How Israel Lured Iran's Top Generals to Their Deaths Will Blow Your Mind

From Red State.com (June 18):

As of Wednesday, the Israeli operation to destroy Iran's nuclear program and its ballistic missile capabilities continued apace, with launchers and production facilities becoming prime targets.

In perhaps the most dominant, decisive show of military force this century, the IDF managed to gain air superiority in the first three days of strikes and has been able to loiter over Tehran without consequence. I'm not sure enough people truly appreciate how insane it is that the Israelis have not lost a single plane yet. Once again, the incredible gulf between American and Russian military technology is being laid bare. To say Iran was a paper tiger would be an insult to paper tigers.

With that said, we are learning some stunning details about how things got to this point. In the early hours of the war, it was reported that dozens of top Iranian military leaders were taken out in a single strike, and how that strike came to be is just as incredible as the result. According to a new report, the subterfuge used to get all those IRGC generals into a single bunker is like something right out of a spy novel.

Amit Segal told the Call Me Back podcast on Monday: “What Israel did was create a fake phone call for 20 members of the air force senior staff an calling them to a specific bunker in Tehran.”

This meant there was no one to give the order to fire the initial salvo of 1,000 ballistic missiles as Iran had previously threatened to do, he added.

The added bonus for the Israelis was that Iranian military leadership was essentially crippled from the moment of Israel’s first strike against the world’s top sponsor of terrorism.

As The Chronicle reported, Mossad had used “falsified communications through Iranian channels” to call the meeting — which successfully lured “the entire senior leadership of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, including Commander General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, his deputies, and key technical personnel, into a fortified bunker outside Tehran.”

Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, infiltrated Iranian backchannels and then placed 20 different fake phone calls to IRGC leaders. Those calls instructed them to all meet a reinforced bunker in Tehran, an order none of them questioned. It's safe to speculate that Mossad agents were on the ground to confirm their arrival, and shortly after, the entire place was blown sky-high.

It was a boon for Israel because Iran's command and control structure was crippled. It took almost a day for the Mullahs to finally muster a military response, and by then, the IDF had severely hampered their ballistic missile capabilities. While initial barrages did cause damage, including tragically killing several civilians due to Iran's indiscriminate salvos, in context, they were very ineffective counterstrikes, accomplishing nothing of military value for Iran. 

Still, as impressive as the nuts and bolts of the plot were, it's how thought-out this all was that's truly incredible. It's one thing to place fake calls through Iranian back channels. It's another to have every general who answered the phone fall for the ruse.

How did that happen? The answer lies in how antiquated and authoritarian Iran's military structure was and remains. When you serve at the behest of an Islamic dictator who tortures and kills people who step out of line, you aren't exactly in a position to question an order. When the calls came in to head to the bunker, wondering if things seemed a little suspicious wasn't an option. So all the generals blindly listened.

But weren't there just other leaders ready to step up and carry out the Mullahs' decrees? Not really. Unlike the U.S. military structure, where junior officers are trained and placed in a defined, highly redundant chain of command, Iran's top brass were insular loyalists. With them out of the way, chaos ensued.

Every part of Israel's strike was considered down to the most granular detail. They knew how to trick the generals, but they also knew what the effects would be with enough confidence to risk a full-scale air war with Iran, and all of this occurred on an incredibly tight, fluid timeline. If someone had written a spy novel with these same details, the publisher would have probably said it was too unrealistic. [source]

These assassinations were mind-blowing! Right out of a thriller or spy novel.  Terrorists are dead. This is what happens when you have a true authoritarian leader unlike what the Left believes about President Trump.

Along the same lines...

How Israel Built a Secret Drone Army Inside Iran That Humiliated the Mullahs and Crippled Their Nuclear Program

Bear Grylls’ Survival Hacks and Tips

A CONDOM. I take these mainly for carrying water. A condom takes up almost no space but is very elastic and can hold up to two litres of water. Since they’re waterproof, they’re also good for keeping tinder dry. And you can use them as an improvised rubber glove if you’re treating a wound and want to guard against infection from a dirty hand. Choose a non-lubricated version.

A TAMPON. For firelighting: the absorbent material inside a tampon makes good tinder.

WATERPROOF MATCHES. Lighters are unreliable in cold temperatures and in the wet. Waterproof matches are your best bet for fire-starting in difficult conditions.

A 9-VOLT BATTERY AND SOME STEEL WOOL. A good back-up to waterproof matches. Touch the steel wool to the contacts of the battery. The electric charge will cause the steel wool to burn.

FILTERING WATER. Take off your sock. Better still, take off your underpants. Even better, use a pair of tights. Pour your unfiltered water through the fabric so that the worst of any debris is filtered out.

OTHER TYPES OF FUEL. Dried animal droppings – these can be mixed with dry grass to make a good fire.

RULE OF HANDS. You can estimate how long it will be before darkness falls by measuring how many fingers there are between the bottom of the sun and the horizon (don’t include your thumb). Each finger measures approximately fifteen minutes. This means, neatly, that a hand is about an hour.

Source: How to Stay Alive: The Ultimate Survival Guide for Any Situation (2017) by Bear Grylls.

The Ingenuity of American Soldiers

I love human ingenuity. In a Newsday.com article it talks about American troops in Iraq using Silly String to detect trip wires. The troops spray the Silly String in a room. If it falls completely on the floor, there are no trip wires in the room otherwise there is. That's just plain clever! That is the very definition of ingenuity: thinking of ways to use an object for different purposes, not just its primary purpose.

Survivorman

The talk on the news about Katrina's anniversary reminds of a TV program I saw on the Science Channel called "Survivorman: Surviving Urban Disasters" with Les Stroud. I really like this guy's problem solving and self-control. He really makes a lot of sense and you can learn from him too. If you never saw the show Survivorman he is in different natural settings. For example, one time he is in the Canadian Rockies surviving by himself, and another time he is in a Costa Rica jungle surviving. The show even had him on a inflatable life raft in the Caribbean Sea. Basically, he has to survive a whole week by himself in a natural setting. All he has is 50 pounds of camera equipment and other equipment he can choose to bring along. Of course, since this is a TV show the producers won't let him die and he can contact them, but the challenge is to survive by himself. He really epitomizes self-control and problem solving.

In the "Urban Disaster" episode he shows the viewers how to survive a flood in a house, car, and office building during a hurricane. In a house for instance, you can sterilize fish with lemon juice. He said it has to be lemon juice because of its high acid content (orange juice will not work) and lemon juice will only work on fish--not meat or chicken. Also, he showed how you can distill water that has been contaminated. In a car he said you put coins or something hard in a sock to break the window of a car to get out. Then you use one of the car's floor mats to drape over the window slot so you don't cut yourself when crawl through the window. Now, that is clever but easy to do. If you are in an office building and the electricity goes off you can role tissue paper up real thin and soak it in alcohol and make a torch out of it. Again, clever and not very hard to do. One other thing I learn is that three of anything is a distress call. What I mentioned is some of his advice. His general advice is not too panic and think what can you use to help yourself survive.

It really goes to show what self-control, knowledge and problem solving skills can do.