‘We’re closer to you than your own neck vein. Put this in your head. May God protect you’

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo / Arash Khamooshi, the New York Times, file

In the hours after Israel launched its first wave of strikes against Iran on June 13, killing top military leaders and nuclear scientists, Israeli intelligence operatives launched a covert campaign to intimidate senior officials.

The apparent aim was to divide and destabilise Tehran’s theocratic regime, according to three people familiar with the operation.

People working for Israel’s security services who speak Persian, Iran’s primary language, called senior Iranian officials on their cellphones and warned them that they, too, would die unless they ceased supporting the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, according to the sources.

One of them estimated that more than 20 Iranians in positions of power were contacted.

The Washington Post obtained an audio recording and transcript of one such call, which took place the same day, June 13, that Israel began its bombardment of Iran.

“I can advise you now, you have 12 hours to escape with your wife and child. Otherwise, you’re on our list right now,” an Israeli intelligence operative told a senior Iranian general close to the country’s rulers, according to the audio recording.

The operative then suggested that Israel could train weapons on the general and his family at any moment.

“We’re closer to you than your own neck vein. Put this in your head. May God protect you,” he said.

The general, a member of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was told he had 12 hours to make a video disassociating himself from the Iranian Government.

“How should I send it to you?” the general replies.

“I will send you a Telegram ID,” the operative says, referring to the Telegram messaging app. “Send it.”

It is unclear whether such a video was made or sent.

The general is believed to be still alive and in Iran, said one of the people familiar with the operation. But a primary goal of the operation was to deter and confuse the Tehran leadership, a second person said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment.

The audio recording and an English-language transcript were made available by an Israeli individual who obtained the material and shared it with the Washington Post, along with a description of a second such call to another senior Iranian official close to Khamenei.

The Washington Post prepared its own English-language transcript of the nearly four-minute audio recording of the conversation, which was conducted in Persian.

The individual who provided the recording said the content of the audio was not manipulated in any way, other than to mask the voice of the Israeli intelligence operative to protect his identity.

The Washington Post obtained the Iranian general’s name but is not publishing it and has removed his voice from the recording to conceal his identity.

The phone calls to top Iranian military and security figures were one node of what Israeli security officials have described as a broad covert action campaign that complemented Israel’s military assault of nuclear sites, weapons production facilities and missile launchers.

The overall operation, dubbed “Rising Lion” by the Israeli Government, relied on the activation of clandestine intelligence teams, pre-positioned weapons caches and other capabilities that had lain dormant inside Iranian territory for weeks or even months, Israeli officials said.

Netanyahu said Israel launched the surprise operation, now in its second week, to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon.

The Israeli Government said that in recent months, Iran was getting closer to being able to turn its stockpile of enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon. Israel has offered no new detailed evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions or weaponisation efforts.

Current and former United States officials said that while they have intelligence that Iran was researching techniques that would allow it to build a crude nuclear device quickly if it chose to, there was no sign it had made a decision to acquire an atomic bomb.

US President Donald Trump ordered a multipronged attack on Iran’s nuclear sites at the weekend using earth-penetrating ordnance dropped from B-2 Spirit bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from submarines. The weapons struck the deeply buried uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, as well as nuclear sites at Natanz and Isfahan.

Top Pentagon officials said the three sites suffered “severe damage” but added that it was too soon to say whether Iran retained some nuclear capability.

The US military strikes came eight days after Israel launched its assault on Iran.

In the opening hours of Israel’s attack, members of Khamenei’s inner circle and top figures in Iran’s nuclear brain trust were killed, in some cases apparent casualties of explosives-packed drones or other devices that blew holes in the sides of apartment high-rises and other structures in central Tehran, according to Israeli and Western security officials, as well as regime statements on known casualties.

Those targeted and believed killed include Major General Hossein Salami, commander of the IRGC; Major General Mohammad Bagheri, an IRGC veteran who was the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces; and Fereydoon Abbasi-Davani, a nuclear physicist and major figure in Iran’s nuclear development.

The Israeli operative emphasised those assassinations in his phone call to the Iranian general.

“I’ll explain to you, listen carefully. I’m calling from a country that two hours ago sent Bagheri, Salami, Shamkhani, one by one, to hell,” the operative tells the general.

The operative’s list of the dead included Vice Admiral Ali Shamkhani, the former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.

Iranian media reported last week that Shamkhani, while seriously injured, had survived the Israeli attack and sent a message to Khamenei promising, “The dawn of victory is near” for Iran.

Israel has shown before that it has the ability to conduct targeted assassinations in Tehran.

In July, it killed the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, using an explosive device smuggled inside the state-run guesthouse where Haniyeh was staying in the Iranian capital.

The covert intimidation campaign against key Iranian figures who survived, or were not targeted in, the initial round of Israeli strikes involved several of Israel’s security and military agencies and was aimed at striking fear into second- and third-tier figures, according to two of the people familiar with the operation.

The goal was to make it harder for Khamenei, who controls Iran’s national security policy, to fill the positions of those Israel killed.

“The second-tier leadership that is supposed to inherit the positions and now fill in the places of those who have been eliminated, they are terrified,” said one of the people familiar with the operation.

“And they are being reminded on a personal level about what happened to the successor of Nasrallah and the successors of Hezbollah commanders who were eliminated, as well.”

The official referred to Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon whom Israel assassinated in an airstrike in September. Israel later killed Nasrallah’s likely successor.

“Khamenei is facing serious difficulties to nominate successors for the positions of officials that were eliminated in the operation,” the official said.

“And even if he succeeds to do so, these are people he didn’t choose in the first place. Because the more serious ones are refusing to take the positions now.”

Western security officials said they have not seen indications of defections among high-ranking members of Iran’s military or the IRGC.

The Israeli official said that some senior Iranian figures received a warning letter under their door, some received a phone call directly, and others were contacted via their spouses.

“They fully understand that they are transparent and known to us and that our intelligence penetration is 100 percent.”

Some of the senior Iranian officials have been contacted several times, resulting in a dialogue between them and Israeli intelligence, one of the people familiar with the operations said.

- Greg Miller in London contributed to this report. Video and audio editing by Zoeann Murphy and HyoJung Kim.