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Mayor Cara Spencer said appointing Don Brown to a role on the Police Board's budget committee "could be perceived by the community as a conflict" and be controversial.

The St. Louis-area was experiencing a shortage of nearly 20,000 seats prior to the tornado, according to the Gateway Early Childhood Alliance. That number has grown since the May 16 tornado. 44 centers were in the path of the storm and 40 of them were damaged.

UPDATE: The St. Louis County Police Department has identified the victim as Kevontae Washington, 23, of St. Louis County. ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. - Police are investigating an overnight shooting that left a man dead Thursday morning in north St. Louis County. According to the St. Louis County Police Department, authorities responded to a call [...]

ST. LOUIS - Thursday will bring mostly sunny skies and a typical August feel. Highs will climb into the low to mid 90s Thursday with noticeable humidity, bringing heat index readings closer to 100 F. In the heat of the afternoon and early evening, we may see a few showers or weak thunderstorms pop. Any [...]

The Alan Parsons Project is set to reissue their sophomore album I, Robot, which was inspired by Isaac Asimov's science fiction stories exploring themes of artificial intelligence.The album will be reissued in a variety of…

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by Rob Davis

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This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact.

A year after Oregon endures its most destructive fire season on record in 2020, state lawmakers order a map estimating the wildfire risk for every property in the state. It’s the kind of rating now available on real estate sites like Zillow. The state wants to use the results to decide where it will apply forthcoming codes for fire-resistant construction and protections around homes.

Around the same time, insurance companies start dropping Oregon homeowners’ policies and raising premiums to limit future losses, much as they have done in other disaster-prone states. Insurers have their own sophisticated risk maps to guide them, but some brokers instead tell homeowners the blame lies with the map the state produced. The belief gets treated as fact both on social media and in mainstream news — even though insurers and regulators say it’s not true.

The anger quickly spreads. Not only is Oregon’s map seen as at fault for higher insurance premiums, one conservative talk radio host calls it an attempt to “depopulate rural areas.” People in an anti-map Facebook group start musing about “Agenda 21,” a conspiracy theory implicating the United Nations in an effort to force people into cities so they can be more easily controlled.

By the time the state pulls back the map and starts over, the myths about it have gained so much momentum there’s no stopping them. Oregon’s hotter, drier climate isn’t the problem; the map is.

Christine Drazan, the Oregon House Republican leader, joins more than a dozen other Republicans in February 2025 behind a sign that says “REPEAL THE WILDFIRE HAZARD MAP.” She calls the state’s map “faulty, defective, harmful” and says it, along with related fire-safe building and landscaping rules that are in the works, is “a heavy-handed bureaucratic takeover” that’s kept rural residents from insuring or selling homes.

“This map is destroying their property values,” she says.

In the end, what’s most remarkable about the campaign against Oregon’s wildfire map isn’t that misinformation found an audience.

It’s that it worked.

A melted sign hangs from a fence in Lyons, Oregon, in 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Chris Dunn, a wildfire risk scientist at Oregon State University and a former wildland firefighter, thought Oregon had a chance to be a national model for adapting to wildfire risks when he was asked to make the statewide map in 2021.

Oregon adopted a unique set of land use laws in the late 1960s and 1970s that helped curb urban sprawl. A coalition of farmers and conservationists formulated the legislation to preserve farmland and keep cities compact. To Dunn, protecting homes seemed within reach because the state had maintained agricultural buffers around cities, helping to serve as firebreaks.

At the time, Zillow hadn’t yet come out with risk ratings. By building its own map, Oregon could use local input and make adjustments as it went along.

The map results would help Oregon decide where to require a tool proven to save homes from wind-driven wildfires: “defensible space.” Owners would have to prune trees up and away from their houses; they would need to keep their roofs clear of leaves, needles and other dead vegetation. The idea was to deny wind-borne embers fuel that can burn down dwellings — a problem fresh on lawmakers’ minds after Oregon’s devastating 2020 fire season destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

Dunn knew public communication would be important. Before the map was released, a private property rights group had warned its members in a letter that the map and its rules were worrisome. Gov. Kate Brown’s wildfire council, advising state leaders about the map’s rollout, knew about the letter and the potential for pushback, according to emails Dunn provided to ProPublica.

Dunn said he was clear with Brown’s wildfire director, Doug Grafe, and others on the council that the map needed a significant, coordinated and effective communications campaign starting months before its release. Dunn said all the state developed was a one-page document on the roles of each government agency.

(Brown and Grafe did not respond to ProPublica’s questions. Grafe told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2022 that “we are committed to ensuring people understand what they can do to increase the likelihood their homes and properties will survive wildfires.”)

Without state outreach, many homeowners learned their homes were in “extreme risk” zones from a July 2022 letter in the mail. It gave them 60 days to appeal the designation or face complying with new building and defensible-space codes the state was developing.

The wildfire hazard map and online user interface, created by Chris Dunn, a wildfire scientist at Oregon State University, shows high hazard areas in orange and those with moderate hazards in purple. (Screenshot by ProPublica of the Oregon Statewide Wildfire Hazard Map)

Dunn could see that an uproar was building around his work. One community meeting where he was scheduled to present was canceled after state officials received threats of violence.

