The hunt for Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei

It is the covert operation that is never officially discussed or confirmed but the hunt for Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is preoccupying Mossad and the CIA. While President Trump considers his next move in the war with Iran, Israel’s foreign intelligence service and their American counterparts are jointly trying to trace the supreme leader who took power after his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on February 28. The challenge for the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agencies is that the target has gone silent. Mojtaba appears not to have picked up a phone or opened a laptop for about 150 days. He is somewhere in a deep shelter, his face disfigured from injuries sustained in the airstrike that killed his father, and he does not dare emerge into daylight for fear of being spotted by an American spy satellite. To track his father, Israel and the US used every cyber trick in the book, including hacking traffic cameras in Tehran to spot the vehicles used by the former supreme leader’s bodyguards and associates. Technology, orchestrated by the American National Security Agency (NSA) and Israel’s equivalent, known as Unit 8200, uncovered where Ali Khamenei and his principal military and intelligence officials would be on that day. They were all eliminated. This time, it is different. Whether or not it makes sense to try to assassinate the new supreme leader when it is clear the military is really in charge of Iran, the fact remains that Mojtaba has a key role in the regime and decisions on military action and he has gone missing. The key to pinpointing his location is now human intelligence (humint), not eavesdropping and surveillance technology. There are still people in the intelligence community who believe he may be dead and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is faking his survival to legitimise its war with the US. So what is needed is proof of his existence and confirmation of where he is hiding, perhaps in one of the underground tunnels in Tehran or the military bunker close to the religious city of Qom, about 90 miles south of the capital. With cyber sleuthing less effective, Mossad, with its network of agents inside Iran, many of them demoralised and disillusioned Iranian nationals, is prioritising its efforts on these two questions: Mojtaba’s status and his whereabouts. “The challenge for Israel is the same problem we had in trying to find and release hostages in Gaza,” said Rami Igra, a former division chief of Mossad. “Israeli intelligence controlled the whole of Gaza, every toilet was rigged [bugged] to trace where they were being held but we didn’t find them. There was too much reliance on electronic technology and not enough on real people, human intelligence. “Mojtaba may not be using a phone but if he exists at all, he has other forms of communication, like little pieces of paper. They are using multiple layers of couriers carrying messages. “These couriers are unaware of what they’re doing, other than taking messages from one person to the next. So, if they [Mossad] find him it will be because of a human element. But the regime in Tehran is aware of this danger.” Just as Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, was traced by the CIA through one of his couriers, so Mossad’s focus is on identifying and following those carrying messages to and from Mojtaba. “The only real way to get to Mojtaba is to recruit an agent who is in contact with him,” said Igra. “But this is very difficult because there is tough screening in Iran of all people close to him, and probably only two or three members of the IRGC know how to contact him. “We can also track other people using their phones and listen in on discussions about Mojtaba and where he might be. Iran is a country where the people are suffering from lack of money and we have ways of offering rewards on the internet for information,” he said. Are Mossad agents following key members of the regime to track Mojtaba? President Masoud Pezeshkian, for example, claimed he had spent two and half hours with the injured supreme leader and said he was fine. “This is bullshit,” Igra said. “The Iranian president never saw him.” Avner Avraham, a former lieutenant colonel in Mossad, identified another problem in the hunt for the ayatollah. “They are also using doubles, just like Saddam Hussein did,” he said. He added: “Mojtaba stays in different locations and people are employed to feed him. But what they don’t know is whether the food they are providing is for the real Mojtaba or a double. So they go home at night and believe they are looking after the supreme leader when it fact he’s probably a fake.” At some point, the Iranian people will demand to see their new supreme leader. He failed to appear for his father’s funeral this month. They only evidence for his existence is several official statements about the war issued in his name. Is it possible that to appease the Iranian people, Mojtaba might record a personal message, just like bin Laden used to do when he was hiding in the border area of Afghanistan and Pakistan? “Even if he doesn’t show his face, he could use his voice to give a message to the Iranian people,” Avraham said. “But that could make him vulnerable. It’s possible to glean information from the voice file, such as the type of recorder used and possibly the location where the voice was recorded.” A former senior US defence official said: “I am quite sure, given [the airstrike] on February 28, that Mojtaba is practising much better operational security and, as a result, human intelligence will be more important in the hunt for him. “I am sceptical about US humint since Iran has been a denied area for 40 years. Israeli human intelligence is clearly much better but it also has its limits.” If Mossad and the CIA manage to establish Mojtaba’s whereabouts, political leaders in the US and Israel will have to decide how to act on the information. A former leading US intelligence official summed up their dilemma: “I think we have probably dispatched enough Iranian leaders for the time being, unless there is very strong confidence that the current leader will be replaced by someone committed to a democratic future for Iran and who will ride in on a white horse.”