The man who is about to answer this phone call has not slept well in weeks. He lies in a darkened bedroom in North Thrron. The air conditioning hums against the June heat.
His uniform hangs on the back of the door, pressed, ready, the way it has always been since the day he joined the Revolutionary Guard 45 years ago. On the nightstand beside him, next to a half-finished glass of water, his phone begins to vibrate. He reaches for it.
The name on the screen is someone he has known for years. The voice on the other end is calm but urgent. There has been a development.
An emergency meeting has been called at the underground command center. His deputies are already on the way. His name is Amir Ali Hajade.
For 16 years, he has commanded every missile, every drone, and every air defense system in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is the architect of the country's aerospace arsenal. The man who fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel.
The man who stood on live television and threatened to kill a sitting American president. And 5 years ago, forces under his direct [music] command shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane 3 minutes after takeoff. 76 people, students, children, newlyweds, a 9-year-old girl traveling with her mother, all dead.
Hajes appeared on [music] television. He said he wished he was dead. Then on the anniversary of the disaster, he went back on television, ignored the victims entirely, and called it a day of God [music] and a great victory.
He was never investigated, never demoted, never charged. Tonight, he gets dressed, walks out of his apartment, and drives through the empty streets of Tran toward a bunker he has used a hundred times before. Across the city, his deputies are doing the same.
The head of Iran's drone forces, the commander of air defense, senior officers from every branch of the IRGC's aerospace division. They are following a protocol designed for exactly this kind of emergency. voice on the phone was not real.
It was manufactured by the MSAD. The bunker's coordinates are already locked into a guidance [music] system 1500 km away. And above Tan, silent, invisible, already past the point of no return.
More than 200 Israeli fighter jets are cutting through the dark sky toward Iran, carrying over 330 munitions aimed at more than 100 targets across the country. But the jets are only part of it. At this very moment, MSAD agents inside Iran are activating a secret drone base they spent months building on Iranian soil.
Commando teams who have been hiding near air defense batteries for weeks are powering up precision weapons. Over 100 Iranian citizens recruited, trained, and armed by Israeli intelligence are taking their positions across the country. In 12 minutes, 30 of the most powerful military commanders in Iran will be gone.
Nine of the country's top nuclear scientists will be struck in their homes by a weapon so secret its nature has never been disclosed. [music] And the Islamic Republic will wake up to discover that its military command structure, [music] the system that controls half a million soldiers, thousands of missiles, and the largest drone fleet in the Middle East, [music] no longer exists. They called it the Red Wedding.
And it started not on this night, but 7 months earlier with a ticking clock that most of the world didn't know existed. In May of 2025, [music] the International Atomic Energy Agency delivered a report that changed the calculation for every intelligence chief in the Western world. Iran had stockpiled enough enriched uranium to produce nine nuclear warheads.
The leap to weapons grade was a matter of weeks, not months. And Israeli analysts could no longer guarantee they would detect [music] the order before it was too late. The clock was not ticking.
It had nearly run out. On June 12th, one day before the strike, [music] the IAEA board of governors formally declared Iran non-compliant with its nuclear obligations for the first time in 20 years. The diplomatic runway had ended.
What followed was a seven-month sprint toward war, disguised [music] until the very last second as peace. In November of 2024, senior officers from the Israeli military and intelligence agencies checked into a hotel in central Israel for a 10-hour marathon session. Their task was simple to state [music] and nearly impossible to execute.
find a way to destroy Iran's military command, its nuclear program, and neutralize its air defenses in a single opening strike. By March, after 120 officers had spent months at Unit 82000 headquarters cross-referencing thousands of intelligence sources, they found the answer that changed everything. Iran's air defense shield was one of the most advanced in the Middle East.
Cracking it from outside was considered impossible. So they decided to crack it from within. In February, [music] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Washington for his first meeting with Donald Trump's second [music] term.
The first foreign leader visit of the new administration. In the Oval Office, Netanyahu laid four scenarios on the table. an exclusively Israeli strike, an Israeli strike with minimal American help, full collaboration, or a US-led assault.
Trump chose diplomacy [music] first. Give Iran a deadline to negotiate away its nuclear ambitions. [music] But the planning continued.
The intelligence sharing accelerated, and everyone in that room understood the unspoken agreement. If talks fail, we go. What happened over the next four months was not just an intelligence operation.