On Facebook, more than 6,000 people joined a private group, ODF Wildfire Risk Map Support, a base of opposition. ODF stands for the Oregon Department of Forestry, the state agency overseeing the map’s creation.

One member warned that state officials would snoop around their rural properties to tell owners what to do.

“Guys this is a agenda 21,” said the member, referencing the conspiracy theory promoted in part by former Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck.

Along with 31 thumbs-ups, eight angry faces and several other emojis, the post got 24 comments.

• This insane bill out of Salem is crazy! Every designation was decided by an algorithm by politicians in Salem who don't a clue about our property, our house, our lifestyles! If you think it’s not their agenda to destroy rural property owners, think again. (10 likes)
• The UN Sustainable Development Goals are driving this push to eliminate rural living. Look into ICLEI and see how the UN infiltrates state and local governments and influences policy and legislation. https://iclei.org (6 likes)
• I learned about this when I first became involved in conservative politics. Back when globalist-backed Agenda 21 and now Agenda 2030 were still thought of as conspiracy theories. (6 likes, 1 sad reaction)

These Facebook comments have been excerpted to preserve anonymity.

Oregon can’t stop firestorms with regulations, conservative talk show host Bill Meyer told listeners, “unless you just get people off the land, and people wonder if that’s what the intent of all of this is ultimately.” Invoking a phrase associated with the Agenda 21 conspiracy, Meyer said rural residents would wind up having to move into “stack-and-pack” housing in Oregon’s cities. (Meyer did not respond to ProPublica’s emails.)

State officials’ lack of communication with the public “led to really significant challenges,” Dunn told ProPublica. “We don’t know if we could have well-communicated and sort of avoided those conspiracy theories and misinformation. But it was just so propagated in the media that it just took over.”

Jeff Golden, the Democratic state senator who helped draft the bill creating the map, said rural residents were understandably upset. The impacts of climate change were abstract to many people, Golden said, until they started getting those letters — at the same time insurance companies were dumping them.

“It’s a really hard adjustment,” said Golden, chairperson of the Senate’s Natural Resources and Wildfire Committee. “This is a very big chicken coming home to roost.”

Misinformation stoked people’s anger. “It makes a conversation that would have been difficult at best almost impossible,” Golden said.

State officials withdrew the map just over a month after its 2022 release, saying that while they had met the legislative deadline for delivering it, “there wasn’t enough time to allow for the type of local outreach and engagement that people wanted, needed and deserved.”

Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden helped draft the bill creating the wildfire risk map. (Jenny Kane/AP Photo)

After homeowners blamed the newly released risk map for insurance cancellations and premium increases, Oregon’s insurance regulator formally asked insurers: Did you use the state risk map?

Companies filed statements, required by law to be answered truthfully, saying they had not. Oregon’s then-insurance commissioner, Andrew Stolfi, announced the industry’s response publicly at the time.

“Insurance companies have been using their own risk maps and other robust risk management tools to assess wildfire risk for years in making rating and underwriting decisions,” Stolfi said in a news release.

Stolfi told consumers to submit any documentation they received from insurance companies showing that the state’s map had been used to influence underwriting or rating decisions. Jason Horton, a spokesperson for Oregon’s insurance regulator, told ProPublica the agency has not substantiated any complaints.

For good measure, lawmakers in 2023 passed a bill explicitly banning insurers from using the map to set rates.

But as Dunn reworked the map, the cloud of misinformation continued to swirl on social media.

After Zillow and other real estate sites began posting wildfire risk ratings on properties nationwide last year, participants in the anti-map Facebook group alleged the state was behind it.

“Who would decide to move out here after seeing that?” one asked.

Zillow uses data from the research firm First Street, a Zillow spokesperson told ProPublica. A First Street spokesperson also said the group doesn’t use Oregon’s map.

Andrew DeVigal, a University of Oregon journalism professor who has studied news ecosystems around the state, said places where news outlets have shrunk or closed down have grown particularly reliant on such Facebook groups. These community watercoolers help confirm participants’ biases. “You surround yourself with people who think like you, so you’re in your space,” he said.

A ProPublica reporter identified himself to the group’s participants, asking in June for evidence that they’d been harmed by the state’s map. None provided definitive proof. Some acknowledged that they couldn’t demonstrate that the map had affected them but said they suspected it lowered their homes’ values or their insurability.

Among the respondents was Chris Dalton, who lives in La Pine, south of Bend. Dalton described spending about $2,000 trimming trees and another $500 putting down gravel to create defensible space.

However, Dalton said, the house’s location had been designated as being at moderate risk. That means it was not subject to the state’s defensible-space requirements. And even if Dalton’s property had been designated as high enough risk to be governed by the new regulations, they had not been finalized at that point and were not being enforced.

“I guess you could say we used common sense to get ahead of future problems,” Dalton said.

The Darlene Fire burned more than 3,000 acres around La Pine, Oregon, in June 2024. (Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office)

Watch video ➜

Oregon officials decided to give the map another try last year.

They re-released it, this time doing more outreach. Following California’s lead and aiming to make the map less confusing, Oregon also changed its nomenclature. Properties weren’t in risk classes, they were in hazard zones. The highest rating was no longer “extreme,” it was “high.” Dunn, the Oregon State scientist, said he thought the map had survived the effort to kill it.

