Raised in a working‑class family near Tehran, he lived an ordinary student life until he and classmates were arrested by the Basij militia and tortured.
By Hezy Laing
In the early hours of June 13, a covert commando team led by a young Iranian known only as X took up positions outside Tehran.
Their target was an anti‑aircraft battery forming part of Iran’s defensive shield of radars and missile systems protecting the capital.
Across Iran, dozens of similar teams—composed of Israeli‑trained operatives recruited from Iran and neighboring countries—were preparing to strike Iranian air defenses from within.
The operation had been planned for more than a year by the Mossad.
It followed the agency’s earlier dramatic success: a covert plot conceived in 2014 that detonated booby‑trapped pagers inside Hezbollah, killing 30 fighters and 12 civilians and injuring more than 3,500.
In June, roughly 70 foreign and Iranian commandos launched drones and missiles at Iranian anti‑aircraft batteries and ballistic missile launchers. A second wave of attacks followed the next day.
X’s personal story, related by the Jewish Chronicle, illustrates how Mossad recruits operatives.
Raised in a working‑class family near Tehran, he lived an ordinary student life until he and classmates were arrested by the Basij militia and tortured. The experience left him enraged and eager for revenge.
A relative abroad connected him to a Mossad recruiter. After encrypted communications, X agreed to meet in a neighboring country, where a Mossad case officer invited him to work as a covert operative.
He accepted on the condition that Israel protect his family.
Mossad officials note that Iran’s ethnic diversity—40 percent of its 90 million citizens belong to minority groups such as Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, and Kurds—creates fertile ground for recruitment.
Candidates are typically met in countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Thailand, or India, where Iranians can easily obtain visas.
They undergo psychological evaluations, training, and detailed behavioral guidance to avoid suspicion.
For Operation Rising Lion, Mossad and Aman intensified surveillance of Iranian military and nuclear personnel.
Smuggling networks across Iran’s porous borders enabled the movement of equipment, often stored for years in safe houses by “infrastructure agents.”
Two commando groups, each with 14 teams, were trained for months—some in Israel, others in third countries.
On June 12, they took their positions. By the end, Israeli officials reported that every air‑defense target assigned to Mossad teams had been destroyed.
The operation culminated in the assassination of 11 Iranian nuclear scientists, whose bedroom locations had been mapped in detail.
On June 13, Israeli aircraft fired missiles at those coordinates, killing all 11.
