Washington DC: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is living in secrecy at an undisclosed location with little access to the outside world, CBS News reported on Sunday, citing US intelligence.
According to the report, the Iranian Supreme Leader is only reachable through a labyrinth of couriers, as US officials with knowledge of the matter told CBS News. Iranian officials authorised to work with the Trump administration are struggling to communicate within their own government system, a major impediment why the negotiations have advanced so slowly, ANI reported.
CBS said that when the US sends proposed details, the difficulty in reaching the Supreme Leader causes a significant delay before Washington receives a response, according to two of the officials. “There is a lot of latency,” one of them said. “Everything that comes back is already dated by the time we see it.”
The report noted that, given the Supreme Leader’s extreme precautions, even top‑ranking Iranian officials are unaware of his exact location and cannot reach him directly. Instead, communications are routed through a network of couriers set up to conceal his whereabouts and eliminate any single, vulnerable point of contact that adversaries could target.
One of the officials also said that American and Israeli intelligence, obtained from sources within the Iranian government, allowed them to pinpoint and eliminate much of Iran’s senior leadership during the war. The report notes that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was injured in the US–Israeli strikes during Operation Epic Fury and has since implemented stringent security protocols to avoid repeat strikes of the kind that killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Though he has not been seen in public in person since before the war started, Iranian media continue to regularly publish messages attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei.
