itself.
I agree this is a factor. But Israel is very good at targeting members of Hamas and Hezbollah too. Not just the Iranian regime.
As far as people saying its regular spy work, I feel like (and I could be wrong) that Israel has become far better at assassinations compared to wars in the past. Which makes me think technology has a huge role. Israel had HUMINT its entire existence, but why has their ability to strategically target people gotten so much better?
Things like hacking CCTVs, spy satellites, cell phone prevalence, etc all play a role. But I’m assuming there are other technological advances Israel has learned to use to target people.
As an unproven conspiracy theory, I wonder if Israel places trackers in palestinian prisoners. Like during medical exams, maybe they implant something that can be pinged at any time to tell them the location of a prisoner. Maybe thats why Israel is so willing to release Palestinian prisoners, because if they implant these devices, they can then release the Hamas members back to Gaza so they can travel through the tunnels and to safehouses, providing Israel with a map as well as locations of the targets.
Like in 1945, the USSR gave a passive listening device to a US ambassador so they could spy on conversations. Since it was passive and not active, it only worked when an external source pinged it. Thats also why it took years to discover it was spying, because normal bug detectors didn’t detect a passive listening device. I wonder if Israel implants those into Palestinians they release during prisoner swaps. But again, thats just a theory.
The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or “bugs”) to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on August 4, 1945. Because it was passive, needing electromagnetic energy from an outside source to become energized and active, it is considered a predecessor of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.[1][2]
Its design made the listening device very difficult to detect, because it was very small, had no power supply or active electronic components, and did not radiate any signal unless it was actively being irradiated remotely. These same design features, along with the overall simplicity of the device, made it very reliable and gave it a potentially unlimited operational life.
I feel like a nation that pulled off the pager operation has tricks far more advanced than most people realize.
As this thread doesn’t seem to have any actual Debate framed, and is asking questions and opinions, I am moving it from Great Debates to IMHO, rather than closing it. If the OP did have specifics in mind, please feel free to flag the thread and we can review it for best placement.
There’s two parts of the problem: Knowing precisely where a particular person is, and delivering death to that precise location. The second part is, I think, mostly where the technology comes in.
Israel is good at hacking all the pervasive and invasive tech that has monitoring capability. They figured out where Khamenei was by viewing hacked traffic cams:
From what I have read in the news, basically Israel took very successful advantage of the fact that Iran built a comprehensive surveillance state to monitor their own people. Israel has the best intelligence service in the world, and took advantage of the available situation, but they need the monitoring set up to do their work. And in Iran the majority of the population is anti-government. Recruiting agents has to be easier than usual there.
And they aren’t really the only such service, remember that when Russia launched their attack on Kiev the CIA provided it Ukraine, in advance, the op order signed by Putin authorizing the military action. I suspect much of the anxiety about hacking is due to the fact that all the major powers realize that they are likely being monitored as well as they are monitoring the other side. It bothers everyone to know you can’t move without the other side knowing about it.