Welcome back to My Weird Prompts! I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our usual spot in Jerusalem with my brother. It is a bit chilly this morning, the kind of damp cold that really settles into the stone walls of this city, but the coffee is hot and the topic today is even hotter.
Herman Poppleberry here. It is good to be back in the studio, Corn. We have had quite a few requests lately to dive back into the events of last summer, and it looks like Daniel has given us the perfect starting point today. It is hard to believe it has already been six months since the ceasefire, but the perspective we have gained in that time is invaluable.
Exactly. Today is February twenty-first, two thousand twenty-six, and looking back at the twelve day war from August of last year, there is still so much that remains shrouded in mystery. Daniel’s prompt today is focusing on that invisible front. The sabotage and remote operations that happened inside Iran before the first Israeli aircraft even crossed the border. It is a fascinating topic because it moves the battlefield from the sky into the very heart of the Iranian military infrastructure. Daniel wants to know about the recruitment of local cells, the drone launches from within Iranian territory, and the sheer logistical nightmare of coordinating a war where the front line is a basement in Isfahan or a warehouse in Karaj.
It really does move the needle on how we understand modern conflict. And what is particularly striking about those twelve days in August two thousand twenty-five is how lopsided the air war seemed at first. People were expecting this massive, grinding attrition between the Israeli Air Force and Iran’s integrated air defense system. We were all looking at the maps, counting the S-three hundred batteries and the Bavar-three hundred seventy-three sites, expecting a repeat of the heavy losses seen in other regional conflicts. But when the strikes actually began on the night of August fourteenth, it was like the Iranian radar screens were just... blank. Or they were seeing ghosts. And we now know that was not just a result of high-altitude electronic warfare from stand-off distances. It was the result of work done on the ground, inside the country, months and even years in advance.
That is the part that really grabs me. Daniel specifically asked about the recruitment of local cells. The idea that the Mossad was using Iranian citizens to degrade their own country’s capabilities. To a lot of people, that sounds like a spy novel, but the logistical reality of it is much more complex and, frankly, much more dangerous for everyone involved. Herman, where do we even begin with the degradation of the anti-aircraft systems? Because that was the prerequisite for everything else, right? If the eyes of the regime are open, the planes never get through.
It was the absolute key. If you look at the Iranian defense posture in early two thousand twenty-five, they were heavily reliant on the S-three hundred and the newer Bavar-three hundred seventy-three systems. These are sophisticated, long-range surface-to-air missile systems. On paper, they should have made any Israeli strike incredibly costly. But what we saw during the twelve day war was a series of catastrophic failures in those systems. Now, some of that was definitely cyber-related. We have talked about Unit eighty-two hundred before and their ability to inject code into closed networks. But you cannot always do that from a basement in Tel Aviv. Sometimes you need someone to physically plug something in, or you need someone to replace a genuine component with a compromised one during a routine maintenance cycle. This is what the intelligence community has been calling the "Ghost Maintenance" protocol.
"Ghost Maintenance." That sounds incredibly ominous. I remember reading reports about these cells. These were individuals who worked within the Iranian military industrial complex or the logistics chains. How does the Mossad even go about finding someone like that? It is not like they are posting on job boards looking for people willing to commit high treason.
It is a slow, methodical process of "spotting and assessing." They look for people with two things: access and grievance. In the years leading up to the two thousand twenty-five conflict, the economic situation in Iran was incredibly dire. We are talking about inflation rates that were hitting sixty or seventy percent. The Rial was essentially toilet paper. A lot of middle-class professionals, the engineers, the technicians, the people who actually keep the lights on and the radars spinning, felt like the regime was gambling their future on regional proxy wars while their children couldn't afford milk. The Mossad leverages that. They might start by approaching someone under a "false flag." They might pretend to be a private consultancy or a foreign intelligence agency from a country that isn't Israel—maybe a European energy firm or an Asian tech conglomerate. They offer a small amount of money for seemingly harmless information, like a shipping manifest or a technical manual that is technically public but hard to find. Once the person takes the money, they are "hooked." Then the tasks get more specific and more dangerous.
