Transcription
Most of the destruction in the current Israel-Iran war has been caused by Israeli and American planes flying across Iran's borders and dropping bombs. But the war didn't start like this. It started with guns, drones, and missiles being smuggled into Iran. So, how did the Israeli military do this? And could you pull it off? Could you smuggle dangerous stuff like that into another country?
The weapons, which were packed in cardboard boxes, were declared as arts and crafts. It turns out successfully smuggling contraband is more difficult than you would expect. The drugs were hidden in layers inside PVC tubing, which was inside long blocks that in turn was concealed within the walls of an industrial freezer, which was found inside crates in the shipping container. Okay, so the babushka doll method apparently doesn't work. But what if you pack the contraband in something super cool like a speedboat? A speedboat imported from Canada caught the attention of customs officers. The boat was put back in its container and it sat here at Port Botney for 3 and 1/2 months waiting for someone to come and pick it up. When the owners arrived, they were arrested, tried, and sentenced to more than a decade without the possibility of speedboating.
But how did the border agents know the drugs were there? They noticed a few things that were a bit unusual that warranted further X-ray and subsequent physical examination. This is the crucial point. While basically all containers are checked for radiation, which makes posting nuclear bombs to your enemies quite difficult, only a fraction of these containers are scanned by X-ray. The trick is figuring out which ones to scan.
Order force and federal police received information about a suspicious shipping container last month. The primary way they do this is with paperwork. Every container has to have paperwork saying where it's coming from, where it's going, who packed it, and what's in it. If the manifest says that the container is registered by IKEA and is carrying IKEA flat packs from IKEA's factory to an IKEA warehouse, it's probably fine. It's safe to say that it's chalk full of gagligs, not narcotics, gunns, not guns, and calaxes, not kalashnikovs. On the other hand, if the manifest says it's from the newly registered Odysius Industries, and it's carrying wooden horses from an abandoned Greek army camp to a town square in the middle of the city of Troy, it's probably going to get x-rayed and questions will be asked about the Bronze Age swordsman inside.
And yet, Israel and Ukraine have started doing basically this, deploying explosive drones hidden inside shipping containers. They're deploying a Trojan horse, but with drones, what I'm calling a Trojan horse, against Iran and Russia. The strike involved 117 drones smuggled into Russia and hidden in the roofs of wooden sheds placed near airfields. Precise assassinations, drone attacks, and car bombs make it clear undercover teams were operating inside Iran. Across both countries, trucks have carried the 21st-century equivalent of Greek soldiers through the city walls. In Iran, in particular, these attacks opened the gate to much larger and more devastating strikes from Israel and the US. So, how did these governments pull these audacious attacks off? And what can intelligence agencies do to defend this newly exposed Achilles heel?
I'm Matt Beavenon and this is If You're Listening. We're going to start this story at a DJ set in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in 2018. [Music] This guy going full send on the mic is Tim, a member of the Ukrainian DJ and fashion collective Dastish Fantastic. Sometime after this absolute heater of a set, Artum and his wife Katya packed up their life and moved from Ukraine to live in the Russian city of Chelabinsk. And why wouldn't you? Chelabinsk seems like quite a buzzy town. It's one of the main hubs on the Trans-Siberian railway. It's also the center of the Russian tractor and tank manufacturing industry. And if that wasn't enough to get you considering it as your next holiday destination, in 2013, a meteor exploded in the sky above it. The meteor's fiery entry into the atmosphere was captured on video. Some of the cameras recorded the bright flash as it exploded and the trail of smoke it left behind. Then this.
So Artum Tim moved to this happening town. In 2024, he became a Russian citizen. And in October, he followed the well-tradden path of many Chelyabinsk men before him and opened up a trucking business. He rented a warehouse and bought at least five trucks. Artum hired Russian drivers to ship things both in and out of Russia and between different Russian regions. It was a legitimate business like so many others operating in the city. And by running a legitimate trucking business for months, Artum was allegedly able to circumvent the screening process for cargo crossing the Russian border. Sometime in the first half of 2025, the trucks started shifting batteries, communications equipment, wood, and parts of explosive drones into Artum's warehouse there. These materials were assembled into 10 structures that look like parts of an ordinary pre-fabricated house and put into shipping containers with detachable tops. In the ceiling cavity of the modular house parts, Artum had mounted several drones which were activated and ready to launch. All of this was done right under the nose of the Russian state, lots of Russian counter-intelligence officers, law enforcement officers, uh, lots of uh, surveillance cameras. Uh, so it's a dictatorship. You you have to understand it's how it's difficult.