But the backlash continued. Of the 106,000 properties found to face the highest hazard, more than 6,000 landowners filed appeals. At least one county appealed the designation on behalf of every high-hazard property in its borders — more than 20,000 of them.

In January, a new Oregon legislative session kicked off and wildfire preparedness was once again a top priority for the body’s Democratic leadership. Gov. Tina Kotek ordered a pause on decisions about homeowners’ appeals until the session ended, giving lawmakers a chance to decide what to do with the map.

Drazan, the House minority leader, led fellow Republicans in opposition.

She told ProPublica she “can’t know for sure” that the map caused homeowners to lose insurance or have trouble selling, as she’d asserted at February’s news conference. “I am reflecting what we were told,” she said.

Regardless, she said, the mandates on protecting properties went too far. “We’re not looking for the state to be the president of our homeowner’s association and tell us what color our paint can be,” Drazan said.

Even Golden, who’d helped shepherd the original bill mandating a map, began to waver.

Golden described conversations with homeowners who struggled to understand why work they’d done to protect their properties from fires didn’t lower their state risk rating. He said the map couldn’t account for the specific characteristics of each property, ultimately making it clear to him that it couldn’t work.

“I got tired of trying to convince people that the model was smarter than they were,” Golden said.

Dunn told ProPublica that the map was not intended to reflect all the changing conditions at a particular property, only the hazards that the surrounding topography, climate, weather and vegetation create. It wasn’t about whether homeowners had cleared defensible space — just whether they should. The work they do makes their individual homes less vulnerable, he said, but it doesn’t eliminate the broader threats around them.

Neighbors walk through their destroyed neighborhood in Phoenix, Oregon, in 2020. Hundreds of homes in the area were destroyed. (Mason Trinca for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Fire retardant coats a playground in a neighborhood largely destroyed by a wildfire in Talent, Oregon, in 2020. Climate change has increased the risk of wildfires in the state. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

By April, the map was on its way out.

The state Senate voted unanimously, Golden included, to repeal the state’s defensible-space and home-hardening requirements as well as the map that showed where they would apply.

Ahead of a 50-1 vote in the House to kill the map, familiar claims got repeated — including from a legislative leader’s office.

Virgle Osborne, the House Republican whip, lamented in a May press release: “These wildfire maps have cost people property values, insurance increases, and many heartaches.”

Osborne told ProPublica he stood behind his comment even though he had no evidence for it. Osborne said he believed Oregon’s maps helped insurance companies justify rate increases and policy cancellations.

“I can’t give you, you know, here’s the perfect example of somebody that, you know, did it, but no insurance company is that foolish,” Osborne said. “They’re not going to write a statement that would put them in jeopardy. But common sense is going to tell you, when the state is on your side, the insurance companies are going to bail out. And they have.”

With or without a map, former California insurance commissioner Dave Jones said, Oregon lawmakers could require insurers to provide incentives for homeowners to protect their properties. Colorado, for instance, ordered insurers this year to account for risk-reduction efforts in models used to decide who can obtain insurance and at what price.

Jones nonetheless called Oregon’s decision to kill the wildfire map “very unfortunate.”

“One of the biggest public health and safety challenges states are facing are climate-driven, severe-weather-related events,” Jones said. “Not giving people useful information to make decisions on that, to me, is not a path to public health and safety.”

During the June vote in the Oregon House, the lone person who voted to preserve Oregon’s wildfire map and its associated mandates was Dacia Grayber, a Democrat from the Portland area who’s a longtime firefighter and worked a brush rig during the 2020 wildfires.

She told ProPublica that by training, the first things she looks for while defending homes in wildland fires are the types of hazards the state intended to target: firewood under the deck, cedar shake siding, flammable juniper bushes growing close to homes.

Grayber said she was disturbed by the sentiment in the Capitol as the repeal vote neared. The decision to kill the map and eliminate home-hardening requirements, she said, had become a “feel-good, bipartisan vote.”

“We are walking away from a very clear decision to build safer, more resilient communities,” Grayber said.

The tragedy of it, she said, is “that it was 100% based in misinformation.”

Kotek, Oregon’s Democratic governor, signed the repeal on July 24.

Oregon Rep. Dacia Grayber is the sole legislator who voted to keep the wildfire hazard map alive. (Jenny Kane/AP Photo)

WASHINGTON — Fueled by President Donald Trump’s aims to bolster the U.S. House’s razor-thin GOP majority in the 2026 midterm elections, a rare mid-decade redistricting fight in Texas grew increasingly bitter in recent days and engulfed other states. As Democratic legislators in the Lone Star State fled to block a new congressional map, a handful of […]

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The loss of staff in the direct care industry threatens the lives of the elderly and people with disabilities.

by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

David Barnea, the director of the Mossad for some of the most remarkable successes in its storied history, never intended to be an intelligence officer. As a young man, he served as a team leader in the Israeli military’s most elite commando unit and then came to New York to study for a career in business.

After earning a master’s degree in finance at Pace University, he took jobs at an Israeli investment bank and then a brokerage firm, the first steps toward a career in which the biggest danger was an unexpected shift in the world’s financial markets.

