Washington:CBS News reports, citing US officials familiar with the matter, that Iran’s supreme leader is essentially holed up in an undisclosed location with little access to the outside world.The Iranian leader is only reachable through a network of intermediaries, the report said.
The unusual communications system has become a key sticking point in ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran on a possible deal, the report said citing US officials. Even Iranian negotiators who are allowed to speak to the Donald Trump administration have had difficulty communicating with Iran’s own leadership, officials said.
The report said Tehran's responses to Washington's proposals or details of a potential deal often take a long time because messages reportedly have to be passed to Iran's supreme leader through a complicated network of couriers due to his highly restricted and undisclosed location.
The White House declined to comment on intelligence about the supreme leader’s location or how Iran communicates.
Highest-level officials unaware of Mojtaba Khamenei’s whereaboutsEven officials at the highest levels of the Iranian government don't know where the supreme leader is and have no way to contact him directly, the report said, while the supreme leader is taking the most cautious measures. Instead, messages are relayed through a network of couriers set up to hide the location of the supreme leader.
"All the information that we get is old and there is a lot of latency in the responses by the Supreme Leader," the official said.
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 final deal points.’ "Every piece of information he gets is dated and there is a lot of latency in his responses," one official said.
One of the officials also said the American and Israeli intelligence from inside the Iranian government made it possible to locate and eliminate much of the Iranian senior leadership during the war.
Khamenei goes to great lengths to avoid strikesThe report also stated that Khamenei, wounded in US-Israeli attacks during Operation Epic Fury, is resorting to extreme measures to prevent attacks like the ones that killed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran from 1989 to February 28, 2026. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen or heard from publicly in any official capacity since before the war began.
Most Iranian leaders have no view of daylight, the sources said, and have spent weeks inside heavily fortified bunkers, avoiding speaking to each other unless absolutely necessary, the report said.
It’s like watching a sitcom, watching them try to figure out how to talk to each other. “They are at their wits’ end,” an official said.
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