Then Artum's Russian drivers were given a final task. The drones were sneaked across the border in wooden crates packed on trucks, then driven to locations near air bases and launched remotely. Deep in southern Siberia near Russia's border with Mongolia is a truck stop with a cafe. It's just a regular roadside cafe with one weird exception. In the car park, there is a statue of two woolly rhinoceroses, an adult and a calf. A helpful sign on the plinth holding the statue says that the woolly rhinoceros was native to the area but went extinct about 14,000 years ago. On the 1st of June 2025, a 61-year-old truck driver named Andre was transporting two of Artum Tim's modular houses when he was instructed over the phone to stop at the cafe with the rhino statues. Andre turned into the car park and pulled on the handbrake. And then within an instant, everything changed. The top slid off the containers on the back of the truck and drones started flying out. Drone after drone strike planes at air bases across five Russian regions. Each truck was carrying two containers carrying 36 drones packed in nine rows of four. Each drone is about the size and weight of a ream of A4 paper.
The Ukrainian intelligence service, the SBU, has released video from one of the drones of its entire 6 km journey from Andre's truck to the nearby Blea airfield, which just happens to be where the Russian military keeps part of its long-range strategic bombing fleet. It takes about 15 seconds for the drone to rise out of the truck, orient itself towards its target, and then hit full speed of 70 km/h. At that speed, it takes just under 5 minutes to reach the airfield, then spends about a minute flying around looking for a target. As the drone searches around, you can already see at least three planes on fire around the airfield. Finally, after hunting around for a bit, it settles down on top of a jet and detonates. Meanwhile, back at the truck stop, the unwitting driver Andre and the other people parked there didn't really know what to do. Eventually, the bystanders worked as a team to try and stop the drones. Two of them stood on top of the truck, chucking rocks at the drones, while others kept lobbing new ammunition up to them from the ground. It wasn't very effective. When the smoke cleared, and with the benefit of satellite imagery, the US said around 20 planes were damaged with 10 destroyed. The planes they attacked were bombers, apparently collectively worth 7 billion US. It was 11 out of 10. Really 11 out of 10. And these planes specifically have been causing Ukraine a lot of suffering. So these bombers have been launching what's known as long-range glide bombs against Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians, and that's what the Ukrainians were trying to prevent. Apparently, the destruction was equivalent to about a third of Russia's strategic bombing capacity.
By the time the trucks exploded, Ukraine says the DJ/trucking mogul Artum, his wife Katya, and anyone else who was knowingly involved were out of Russia. According to the Ukrainian government, planning for this Trojan horse attack took a year and a half. It's an extraordinary gambit, but in terms of effectiveness, it's nothing compared to the one Israel pulled off a fortnight later in a very different country from Russia. The mission was years in planning but dreamt of for decades. Tonight, I wish to speak to you, the proud people of Iran. We're in the midst of uh, one of the greatest military operations in history, Operation Rising Lion.
Israel had a number of advantages that Ukraine did not. The primary one is that while Russia keeps its strategic military assets spread out over a vast area, Iran's are all quite closely clustered around the capital, Tehran. In preparation for Operation Rising Lion, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad appears to have set up multiple drone factories throughout Iran, including in Tehran. The parts for the drones were shipped in through a vast network of commercial logistics companies, many of whom were totally unaware of their involvement in the wider operation.