It was a [music] performance constructed so carefully that it fooled Iran's security apparatus, the international media, and most of the world's intelligence agencies. The stage was set in the negotiations. The United States and Iran had been talking since April.
A sixth round of nuclear talks was scheduled for June 15th in Oman. America's special envoy publicly announced he would attend. Israeli officials leaked word that the MSAD director would be meeting the envoy beforehand to discuss progress.
Reporters wrote stories analyzing whether a deal was possible. Analysts debated Iran's red lines. All of it was theater.
The talks were dead. The only thing still alive was the operation. To make the fiction hold, both governments manufactured a rift between them.
Officials on both sides deliberately leaked stories about disagreements. One report published by a former Israeli military intelligence officer claimed Trump had told Netanyahu in a dramatic phone call to remove an attack from the table. Another suggested the White House was furious with Israeli saber rattling.
The truth was simpler and more dangerous. Netanyahu and Trump had spoken for 40 minutes on June 9th. That was the day Israel chose the date.
Everything published after that call was choreographed. Then Netanyahu himself became part of the performance. His office announced he would not cancel his weekend vacation in the north.
His son Aner's wedding was scheduled for the following Tuesday. Israeli police erected iron roadblocks and barbed wire fences around the venue, an upscale event hall called Ronit's Farm in Kabut Yakum. Catering was arranged.
[music] Security protocols were established. Invitations had been sent. Even his own family believed it was happening.
The wedding was secretly postponed. His family [music] did not know. And then Trump delivered the final wine.
On June 12th, the day before everything, he stood before reporters and told them the United States and Iran were fairly close to an agreement and that he did not want the Israelis going in. He said this while knowing Israeli Air Force pilots were receiving their final briefing in the Negv desert. He said this while 200 fighter jets were being armed and fueled on runways across Israel.
Hours later, as those jets lifted off into the night sky, Trump posted on Truth Social, "We remain committed to a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue. " The words went live. The planes were already in the air.
Iran believed all of it. The negotiations were happening. The Americans were restraining Israel.
The prime minister was going on vacation. His son was getting married. There was no reason to expect an attack, [music] but the deception was only the surface.
Beneath it, something far more dangerous had been building inside Iran for [music] years. MSAD, Israel's intelligence agency, had spent the better part of a decade infiltrating the Islamic Republic at every level. According to defense analysts, Israel maintained between 30 and 40 active cells inside Iran.
Most were not Israeli citizens. They were Iranians [music] recruited through ideology, money, or coercion, trained by MSAD handlers, and held in place for operations that might never come. [music] Some gathered intelligence.
Some smuggled equipment. Some [music] lived entirely normal lives, holding jobs, raising families, attending Friday prayers, [music] while waiting for a signal that would change everything. The risk these people [music] carried was beyond calculation.
Iran does not forgive espionage. The Islamic Republic's intelligence apparatus, the same IRGC intelligence that MSAD was about to decapitate, had a documented history of extracting [music] confessions through extreme methods, threatening agents families and making public examples of those it caught. In 2012, [music] Iran arrested a man named Majjid Jamali Fashi after he confessed on state television to working for [music] MSAD.
He did not survive the sentence. In the years [music] since, dozens of Iranians had been arrested and tried on espionage charges, some genuinely guilty, others almost certainly innocent, caught up in a regime desperate to demonstrate it could find the traitors within. Every one of the agents MSAD had recruited knew this.
Every morning they woke up, went to their normal jobs, smiled at their neighbors, and carried a secret that would end their lives [music] if discovered. Some had been living this way for years. The months before June 13th, the signal came.
MSAD agents began moving components for hundreds of attack drones into the country. Parts arrived in suitcases carried through commercial airports, in trucks crossing borders with falsified cargo manifests, in shipping containers routed through third country ports. In some cases, the businesses handling the shipments had [music] no idea what was inside.
Field agents collected the components from dead drops and safe houses, [music] then distributed them to small operational teams scattered across tan and central Iran. If any single shipment had been intercepted, [music] if one border guard had opened the wrong container, if one agent had been followed to the wrong address, [music] the entire architecture would have collapsed and every person involved would have faced a death sentence. [music] Nothing was intercepted.
The teams assembled the drones. The drone base, a fully operational attack platform [music] hidden inside Iranian territory, came online near Tran. Its targets were already programmed.
Surfacetos surface missile launchers at the IRGC Aerospace Forces [music] Essabad base. The weapons Iran would use first [music] in any retaliation. Alongside the drones, MSAD commandos deployed to positions near Iran's most critical air defense installations.
