June 16, 2026: Since last year Israel has been preparing two small bases in Iraq’s western desert, with the help and knowledge of the Iraqi government. These bases were there to observe and report on what was happening across the border in Iran. This operation was but one of many that monitor, and sometimes disrupt, activities inside Iran.

Israel has long maintained a network of operatives, most of them Iranian, inside Iran but also in other nations that border Iran, like Azerbaijan, or the UAE/United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf or Somaliland, an independent state north of Somalia.

Israel has long considered Iran its primary security concern, accounting for about 80 percent of Israeli planning and preparations for future conflicts. It’s not just Iran itself but also the foreign operations Iran undertakes against Israel, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and numerous other overseas operations intermittently created to hurt Israel.

The Israeli use of operatives inside Iran enables Israeli airstrikes to kill key military, scientific, diplomatic, religious and political personnel. Israel has also killed key Iranians and Islamic terrorists worldwide. Details of what the Israeli operative network inside Iran did during the recent war won’t be known until the war is over, perhaps only after several years of peace. Israel certainly had real-time knowledge of the locations of all the senior Iranian leaders for the last day of peace and the first few days of war in January and used it to kill all of them.

Israel likes to keep its secrets, as this is a matter of life or death for Israel as well as their foreign operatives.