So, you might have a technician at an airbase near Isfahan who thinks he is just helping a "business competitor" get an edge on some parts procurement, but in reality, he is being coached on how to introduce a tiny hardware Trojan into a radar control board.
Precisely. And we saw the results of that on the night of August fourteenth, two thousand twenty-five. When the first wave of Israeli F-thirty-fives entered Iranian airspace, several key radar sites in the western part of the country simply failed to initialize. They didn't even see the planes. The internal diagnostics reported that everything was fine, but the actual signal processing was being suppressed by a piece of hardware that had been installed months prior. That is the ultimate sabotage. It is not an explosion; it is a whisper that tells the system to stay asleep. And by the time the Iranian commanders realized their systems were lying to them, the Israeli munitions were already halfway to their targets.
That brings us to the more "kinetic" side of Daniel’s prompt. The drone launches from within Iran. This was one of the most shocking revelations of the conflict. The idea that drones were hitting Iranian nuclear facilities and missile silos, but they weren't flying in from hundreds of miles away. They were being launched from a few miles down the road. It completely flips the script on how we think about border security.
This is "Operation Marten," or at least that is the code name that has been circulating in the defense journals since the ceasefire. The challenge for Israel has always been the distance. Flying a drone from Israel to central Iran requires a massive aircraft with a huge fuel load, which is easy to spot on long-range radar. But if you can smuggle the components for a small, high-explosive quadcopter into the country, you can take out a billion-dollar facility with a fifty-thousand-dollar drone. During the twelve day war, we saw this used with devastating effect against the Natanz enrichment site and the Parchin military complex.
But the logistics of that are a nightmare. How do you get a drone, even a disassembled one, past the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps? They are not exactly known for their lax border controls.
You break it down into pieces that don't look like drone parts. Think of it like a high-stakes version of an Ikea furniture kit. You have the carbon fiber frame pieces hidden in a shipment of agricultural equipment or irrigation pipes. You have the flight controllers and GPS modules coming in through the "gray market" as consumer electronics or parts for medical devices. The motors can be disguised as parts for industrial fans or even high-end kitchen appliances. The most difficult part is the high-grade explosives for the warhead. But even there, Iran is a country with a huge mining and construction industry. Explosives move around that country every day. If you have a local cell with the right connections, you can "divert" a few kilograms of plastic explosives from a quarry or a construction site. It is all about the "last mile" assembly.
And then you need a safe house. You need a place where these local agents can assemble the drones and wait for the signal. Daniel asked about the challenges of recruiting these cells to act against their own country. Beyond the money, there has to be a massive psychological barrier to overcome, right? You are asking someone to potentially cause a disaster in their own neighborhood. How do you convince an Iranian patriot to help a foreign power attack their own soil?
That is the most difficult part of the recruitment, and it is where the Mossad’s psychological operations really come into play. They often target people based on their specific political or ethnic identity within Iran. There are significant minority groups in Iran, like the Kurds in the northwest or the Balochis in the southeast, who have long-standing grievances against the central government in Tehran. For some of these individuals, they don't see it as acting against "their country." They see it as acting against a regime that they feel is occupying their land or suppressing their culture. But even for ethnic Persians, the argument is often framed as "we are doing this to prevent a bigger war." The recruiters tell them, "If we can disable these missiles now, Israel won't have to bomb the whole city later. We are saving lives by taking out the machines." It is a form of moral licensing. You convince the agent that their small act of sabotage is actually a humanitarian mission.
It is a "surgical strike" philosophy applied to human intelligence. If I help them break this one radar, maybe my family won't be under a carpet-bombing campaign next week. It is a desperate kind of logic, but in a high-tension environment like two thousand twenty-five, I can see how it would be effective. Now, the actual drone launches during the war... we saw those videos from the outskirts of Tehran. It looked like ordinary commercial quadcopters, but the impact was far beyond what a hobbyist drone could do.
