The Ayatollah is Dead. Who Will Replace Him?

60 seconds. That was all the time it took for Israel to execute one of the most complex missions in recent history. And at the end of it, eight members of Iran's top leadership, including the nation's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khomeini, lay dead.

While the mission itself took 60 seconds, it was the culmination of decades' worth of painstaking intelligence work by the Israeli Secret Service that had ramped up in the last six months with the aid of the CIA and other American agencies.

According to The New York Times, the CIA had been tracking Khomeini's movements for months, studying his patterns and locations, and when they learned that he would be at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran for a meeting, they passed the information to Israel.