In one of the most stunning military initiatives of the war, Israel smuggled the parts for drones into Iran and set up an assembly plant near Tehran. Where Iranian drones took six hours and more to fly from Iran to Israel and Israel thus had lots of time to shoot them down, Israel had a hired army inside Iran to launch drones just hundreds of meters from their targets.
It isn’t known how many people Iran recruited for this coup or how many drones it assembled. But the operation was only good for that first night of the war. Israel knew it would quickly become known to Iran and its army would have to disperse.
Iran announced on the third day of the war that it had found the factory.
Israel had smuggled some parts into the country in suitcases, while other parts were sent in commercially and passed through Iranian customs. The planning took several months, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The drones were mostly quadcopters, small enough that one man can easily carry one and launch it on his own. The men went to locations very near to air defense sites and missile launchers in western Iran. When those sites were notified that Israeli missiles were on their way, the men launched their quadcopters, which flew into the air defense sites and missile launchers seconds after the quadcopters became airborne.
The Israeli operatives owned a fleet of trucks used to take the men and quadcopters to the places from which they launched the quadcopters.
The Wall Street Journal said Israel trained the team leaders in foreign countries and those leaders in turn trained the men who actually launched each quad-copter.
It remains unknown how many men were captured by the regime, how many got out of the country and how many are still hunkered down inside Iran.
State broadcasting said the factory that assembled the missiles was a three-story building on the outskirts of Tehran. Two days after the attacks, police released a video showing components inside the building along with the machinery needed for making the drones.
Four days later, authorities said they had arrested 18 people in Mashhad, accusing them of designing and manufacturing drones for Israel.
According to a report by Fars news, the suspects were allegedly operating under the cover of local workshops. They were apparently an additional work force beyond those in the Tehran factory.