They carried precisiong guided weapon systems hidden in civilian vehicles and positioned in open areas near surfaceto-air missile batteries. They waited in garages, in rented apartments, in parking lots, invisible, patient, watching the installations they would destroy. And somewhere deep inside Iran's military establishment, a person was living two lives.
The identity of this individual has never been revealed. What is known is that they operated within the inner circle of Hussein Salami, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful military figure in Iran after the Supreme Leader himself. Every morning, [music] this person woke up and went to work inside the most dangerous intelligence environment on Earth, attending meetings with men who would execute them without hesitation if they suspected the truth.
sharing meals, sharing intelligence, building trust over months, possibly years, carrying a secret that would kill everyone in the room. In the final days before June 13th, according to reports that emerged after the war, this person did something that defied every instinct of self-preservation. Acting on MSAD's instructions, they deliberately leaked the date of the coming Israeli attack to Salami.
This sounds insane. Why would Israeli intelligence tell its most important target exactly when the strike was coming? Because they didn't want Salami to run.
They wanted him to react, to go to a specific location, a location where his killing had already been arranged. And they trusted that his training, his protocols, [music] his instinct to command would bring him exactly where they needed him. Salami received the intelligence.
He believed it. And on the night of June 13th, he went exactly where Msad wanted him to be. The most powerful military commander in Iran had just walked into a trap set by someone he trusted with his life.
And somewhere in Tron, at a dead drop, in a car, in an apartment with the [music] lights off, the person who set that trap waited for a war to begin, knowing they had just sealed the fate of everyone they had pretended to serve. And then the phones rang. Tron is asleep.
14 million people in one of the oldest cities on Earth. Traffic lights cycling through empty intersections. Night guards drinking tea outside apartment buildings.
Stray cats threading through alleys older than most nations. In the residential towers of North Tyrron, Iran's nuclear scientists are in their beds. Some with wives beside them, some with children sleeping down the hall.
In military quarters across the city, senior generals sleep with phones on their nightstands, always reachable, always ready. Not one of them knows this is the last normal hour they will ever experience. At 3:00 in the morning in an open field in central Iran, a man crouches beside a weapon system he has been tending for weeks.
He is Iranian. He has a family in Thran and he is about to fire a precision [music] missile at his own country's air defense network on behalf of the Mossad. He has been told there is an extraction plan for after the war.
[music] He has also been told that plans do not always survive wars. The signal comes. He fires.
The missile arcs low across the dark terrain and strikes [music] an S300 surfaceto-air battery. The installation erupts. He drops the launcher, turns, and runs away from the fireball, [music] away from the base, away from every life he has known until this moment.
[music] At the same moment, across four provinces, in fields, in modified vehicles, in positions that no Iranian radar operator thought to watch, other teams receive the same signal. Precision weapons launch from inside Iran's own borders. [music] The first radar station goes dark, then a third, then a fifth.
In Iran's air defense command centers, the screens begin to stutter. Operators call forward batteries. [music] No answer.
They try backup frequencies. Static. Contact with remote installations is dropping, not one at a time, but in clusters.
[music] A senior operator picks up a secure phone and dials the central command. The line [music] connects, but no one picks up. He dials again.
Nothing. [music] He dials the backup number. a tone that means the line no longer exists.
Around him, younger operators are looking at their screens with an expression he has never seen in 20 years of service. It is not confusion. It is not fear.
It is the slow recognition that the system they have spent their careers maintaining. The system they were told made Iran untouchable is dying in front of them. [music] And they cannot identify what is killing it.
Because the weapons are not falling from the sky. They are [music] rising from the ground. From inside the perimeter, from inside [music] Iran near Thrron at the Esphabad base, hundreds of quadcopter drones lift off from positions that have been hidden for months.
They are small. [music] They are quiet. Each one carries enough explosive to destroy a missile launcher.
The drones swarm toward the ballistic missile launchers. The weapons Iran would need for its first retaliatory strike. The first launcher explodes before its crew can align it.
A second detonates mid setup. Not every drone finds its mark. Some are detected by alert crews who manage to move launchers seconds before impact.
Others malfunction and crash into empty fields, but enough get through. Dozens of launchers are destroyed on the ground, and the fighter jets have not even arrived yet. More than 200 Israeli aircraft cross into Iranian airspace.
F-35 stealth fighters leading the formation. Five waves, 330 precision munitions, over 100 targets across the country. They fly through corridors that should be lethal.