Barnea’s world was jolted in November 1995 when an extremist right-wing Israeli assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally. Rabin had signed the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was pushing for a two-state solution to decades of conflict between Arabs and Jews.

“The Rabin assassination shocked him like many other Israelis,” recalled David Meidan, a retired senior Mossad operative considered Barnea’s mentor. He said the killing prompted Barnea, at age 30, to rethink everything and look for “some meaning in his life.” A friend suggested he apply to the Mossad, and after passing the required physical and psychological tests, he was accepted into the agency’s trainee program.

Barnea showed a knack for spotting, recruiting and running agents who would work for the Mossad inside countries hostile to Israel. A year after he joined the spy agency, he became a case officer in its Tzomet, or Junction, division.

Meidan said Barnea had the qualities essential for success in the role: “emotional intelligence and empathy.” His foreign postings included years in a European capital, where Mossad colleagues said he proved to be charming, focused and determined.

The latter qualities were evident from an early age. Barnea was born in Ashkelon, Israel, in 1965. His father, Yosef Brunner, left Hitler’s Germany in 1933 for British-ruled Palestine and eventually served as a lieutenant colonel in the early years of the Israel Defense Forces.

At age 14, Barnea’s parents enrolled him in a military boarding school. He became a fitness fanatic and still runs or cycles when he has the chance. When it came time to do his required military service, Barnea won a coveted spot in the Sayeret Matkal, an elite commando unit frequently dispatched across Israel’s borders to collect intelligence or carry out covert attacks or sabotage.

In the 1990s, when he began his career as a spy, the Mossad’s main focus was on Palestinian terrorism. Barnea, who speaks Arabic, proved adept at running agents in and around the PLO and other organizations.

He rose through the ranks and was part of the Mossad’s leadership when it decided to make gathering intelligence on Iran its top priority in 2002. The shift reflected growing concern about Iran’s secretive nuclear program and its ties with powerful regional proxies such as Hezbollah.

In 2019, Barnea was named deputy head of the Mossad and chief of its operations directorate. Within the agency, he stood out as an advocate of aggressive operations aimed at Iranian scientists, nuclear sites and Iran’s growing arsenal of missiles that could reach Israel.

In November 2020, Barnea oversaw the operation that assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a physicist and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general who was in charge of the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. After months of surveillance by non-Israeli agents, the Mossad was able to figure out Fakhrizadeh’s travel patterns. A plan was hatched to park a Nissan pickup truck by the side of the road and install a unique remote-controlled machine gun on its bed. The weapon had a sophisticated camera and artificial intelligence software that would identify Fakhrizadeh and shoot only at him.

The operation was controlled from Mossad headquarters, north of Tel Aviv, where Barnea was joined in the command center by his boss, agency director Yossi Cohen. They could see the nuclear physicist’s car approaching, and then the gun opened fire, hitting Fakhrizadeh several times while sparing his wife, who was sitting next to him.

Seven months later, Barnea was appointed head of the Mossad by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the 13th man to hold the job.

In the years that followed, Barnea built on the strengths of the Fakhrizadeh operation, recruiting scores of non-Israeli agents for operations inside Iran. Those agents played crucial roles in the June airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program, identifying the locations of nuclear scientists’ homes and knocking out Iran’s air defenses.

A colleague in the Mossad’s top ranks, Haim Tomer, said that Barnea may not be as “strategic, charismatic or flamboyant” as some of his predecessors, but he has proved himself to be a “top-tier operator.”

The Mossad’s successes under Barnea include the exploding pagers that decimated Hezbollah, the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and a Hamas political leader who was visiting Tehran, and the commando raids that destroyed Iran’s air defenses and allowed Israel to strike the nuclear facilities without losing a plane.

Those missions represent a remarkable turnaround for Israelis in the intelligence community, many of whom felt they had failed the nation after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 251. That sense of shame was felt in every agency, even ones like the Mossad that were not chiefly responsible for monitoring Hamas.

The Mossad’s directors generally serve for five years, and so Barnea, or Dadi as he is known to his staff, may be replaced by the middle of 2026; but his term could be extended as recognition of his successes.

“These are historic days for the people of Israel,” Barnea told a gathering of operatives at Mossad headquarters after the brief war in June, where he referred to his close cooperation with the CIA. “The Iranian threat, which has endangered our security for decades, has been significantly thwarted thanks to extraordinary cooperation between the Israel Defense Forces, which led the campaign, and the Mossad, which operated alongside — together with the support of our ally, the United States.”

Yossi Melman is a commentator on Israeli intelligence and a documentary filmmaker. Dan Raviv is a former CBS correspondent and host of “The Mossad Files” podcast. They are the co-authors of “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.”

Students will pay the price for gutting a key agency for disbursing federal aid and overseeing private student loan companies.

by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv for ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the early morning hours of June 13, a commando team led by a young Iranian, S.T., settled into position on the outskirts of Tehran. The target was an anti-aircraft battery, part of the umbrella of radars and missiles set up to protect the capital and its military installations from aerial attack.

Across the country, teams of Israeli-trained commandos recruited from Iran and neighboring nations were preparing to attack Iranian defenses from within.

As described by their handlers, their motives were a mix of personal and political. Some were seeking revenge against a repressive, clerical regime that had imposed strict limits on political expression and daily life. Others were enticed by cash, the promise of medical care for family members or opportunities to attend college overseas.

