Guarded by a unit no one knew existed, Khamenei lives in fear

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4 hours ago

Iran's supreme leader has been moved to a highly secure location where he is under the protection of a top-secret elite unit, The Telegraph has learned.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled Iran since 1989, has entrusted his survival to a previously unknown group of deeply vetted bodyguards, amid increasingly overt threats from Israel on his life, according to officials in Tehran.
Believing Israeli intelligence has comprehensively penetrated the regime, the unit was kept so secret that even senior officials within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were unaware of its existence.
'He's not hiding from death, he's not in a bunker,' said one Iranian official. 'But his life is in danger, and there is a unit responsible for his protection that no one even knew existed to avoid any chance of infiltration.'
Khamenei has long spoken of his impending 'martyrdom' and is believed to have expected that Israel would one day attempt to assassinate him. But the killing of at least 11 senior military officers and 14 nuclear scientists in targeted strikes since Israel launched hostilities a week ago has accentuated the risk.
Following a missile strike on a hospital in Beersheba on Thursday, the Israeli government has grown more explicit in its calls for Khamenei's death.
Credit: ABC News
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has refused to rule out an attempt to kill him, saying it 'could bring an end to the conflict'. His defence minister, Israel Katz, went further, calling him a 'modern Hitler' who 'cannot be allowed to continue existing'.
Although Donald Trump reportedly vetoed an Israeli plan to assassinate Khamenei, the US president has also adopted more threatening rhetoric in recent days, saying on Tuesday: 'We know exactly where the so-called 'supreme leader' is hiding.
Mr Trump added that the US had no plans to target Khamenei, 'at least not for now', but described him as an 'easy target' should he change his mind.
For either Israel or the United States to undertake a mission of such magnitude, they would first have to locate Khamenei.
Despite reports that regime officials were preparing to flee to Moscow, there is no evidence that Khamenei is planning to leave Iran. Few expect him to follow the example of Bashar al Assad, Syria's former leader — and a close ally — who escaped to Russia as his regime crumbled in December.
'He is in Iran and is not going anywhere,' the official said. 'He won't flee like the coward Assad. At a time of this foreign aggression, the nation's morale depends on his survival.'
The 86-year-old leader has traditionally lived and worked out of the Leadership House complex in Tehran's District 11. But his recent video appearances suggest he has changed location.
He now speaks against a brown curtain, sometimes adorned with a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution that toppled the Iranian monarchy in 1979. The setting differs markedly from the location of his usual briefings.
Video analysis suggests these briefings were filmed at the IRGC's media operations centre in central Tehran — indicating that he could be living nearby, or possibly beneath the building itself.
Given the recent spate of mysterious car bombings in Tehran and the death of so many colleagues, it is considered highly unlikely that Khamenei is travelling around the city by vehicle.
Khamenei's precautions are understandable. Israeli intelligence has a long history of assassinations and kidnapping far beyond its shores, dating back to the abduction of Adolph Eichmann — a principal Nazi architect of the Holocaust — from Argentina in 1960.
The principle of 'rise and kill first', is deeply ingrained in Mossad's culture. It is not merely a military doctrine, but one with roots in religious teachings found in the Jewish Talmud.
Mossad, which rarely acknowledges its operations, has carried out assassinations in at least a dozen countries — including several in Europe — often with chilling ingenuity. In 1996, Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas bomb maker, was killed by an exploding mobile phone — a precursor of last year's detonating pagers and walkie-talkies that wounded thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.
In earlier decades, the agency is believed to have used letter bombs to kill German nuclear scientists in Egypt, poisoned a Palestinian militant leader's toothpaste in East Germany and attempted to assassinate another by spraying nerve agent into his ear in Jordan.
Khamenei was reportedly deeply unnerved by the killing in 2020 of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the country's top nuclear scientist, with a remote-controlled killer robot.
Last year's assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, showed inventiveness of a different sort.
Although the full details remain unclear, it is believed that an explosive device was hidden in his flat — possibly inside a lavatory — weeks before he arrived in the country for the inauguration of Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran's president.
Credit: Mossad via Sent Defender / X
Such assassinations underscore the scale of Israeli infiltration into Iran's most secure circles.
No single killing is said to have shaken Khamenei more than that of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who died last year when Israel dropped 'bunker-buster' bombs on his subterranean headquarters beneath a Beirut tower block.
Khamenei was reportedly perturbed not just by the loss of a trusted ally and friend, but also by the suspected source of Israel's intelligence — it is believed the information in Nasrallah's whereabouts came not from within Hezbollah but from Tehran itself. Given the extreme sensitivity of such details, the leak must have come from someone with direct access to top-level information.
It is little wonder, then, that Khamenei is, in the words of Yaakov Amidror, Israel's former national security advisor, 'probably one of the most cautious people in the world.'
'He understands that he must be the next target,' Gen Amidror said. 'I am sure that he is moving from one place to another, trying to find a place where he feels comfortable.'
Israel has almost certainly spent years gathering information on Khamenei's movements, using a blend of human, operational and artificial intelligence.
Mossad is likely to have attempted to embed agents within his inner circle by recruiting disillusioned officials, resentful guards, or even low-level staff with access to his quarters.
Signal intelligence would also be crucial. While Khamenei himself avoids electronic devices, the same cannot be said for those around him. Intercepted phone calls, emails and encrypted traffic would all be monitored by Israeli analysts.
Artificial intelligence systems would then process that data to identify probable locations and track patterns in his movements.
Once confirmed, a kill operation could then take many forms: a drone strike, a street-level assassination, or an air force attack. Special forces might even be deployed by helicopter, as in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
'How we would do it depends on the intelligence,' said Gen Amridror. 'If he's in a bunker, you use the air force. If he's in an apartment, you use a drone. If he's in a car then you use an agent in the street.'
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