Flight paths covered by overlapping air defenses. But tonight, the defenses are burning from within. The jet strike nuclear facilities, missile factories, command centers, ammunition depots.
The explosions roll across Iran like distant thunder. And in an underground bunker beneath Thrron, the men who are supposed to stop exactly this are gathered around a conference table trying to coordinate a response they will never live to give. Hajisad stands at the center of the room.
His deputies are around him, the head of Iran's drone forces, the commander of air defense, senior officers from every branch of aerospace operations. They are receiving fragmented reports, massive gaps in radar coverage, [music] explosions at multiple bases, communications failing across entire provinces. Hajisad is trying to build a picture, trying to determine where to aim Iran's counter strike.
They are following a protocol they have rehearsed for exactly this kind of crisis. Gather the leadership, assess the damage, issue the order. The protocol is correct.
The logic is sound and it is the reason they are all about to die because Israel did not just know about this protocol. Israel built the entire operation around it. They knew that when bombs started falling, Iran's aerospace commanders would do exactly what their training demanded.
Converge in the bunker. The bunker whose location MSAD had identified years ago. The bunker whose coordinates were already programmed into a weapon in flight.
A single precision munition strikes the facility. The bunker caves. Everyone inside is gone.
The commander of the IRGC aerospace force, the head of drone operations, the head of air defense, and every senior deputy who answered the call. Zade was born in 1962. He survived the Iran Iraq war.
He built Iran's missile program from nothing into one of the most feared arsenals in the Middle East. He commanded strikes against American bases and Israeli cities. The Supreme Leader personally awarded him the nation's highest military honor.
5 years ago, his forces killed 176 innocent people in the sky above Tyrron. And he stood before the cameras and called it a victory. Tonight, a voice he recognized summoned him to a room he trusted.
And a weapon he never saw [music] ended everything he spent 45 years building. The phone call that brought him there was the last successful operation of his career and it was not even his. But Hajisade was dead.
His command was gone. And across Tyrron, in quiet apartment buildings where families slept and children dreamed, a second operation was already unfolding in absolute silence. It was called Operation Narnia, named like something from a fairy tale for an event that should not be possible.
For years, dozens of researchers inside the IDF intelligence division had been building files on Iran's nuclear scientists. Not the technicians or junior researchers, the minds at the top, the people who held knowledge that existed nowhere else. Enrichment [music] formulas, weapons physics, detonation engineering, centrifuge calibration.
Knowledge built through decades of classified work that could not be learned from textbooks [music] or replaced by hiring someone new. Israeli intelligence started with 400 names drawn from [music] Iran's stolen nuclear archive. They narrowed to 100, then to 12.
Each scientist was tracked. Their home address, their routines, their security detail mapped to the millimeter. On the night of June 13th, nine of them were asleep in their beds.
Some had left work late [music] that evening, checking equations, reviewing data, doing the quiet, meticulous work that had consumed [music] their careers. Some had eaten dinner with their families. Some had watched the news.
The same news that reported nuclear negotiations were still on track, [music] that the American envoy was preparing for talks in Oman, that Israel's prime minister was going on vacation. None of them had any reason to believe this night was different from any other. At the same moment the bunker was hit, a classified weapon struck nine residential locations simultaneously.
Nine homes, nine scientists, nine strikes at the same instant, [music] timed so precisely that no one could make a phone call, send a message, or shout a warning to the others. The nature of the weapon has never been disclosed. [music] Israeli military sensors have blocked all details.
What is known is that all nine were struck where they lay [music] in their beds while their families slept beside them. The 10th [music] was struck shortly after. Among those struck was Muhammad Medi Terranchi, a physicist and explosives expert who lived on the sixth floor of a building known [music] locally as the professor's complex.
And Fareredun Abbasi Deani, a former head of Iran's atomic energy organization. The 11th Sed Sadigi Saber was not at the expected location. The strike hit his home anyway.
He survived. His 17-year-old son did not. A senior Israeli intelligence official later explained the logic with a clarity that was difficult to argue with.
You can replace a general, you can promote a colonel, issue new orders, rebuild a command chain, but the knowledge inside a nuclear scientist's mind, decades of research, experimental intuition built through thousands of hours of classified work, that cannot be replaced. Not in a year, not in five years, maybe not ever. The strikes were not clean.