The attack had been planned for more than a year by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Just nine months earlier, the spy agency had shocked the world with its technical prowess — executing a plot hatched in 2014 by its director at the time, Tamir Pardo, that crippled Hezbollah by detonating pagers booby-trapped with tiny but lethal amounts of explosives. According to Hezbollah, the blasts killed 30 fighters and 12 civilians, including two children, and injured more than 3,500.

At 3 a.m. on June 13, S.T. and a foreign legion of roughly 70 commandos opened fire with drones and missiles on a carefully chosen list of anti-aircraft batteries and ballistic missile launchers. (His handlers in the Mossad would only tell us his initials.) The next day, another group of Iranians and others recruited from the region launched a second wave of attacks inside Iran.

In detailed interviews, 10 present and former Israeli intelligence officials described the commando raids and a wealth of previously undisclosed details of the country’s decadeslong covert effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. They requested anonymity so they could speak freely.

The officials said the commando attacks were pivotal in June’s airstrikes, allowing Israel’s air force to carry out wave after wave of bombing runs without losing a single plane. Informed by intelligence gathered by the Mossad’s agents on the ground, Israeli warplanes pounded nuclear facilities, destroyed around half of Iran’s 3,000 ballistic missiles and 80% of its launchers, and fired missiles at the bedrooms of Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders.

As they had with the pagers, Israeli spies took advantage of their ability to penetrate their adversary’s communications systems. Early in the aerial attack, Israeli cyberwarriors sent a fake message to Iran’s top military leaders, luring them to a phantom meeting in an underground bunker that was then demolished in a precision strike. Twenty were killed, including three chiefs of staff.

The strategic map of the region has been dramatically redrawn since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages. Public attention, particularly in recent weeks, has focused on Israel’s retaliation against Gaza, which has caused scores of thousands of deaths and a deepening famine that has been globally condemned.

The secret war between Israel and Iran has attracted far less public attention but has also played a significant role in the region’s changing balance of power.

In 2018, Israeli-trained operatives broke into an unguarded Tehran warehouse and used high-temperature plasma cutters to crack safes containing drawings, data, computer disks and planning books. The material, weighing over 1,000 pounds, was loaded onto two trucks and driven into neighboring Azerbaijan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed the material at a press conference in Tel Aviv and said it proved Iran had been lying about its nuclear intentions.

Two years later, the Mossad killed one of Iran’s top physicists, using artificial intelligence-enhanced facial recognition to direct a remotely operated machine gun parked on a roadside near his weekend house.

In the lead-up to June’s air attacks, according to Israeli planners, they arranged for unwitting truck drivers to smuggle into Iran tons of “metallic equipment” — the parts for the weapons used by the commando teams.

Israeli officials said these operations reflect a fundamental shift in the Mossad’s approach that began about 15 years ago. The agents in Iran who broke into the safes, set up the machine guns, blasted the air defenses and watched the scientists’ apartments were not Israelis. All were either Iranians or citizens of third countries, according to senior Israeli officials with direct knowledge of the operations. For years, such missions in Iran had been the exclusive work of Israeli field operatives. But officials said the growing unpopularity of the Iranian regime has made it much easier to attract agents.

S.T. was one of them. Israeli officials said he grew up in a working-class family in a small town near Tehran. He enrolled in college and was living a seemingly ordinary student life, when he and several classmates were arrested by Iran’s feared Basij militia and taken to a detention center where they were tortured with electric shocks and brutally beaten.

S.T. and his friends were ultimately released, but the experience left him enraged and eager for revenge. Soon after, a relative living overseas provided his name to an Israeli spy whose job was to identify disaffected Iranians. Messages were exchanged via an encrypted phone app, and S.T. accepted a free trip to a neighboring country.

A case officer from the Mossad invited him to work as a covert operative against Iran. He agreed, asking only that Israel pledge to take care of his family if anything went wrong. (Iran summarily executes anyone caught spying for foreign countries, especially Israel.)

He was trained for months outside of Iran by Israeli weapons specialists. Just before the attack was to begin, he and his small team slipped back into the country to play their role in one of the biggest and most complex military operations in Israel’s history.

The Origins of a Secret War

The Mossad made Iran its top priority in 1993 after Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, seemingly ending decades of conflict.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, center-right — flanked by, from left, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli negotiator Joel Singer, President Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization — signs the Oslo Accords in 1993. The agreement sought to end decades of conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. (J. David Ake/AFP via Getty Images)

Israel had long had a complicated relationship with Iran. For decades, it maintained a strategic alliance with the shah of Iran. But Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Islamists who overthrew the monarch in 1979 described the Jewish state as a “cancerous tumor” that should be excised from the Middle East.

Israel’s strategy is, in effect, to protect its nuclear monopoly in the region. It does not publicly acknowledge its arsenal, estimated at more than 90 warheads. The Israeli air force destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor under construction in 2007.

