I am, by trade, an investigator. I follow facts. I withhold opinion until the information sets in concrete and dries. But since I've been appearing on television and radio to discuss what is unfolding in Iran, I want to share my thinking here, stripped of political noise and conspiracy, and focused entirely on intelligence, espionage, and the covert architecture that made this moment possible.

In other words, let’s look at the facts.

Right now, those facts read like the opening chapter of a spy thriller.

The conflict began on Saturday, February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched a coordinated strike campaign inside Iran.

This was not improvisation. Intelligence agencies on both sides had reportedly waited months for a rare convergence: senior political and military leaders of the Islamic Republic gathered in the same place at the same time. Opportunities like that do not arrive often. When they do, professionals move.

Israeli and U.S. intelligence tracked Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to a leadership meeting in Tehran. Israeli fighter jets struck his compound in broad daylight — roughly thirty bombs on a single site. The broader operation was staggering in scale: more than two hundred Israeli aircraft striking approximately five hundred targets across Iran in the opening phase alone, the largest single air operation in Israel's history.

Khamenei was killed. Numerous senior Iranian officials died alongside him. Within hours, the region descended into chaos.

Iran retaliated with missile and drone strikes against Israel and U.S. positions across the Middle East. Explosions were reported from the Persian Gulf to Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates. At sea, for the first time since World War II, an American submarine reportedly torpedoed an enemy warship, sinking an Iranian vessel quietly, with a message from a Sea Wolf that no press release could deliver.

One of the most tragic moments came when a girls' elementary school in Minab was destroyed during the strikes, reportedly killing numerous children. In the fog of war, the exact details remain contested — who was responsible, how many were lost, but I’m keeping my eye on the investigation.

As the old saying goes: war never changes.

Air strikes and missiles grab headlines. Intelligence professionals know the real story almost always begins much earlier — in back-channels, safe houses, and the long, patient cultivation of human sources inside hostile regimes.

Operations of this magnitude do not happen without deep penetration of the target. Identifying the precise time and location of a senior leadership meeting. Tracking the movement of high-value targets inside hardened compounds. Confirming the presence of someone as elusive, as protected, as Iran's Supreme Leader. That requires human intelligence. Otherwise known as sources.

Clearly, someone talked.

Iran's power structure runs through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (the IRGC) an organization that blends military command, intelligence operations, and ideological enforcement into something closer to a parallel state. For Western intelligence to know the exact moment Iran's leadership was gathered together, sources almost certainly exist inside the IRGC itself, or extremely close to it.

The CIA and Mossad have spent decades building these networks. Successfully penetrating Iran's security apparatus would represent a crown jewel of espionage — the kind of achievement that gets written about in memoirs thirty years after the fact, if at all.

If those penetrations exist (and the precision of this operation strongly suggests they do) then this may be one of the most consequential intelligence operations of the century.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: no one has clearly articulated what comes next.

Neither the United States nor Israel has publicly outlined a plan for the political future of Iran. Removing a regime is difficult. Replacing one is harder. And history is unambiguous on what follows when no one fills that vacuum deliberately.

Someone always fills it.

The labyrinth does not end at the strike. It begins there.

The Optimistic Scenario. Iran has endured years of mass protest, most powerfully the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement, which signaled deep fractures between a population hungry for change and a theocracy determined to deny it. Exiled opposition figures, most prominently Reza Pahlavi, have urged Iran's military and security forces to remember where their real obligation lies: to the Iranian nation, not to the Islamic Republic. He has warned those who continue defending the regime that they risk going down with it. If Iran's security forces fracture or stand aside, a pathway toward secular governance becomes imaginable. It would represent one of the most significant political transformations in the modern Middle East.

The Dangerous Scenario. If the clerical regime collapses, the IRGC could simply absorb the vacuum and assume direct control, leading to a military-led state that preserves the architecture of repression under a different banner. Military governments rarely prioritize democratic reform. Their focus is stability, control, and institutional survival.

The Chaotic Scenario. This is the one history delivers most often. The IRGC splinters. Militias emerge. Terrorist organizations rush in. Regional proxies compete for territory and influence. The Middle East has lived this pattern before. It rarely ends well, and it rarely ends quickly.

For years, China has purchased significant volumes of Iranian oil, paying in yuan as part of a deliberate effort to erode the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global energy markets. Intelligence officials have long argued that China also quietly supplied Iran with materials and technology that helped develop its missile programs — the bristling porcupine that Iran constructed across the region, sharpened in part with Beijing's assistance.

If Iran's regime collapses, or even weakens significantly, China finds itself on the losing side of that equation. A strategic partner gone. An energy relationship disrupted. A proxy network dismantled. The geopolitical map shifts in ways Beijing cannot easily absorb.

