Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has nominated three clerics as potential successors as he hides in a bunker while facing threats of assassination by Israel in the ongoing war, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, has also named an “array of replacements down his chain of military command” in case Israel eliminates more top officers, according to the report, which cited three Iranian officials familiar with the plans.
According to the officials and diplomats in Iran, the Islamic Republic’s chain of command is still functioning despite the blows it sustained, and the political ranks have shown “no obvious signs of dissent,” The Times said.
Two Iranian officials cited by the paper said Iran’s intelligence ministry has ordered all senior government officials and military commanders to stay underground due to the possibility that they will be targeted.
The ministry has also ordered officials to stop using electronic communications, including cellphones, and Khamenei himself now communicates with his commanders only via a trusted aide, The Times reported.
The report did not say where precisely Khamenei is hiding. Dissident Iranian news outlet Iran International reported that he escaped with his family to a shelter in Lavizan, in northeast Tehran, when Israel launched operations in Iran on June 13. However, there has been no outside confirmation of that claim.
Khamenei’s succession is a tense issue that would otherwise be decided in monthslong deliberations by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, according to Iranian officials cited by The Times. The clerical body that will now have to choose from the supreme leader’s three nominees should he die.
The officials said Khamenei, 86, knows the US or Israel could try to assassinate him, views such a death as martyrdom and wants a clean transition of power after his death, both to safeguard his legacy and to ensure Iran doesn’t get bogged down in messy battles of succession while at war.
The report did not elaborate on the identities of Khamenei’s three nominees for the next supreme leader. However, the officials said Khamenei’s son Mojtaba was not among them.
Mojtaba, who is considered close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, was a rumored frontrunner for supreme leader after Khamenei’s previous heir apparent, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash last year while serving as Iranian president.
The report that Khamenei had selected potential successors came after Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday that the supreme leader “cannot continue to exist,” as Israeli leaders fumed following a missile barrage that hit a Beersheba hospital and homes in central Israel.
Other Israeli officials have stopped short of threatening Khamenei directly, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declining to comment or giving vague answers when asked on the matter.
US President Donald Trump reportedly vetoed a possible assassination of Khamenei when Israel had the opportunity to do so on the first day of the war. On Tuesday, Trump said he knows where Khamenei was hiding but that he was holding off on killing him “for now.”
The president has said he would decide within the next two weeks whether to join Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear program — particularly on the underground Fordo facility, which is thought to be penetrable only with American “bunker buster” bombs.
Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, nuclear scientists, uranium enrichment sites, and ballistic missile program is necessary to prevent the Islamic Republic from realizing its avowed plan to destroy the Jewish state.
Iran has retaliated by launching over 470 ballistic missiles and around 1,000 drones at Israel. So far, Iran’s missile attacks have killed 24 people and wounded thousands in Israel, according to health officials and hospitals. Some of the missiles have hit apartment buildings, causing heavy damage.
Among the top commanders killed in Israel’s opening strike were the commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and the military’s emergency command.
On Saturday, the IDF said it had also taken out the IRGC’s Palestinian Division chief, an architect of the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, which sparked the war in Gaza.
“It is clear that we had a massive security and intelligence breach; there is no denying this,” said Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Gen. Mohammad Ghalibaf, analyzing Israel’s opening strike, in audio cited by The Times. “Our senior commanders were all assassinated within one hour.”
Meanwhile, reformist Iranian politician Mohammad Ali Abtahi was quoted by the paper as saying in a telephone interview from Tehran that Israel’s attacks on Iran had actually led disparate forces in the Islamic Republic to come together in opposition to Israel.
The war “softened the divisions we had, both among each other and with the general public,” he asserted.