Those were likely the "Maoz" or "Spike Firefly" variants, or perhaps a localized version of the "Harop" loitering munition. What is incredible is that these cells were operating in the middle of a high-alert environment. During those twelve days, the Iranian security forces were everywhere. They were looking for spies, they were looking for saboteurs, they were setting up checkpoints on every major road. And yet, we had these drones popping up from the roofs of apartment buildings or the backs of delivery trucks. One of the most successful missions was the strike on the Karaj drone factory on August seventeenth. The drones were launched from a warehouse less than three kilometers away. They flew low, hugged the terrain to stay under the radar of the local point defenses, and hit the most sensitive part of the assembly line—the clean room where the guidance sensors are calibrated. It wasn't just about the damage; it was about the message. It told the Iranian leadership, "You are not safe in your own backyard. Your neighbors might be our pilots."
It creates a sense of total paranoia. If you are an Iranian general, you start looking at your own staff, your own technicians, your own drivers, and wondering who is on the payroll of the Mossad. That kind of internal friction is probably just as valuable to Israel as the actual physical damage. It slows down every decision. You have to double-check every order, vet every person again and again. It paralyzes the command structure.
Exactly. It is "organizational sabotage." And the Mossad is brilliant at planting seeds of doubt. They might intentionally leave behind evidence that points to a high-ranking official who is actually innocent, just to trigger a purge within the IRGC. We saw a lot of that in the aftermath of the twelve day war. There were dozens of arrests and executions within the Iranian military. Some of them were probably actual Mossad agents, but many were likely just caught up in the wave of panic. The regime ended up eating its own tail, which only further degraded their ability to respond to the actual military strikes.
Let's talk about the "remote" part of these operations. Daniel mentioned remote operations, and I know there has been a lot of talk about the "satellite-linked" equipment used in these missions. Back in two thousand twenty, we saw the assassination of Fakhrizadeh using a remote-controlled machine gun. That felt like science fiction at the time. Did we see an evolution of that technology in the two thousand twenty-five conflict?
Oh, absolutely. The technology has become much more miniaturized and reliable. In two thousand twenty-five, we saw the use of "automated sentry kits." These are small, tripod-mounted systems equipped with high-resolution cameras and silenced weapons, or even small rockets. They can be smuggled into a location in pieces, assembled by a local agent who then leaves the area, and then the system is operated via a secure satellite link from a command center in Israel. This removes the "human in the loop" at the moment of the strike, which makes it much harder to capture an operative. If the IRGC finds the weapon, there is no one there to interrogate.
So the local agent is just the "delivery man." They set the stage, they find the vantage point, and then the actual "trigger puller" is sitting in a room in Tel Aviv or Haifa. That has to make the recruitment easier, right? You are not asking the person to pull the trigger; you are just asking them to "leave a suitcase in a field" or "park a van on a specific corner."
It definitely lowers the psychological threshold. "Just park this van here and walk away." It sounds so much less like murder or sabotage. But the technical challenge is the latency. Even with modern low-earth orbit satellites, there is a delay of several hundred milliseconds. You need a very sophisticated artificial intelligence on the device itself to handle the "last mile" of targeting. The AI identifies the target, tracks it, and the human operator just gives the final "authorized" command. We saw this used against several mobile missile launchers during the August conflict. The launchers would come out of their tunnels to prep for a strike, and before they could even get their stabilizers down, a remote-controlled unit hidden in a nearby "broken down" vehicle would fire a shaped charge into the fuel tank. It was incredibly precise and incredibly demoralizing for the Iranian crews.
It is a terrifying way to fight a war. It is completely asymmetrical. You are fighting an enemy you can't see, and you are being betrayed by the objects in your own environment. A trash can, a parked car, a piece of industrial equipment... any of it could be a weapon. It turns the entire physical world into a potential threat.