Investigations later found that at least 71 civilians lost their lives during Operation Narnia, including a 2-month-old infant. Israeli officials said they took extensive measures to minimize collateral damage. But in war, measures are not the same as guarantees.
While Hijizeday died in a bunker and scientists died in their beds, precision strikes were finding targets across Thrron and beyond. Within minutes, the three highest ranking military officers in the Islamic Republic were gone. IRGC commander Hussein Salami, delivered to his killing ground by the double agent he trusted.
Armed Forces Chief Muhammad Hussein Bageri struck at his position and Katam al- Anbi commander Gulam Ali Rashid hit in the same opening wave. below them. The destruction rolled through the ranks.
The head of IRGC intelligence and his deputy, the chief of defense research, the man who ran the Palestine desk and personally managed the relationship with Hamas, the commander who smuggled weapons to every proxy group from Lebanon to Yemen, provincial commanders, police intelligence chiefs. When Iranian media later published the list, 30 names, three lieutenant generals, eight major generals, 17 brigadier generals, the list itself was an admission of catastrophe they could not hide. Iran's military tried to respond.
At lower levels, commanders reached for phones, tried to contact superiors, attempted to activate retaliation protocols. Encrypted channels carried no orders. Phone lines rang with no [music] answer.
In military bases across the country, officers with the training and the will to fight back found themselves in a nightmare that no war college had prepared them for. A colonel in Isvahan who commanded a battalion of ballistic missiles later described the experience to Iranian media. He had the missiles, he had the crews, he had the targets pre-programmed into guidance systems.
What he did not have was authorization to fire. And the men who could give that authorization were either dead or unreachable. The system had one assumption built into its design that the people authorized to give the order to strike back would still be alive.
They were not. Israeli planners had prepared for the worst case immediate retaliatory launch of 500 ballistic missiles. Every air defense battery in Israel was on maximum alert.
American naval assets were coordinated for intercept. The retaliation did not come. Not in the first hour.
Not in the second. What Israeli planners had not fully anticipated was the speed of what happened next. Within hours, Iran managed to launch approximately 100 attack drones toward Israel, faster than the worst case models had predicted.
Every single one was intercepted before reaching its [music] target. But the fact that Iran could organize any response at all with its entire command structure in ruins sent an uneasy signal through Israeli war rooms. There was nobody to give the order and Iran still found a way to fight.
This is the part of the story I cannot get past. Hajisada was not a careless man. Israeli intelligence officials themselves called him the smartest and most dangerous man in Iran.
He knew Israel wanted him dead. His own son later said his father always removed smart devices during sensitive meetings. And yet on the most critical night of his life, he answered a phone call from a voice he recognized, drove to a bunker he had used a 100 times, and followed a protocol he had rehearsed for exactly this scenario.
Every decision was rational. Every step was correct. And every step brought him closer to his death.
Because the enemy had spent years studying how he would behave in a crisis and built the entire operation around his response. So here is the question that haunts me. If you were in his position that night, the phone ringing, a familiar voice, an emergency you've trained your whole life for, would you have questioned it?
Would you have paused, called someone else, asked for verification? Or would you have done exactly what he did? Trusted your instincts, trusted the protocol, trusted the voice, [music] and walked into that bunker without a second thought.
Because Hajiseday was not the only one who answered the call that night. Every deputy who drove to that bunker made the same decision. Every general who went to the location they were summoned to made the same choice.
30 men, all experienced, all trained in operational security, all aware they were potential targets. And every single one responded to the emergency exactly the way they had been trained to. The system worked.
The protocol functioned perfectly. and that is exactly why it killed them. Tell me in the comments what you would have done because I think most of us would have walked right in.
The night of June 13th was not the end. For 12 more days, the hunt continued and the methods grew more terrifying with each kill. Golam Ali Rashid, the commander of Iran's Supreme Wartime headquarters, was dead.
Within hours, Ali Shadmani was appointed as his replacement. Shadmani understood the danger. Immediately he vanished.
[music] No phone, no electronic footprint, no public appearances. He moved between locations constantly, avoided every known military facility, and trusted no one. None of it mattered.
Msad reportedly obtained his DNA sample through what intelligence sources described only as digital means, a phrase that has never been fully explained. They fed the sample into an artificial intelligence system that matched genetic profiles to facial recognition data. They had a face.
Now they needed a location. For years, MSAD had been planting malware inside Tran's urban security camera network. The same cameras the Iranian regime had installed to track its own citizens and monitor political opponents.
