Who killed Khamenei

There is a question that has foxed China's MSS (Ministry of State Security)  since last Saturday 28 February, but western media have not looked at it. And the answer to that question is more troublesome than anything that has happened to Iran.

China gave Iran real-time aircraft tracking data. They gave Iran anti-stealth radar systems. They gave them the specific flight paths of every Israeli F-35 that took off from Nevatim airbase. They watched those aircraft cross Iraq in real time and transmitted their position, speed, and altitude to Iranian military commanders. The flight time from Nevatim to Tehran is 2.5 hours. Although this warning was given to Iran, but Khamenei still died in his compound on a Saturday morning with 40 of his most senior commanders sitting next to him. So, who stopped that warning from reaching him?

HUMINT or human intelligence showed that Khamenei would be at a particular meeting and the strike was timed accordingly. No US satellite tracked his location. There was also no signals intercept. No artificial intelligence system analysed Khamenei’s movement patterns and predicted his location.  But there is a highly placed CIA mole who knew about that meeting, who transmitted to the CIA the single piece of information that 35 years of the most sophisticated surveillance architecture in human history had never previously produced.

The strike was originally planned for a particular night, but rescheduled specifically for the morning of 28 February. No military command redesigns a major military operation hours or days before launch, only because a satellite showed up something interesting. It is cross verified and debated. You redesign it because a person you trust told you something specific; a specific meeting, a specific location, a specific time.

Only three people knew the details of IRGC Qud’s force chief Qasem Soleimani’s travel to Baghdad in January 2020. Hassan Nasrallah the Hezbollah Secretary General was killed in his headquarters in Beirut in September 2024. A small number of people knew the location of the tunnel complex in Beirut's Dahieh suburb where he convened operational meetings. Ismail Haniyah the Chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau was assassinated in Tehran itself in July 2024. The Tehran guest house where he was staying was known to a handful of people within the Iranian security apparatus. And now Khamenei, whose location was relayed to the CIA in time to redesign a planned nighttime operation into a Saturday morning strike.

Is there a suspect?

There is only one man alive today who attended that fateful meeting and survived. He was alone among the four or five people who knew about the fateful Saturday meeting. That man is an establishment insider who hails from one of Iran’s leading clerical families.

He is Ali Larajani, Khamenei’s designated successor, who had been overseeing Iran's efforts to reach a nuclear deal with the United States just a month after Washington sanctioned him in early January this year for allegedly directing a deadly crackdown on anti-government protests. Ali Larajani, the man who emerged as Iran's seniormost surviving official, the man who was sanctioned and was simultaneously in the negotiating team in Doha and Geneva. Larijani’s name appeared on Khamenei's succession list 6 days before the Saturday strike. At present, Iran's security establishment is burning the midnight oil unable to determine definitively who had betrayed them because the betrayer is embedded too deeply in the state’s power structure.

Russia gave Iran the Verba 9K333 man pad which is a  Russian fourth-generation man-portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile. Russia gave Iran this advanced technology that kept the IRGC’s missile systems functional despite US jamming. Russia leaked America's complete war plan to Iran. And despite all of that, despite every intelligence advantage, every weapon system, every technological upgrade that both Russia and China spent the last 8 months delivering to Iran, Khamenei is dead. And 40 senior commanders died in two locations in one minute, and the Israeli jets that killed them, had been tracked by Chinese radar for 2.5 hours before the first bomb fell.

As a result, Russia and China will likely refrain from offering Iran any further meaningful military assistance beyond rhetorical support, till the mole is uncovered and they have conducted forensic investigations about the extent to which their weapons systems stand compromised. The top intelligence officials in the SVR in Moscow and the MSS in Beijing in all probability spent the last weekend sitting in intelligence review meetings, asking only one question that neither can answer with certainty. If the person who brought Khamenei out of his bunker and into that building knew what was coming, and that someone clearly did, then how deep does the penetration go? Who else inside Iran's military and intelligence structures is working for the other side? Who else in the chain that received China's real-time US F-35 tracking data decided that information should go no further to alert the designated targets? Until Beijing and Moscow can answer that question, every piece of intelligence they share with Iran's new leadership is potentially intelligence they are sharing with the CIA and the Mossad.

Russia and China who designed and constructed Iran's defensive architecture, are now conducting emergency reviews of every system they gave Iran, not to upgrade them, but to determine whether they were compromised from inside before the first bomb fell. This fact raises a parallel that has appeared in every major Israeli intelligence success of the past decade that was achieved against Iran and its proxies, namely, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Until these two countries decipher and aggregate this pattern, they will remain on the sidelines and not step into the trap laid for them by both the CIA and the Mossad. No PLA ( People’s Liberation Army) naval ship nor any Russian naval ship will step into the fray against the US 5^th Fleet in the Arabian Sea.