And it is not just about the hardware. The "remote" part also applies to the cyber-physical attacks. During the war, we saw several Iranian "smart" facilities, like water treatment plants and power substations, experience "cascading failures." These weren't caused by bombs. They were caused by local agents who had installed "bridging devices"—small, thumb-drive-sized hardware—that allowed Israeli hackers to jump from the public internet into the secure, air-gapped internal networks. Once you are in the PLC—the Programmable Logic Controller—you can tell a turbine to spin until it explodes, or you can tell a valve to shut off the cooling water to a reactor. We saw this happen at the Bushehr power plant on August nineteenth. The plant didn't blow up, but the cooling systems were manipulated in a way that forced an emergency shutdown that took the entire regional grid offline for forty-eight hours.
This really highlights the "challenge of the local cell" that Daniel asked about. The sheer number of people you need to make this work is significant. You need the smugglers, the safe-house keepers, the technicians, the "delivery people," and the watchers. How does the Mossad keep that many people from talking? Or from being discovered by the VEVAK, the Iranian intelligence service?
Compartmentalization is the only way. In a classic cell structure, no one knows more than one or two other people. The person smuggling the drone parts doesn't know who is going to assemble them. The person assembling them doesn't know where they are going to be used. And often, they communicate through "dead drops" or encrypted apps that self-destruct. They also use what is called "transactional loyalty." They pay well, and they pay in ways that are hard to track, like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. In a country where the local currency is worthless and people are struggling to buy basic goods, a few thousand dollars in crypto can be a life-changing amount of money. It can buy a family’s way out of the country.
But there is also the "stick" to go with the "carrot." I imagine the Mossad makes it very clear that they know everything about these people. Their families, their addresses, their secrets. Once you are in, the only way out is through the completion of the mission or... well, a much darker outcome. It is a one-way street.
It is a brutal business. And the risk for these Iranian citizens is total. If they are caught, the regime's response is not a trial; it is a public execution. We saw that in September and October of last year, after the war ended. The Iranian government went on a massive "cleanup" operation. They were desperate to show that they had regained control, so they arrested thousands of people. Many were likely innocent, but the regime needed scapegoats to explain how their "impenetrable" defenses had failed so completely. But the damage was already done. The twelve day war showed that the "invisible wall" around Iran had been breached. The myth of the regime's total control was shattered.
It makes me wonder about the long-term implications. If you are a country like Iran, or really any country, how do you defend against this? You can have the best missiles in the world, you can have the most advanced fighter jets, but if your neighbor is being paid by your enemy to put a magnet on your radar or a virus in your power grid, what do you do? How do you secure a nation against its own citizens?
You have to move toward "zero trust" military architecture. You have to assume that every component is compromised from the moment it leaves the factory. You have to have redundant systems that don't share the same supply chain. You have to monitor your own personnel with a level of intensity that is almost unsustainable. It turns the military into a police state within a police state. And that, in itself, creates more resentment, more economic hardship, and more potential recruits for the Mossad. It is a vicious cycle. The more you squeeze your people to prevent betrayal, the more you give them a reason to betray you.
It is a feedback loop of paranoia and vulnerability. And it is not just Iran. We are seeing these "remote-local" hybrid operations becoming the new standard for modern conflict. Look at what happened in the Caucasus last year, or the ongoing tensions in the South China Sea. The "front line" is now everywhere. It is in the software updates, it is in the delivery trucks, it is in the people working in the factories. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" infrastructure is disappearing.
One thing that really stood out to me from the reports after the August conflict was the "modular" nature of the Israeli equipment. They have developed these "sabotage kits" that are designed to be used by people with very little training. You don't need to be an engineer or a special forces operator to use them. You just need to follow a set of instructions on an encrypted tablet. "Plug Part A into Port B. Wait for the green light. Leave the area." This allows them to recruit "disposable" agents—people who aren't high-level spies, but just desperate individuals who need the money. It lowers the barrier to entry for sabotage.
That is a chilling thought. The democratization of sabotage. You don't need a James Bond; you just need a guy who is willing to take a risk for a paycheck. And in a world of increasing economic inequality and political instability, there is no shortage of those people. It makes the job of counter-intelligence almost impossible.