After the Iraq airstrike, Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, declared that his country had a right to prevent neighbors from building their own bomb. “We cannot allow a second Holocaust,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, left, in 1981 with Ariel Sharon, who at the time was the defense minister and would become prime minister in 2001. Begin said that his country had a right to prevent its neighbors from building a nuclear bomb. (STF/AFP via Getty Images)

A few years later, Iran began researching nuclear weapons, drawing on the expertise of a Pakistani engineer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who had once worked for a Dutch company that produced enriched uranium.

Shabtai Shavit, the Mossad director whose term ended in 1996, said Israel was aware of Khan’s travels in the region but did not initially detect his crucial role in Iran’s program. “We didn’t fully understand his intentions,” Shavit told us in an interview before his death in 2023. “If we had known, I would have ordered my combatants to kill him. I believe that could have reversed the course of history.”

According to United Nations nuclear inspectors, the Iranians used blueprints provided by Khan to begin building the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium they purchased from Pakistan, China and South Africa.

In 2000, Shavit’s successor drew up plans for the Mossad’s special missions unit known as Kidon — Hebrew for “bayonet” — to assassinate Khan while he was visiting what one official described as “a Southeast Asian country.” The mission was shelved when Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, told President Bill Clinton he would rein in Khan’s global activities.

Iran turned to Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani engineer who had worked for a Dutch company that produced enriched uranium, as Iran began researching nuclear weapons. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

That promise wasn’t kept.

That same year, the Mossad discovered that the Iranians were building a secret enrichment plant near Natanz, a city about 200 miles south of Tehran. The spy agency tipped off an Iranian dissident group, which went public with the revelation two years later.

Mossad veterans said that operatives — likely Israelis posing as Europeans installing or servicing equipment — walked around Natanz wearing shoes with double soles that collected dust and soil samples. Testing eventually revealed that the Iranian-made centrifuges were enriching uranium well beyond the 5% level needed for a nuclear power plant. (Medical isotopes use 20% enriched uranium; bombs need 90%.)

In 2001, Israel elected Gen. Ariel Sharon, famous for his belligerent toughness, as prime minister. The following year, Sharon named one of his favorite generals, Meir Dagan, as director of the Mossad. Both had a reputation for pushing boundaries and defying norms.

Dagan, who led the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, decided to make stopping Iran’s nuclear program the spy agency’s main goal.

Like Begin, who was born in Poland, Dagan was haunted by the Holocaust. Heads of foreign intelligence agencies recalled visiting his office and seeing a photograph of Nazi soldiers brutalizing Dagan’s grandfather on the wall. Explaining the photo’s meaning at an anti-Netanyahu rally in 2015, he said: “I swore that that would never happen again. I hope and believe that I have done everything in my power to keep that promise.”

Meir Dagan, who led the Mossad from 2002 to 2011, had this photograph of Nazi soldiers brutalizing his grandfather on the wall of his office. He explained its meaning in 2015: “I swore that that would never happen again. I hope and believe that I have done everything in my power to keep that promise.” (Yad Vashem)

Under Dagan’s leadership, the Mossad organized an array of covert operations to slow the Iranian program. Israeli agents began assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists, sending operatives on motorcycles to attach small bombs to cars in traffic.

The Art of Recruitment

Dagan took pride in the Mossad’s growing ability to recruit Iranians and others for covert operations inside Iran.

One key to the spy agency’s success is the ethnic composition of Iran. Israeli officials noted in interviews that roughly 40% of the country’s population of 90 million is made up of ethnic minorities: Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and others.

Shortly before he died in 2016, Dagan told us that “the best pool for recruiting agents inside Iran lies within the country’s ethnic and human mosaic. Many of them oppose the regime. Some even hate it.”

Present and former officials said Dagan championed the shift to relying on foreign-born agents. In the early years of the effort to penetrate Iran, the spy agency had relied mostly on Israelis, known to Mossad insiders as “blue and white” — a reference to the colors of Israel’s flag.

Under Dagan, the Mossad’s leadership came to believe they could find highly effective agents in Iran or among Iranian exiles and others living in one of the seven countries that border it.

Meir Dagan, seen in an undated photograph, was a proponent of using foreign-born agents for the Mossad’s missions against Iran. (Yaakov Saar/GPO/Getty Images)

Present and former officials said the recruits fell into two categories. Some gravitated to the realm of traditional espionage, gathering intelligence and passing it on to their handler. Others expressed a willingness to carry out violent operations, including attacks on nuclear scientists.

Not surprisingly, given the risk of summary execution, many had initial doubts.

“Convincing someone to betray their country is no small feat,” said a former senior Mossad officer who oversaw units handling foreign agents. “It’s a process of gradual erosion. You start with a minor request, an insignificant task. Then another. These are trial runs. If they perform well, you assign them something larger, more meaningful. And if they refuse — well, by then you have leverage: pressure, threats, even blackmail.”

Spymasters, he said, try to avoid threats or coercion. “It’s better to guide them to a place where they act willingly — where they take the first step themselves,” the former officer said.

The most critical element is trust. “Your agent must be loyal and emotionally tied to you. Like a soldier who charges forward despite the danger, trusting his comrades, so it is with agents. He goes on the mission because he trusts his handler and feels a deep sense of responsibility toward him.”

Most of the people who agreed to work for Israel expected payment for the risks they were taking. But the present and former officials said the driving force for people who agree to spy on their own country is often more primal.

