Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Connective Authority

Introduction — The Authority the State Never Defined

For more than two decades, Mojtaba Khamenei appeared repeatedly at the edges of the Islamic Republic’s most consequential political and security decisions. His name surfaced in accounts of electoral intervention, relations with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the management of political crises and the increasingly restricted circle around Ali Khamenei. Yet throughout most of that period, the state offered no clear institutional explanation for his authority.

Mojtaba held no publicly defined senior office that accounted for the breadth of influence attributed to him. He was not the head of the Office of the Supreme Leader, a military commander or a publicly identified member of the principal national security bodies. The formal structure of the Islamic Republic did not explain his position.

That absence becomes more significant when placed beside the machinery already visible inside the Office of the Supreme Leader. IranSTO’s previous Regime Atlas investigations reconstructed an administrative structure centred on Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, a political-security channel associated with Ali Asghar Hejazi and an executive environment in which Vahid Haghanian carried sensitive assignments beyond the Office itself.

Together, those roles begin to explain how the leadership institution maintained administrative continuity, handled politically sensitive information and pursued the Supreme Leader’s priorities beyond the immediate Office. They do not, however, explain Mojtaba.

The problem is not a shortage of allegations about his influence. It is the absence of a defined institutional position against which those allegations can be tested.

In November 2019, the United States Treasury stated that Ali Khamenei had delegated part of his leadership responsibilities to his son and that Mojtaba worked closely with the Quds Force and the Basij to advance his father’s domestic and regional objectives. The designation identified something more consequential than family proximity: the reported exercise of responsibilities belonging to the Supreme Leader. Yet IranSTO has identified no corresponding public decree, mandate or published description defining the functions delegated to Mojtaba.

Later reporting made the contradiction harder to dismiss. Reuters described Mojtaba as having developed a central role in his father’s decision-making process and as moving among individuals, political factions and organisations to coordinate specific matters. This was not the language of a ceremonial relative. Nor did it describe the conventional head of a ministry, military branch or administrative bureau. It described an actor whose reported relevance extended across institutional environments without a publicly defined jurisdiction explaining why.

Other evidence raises the same institutional question from different directions. A leaked record attributed to a meeting of senior IRGC commanders refers explicitly to “Mojtaba’s office” and discusses his involvement in matters in which he had reportedly been authorised to intervene. Mohammad Sarafraz, the former head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, has separately described small, trusted arrangements for handling politically and security-sensitive matters connected to the Supreme Leader.

Neither source can be treated as a complete map of Mojtaba’s authority. The leaked record remains publicly unauthenticated, and Sarafraz’s testimony must be assessed as the account of a former senior insider who later entered into conflict with figures he described. But their limitations do not remove the institutional questions they raise. They add to a record in which delegation, coordination and participation in sensitive leadership matters repeatedly appear without an equivalent public definition of mandate.

The question, therefore, is not whether Mojtaba Khamenei was “powerful”. Power, used without institutional definition, explains very little.

The more precise question is where his authority resided and through what mechanism it was exercised. If he did not derive his role from a transparent public office, how were leadership responsibilities transferred to him? How did officials understand the authority behind his intervention? Through what working arrangements were sensitive matters pursued? And when his involvement reached institutions with their own formal chiefs and chains of command, where did responsibility for the resulting decision reside?

These are not biographical questions. They concern the design of the leadership system built around Ali Khamenei and the distribution of governing authority within it. An institution cannot be reconstructed solely from the titles it publishes. It must also be examined through the routes by which information, instruction and intervention move between the principal decision-maker and the institutions expected to act.

In Mojtaba Khamenei’s case, the published organisational structure leaves a substantial part of that process unexplained.

This dossier examines that missing layer. It does not treat every allegation surrounding Mojtaba as established fact or attempt to compress every political, security and financial network associated with his name into a single investigation. His relationship to specific episodes of repression, the security command system and the financial structures linked to his network require separate evidence and separate reconstruction.

The institutional problem examined here is narrower and more fundamental: how could responsibilities belonging to the Supreme Leader be exercised by an individual whose mandate, jurisdiction and place in the chain of authority were never transparently defined?

The Office already contained identifiable administrative, political-security and executive functions. Mojtaba Khamenei’s reported authority does not fit neatly within any of them.

That discrepancy is where the investigation begins.

Chapter 1 — The Office the Organisational Chart Cannot Explain

The Office of the Supreme Leader was never a conventional government department. Its published titles and visible personnel identified parts of the institution, but they did not necessarily reveal how authority was distributed around the Supreme Leader himself.

The distinction matters because the Office operated across a ruling system whose formal institutions possessed more recognisable structures. Ministries had ministers. The armed forces had commanders. State organisations had appointed chiefs. The leadership environment, by contrast, developed around access to one individual whose constitutional and political authority extended into almost every significant part of the Islamic Republic.

