On February 28, 2026, Ali Khamenei was assassinated. He was killed in a joint American and Israeli airstrike, in a bunker so deep the elevator took five minutes to reach it, at a meeting with senior advisers whose location intelligence services had tracked for months. The infrastructure that made this targeted assassination possible—the human networks engaged in the patient penetration of one of the most hostile intelligence environments on earth—had been built over more than two decades. Today, Yonah Jeremy Bob joins Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to delve into how the Mossad build that infrastructure.
Bob is the senior military and intelligence analyst for the Jerusalem Post and has deep access to the Israeli intelligence community. His book Target Tehran, co-authored with Ilan Evyatar and published by Simon & Schuster in 2023, was named a top book of the year by the Wall Street Journal. When Prime Minister Netanyahu was photographed in his war room during Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, a copy of Target Tehran was visible on the table in front of him. Bob also has a forthcoming book with the Wall Street Journal's Elliot Kaufman, titled In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis.
Before the airstrikes, there was a decades-long effort to recruit agents inside the nuclear program, to infiltrate Iran's supply chains, and to track and, when necessary, to assassinate the Iranian officials and weapons producers who posed the greatest threat to Israel and America. This episode examines three operations in depth—the 2018 theft of Iran's nuclear archive, the assassination of the weapons-program chief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and the infiltration of the supply chain for the Natanz nuclear complex—and asks what Israeli human intelligence is contributing to Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury.
This episode of the Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Dr. Michael Schmerin and Family. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.
