CIA tracked Khamenei for months, shared his exact location with Israel — and a Saturday morning meeting sealed his fate.
By Rootsalert Global Desk
They knew exactly where he’d be. And they waited.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — Iran’s supreme leader for 35 years, the man who outlasted sanctions, wars, and four American presidents — was killed Saturday morning when Israeli fighter jets dropped precision munitions on a compound in central Tehran. He didn’t make it out of the building. Neither did more than a dozen of Iran’s top military commanders who had gathered nearby.
The strikes hit at approximately 9:40am Tehran time. By the time the smoke cleared, Iran’s entire defense leadership had been gutted in a single morning.
The CIA had gathered intelligence about a Saturday meeting at the compound — a location that houses the offices and residence of the supreme leader, Iran’s president, and the country’s National Security Council — and shared it with Israel, according to The New York Times, citing anonymous sources familiar with the operation. CBS confirmed separately that the CIA passed Khamenei’s location data directly to Israeli forces.
That tip changed everything.
Israel and the US had originally planned to hit Iran at night, mirroring the method used during Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025. But the CIA’s intelligence about the morning gathering pushed the timeline forward. Israeli jets took off from a base inside Israel around 6:00am local time, flew two hours to Tehran, and dropped their payload.
Khamenei was in a separate building from his top generals when the bombs fell — but close enough. He didn’t survive.
US Cyber Command moved first, jamming Iranian communications to blind the country’s ability to see, respond, or scramble a defense. Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine confirmed this in his post-strike briefing, saying the operation layered “non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran’s ability to see, communicate and respond.”
Republican Congressman Mike Turner told CBS that the US did not directly target Khamenei — that Israel acted unilaterally using American intelligence. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the same. But Trump’s own words told a different story. In a Truth Social post following the killing, Trump wrote that Khamenei “was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems” and that the US had been “working closely with Israel.”
Make of that what you will.
The CIA had been tracking Khamenei’s movements for months — well before the 12-day Israel-Iran war last June — monitoring how officials communicated and where they moved during periods of stress, according to The Times. An unnamed former CIA official told The Guardian that Israel had long cultivated covert operatives inside Iran, gathering intelligence as granular as how and where senior figures sourced their food.
Trump had also publicly telegraphed his awareness of Khamenei’s whereabouts back in June 2025. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” he posted on Truth Social on June 17. “He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
Nine months later, that restraint was gone.
At least 13 senior Iranian defense officials were confirmed killed in Saturday’s strikes, including IRGC Commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defense Minister Azis Nasirzadeh, and Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi. About a dozen members of Khamenei’s family and close entourage also died, according to Israeli military officials who spoke with The Guardian.
The death toll across Iran reached 787 as of Monday, per the Iranian Red Crescent. Among the dead: at least 165 schoolgirls and staff killed when a strike hit a school in the southern city of Minab. That strike drew immediate international condemnation.
Joint US-Israeli operations haven’t stopped. Strikes have continued hitting locations across Iran, including hospitals and schools in residential neighborhoods. Iran has retaliated with strikes targeting Israel and US military assets in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman.
On Sunday, Iranian authorities announced a three-member transitional leadership council — President Masoud Pezeshkian, Supreme Court Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Guardian Council member Ayatollah Alireza Arafi — to temporarily govern the country.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth justified the campaign Monday as necessary to destroy Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure. Trump said strikes will continue until the US achieves what he called “peace in the Middle East.”
Whatever comes next, the region has crossed a line it can’t walk back from. A supreme leader is dead, Iran’s military command is in ruins, and a caretaker council is now managing a country under active bombardment. The next 72 hours will determine whether this ends as a decapitation strike — or the opening act of something far worse.