“Financial reward is, of course, important,” the former Mossad officer said. “But people are also driven by emotion — hatred, love, dependence, revenge. Yet it always helps when the recruit’s motives are supported by some kind of tangible benefit: not necessarily a direct payment but some type of indirect help.”

This is how S.T. was recruited.

His handlers said he was consumed by hatred toward the regime and what had been done to him by the Basij militia. But what finally pushed him to cooperate was the Mossad’s offer to arrange medical treatment unavailable in Iran for a relative.

For decades, medical care has been one of the Mossad’s signature recruitment methods. Israeli intelligence has links with doctors and clinics in several countries, and arranging surgery and various therapies was also used to penetrate Palestinian extremist groups. It has featured even more in approaches to Iranians, in the hope of persuading them to help Israel.

The Mossad also uses the internet to attract agents, creating websites and publishing social media posts aimed at Iranians that offer to help people suffering from life-threatening illnesses such as cancer. These posts include phone numbers or encrypted contact options.

Israeli intelligence can mobilize its international network to find trusted doctors or clinics — places that won’t ask too many questions. The Mossad typically pays the bills directly and discreetly.

Another incentive used to entice potential spies is higher education in a foreign country. Based on years of research and experience, Mossad recruiters know that Iranians crave access to quality education. Even the fundamentalist religious regime of the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, encourages academic advancement. This makes offers of placement in Western universities, or boarding schools for teenagers, an especially compelling tool.

Once a candidate is identified, the Mossad sets up an initial meeting in an accessible location — often in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Armenia or Azerbaijan, which are relatively easy for Iranians to enter. Other options include destinations in Southeast Asia like Thailand and India that allow Iranian citizens to apply online for business, medical or tourist visas.

Candidates undergo a series of meetings and psychological evaluations. Psychologists observe their behavior, often from behind one-way mirrors. They fill out detailed questionnaires about their personal history, including intimate details about their family life, and are questioned by a polygraph examiner.

Agents are regularly retested after they begin working in the field. Every action, whether minor or major, is followed by another lie detector test to confirm continued loyalty.

They receive extensive training and supervision. To avoid arousing suspicion, they are told what to wear, where to buy their clothing, what cars to drive, and even how, when and where to deposit the money they receive.

The agent-handler relationship is critical, as a former Mossad operative who “ran” agents explained. In many cases, the handler is simultaneously confessor, babysitter, psychologist, spiritual mentor and surrogate family member.

The goal is to build a bond so strong that the agent feels safe and supported — comfortable enough to share even their deepest personal secrets, including their sexual relationships.

Any and all information about the agent can be valuable to the Mossad, either as a red flag marking a potential vulnerability to Iran’s secret police or another aspect of the agent’s life that the handlers can put to use. Among the key questions: Who’s in the person’s social circle? Can he or she use that relationship to the Mossad’s benefit?

The operatives who were assigned to assassinate nuclear scientists on the street received extensive training from Mossad case officers. They were taught to ride motorcycles and either shoot their targets at close range or plant explosives on their vehicles.

The intent was both to deprive the Iranian program of expertise and to discourage promising scientists from working on nuclear weapons. From 2010 to 2012 the Israelis killed at least four scientists and barely missed another.

The operations were managed by Israelis, down to the smallest details, often from nearby countries or directly from Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv, and occasionally by Israeli intelligence officers who briefly entered Iran.

Operation Rising Lion

Over the years, the Mossad and Israel’s military repeatedly drew up plans to halt Iran’s nuclear program by bombing its key facilities. Israel’s political leaders always drew back under pressure from American presidents who feared an attack would trigger a regional war, destabilizing the Middle East. Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, had stockpiled tens of thousands of missiles, enough to overwhelm Israel’s air defenses and hit its largest cities.

Those calculations shifted dramatically in the past year.

In April and October of 2024, Iran fired missiles and drones directly at Israel. Nearly all were shot down with the help of the United States and allies. The Israeli air force responded with airstrikes that destroyed much of Iran’s air defenses.

The remains of an Iranian missile ended up near the Dead Sea in Israel on Oct. 2, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Getty Images)

The Israeli military had begun planning a bombing campaign against Iran in mid-2024 that it hoped would be ready within a year. With Donald Trump’s victory in the November election, and Hezbollah neutralized, Israeli officials saw a window of opportunity.

Israel’s American-trained pilots had been secretly flying over Iran since 2016 — learning the landscape and exploring various routes to minimize the chances of detection.

One nuclear target in Iran, however, was considered so formidable that the Israeli air force had no plan for destroying it. The Iranians had built a uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo and buried it inside a mountain — nearly 300 feet beneath the surface. Iran tried to keep Fordo a secret, but the Mossad and American and British intelligence were able to track movements in and out of the mountain. President Barack Obama disclosed its existence in 2009, and United Nations inspectors who visited the site soon after found that Iran was planning for up to 3,000 highly advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium.

A 2013 satellite image shows a uranium-enrichment facility in Fordo, Iran. (DigitalGlobe via Getty Images)

Only the United States had a bomb powerful enough to pierce a mountain: the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the world’s largest conventional bomb known as a “bunker buster.”