Meanwhile, Iran is now on “death ground” amid existential threats from US attacks and is retaliating erratically by bringing the entire Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the ambit of its drone and ballistic missile attacks. The term death ground is from Sun Tzu's art of war, the Chinese military text that every officer in the PLA studies and is absorbed into his/her consciousness. This term means that this is the ground on which an army fights when retreat is impossible and destruction is the only alternative to total commitment. A force on death ground fights with a ferocity that cannot be sustained but also cannot be predicted. It is the most dangerous opponent in any engagement because it has nothing left to calculate about cost. It has already accepted total cost and its only remaining variable is how much damage it can inflict before it ceases to function.

From Saturday 28 February, commences a period of 40 days of mourning; 7 days of public holiday.  A three-person constitutional council has taken charge, governing under continuous bombardment. A new IRGC commander was appointed within 24 hours. 6 waves of retaliation against 27 American bases in the Middle-East has occurred. Fattah-2 is an Iranian hypersonic missile unveiled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in November 2023 and technically still under development. It has a hypersonic glide vehicle and can achieve speeds up to Mach 15. The Fatah 2 hypersonic missile was used in combat for the first time in retaliation to the killing of Khamenei.

China and Russia are also silently watching the play because they are doing the same calculation that every strategic actor on earth has been doing since 28 February. Was Khamenei's death the beginning of Iran's collapse or the beginning of something that has no historical precedent and no predictable endpoint?

The answer to that question will not be found in any missile trajectory, nor in any stock market reaction, nor any truth social post by Trump. It will be found in what Iran's streets do over the next 40 days of mourning. Whether they produce the regime change that Trump's operation was designed to trigger or whether they harden into the kind of resistance that turns a military operation into a generation long conflict?

China is watching those streets. Russia is watching those streets. And the inside source who gave the CIA the meeting location, whoever it is or whoever they are, wherever they are right now, are also watching those streets, waiting to find out whether the most consequential betrayal in the history of the Islamic Republic has produced the outcome it was designed to produce.

The official IRNA news agency reported that a three-person council consisting of the country's president, the chief of the judiciary, and one of the jurists of the guardian council will temporarily assume all leadership duties in the country. The body will temporarily oversee the country until a new supreme leader is elected. The three-person council, is a constitutional succession mechanism activated within hours. President Masoud Pezeskhian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi.

These are not military men. They are legal and clerical figures whose institutional authority derives from the same constitutional document that Khamenei himself administered for 35 years. They are the government and they are governing a country that has declared 40 days of mourning while simultaneously firing the sixth wave of missiles at 27 American bases. Mining the Strait of Hormuz, attacking an oil tanker with Iranian crew members on board and watching its crowds pour into the streets. Some to mourn, some to celebrate. All of them uncertain about what comes next.

If the regime feels threatened, it will lash out harder than it would if it thought it could ride out the attacks. Will this conflict stay regional or expand to a global confrontation?

China and Russia have provided Iran with intelligence, with weapon systems, with diplomatic cover, but neither has committed military forces. Neither has entered the war. Putin called for an emergency UN security council session. He issued a statement calling for restraint. Neither has crossed the line from strategic partnership to active military engagement. Crossing that line transforms a regional war into a confrontation between nuclear powers and neither Beijing nor Moscow has decided that Iran's survival is worth that cost.

Trump warned that bombing would continue uninterrupted throughout the week or as long as necessary to achieve what he called the goal of peace throughout the Middle East and indeed the world. Throughout the week or as long as necessary, peace throughout the Middle East and indeed the world. Those two phrases, the indefinite timeline and the maximalist objective, define the precise parameters of America's current commitment; not just a surgical strike with defined end points. A campaign whose duration is measured in weeks, whose goal is “peace” for the entire world, and whose mechanism is continuous uninterrupted bombing of a country of 90 million people who have just declared 40 days of mourning for the man those bombs killed.

40 days of mourning is not a diplomatic formality in Shia Islam. It is a religious obligation, a period during which grief is institutionalized, during which the community marks its loss through ritual, during which every Friday prayer in every mosque in Iran will include the name Khamenei alongside the names of martyrs whose deaths created obligations of response. Iran has spent 47 years teaching its population that American and Israeli aggression demands resistance. That ideology did not die with Khamenei. It was the water every Iranian institution has been swimming in since 1979. And the killing of the man who personified it has in the first 24 hours produced more people chanting resistance in Iranian streets than celebrating regime change. Let us see how the cookie crumbles?