Tamar Rabinyan (16 April 1994-), also known as Ibtisam Abdallah Ibrahim Badran and Jila Gorbanifar, was an Iranian-Israeli Mossad agent who was, in 2020, sent to Iran to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. She switched identities with electric company employee Jila Gorbanifar for her mission, but she was stranded in Tehran after her hack of the Iranian anti-air defense systems went wrong, and the IRGC counter-intelligence unit was sent to hunt her down.
Biography[]
Tamar Rabinyan was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1994 to a Jewish family, and her family emigrated to Israel when she was six to flee persecution at the hands of the Islamist regime. They settled in Bat Yam, and Rabinyan was raised by her father after her mother died while she was young; her father still maintained a love for the kind people of Iran, but he regretted what the country had become. Rabinyan joined Mossad, being stationed at Glilot before being trained as a computer hacker. On Independence Day of 2020, she got an Outstanding Officer award from the head of the IMD. In 2020, she was assigned a high-stakes, deep-cover mission in which she would switch identities with Tehran electric company employee Jila Gorbanifar and use this cover to neutralize Iran's air defenses and allow for the Israeli Air Force to strike an Iranian nuclear reactor before it could develop an atomic bomb.
Arrival in Tehran[]
Rabinyan at the airport
Under the alias "Ibtisam Abdallah Ibrahim Badran", Rabinyan flew into Tehran via Amman, Jordan on a flight bound for Malaysia, and she switched IDs and clothing with Gorbanifar in the women's bathroom. There, she briefly ran into her former comrade Shira, who recognized her from their days at Glilot; however, Rabinyan lied and told her that she did not understand what she was saying. When an Iranian customs official came in to check on Shira, whom he had sent to the bathroom to clean up her vomit (she and her boyfriend Yoni had been apprehended while transferring flights due to their Israeli passports), Rabinyan spoke to the official in Farsi, telling him that the woman had been harassing her; the official proceeded to escort Shira out, allowing for Rabinyan to continue with her mission. Meanwhile, Rabinyan's fellow Mossad agent Milad flew on to New Delhi with Gorbanifar.
Rabinyan in the taxi
She proceeded to leave the airport in a taxi, where she spoke with a friendly Iranian cab driver who expressed his disappointment with his government's apathy towards its citizens' lives. They then made conversation, and she claimed to be from the Garden neighborhood of Tehran, the daughter of an international merchant who later settled the family in Qatar. The driver later drove past an execution scene, where he told Tamar that a bank manager had been hanged for embezzling oil funds; Tamar was disturbed by the scene, and the driver expressed his disgust that people would gather to watch the public execution. She then went to her safehouse, where she was given Jila's work clothing by Jila's husband Gheysar, and where she contacted her superiors. Rabinyan then put on makeup to make herself look similar to Jila, and Jila's boyfriend sadly told Tamar that he knew that Jila would not return, and that he was helping Tamar out of love and not for money.
Rabinyan standing over the rapist's body
That night, wearing a bandage over her nose both to conceal her identity as well as to make it appear as if she had come back from Jila's planned nose surgery, Tamar went to the electric company. She tried to ignore her female coworker Sara Farahmand as she greeted her, and Sara, thinking that "Jila" was upset at her for not standing up to her husband's supposed abuse, told "Jila" that she would deal with her husband if "Jila" did not do so. Tamar then snuck away into the server farm and began to hack the servers with the help of her Iranian contact "Sickboy", who gave her the code to the server (which changed every day at 6:00 PM). However, the hack was interrupted by the arrival of Jila's boss, who chased Tamar down and attempted to rape her. Tamar threw him down a small staircase, causing him to break his skull and die. She was then found by her Iranian contact "The Eagle", Masoud Tabrizi, who helped her dispose of Jila's boss' body, assuring her that there were no cameras at the company. Rabinyan's superiors back in Israel then convinced her to have another go at the hack, as she still had 50 minutes before the Israeli jets would take off. While she was on one of the office computers, she was called by Tabrizi, who warned her that garbagemen had found the body, and that she would have to complete her 15-20-minute task as soon as possible. However, she was unable to complete the task before guards entered the office to demand that she join the other personnel in the main hall, and she activated the "Fox on the Run" mode, which erased all of her progress to cover her tracks.
Rabinyan in the main hall
At the main hall, Tamar obtained a bathroom break, during which she told Masoud of her predicament, and Masoud told her to ensure that Sara would not speak; he also promised Tamar that he would get her out of there. Tamar gave Sara a note demanding that she not tell the interrogators about their boss. However, when it was her turn to be interviewed, Tamar's claim that her boss was yelling at her because of his anger at his late night shift made the interrogator Rasoul Nemati bring up the fact that Sara had testified otherwise, and that their boss believed that "Jila" was a slacker who made too many private phone calls. Tamar was then forced to lie several times to answer the other questions, including one about her accent, bringing up her frequent travels before returning to Iran two years before. Ultimately, her answers were not to the interrogator's satisfaction, and the officer ordered that Rabinyan be detained at the company building overnight. The next day, she was taken to an apartment where she met with a social worker, who told her that her husband had passed away an hour before by suicide, having left a note claiming that he had killed a man before committing suicide out of grief. Tamar remembered that she had told Tabrizi that Gheysar was also aware of Jila's boss' abuse, and deduced that Massoud had killed Gheysar and framed him for the boss' murder. She then headed to the balcony, and she saw Massoud on a rooftop across the street. Massoud signalled her to jump off of the balcony and onto the street, so Massoud ran into the other room, pushed past the social worker, and jumped onto the street, running away from the police. She was also pursued by IRGC counterintelligence commander Faraz Kamali, but she managed to escape, accidentally leaving her nose bandage behind.
On the run[]
Rabinyan making contact with Kadosh
Rabinyan then escaped to a nearby park, where she made contact with her handler Yael Kadosh, telling her that "the weather" (code for herself) was fine. However, she reported that she had broken off contact with Massoud due to his bad info and his embroilment in murder; she felt that she could not trust him, and decided to escape the country herself. She went to the only place she felt secure at, the home of her aunt Arezoo, who had converted to Islam and not seen Tamar since Tamar was little.
Tamar meeting with Arezoo
Tamar met with Arezoo in a public park, where Arezoo told Tamar that she could not help her, as her own daughter was unaware of her Jewish heritage, and helping an Israeli would condemn Arezoo's family. Tamar promised not to tell anyone of Arezoo's help, and she also reminded Arezoo of how her mother, Yasamina, had agreed to cut off contact with Arezoo on her conversion, but always thought of her. Tamar told Arezoo that she owed it to her late sister to help her niece, and Arezoo reluctantly agreed, although she advised Tamar to hide her mother's necklace, which she had shown to Arezoo to prove their relationship. Arezoo then took Tamar to her home, where she introduced her to her husband Dariush and to her daughter Razieh as one of her students, "Zahra", who had asked if she could stay with Arezoo until she could sort out problems with her husband. That night, Arezoo showed Tamar to her room and explained how she had loved her sister, but that her family had deep roots in the country (Dariush's brother had been killed in the Iran-Iraq War, and Dariush worked in the judicial system), and she had to stay in Iran, despite the cost. That same night, Rabinyan made contact with her Iranian hacker contact "Sickboy" and agreed to meet at Laleh Park the next day at 1:00 PM to discuss how she could obtain a passport. Unbeknownst to her, just over two hours before the meeting was to take place, Kadosh and Mossad hacked Jira's laptop (which had been handed over to her by her father, who also told them about Arezoo) and discovered her scheduled meeting with Sickboy.