And so Israeli military planners drew up a plan for a highly risky ground operation, details of which are disclosed here for the first time. Under the plan, elite commandos were to be smuggled to the Fordo site without being detected. Then they would storm the building, taking advantage of the element of surprise. Once inside, their mission would be to blow up the centrifuges, grab Iran’s enriched uranium and escape.

The new head of the Mossad was skeptical. David Barnea, known as Dadi, had long pushed for aggressive actions against Iran. He had overseen the remote-machine gun attack in 2020 just before being promoted to the top job. Yet he thought the plans for a commando attack on Fordo were far too risky. Barnea worried that some of Israel’s best soldiers and spies would be killed or taken hostage, a nightmare for Israelis already deeply pained by the ordeal of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since the attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

Barnea and other Israeli officials came to believe that the Trump administration might join an Israeli attack on Iran, with U.S. warplanes dropping the massive “bunker busters” on Fordo. Trump had repeatedly and publicly declared that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb.

To prepare for what would be dubbed Operation Rising Lion, the Mossad and the military intelligence agency, Aman, stepped up their tracking of Iran’s military leaders and nuclear teams. Several of the operation’s planners said that Barnea significantly expanded the Mossad’s Tzomet, or Junction, division, which recruits and trains non-Israeli agents. The decision was made to entrust this foreign legion with Israel’s most sophisticated equipment for paramilitary operations and communications. The cover stories for each agent, known as their legends, were checked and rechecked for inconsistencies.

The Mossad’s espionage efforts were helped by a geographic fact. Iran is bordered by Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Smuggling is a way of life in the region, as thousands of people earn their living using donkeys, camels, cars and trucks to carry drugs, fuel and electronics across the borders.

The Mossad had developed contacts with smugglers — and often with the government intelligence agencies — in all seven nations.

“Bringing equipment in and out is relatively easy,” said an Israeli who has worked with Mossad on logistics, “and the Mossad also used front companies that legally shipped boxes and crates by sea and on trucks driven legitimately through border crossings.”

The material was delivered to “infrastructure agents,” Mossad operatives inside Iran who store the material until it’s needed. Mossad veterans said the gear can be hidden in safe houses for years, updated as technology evolves or maintenance is needed.

Officials said the Mossad trained the non-Israeli agents who would attack Iranian targets for about five months. Some were brought to Israel, where models had been built to enable practice runs. Others rehearsed their missions in third countries where they met Israeli experts.

There were two groups of commandos, each with 14 teams of four to six members. Some already lived in Iran. Others were anti-regime exiles who slipped into the country on the eve of the attack.

Each had their instructions, but they were also in touch with Israeli planners who could change or update the attack plan. Most of the teams were tasked with striking Iranian air defenses from a list of targets provided by the Israeli air force.

The Mossad had code names for each of the teams and their assignments, which were based on combinations of musical notes.

On the night of June 12, the teams arrived at their positions as orchestrated. The Israelis in charge of the covert operations directed the agents to leave little or no equipment behind. (Iranian media reports after the attack asserted that the infiltrators had missed their targets and fled without their gear; Israeli officials said what the Iranians found were insignificant components — the equivalent of gum wrappers.)

“One hundred percent of the anti-aircraft batteries marked for the Mossad by the air force were destroyed,” a senior Israeli intelligence official said. Most were near Tehran in areas where the Israeli air force had not previously operated.

In the first hours of the war, one of the commando teams struck an Iranian ballistic missile launcher. Israeli analysts believe this mission had a disproportionate impact, causing Iran to delay its retaliatory salvo against Israel out of fear that other missile launchers were vulnerable to attacks from inside Iran.

Officials emphasized that the military logistics of the plan were the work of Aman and the Israeli air force, which hit more than a thousand targets over the 11 days of airstrikes. But officials agree that the Mossad contributed key intelligence for one aspect of Rising Lion: the assassinations of senior Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists.

The Mossad compiled detailed information on the habits and whereabouts of 11 Iranian nuclear scientists. The dossiers even mapped the locations of the bedrooms in the men’s homes. On the morning of June 13, Israeli air force warplanes fired air-to-ground missiles at those coordinates, killing all 11.

After a delay, Iran retaliated with a barrage of missiles. Most were intercepted, but the ones that got through did considerable damage. Israel reported 30 civilian deaths and estimated its reconstruction costs at $12 billion. Iran’s state media put the death toll in their country at more than 600.

An aerial view of the destruction after an Iranian ballistic missile hit Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv, Israel, on June 14. (Yair Palti/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The question of how much Iran’s nuclear efforts were set back remains in dispute. Trump has insisted the American airstrikes on Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan “obliterated” Iran’s program. Analysts in Israeli and American intelligence have been more restrained.

“This war significantly set them back,” said a former head of Aman, Gen. Tamir Hayman. “Iran is no longer a nuclear threshold state, as it was on the eve of the war. It could be able to return to threshold status in one or two years at the earliest, assuming a decision by the Supreme Leader to break out toward a bomb.”

Hayman, who now heads the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, said it’s possible the assault might have the opposite of its intended effect, if Iran becomes even more eager to build a bomb that could deter future Israeli attacks.

Yossi Melman is a commentator on Israeli intelligence and a documentary filmmaker. Dan Raviv is a former CBS correspondent and host of “The Mossad Files” podcast. They are the co-authors of “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.”

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