The first three dossiers in this collection examined that environment through three senior figures. Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani represented the administrative continuity of the Office: the management of formal access, official representation and the bureaucratic routines surrounding the Supreme Leader.

Ali Asghar Hejazi revealed a different layer, shaped by political-security access, sensitive communications and the movement of information between the leadership and the security establishment.

Vahid Haghanian exposed an executive function less easily located on a conventional organisational chart: special assignments, intervention beyond the physical Office and the follow-through required to carry leadership priorities into other institutional environments.

These were not interchangeable positions. Nor does the available evidence support a simple hierarchy in which one of the three controlled the others. What emerges instead is a leadership institution organised around distinct but sometimes overlapping functions. Administration protected continuity. Political-security channels managed sensitive access and information. Executive intervention allowed specific matters to move beyond the Office and into the institutions expected to act on them.

The resulting structure was more complex than the public image of a clerical leader surrounded by advisers, but identifiable functions could still be connected to individuals holding recognised positions within the leadership environment.

Mojtaba Khamenei presents a different institutional problem.

For much of the period in which his political significance was reported, Mojtaba did not occupy a publicly defined senior position comparable to those of Golpayegani, Hejazi or other recognised officials around the Supreme Leader. His authority cannot be reconstructed from an appointment decree setting out a portfolio. IranSTO has identified no publicly available description of a department under his leadership, no published jurisdiction and no transparent chain of officials formally required to report to him.

Even the basic language used to describe his role has often depended on imprecise terms such as “influential”, “powerful” or “close to his father”.

Those descriptions may indicate political significance, but they are institutionally inadequate. A person may be influential because he advises a decision-maker, controls information, manages appointments, carries instructions, commands an organisation or can mobilise a network of trusted officials. These are different mechanisms of authority and influence. Treating them as interchangeable obscures the mechanism an institutional investigation is supposed to identify.

The difficulty is particularly acute in Mojtaba’s case because the breadth of activity attributed to him does not correspond to a single conventional jurisdiction. His name has appeared in connection with the IRGC and the Basij, internal political disputes, electoral controversies, security matters and the decision-making circle around Ali Khamenei.

The evidentiary value of these accounts varies considerably. Some derive from statements by former officials. Others rely on source reporting, leaked material or political allegations that cannot be independently established. The existence of multiple allegations does not make them collectively true.

It does, however, create an institutional question that cannot be answered by searching for a title alone.

If Mojtaba advised Ali Khamenei privately, his role would be personal and consultative. If he transmitted instructions from his father, he would function as an intermediary. If he coordinated officials around a matter entrusted to him, his authority would derive from a delegated relationship to the Supreme Leader. If he controlled appointments or directed security actors independently, a substantially stronger claim about institutional power would be required.

The Islamic Republic did not publicly provide a framework for distinguishing among these possibilities in Mojtaba’s case.

That opacity creates a problem of institutional attribution. When authority is attached to a defined office, investigators have an identifiable starting point. Appointment records, institutional correspondence, public appearances and formal chains of responsibility may reveal at least part of the route through which a decision moved.

When the mandate itself is unpublished, the observer may see an intervention without knowing its jurisdiction, a meeting without knowing the authority under which a participant entered it, or an institutional outcome without being able to reconstruct the leadership channel that preceded it.

The ambiguity is particularly significant for accountability. If Mojtaba participated in a political or security matter, the fact of his presence would not, by itself, establish command or responsibility. Investigators would need to determine the capacity in which he acted, the authority available to him and his contribution to the resulting institutional conduct.

Yet the state did not publicly define the position from which those questions could begin.

This is why Mojtaba requires a different method from the three officials examined earlier in this collection. Golpayegani, Hejazi and Haghanian occupied recognisable positions from which their dominant institutional functions could be reconstructed. Mojtaba’s significance lies precisely in the possibility that substantial authority existed without a transparent office of equivalent weight.

The organisational chart therefore leaves the central question unresolved.

If Mojtaba’s authority did not originate in a conventional senior office, the investigation must move towards the source from which officials could have recognised his right to intervene.

On the available public record, the clearest documented answer does not come from the Islamic Republic itself.

It comes from a foreign sanctions authority that, in 2019, described Ali Khamenei as having delegated part of his own leadership responsibilities to his son.

 

Chapter 2 — Delegated by the Leader

The clearest public description of the source of Mojtaba Khamenei’s authority did not come from the Office of the Supreme Leader. It came from the United States Treasury.

On 4 November 2019, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Mojtaba Khamenei as part of an action targeting what it described as Ali Khamenei’s inner circle. The designation stated that Mojtaba “acts in an official capacity on behalf of his father” and that the Supreme Leader had “delegated a part of his leadership responsibilities” to him. Treasury also stated that Mojtaba worked closely with the Quds Force and the Basij to advance his father’s “destabilising regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives”.

The wording matters.

