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The Iran-Israel war is being fought not only with missiles and naval blockades — it is also being waged in the shadows, inside secure military bases, through encrypted messaging apps and cryptocurrency wallets. And according to Israeli prosecutors, Iran has just scored one of its most damaging intelligence victories of the conflict: a penetration of
The Iran-Israel war is being fought not only with missiles and naval blockades — it is also being waged in the shadows, inside secure military bases, through encrypted messaging apps and cryptocurrency wallets. And according to Israeli prosecutors, Iran has just scored one of its most damaging intelligence victories of the conflict: a penetration of the Israeli Air Force that put classified data on the country’s f 15 israel fleet directly into the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Two Israeli Air Force technicians have been charged with espionage for Iran in what Israeli security officials are describing as one of the worst counter-intelligence failures in the nation’s recent military history — a breach kept under wraps for nearly a month before going public.
The suspects, Asaf Shitrit, 21, and Sagi Haik, 19, served as mechanics and avionics specialists in the 133rd “Knights of the Twin Tail” Squadron — one of the IAF’s elite units operating the israel f 15 fleet from Tel Nof Airbase, located south of Tel Aviv. Both were arrested in March 2026 but only charged in late April after an investigation led jointly by the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and military prosecutors.
According to the indictment, the two men maintained contact over several months with operatives from the IRGC Intelligence Organization, primarily through the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. Payment was handled in cryptocurrency, leaving a difficult-to-trace financial trail.
The data they allegedly passed to their Iranian handlers is the most alarming element of the case. Prosecutors say the stolen materials included technical documentation on the f 15 israel “Baaz” (A/C/D variants), covering avionics systems, self-protection suites, and engine schematics — exactly the kind of information that an adversary could use to develop countermeasures, identify system vulnerabilities, or design targeted electronic warfare responses. Also passed along: photographs identifying the face of an IAF flight instructor, in violation of strict Israeli military censorship regulations.
The charges go further — and darker. Iranian handlers reportedly tasked one of the soldiers with gathering intelligence on former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In the most chilling detail to emerge from the indictment, an Iranian handler allegedly asked one of the accused to assassinate IAF commander Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar — the head of the entire Israeli Air Force. The soldier reportedly told the handler he would “check it and try.”
Prosecutors also revealed that the two suspects had been in discussions with their handlers about traveling to an unnamed Arab country for in-person “training.” Perhaps most alarmingly, investigators warned that if one falsified document the suspects had prepared had reached Tehran, it could have been misread as genuine intelligence and triggered a preemptive Iranian strike against Israel.
Eight other soldiers at Tel Nof Airbase are now suspected of having known about the espionage without reporting it — an institutional failure that has deepened the scandal beyond the two principal accused.
In the broader context of Iran-Israel war latest news, the Tel Nof case is not an anomaly — it is the latest data point in what Israeli security officials have officially termed an “espionage epidemic.” Since October 2023, more than 50 indictments have been filed against Israeli citizens for spying on behalf of Iran. The Shin Bet reported a 400 percent surge in Iranian espionage recruitment attempts in 2025, a pace that has accelerated further since the outbreak of full-scale conflict in February 2026.
Iran’s IRGC intelligence apparatus has dramatically professionalized its Israeli recruitment operation. Rather than relying on ideological motivation, handlers are using financial incentives, personal blackmail, and carefully constructed social media profiles to identify and approach military personnel — a model security experts say is borrowed from Russian intelligence tradecraft.
The iran and israel war has produced Israeli counter-moves in the espionage domain as well. Earlier this month, a precision Israeli airstrike eliminated IRGC intelligence chief Majid Khademi — the architect of many of the surveillance and recruitment operations now bearing fruit in cases like Tel Nof. Khademi had also been deeply involved in attempts to breach U.S. Pentagon systems and coordinated extensively with Russian intelligence services, according to Israeli and American officials.
Meanwhile, Iran’s parallel cyber campaign has not relented. Since Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, over 60 pro-Iranian hacktivist groups mobilized within hours. IRGC-linked group MuddyWater had reportedly pre-planted backdoors inside Israeli-adjacent defense and financial targets long before the kinetic conflict began — part of a layered intelligence preparation that the Tel Nof breach now reveals was running simultaneously with human spy recruitment.
The precise operational damage from the israel f 15 breach remains classified. Israeli military censors have blocked detailed reporting on which specific systems’ data was compromised and whether Iranian engineers have had sufficient time to analyze it. What is clear is that the iran israel war has demonstrated Iran’s willingness and capability to run sophisticated human intelligence operations inside Israel’s most sensitive military facilities — even during an active shooting war.
The question that Israeli defense planners are now urgently trying to answer: how many more Shitrit-and-Haik-style operations are still running that Shin Bet has not yet found?
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