An audio recording of a phone call shows that on the day Israel began bombing Iran’s nuclear sites and assassinating key officials in Tehran, its intelligence agents launched a campaign to threaten Iranian military leaders.
Individuals working for Israeli security services and speaking Persian, Iran’s official language, called high-ranking Iranian officials on their mobile phones and warned them that they too would die if they did not stop supporting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime, the supreme leader of Iran, report three sources cited by Washington Post. One of them estimated that over 20 Iranians in positions of power were contacted.
The American daily obtained an audio recording and a transcript of such a call from June 13, the day Israel launched the bombardment on Iran.
"I advise you now, you have 12 hours to escape with your wife and child. Otherwise, you are on our list right now," an Israeli secret service agent told a high-ranking Iranian general, close to the country's leaders, according to the audio recording.
The agent then suggested that Israel could launch a military attack on the general and his family at any moment. "We are closer to you than your jugular vein. Get this into your head. God bless you," the agent said.
The general, a member of Iran's feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was informed that he had 12 hours to make a video recording in which he disassociates himself from the Iranian government.
"How do I send it to you?" the general asked.
"I will send you a Telegram ID," the agent said. "Send it."
It is not clear whether the video recording requested by the Israeli agent was made and sent. One of the individuals familiar with the operation stated that the general is believed to be alive and in Iran. However, the main objective of this operation was to deter and sow confusion among the leadership in Tehran, according to a second source.
Washington Post obtained the name of the Iranian general but did not publish it and altered his voice in the recording to conceal his identity.
At the beginning of the call, the agent mentioned that he comes from a country that "sent Salami, Bagheri, and Shamkhani to hell," referring to three high-ranking Iranian leaders killed by Israel at the start of the campaign. These are Hossein Salami, the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of the Iranian army; and Ali Shamkhani, a top advisor to Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader.
The call was part of the extensive operation of Israeli intelligence services that accompanied the attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, the newspaper notes.
Israeli intelligence services secretly infiltrated groups of agents and weapons into Iran. In addition to assassinating military leaders, Israel also killed many of Iran's most important nuclear scientists. On Monday, an Iranian news agency cited by Times of Israel announced that a person arrested in 2023 for collaborating with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had been executed.
T.D.