Where is Iran’s Supreme Leader? The US says they are “hiding” in a secret location. Experts add that he uses Osama bin Laden’s handbook | Today’s news
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen or heard from in public since before the start of the war with the United States and Israel. According to the CBS report, which cited U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence assessments, Khamenei is effectively isolated in an undisclosed location, surrounded by extreme security designed to prevent the kind of targeted strike that killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who led Iran from 1989 until his death on February 28.
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The disappearance of Iran’s supreme leader now has a direct and measurable impact on the nuclear negotiations between Washington and Tehran. When the U.S. sends proposed terms of the deal, difficulties in reaching the top leader mean a response could take an unusually long time, two U.S. officials confirmed.
How Khamenei communicates: A network of couriers designed to hide his location
US intelligence officials say that Mojtaba Khamenei constructed an elaborate courier system for receiving and sending messages that deliberately ensured that even the highest officials of the Iranian government did not know his exact location and were unable to contact him directly.
Every message he receives goes through a chain of intermediaries before it reaches him. Every response comes back in the same slow, circuitous way.
“That’s why you see people saying things like, ‘The Supreme Leader has agreed to the framework’ or ‘We’re waiting to hear back on the points of the final agreement.’ Every piece of information he receives is dated and his responses are very delayed,” one US official said.
The Supreme Leader communicated broadly with his subordinates, providing guidance on which issues Iranian negotiators could discuss and which topics were completely off the table.
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The officials described a paralyzing atmosphere of caution that pervades Iran’s senior leadership. Most Iranian officials spend weeks inside heavily fortified bunkers, avoiding direct communication with each other unless absolutely necessary.
“Watching them try to figure out how to talk to each other is almost like watching a sitcom. They’re completely irritated,” one official said.
Experts compare Khamenei’s strategy of hiding to Osama bin Laden’s last years
Counterterrorism analysts draw direct comparisons between Khamenei’s disappearance and the decade Osama bin Laden spent in hiding after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, eventually holed up in a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, before being killed in a 2011 US Navy SEAL raid.
“For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the United States has done to Tehran what it spent two decades doing to al-Qaeda and ISIS,” Dr. Omar Mohammed, a counterterrorism expert at George Washington University’s Antisemitism Research Initiative in the Program on Extremism, told FOX News.
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“The United States has brought its leader into the same kind of operational invisibility that bin Laden lived in for 10 years in Abbottabad,” Mohammed added.
According to Muhammad, the parallels go beyond geography and tactics to the circumstances that brought both men to power.
“Both Mojtaba Khamenei and bin Laden inherited their status after the US operation and both reacted in the same way: they ceased to exist publicly,” Mohammed said, adding that bin Laden “stopped releasing dated videos around 2007 and reduced himself to hand-transmitted audio messages.”
The Osama Bin Laden Handbook: How Physical Couriers Enabled Decades of Hiding
Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in the late 1980s and directed the 9/11 attacks against the United States. After the US invasion of Afghanistan, he avoided capture for a decade by abandoning all digital communication and relying solely on a small network of trusted physical couriers.
U.S. intelligence eventually tracked one of those couriers to his compound in Abbottabad, a garrison town about a mile from Pakistan’s top military academy, where bin Laden hid behind high concrete walls and barbed wire.
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“Bin Laden survived without cables from the Abbottabad compound. Communications were carried manually by two trusted couriers, Kuwaiti brothers,” Mohammed said.
The lesson Tehran seems to have learned from this episode is a stark one.
“Bin Laden remained hidden for the rest of his life because the moment he emerged was the moment of death. Mojtaba’s incentives point in the same direction. Mojtaba Khamenei will not emerge,” Mohammed said.
“The lesson from Abbottabad, which Tehran will study closely, is that the safest place to hide is not a cave in Tora Bora, but a walled compound in a garrison town,” Mohammed added.
As for where Khamenei might be hidden, Mohammed pointed to one logical conclusion: “The logical Iranian equivalents are fortified sites under or next to IRGC facilities,” referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Where the nuclear deal stands: Trump says final word expected soon
Despite the communication difficulties, a senior official said on Sunday that Khamenei had agreed to the broad outlines of the current draft agreement. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he expects a final answer within days, though he told reporters on Wednesday that he was “in no rush.”
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Trump suspended a planned military strike against Iran until May 19 while negotiations continued.
Khamenei appears to have shared three posts on his official X account on May 18, although he has not publicly verified himself.
American and Israeli intelligence gathered from sources inside the Iranian government enabled most of Iran’s senior leadership to be located and eliminated during the conflict, according to one official. Analysts say the same intelligence is driving Khamenei’s extreme isolation.