A key difference between Israel and Ukraine's use of Trojan horse attacks, though, is the military power balance. For Ukraine, which doesn't have any real technological advantage over Russia, the drones were the beginning and the end of the strategy. Drones go in, planes go boom, DJ goes home. But Israel has vastly more advanced military technology than Iran does. For Israel, the drones were truly just like the Greeks in the Trojan horse. Just as he hoped, the Trojans had brought the horse inside the walls of Troy. The city was sleeping now, and the walls were unguarded. In the mythological story, the soldiers in the horse were just there to start the assault on Troy by opening the gates and letting the rest of the Greek army in. Caught completely by surprise, the Trojans were easily defeated by the Greek soldiers who found their beautiful princess and took her back safely to Greece. Well, okay, the princess part is a little bit different, but the rest fits.
On Friday, Israeli commandos cleared the way with attacks on air defense sites. The drone swarm targeted the missile launchers with perfect precision, disabling dozens of them and clearing the way for the primary attack, a massive air raid conducted by Israeli jets against Iran's nuclear weapons program and military. We're preparing. We pave the way to Tehran and our pilots over the skies of Tehran will deal blows to the Itono regime that they cannot even imagine. Israel striking what it says were dozens of Iranian military and nuclear sites as well as key officials and scientists. Eight leaders of Iran's missile program were killed when their bunker was hit, as well as the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the armed forces. It was a decapitation strike. Drones, jets, and missiles took out all of the top military brass. This will go as far as Netanyahu can take it. He was born for this fight.
Daybreak in Iran revealed destruction in residential areas. This building where we live blew up. I don't know if they hit it with a missile or what. When the US Air Force went in to drop the big bunker buster bombs on top of the nuclear facilities, they were met with absolutely no resistance. Not a single shot was fired at them the whole time they were in Iraq.
Needless to say, all of this is very exciting for everyone involved in the planning and execution of these Trojan horse plans. But I want to slow down for a moment and consider this question: Are we seeing the ushering in of a new era of warfare, the use of drones from afar? I did tell you that we were slowing down. After all, uh, these drones were smuggled into Russia, hidden for a great span of time, and then activated from 2,500 miles away. Are we prepared both defensively and offensively, Mr. Secretary?
It's an incredibly good question. Let's see how the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth handles it. I would say, sir, it was a a daring and very effective operation that we were not aware of in advance and reflects significant advancements in drone warfare. For most of recent history, the majority of defense planning and funding is based around protecting your country from big threats: ships on the horizon, submarine warfare, stealth bombers. But Ukraine has changed the game. The chairman and I got together right after seeing that and saying, "What more can we do to ensure we're prepared and our pl our country's defensible against something like that?"
Donald Trump is currently proposing spending trillions of dollars protecting the US from ballistic missile attacks with his so-called Golden Dome air defense system, which would defend America against a long-range attack from outside their borders. But the Golden Dome would not protect America from attacks that are launched domestically, these Trojan horse attacks. They're much more low-tech and covert. Ukraine's entire operation probably cost a couple of million dollars to pull off and did $7,000 million worth of damage. In terms of cost-benefit to the attacker, it's more like a terrorist operation than a military one. The 9/11 attacks cost about half a million dollars to pull off, exploiting a vulnerability in airline security, but plugging that loophole was incredibly simple: Just lock the cockpit door. So, there's no way that you can get inside that cockpit uh, no matter what you do if you're on the other side of the door, unless someone lets you in. That's exactly the way they're designed as the access to and from that door is totally controlled by the pilots on the flight deck. Problem basically solved. Airline hijacking has basically been non-existent ever since. But there's no simple fix for making your military and government infrastructure safe from a sudden truck-launched drone swarm. That is far more complicated.
As I'm recording this, there is an extremely shaky ceasefire between Iran and Israel. But Iran has suffered massive, massive losses. Retaliation in the long term is certainly possible, but what will that look like? Could it be a swarm of 72 attack drones emerging from a truck outside a US military base or outside the Pentagon or outside Donald Trump's golf course in Florida? What can be done to stop this? Not allow trucks within 10 kilometers of air bases and golf courses. X-ray the contents of every single container traveling into the country and the ones traveling from city to city; the global supply chain would basically collapse. I mean, we could just ban the manufacturer of drones, but then how will real estate agents get their ads done? Yes, there is always a real estate angle.