The surveillance state Iran built to [music] control its people had been turned into a weapon against its own leaders. One camera had proved especially valuable. It was angled to show where Supreme Leader Comedy's bodyguards parked their cars.
Through years of observation, Israeli intelligence had built complete files on the security teams, [music] addresses, schedules, which officials they protected. Unit 82000 fed this data into AI algorithms that could predict where a target would be tomorrow based on where they had been for the last year. Now those algorithms were scanning thousands of feeds, matching faces against a growing database of targets.
The system found Shadmani in the Zafarania neighborhood. On June 27th, 4 days after he took [music] command, a drone descended over the neighborhood. A single precision [music] strike.
His predecessor had held the position for nearly a decade. Shedmani lasted 4 days. The next killing carried a different weight.
Major General Muhammad Kazami, the head of IRGC intelligence, had survived the opening night. He was now leading the frantic effort to identify and arrest MSAD agents operating inside Iran. A MSAD operative, [music] someone Kazami or his people apparently trusted enough to meet, reportedly arranged a meeting at a safe [music] house in Kurdbacha Alley.
Kazami arrived with two deputies. The safe house sat between two kindergartens and a girl's school. Israeli forces had the target confirmed.
The weapon was [music] ready. But the strike order did not come. Not [music] yet.
Children were still inside the buildings. The operators watched the feeds. [music] They watched children file out through the gates.
Watched parents collecting their sons and daughters. Watched teachers closing up. 10 minutes after the last child left the building, the drone struck the safe house.
Kazami [music] and both deputies were eliminated. The head of the organization responsible for catching MSAD agents killed by a MSAD agent who lured him there in a building MSAD had mapped at a time MSAD chose because the children had finally gone home. And then there was Sabre Sed Sadigi Sabre, the nuclear scientist who survived the opening night while his 17-year-old son died in his place.
He fled Tehran and traveled to a relative's home in Gilan province over 300 km from the capital. For 11 days, he stayed hidden. On June 24th, the last day of the war, he returned to his relatives home for his son's morning ceremony.
Israeli intelligence had been tracking him since the first night. They followed his movement. They knew he had survived.
They knew where he went, and they knew when he came back. A drone struck the house during the morning. Saber was struck alongside 15 people, including four children.
He survived the night that killed 30 generals. He survived 11 days in hiding. But when he came back to mourn his 17-year-old son, they [music] were waiting.
The hunt reached even higher. On June 15th, 2 days into the war, an Israeli air strike struck a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council in Tran. Iran's president, Masud Peshkan, was inside the building.
The blast collapsed sections of the facility. Peskon and other officials survived by crawling through debris to reach a pre-desated emergency hatch, a narrow opening they had to dig out of the rubble to access. The president escaped with a minor leg injury.
His interior minister was hospitalized for respiratory distress. Iran later accused Israel of a direct attempt on the president's life. Israel never confirmed or denied.
Over 12 days, the full scale of the operation became visible. Israel destroyed more military infrastructure than most nations possess. Over 700 targets struck, including 200 missile launchers, 80 air defense systems, 70 radars, and six airports.
It was the most comprehensive aerial campaign against a single nation's military since the Gulf War. The Natan's nuclear facility, Iran's largest enrichment site, had its above ground infrastructure destroyed and its power systems disabled. Centrifuges that had been spinning toward weaponsgrade uranium went silent.
But Iran did not go quietly. Over the 12 days, its forces launched more than 550 ballistic missiles and over a thousand attack drones at Israel. Most were intercepted by Israel's layered defense.
Arrow, David Sling, and Iron Dome working in coordination with American naval assets. But the shield was not perfect. Missiles broke through.
28 Israeli civilians lost their lives. Hundreds were wounded. Entire neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Hifa were left in ruins.
Families ran to shelters that did not always hold. The damage was estimated at billions. Israeli defense officials later admitted that Iran's missile strikes were more precise than expected, hitting military bases and strategic sites that the public was never told about.
On June 22nd, the United States entered the war directly [music] under an operation cenamed Midnight Hammer. American B2 stealth bombers struck three Iranian nuclear sites buried too deep for anything in Israel's arsenal to reach. 2 days later, a ceasefire was announced.
Trump called it the 12-day war. Among the wreckage, one story stood apart. Not a death, a survival.
Ali Shamhani, Secretary of Iran's Defense Council, [music] one of the Supreme Leader closest advisers, had been hit in the opening wave. He later described what happened. He had woken for dawn prayer, [music] the pre-rise ritual he had performed every morning of his adult life.
