Russia’s security services shut parts of a special surveillance system protecting President Vladimir Putin and his closest aides in the wake of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination in Tehran, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The system — which is separate from the nearly 300,000 cameras that surveil Moscow’s citizens — was only turned back on after engineers combed through it in an attempt to hermetically seal it off from the internet, said one of the people.
The extraordinary precautions were taken after Israeli intelligence harvested vast amounts of video footage from Iran’s traffic cameras to help pinpoint the exact location and timing of a February 28 meeting between Khamenei and his closest aides. Several top security officials were killed at the meeting in the opening salvo of the joint US-Israel war on the Islamic republic.