As of Wednesday, the Israeli mission to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and its ballistic missile capabilities continued to progress, focusing primarily on launchers and production sites. 

In what may be the most dominant and decisive display of military force this century, the IDF achieved air superiority within the first three days of strikes and has managed to hover over Tehran without repercussions. It’s hard to grasp how remarkable it is that the Israelis have not lost a single plane yet. This scenario highlights the significant disparity between American and Russian military technology. Calling Iran a paper tiger would be understating the situation. 

Moreover, we are uncovering some astonishing details about how the situation developed to this point. At the onset of the conflict, it was reported that several top Iranian military leaders were eliminated in one strategic strike, and the method behind this strike is as impressive as its outcome. According to a recent report, the espionage tactics employed to gather all those IRGC generals into a single bunker resemble the plot 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.