The world was quiet. [music] Then everything became ruins. His first thought was that an earthquake had struck.
The ceiling had collapsed. Walls caved [music] inward. Dust choked his lungs.
He could not see. He could not move. Rescue teams arrived, but the destruction was so total they could not find him.
For 3 hours, he lay buried, broken, conscious, waiting. When they [music] finally pulled him out, his injuries were catastrophic, a fractured chest, internal organ damage, one leg destroyed [music] beyond saving. Weeks later, he appeared on Iranian state television leaning on [music] a cane.
He told the cameras something chilling. He and other generals had known before the strike that they would be targets. They had expected an attack.
They had taken precautions and none of it had been enough because the enemy was not just above them dropping bombs from the sky. The enemy was already among them in their intelligence [music] services, in their security cameras, in the phones they carried, in the [music] voices they trusted. In the aftermath, Iran arrested over 700 people suspected of working for Israeli intelligence across 11 provinces.
Smartphones were permanently banned for all senior officials. The internet was [music] restricted. The besiege paramilitary was mobilized.
Over 20,000 cyber attacks were reported during the conflict. And then came the revelation that shattered whatever remained of Iranian confidence. According to intelligence sources, investigators discovered that the former head of Iran's counter MSAD task force, [music] the person specifically responsible for hunting Israeli spies inside the country, [music] had himself been working for MSAD the entire time.
The man Iran trusted to protect it from infiltration was the infiltration. Think about what that means for every security review, every counter intelligence operation, every arrest of a suspected spy that this man had overseen. How many real agents did he protect by pointing investigations in the wrong direction?
How many genuine leads did he quietly bury? How many innocent Iranians were arrested as scapegoats while the real operatives moved freely through Tyrron? The entire foundation of Iran's counter intelligence, the institution tasked with keeping the country safe from exactly what had just happened, had been compromised at its core.
And nobody knew for how long. On June 25th, one day before the ceasefire, MSAD Chief David Barnea released a rare video message to his agents. His words were brief.
They were also clearly intended for Thrron to hear. We will be there like we have been there. There is a postcript to this story that has nothing to do with generals or missiles or geopolitics.
It has to do with a girl. On January 8th, 2020, 9-year-old Riiera Esson boarded a flight from Tran with her mother. They were flying to Kev, then connecting to Toronto, where Riiera's father was waiting.
Riiera loved drawing. She loved school. She had recently started learning to skate on the ice rinks near their Toronto home.
Her mother had brought her to Tran to visit family. They were coming home. 3 minutes and 42 seconds after takeoff, two missiles from forces under Hajised's command struck the aircraft.
The plane broke apart in the sky. 176 people lost their lives. students returning to university, newlyweds starting their lives, families going home.
Riiera, her mother. Ria's [music] father, Hamemed Esmeian, was at the airport in Toronto when he learned the news. He spent the next 5 years fighting for justice that never came.
[music] Leading protests, pressuring international courts, speaking before parliaments, building a coalition of grieving families. Hisade was never charged. Iran's judiciary never recognized him as a suspect.
On the anniversary of the disaster, Hajiseday appeared on television, ignored the victims, and called the day a great victory. When the news reached Esmeon that Hizeday had been killed on the night of June 13th, killed by a phone call that was not real in a bunker he thought was safe, he released a statement. You are dead, he wrote.
But our hatred of you, dead and alive, will live on in history. Across the diaspora, families of the victims posted joyful clips of their loved ones. Images of the people they had lost reclaimed for one moment from the void.
One journalist wrote that she hoped Hisday had survived inside that bunker for [music] exactly 3 minutes and 42 seconds. the same amount of time it took flight 752 to fall from the sky. Here is the question that no intelligence analyst, no military strategist, no government official has been able to answer.
And as of today, no one can. If MSAD had 40 cells operating inside Iran, if the former head of Iran's own counter MSAD unit was an Israeli asset, if they hacked every traffic camera in Tyrron and built a drone base in the shadow of the capital, then how [music] deep does the infiltration actually go? And the question that matters most, is it still there?
Because on the night the Red Wedding ended 30 lives in 12 minutes, the man who ordered it looked into a camera [music] and made a promise. We will be there. And thyron [music] with its purges and its arrests and its banned smartphones and its [music] shattered command chain has no way of knowing if that promise has already been kept.
