CIA intelligence led to attack that killed Khamenei in Iran, source says

Intelligence information collected for months by the CIA and shared with its Israeli counterparts led to the missile attack who killed the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials on Saturday, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to News themezone.

The spy agency had been tracking Khamenei’s location for several months before Saturday’s joint US-Israel strikes, gaining deeper insight into his whereabouts as he moved. The agency then learned of a Saturday morning meeting of senior Iranian officials at a compound in Tehran that Khamenei was expected to attend.

That idea, conveyed to their Israeli counterparts, accelerated the timeline for a strike to take advantage of the opportunity, the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters, told News themezone.

In an interview with Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, News themezone’ “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan asked directly whether the United States had carried out the attack on Khamenei. Turner said he had spoken with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who “was very clear in the response that we were not targeting Khamenei and we were not targeting Iran’s leaders.”

Khamenei, who was Iran’s leading religious figure and head of state during his nearly 40-year rule, was killed in his compound in Tehran on Saturday by an Israeli missile strike. Iranian state media confirmed the death early Sunday, hours after President Trump said Khamenei had been killed in the joint US-Israeli operation.

The New York Times was the first to report the CIA’s involvement in tracking Khamenei before his death.

Senator Tom Cottonchairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that while he declined to share details about the intelligence used before the attacks on Iran, the United States had “exquisite intelligence-gathering methods.”

“The location and intentions of the supreme leader and the other ayatollahs in Iran, or for that matter, the leaders of other adversaries around the world, is obviously a top priority for our intelligence community,” he said. “But clearly, this operation is driven by intelligence collected by Israel and the United States that has demonstrated once again that our nations have capabilities that no other nation on Earth has.”

Khamenei, 86, had been Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, assuming command after the death of Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the country’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. For nearly four decades, Khamenei consolidated his authority over all branches of the government and the armed forces, wielding maximum political and military power while also occupying the role of the country’s top religious authority.

It is not yet clear who will succeed him, but Iran’s top diplomat said Sunday that the country’s ruling clerics could elect a new supreme leader within a couple of days.

in a interview In an interview with News themezone on Saturday, President Trump said “there are some good candidates” to lead Iran after Khamenei’s death, but did not elaborate. Asked if he knew who made the decisions in Iran, Trump responded: “I know exactly who, but I can’t tell you.”