Israeli commandos launched a daring raid into Syrian territory to plant sophisticated camera equipment that looked exactly like the indigenous rocks.
Israel’s elite Flotilla 13 sneaked onto an island near the Syrian port of Tartus on silent skiffs and extracted the stones to replicate for a spy camera.
Under cover of night, the frogmen returned to plant the decoys and set up the surveillance rig, avoiding detection by the Syrians, the American Navy and a British monitoring station.
Until their discovery by locals early this month, the rocks had let the Israelis observe Russian vessels docked in the port for evidence that Moscow was scrambling to get its citizens out of the country, which could signal the end of the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“The Russians have been convinced for a long time that Assad is doomed,” a defense source told the Times of London.
Israel has become more and more nervous as Assad’s grip on power has started to slip, with radical Islamist groups seizing territory near Israel’s border with Syria in the Golan Heights.