The story Tehran wants you to read

The New York Times published a detailed account this week of Iran’s new leadership structure, based on interviews with more than 20 Iranian officials, former officials, Revolutionary Guard members and individuals close to the new supreme leader. It deserves a careful read, but not for the reasons the Times intends.

The piece describes the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, as gravely wounded, communicating via handwritten notes passed through a motorcycle courier chain, mentally sharp but with injuries that make speaking difficult, deliberately avoiding video out of concern for appearing weak. The key details of his condition come from unnamed Iranian officials. There is no photograph, no medical record, no independent verification of any kind. The article does not ask readers to weigh the incentives behind those sources. It presents the account as fact.

Reporting from inside an authoritarian state, especially one at war, where the regime decides who speaks to Western journalists and what they are permitted to say, requires deep scepticism that the article does not apply. The sources describing Mojtaba’s condition have a direct interest in the picture they are painting: a living, mentally engaged supreme leader who has simply delegated, but remains very much involved, during a difficult period. That picture serves the regime well. It preserves the fiction of functioning leadership. Perhaps this account is accurate. But reporting sourced entirely from people with a direct interest in what you believe deserves a disclaimer that the Times did not provide.

The sourcing problem would be significant on its own. But the historical framing underneath it is far more consequential.

The article states that power has shifted to “an entrenched, hard-line military” and that “the broad influence of the clerics is waning”. The implication, never stated outright but structurally present throughout, is that this represents a radicalisation of what came before. It does not.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the cleric who led Iran for 35 years, advanced Iran’s nuclear programme to the edge of weaponisation, built the ballistic missile programme, the drone programme, and the network of proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the Shia militias in Iraq that threatened Israel, the Gulf states, and American forces across the region for decades. He crushed the Green Movement in 2009. His regime executed protesters in the crackdown that followed the 2022 uprising. He directed the IRGC’s Quds Force under Qassem Soleimani, whose operations killed and maimed American soldiers for years. The IRGC was not a force that the clerics restrained. It was the instrument through which the clerical vision was executed. Every major missile programme, every proxy network, every centrifuge facility was built under clerical direction.