No, there isn't. And as the technology for these remote-controlled weapons gets cheaper and more accessible, we might see non-state actors using these same tactics. Imagine a cartel or a terrorist group using "local cells" to sabotage a city's infrastructure from the inside. The "Twelve Day War" was a state-versus-state conflict, but the methods used are a blueprint for a whole new kind of chaos. We are entering an era where the most dangerous weapon isn't a nuclear missile; it is a compromised technician with a thumb drive.
It really changes how we think about "air superiority." In the past, you got air superiority by shooting down the other guy's planes in dogfights or taking out their runways with bombers. In two thousand twenty-five, Israel got air superiority by making sure the other guy's planes couldn't even start their engines, and their radars couldn't see the sky. It is a "pre-emptive" victory that happens before the first shot is even officially fired. It is winning the war in the months of preparation, not the days of combat.
And it is why the Iranian response was so focused on ballistic missiles. Because their air force and air defenses were so compromised by internal sabotage, the only thing they had left was the "hammer" of their missile silos. They couldn't play the "fencing match" of an air war, so they tried to just smash everything with sheer numbers of missiles. But even there, we saw the effects of the local cells. Some of those missiles failed on the launch pad. Some of them had "guidance errors" that sent them into empty desert. How many of those were "hardware Trojans" planted by a local technician months earlier? We may never know the full count, but the suspicion alone is enough to ruin a military's confidence.
It is the ultimate "fog of war." You don't even know if your own equipment is on your side. Herman, we have covered a lot of ground here, from the recruitment of local cells to the technical specifics of remote-controlled weaponry and "Operation Marten." What are the practical takeaways for our listeners who are trying to make sense of this new world? What does this tell us about the future of security?
The biggest takeaway is that "physical security" and "cyber security" are now the same thing. You cannot protect a network if you don't protect the people who have access to the hardware. And you cannot protect a country if you have a significant portion of your population that feels alienated or desperate enough to be recruited by an enemy. National security is now as much about "social cohesion" and "economic stability" as it is about "missile counts" or "stealth technology." If your people are your greatest vulnerability, then no amount of technology can save you.
That is a profound point. If your people are your greatest vulnerability, then no amount of technology can save you. You have to address the root causes of the grievance, or you will always be fighting a losing battle against the "enemy within." It turns the concept of "defense" into something much more internal and much more social.
Exactly. And for the individuals involved, the message is one of extreme caution. The "invisible war" uses people up and throws them away. Whether they were working for the Mossad or the IRGC, many of the people involved in these operations didn't survive the year. They were pawns in a very high-stakes game played by people in comfortable offices far away. The "Ghost Cells" were effective, but they were also expendable.
It is a sobering thought to end on. But it is the reality of the world we are living in now, six months after the twelve day war. The conflict may have paused, but the invisible front is still active. The "weird prompts" of history are becoming more complex by the day, and the line between the digital and the physical is blurring into nothingness.
It really was a turning point. And I think we are going to be analyzing the fallout of those twelve days for years to come. There is still so much we don't know about the full extent of the "Ghost Cells" or the other operations that haven't even been leaked yet. Every time a new report comes out, the scale of the infiltration seems even larger than we imagined.
Well, we will keep digging as more information becomes declassified or leaked. And we want to thank Daniel for sending in this prompt. It gave us a lot to chew on and really forced us to look at the "human" side of high-tech warfare. If you are enjoying "My Weird Prompts" and the deep dives we do into these complex topics, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps other people find the show and join the conversation.
Yeah, it definitely does. We love hearing from you and seeing the community grow. Your prompts are what keep this show going, so keep them coming.
You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are also at myweirdprompts dot com, where you can find our full archive and a contact form if you want to reach out. You can also email us directly at show at myweirdprompts dot com. We read every message we get.
This has been "My Weird Prompts," a human-AI collaboration. I am Herman Poppleberry.
And I am Corn. We will be back soon with another prompt and another deep dive into the strange and often terrifying world of the mid-twenty-twenties. Until then, stay curious and keep an eye on the world around you. You never know what is hiding in plain sight.
Goodbye everyone.
Bye.