That is not an accident. It is likely a feature.

I have always considered myself a better field operative than an armchair strategist. I won’t pretend to know whether a long-term plan exists, or what it contains if it does.

What I know is this: uncertainty creates instability, and instability in the Middle East has a habit of spreading far beyond the region itself. Hamas remains in Gaza. Hezbollah operates in Lebanon. The IRGC remains intact as an institution. Nuclear material still sits inside Iran.

Navigating this labyrinth will not be simple. The walls shift. The exits are not marked.

But investigators learn something over time: hope is not naïve. It is necessary.

There is also a possible future in which Iran emerges from this as a secular nation. In that future, children study mathematics instead of chanting death to their neighbors. Trade flows between Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, reshaping the region's political landscape. Terrorist proxies, cut off from billions in Iranian funding, slowly wither. Bomb shelters become storage rooms. Iranians forced into exile return home without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or torture.

That future is far from guaranteed. But it’s possible.

Inside the labyrinth, the path forward is rarely clear. But somewhere ahead, past the dead ends, past the false exits, past the fog of war that never fully lifts, there is always a way out.

~ Eric

Before the first bomb fell on Iran, another battlefield had already been active for months—cyberspace.

Reports indicate that Israeli and U.S. cyber operators conducted a series of coordinated digital intrusions designed to build intelligence and disrupt Iran’s ability to respond. One operation allegedly compromised a widely used Iranian prayer-time app, turning a religious utility into a psychological operations platform. Users suddenly received messages urging Iran’s security forces to defect and telling the public that “help has arrived.” Even Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, was briefly hijacked with messages declaring that the regime’s security apparatus had suffered a crippling blow.

At the same time, Israeli intelligence reportedly penetrated Tehran’s smart-city surveillance systems, gaining access to traffic cameras across the capital. The footage—encrypted and transmitted to servers in Israel—allowed analysts to conduct what intelligence professionals call “pattern-of-life” analysis, tracking the movement of officials, security convoys, and leadership routines across the city. In parallel, cyber operators allegedly disrupted cellular infrastructure near key targets, preventing warning messages from reaching Ayatollah Khamenei’s security detail during the strikes.

If true, these operations illustrate something cybersecurity professionals already understand: modern cities are intelligence platforms. Traffic cameras, smart infrastructure, and connected devices can quietly become strategic sensors when accessed by a determined adversary.

We’ve seen hints of this vulnerability before. In Washington, D.C. in 2017, attackers compromised roughly 65% of the city’s police surveillance cameras just days before a presidential inauguration—proof that even public safety systems can become high-value cyber targets.

The lesson is clear: future wars will not begin with missiles or tanks. They will begin with malware, compromised apps, hijacked sensors, and disrupted communications.

Cyber warfare is rapidly becoming the central axis of military strategy—the invisible battlefield where intelligence is gathered, defenses are blinded, and victory is often decided before the first shot is fired.

Iran cannot realistically strike the United States with conventional military force. Geography, logistics, and the overwhelming strength of the U.S. military make that nearly impossible.

But cyberspace is another story.

U.S. intelligence agencies (including CISA, the FBI, and the NSA) have repeatedly warned that cyber actors tied to Iran’s IRGC have been probing American critical infrastructure for years. Their activity includes reconnaissance, espionage, and attempts to map vulnerabilities inside the systems that keep modern life running.

Those targets are predictable: power grids, water systems, healthcare networks, and transportation infrastructure.

We’ve already seen early warning signs. Iranian-linked hackers have launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against infrastructure in multiple countries, including Israel. Iran also tolerates—and sometimes quietly enables—cybercriminal groups that attack Western targets, giving them a pool of unofficial partners who can surge during a geopolitical crisis.

The good news is this: even if Iran launches cyberattacks against U.S. infrastructure, they are unlikely to cause long-term outages. American systems are resilient, and restoration plans are well practiced.

But even a temporary disruption lasting several days or more can create real problems.

A week without power or water is a long week.

Here are five simple steps you can take today to prepare:

Don’t panic. Think of it the same way you prepare for a winter storm or a hurricane: a little preparation now makes a short disruption far less stressful.

Because the wars of the future won’t always start with missiles.

Sometimes they start with the lights going out. 

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This week I experimented with Google’s new research model called Paper Banana, designed to generate academic-style diagrams and technical illustrations.

I asked it to turn my title story—The Iran Labyrinth—into a methodology diagram of the conflict itself.

The result is a layered intelligence map showing how modern warfare unfolds:

cyber espionage → intelligence gathering → strategic targeting → military action → uncertain geopolitical outcomes. I think it could have down better, but maybe my prompt was to blame!

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