By Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene, Tal Shalev, Natasha Bertrand, CNN
(CNN) — For months, Israeli and American intelligence agencies — including the CIA — had been secretly watching Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for just the right moment.
They were monitoring for his daily patterns — where he lived, who he met with, how he communicated and where he might retreat under threat of attack, five people familiar with the matter tell CNN. They were keeping tabs, too, on Iran’s senior political and military leaders, who rarely gathered in the same place with the ayatollah, the country’s supreme leader for nearly four decades.
Over the last several days, they found their opportunity. Top Iranian officials, including Khamenei, planned to meet Saturday morning at separate sites on a Tehran compound that is home to the offices of the ayatollah, the Iranian presidency and the national security apparatus.
The overly cautious supreme leader felt less vulnerable during daylight hours, an Israeli source said, and let down his guard.
It was an opening some Israeli and US officials believed was too good to pass up.
Attack plans for a dark-of-night assault were adjusted to a daytime assault, three of the people said. In a note to Israeli air force pilots, the chief of staff of Israel’s military, Eyal Zamir, laid out the stakes.
“On Saturday at dawn, Operation Roaring Lion begins,” he wrote. “You are cleared to strike your targets. We’re making history. I trust you. Good luck to us all.”
In broad daylight, at around 6 a.m. in Israel, Israeli war planes fired into the compound in the opening salvo of a highly coordinated wave of strikes from the US and Israel. They were equipped with highly accurate munitions and long-range missiles, sources said. All three sites with the various leaders at the compound were hit simultaneously. Hours later, Trump announced Khamenei was dead.
“He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do,” Trump wrote in his announcement on social media.
It’s still not clear what prompted Iran’s senior-most leaders — including the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the defense minister — to convene in the middle of Tehran in the same rough location as Khamenei, and at a moment when the US had amassed extensive military firepower in the region to make good on Trump’s threats to attack. Israeli intelligence had determined Khamenei’s top advisers, including Aziz Nasirzadeh, the minister of defense; Admiral Ali Shamkhani, the head of the Military Council; Mohammad Shirazi, the deputy intelligence minister; Mohammad Pakpour, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; and Seyyed Majid Mousavi, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force, were present, among others. Nor was it clear who would replace them.
But even amid the vast uncertainty about what lies ahead, the operation laid bare how well-developed Israeli and American intelligence had become inside Iran over the last several months, and how quickly the two countries were prepared to act when the opportunity arose.
“Isra