Iranian Foreign Minister Reveals the Intelligence Breach That Let Israel Track Meetings Near Khamenei

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi acknowledged that the attempted assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the start of the war exposed a major intelligence failure inside Iran, one that he says still has not been fixed. The remarks were published today (Sunday) by the Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. In them, Araghchi described the events leading up to the strike and the realization that information about what was happening inside the compound had leaked to Israel.

According to him, the very fact that meetings were being held at the compound where Khamenei was staying was not unusual at the time. Still, the fact that Israel knew about them points, he said, to an ongoing intelligence failure: "The fact that the enemy knew about the meetings was the result of an intelligence breach that apparently still exists and has not been resolved."

Araghchi revealed that he himself was at Khamenei’s residential compound on the morning the strike took place, and he described the chain of events in the minutes beforehand. According to him, at 8:00 a.m. he met with Iran’s president and told him: "There is an atmosphere of war." Later that morning, at 9:00 a.m., he arrived for a meeting with Ali Asghar Hejazi, Khamenei’s chief of staff, in order to deliver him the negotiation report.

The Iranian foreign minister explained that this was the usual procedure for passing reports on to the supreme leader: "Usually we would deliver the reports to Mr. Hejazi, and he would pass them on to the supreme leader." During that meeting, while he was presenting the report and speaking with Hejazi about the security tensions, he said, the strike took place.