Treasury did not merely describe Mojtaba as an influential son, informal adviser or politically connected cleric. It attributed to him an official capacity and identified delegation from the Supreme Leader as the source of at least part of his responsibilities. In institutional terms, this is a materially different proposition. Influence describes an ability to affect a decision. Delegation identifies authority or responsibility entrusted by one officeholder to another.

Yet the designation creates almost as many questions as it answers.

Treasury did not publicly identify which leadership responsibilities had been delegated. It did not specify when the arrangement began, whether it was permanent or issue-specific, or through what instrument Ali Khamenei had authorised his son to act. The public designation identified no decree, internal directive or formal appointment establishing Mojtaba’s jurisdiction. Nor did it explain how officials in the Quds Force, the Basij or other institutions were expected to distinguish between a personal intervention by the Supreme Leader’s son and one carrying delegated leadership authority.

IranSTO has identified no publicly available decree issued by Ali Khamenei defining a pre-succession leadership portfolio for Mojtaba. No published mandate reviewed for this dossier sets out the responsibilities transferred to him. No publicly accessible organisational chart of the Office identifies a department corresponding to the breadth of the role described by Treasury.

The public record therefore contains an unusual asymmetry: a foreign sanctions authority explicitly identified delegated leadership responsibilities, while the institution from which those responsibilities reportedly originated did not publicly define their scope.

That asymmetry cannot be filled with assumption. Treasury did not publicly disclose the intelligence or documentary material supporting every element of its assessment, and IranSTO has not identified the internal instrument, if one existed, through which Ali Khamenei formalised the delegation.

The precise content of the transferred responsibilities remains an intelligence gap.

The institutional consequence is nevertheless significant. If Treasury’s assessment was accurate, Mojtaba exercised at least some responsibilities attached to the Supreme Leader without the Islamic Republic providing a public framework through which the limits of that authority could be examined. The question is no longer simply why a ruler trusted his son. It is how the governing system recognised and acted upon authority whose jurisdiction was not visible outside the leadership environment.

The constitutional position of the Supreme Leader makes that question particularly important. Article 110 of the Constitution assigns the Leader extensive powers, including the determination of general state policies, command of the armed forces, appointment and dismissal of senior military commanders, and the appointment of the heads of the judiciary and state broadcasting. The same article provides that the Leader may delegate part of his duties and powers to another person.

The existence of a constitutional basis for delegation does not identify what Ali Khamenei delegated to Mojtaba.

This distinction is essential. The legal capacity to delegate cannot be used as evidence that every reported intervention by Mojtaba carried constitutional authority. Nor does Treasury’s designation establish that he possessed a general licence to intervene across the state.

The available record supports a narrower finding: a major sanctions authority publicly assessed that Ali Khamenei had transferred part of his leadership responsibilities to his son and that Mojtaba acted officially on his behalf. The boundaries of that arrangement were not publicly disclosed.

Those missing boundaries create a problem of attribution.

If Mojtaba privately advised his father, the relevant mechanism was influence through personal access. If he entered a matter that Ali Khamenei had entrusted to him, the institutional position was different. The same individual could potentially operate in both capacities, while an external observer saw only “Mojtaba’s involvement”.

The Islamic Republic’s public record offered no reliable method for distinguishing between them.

The ambiguity may also have affected officials inside the system. In a conventional bureaucracy, an instruction can at least nominally be tested against the authority of the office issuing it. A minister’s jurisdiction, a commander’s position or an agency head’s institutional role provides a basis for asking whether an intervention falls within that official’s competence.

Mojtaba’s reported position was different. If his authority derived directly from Ali Khamenei, officials encountering his intervention needed to understand not only who he was, but whether he was acting in a matter entrusted to him by the Supreme Leader.

A leaked record attributed to a January 2023 meeting of senior IRGC commanders contains language relevant to this question. In one passage, a speaker defending Mojtaba’s involvement reportedly refers to matters in which he had been given permission to enter and assist.

The record remains publicly unauthenticated and cannot establish the terms of Mojtaba’s mandate. Its wording is nevertheless consistent with an environment in which at least some senior figures understood his involvement as authorised within particular matters rather than as the product of a single publicly defined office.

Treasury’s designation and the leaked record are different in origin, evidentiary status and purpose. They do not independently prove one another. It would be methodologically unsound to combine them into an established account of the exact terms of Mojtaba’s delegation.

The narrower pattern is more useful.

Separate sources describe an environment in which Mojtaba was understood to act on behalf of Ali Khamenei, to hold some delegated leadership responsibilities and, according to the leaked account, to enter particular matters with permission.

That pattern is compatible with principal-based authority: the right to intervene arising not from a permanent public portfolio, but from authorisation by the principal within specified or understood areas.

A delegated actor does not necessarily require a ministry or a formally published department if the surrounding institutions recognise the authority behind him. The practical significance of the intermediary depends on whether other actors understand that his intervention is connected to the person from whom the authority originates.

This does not mean that every request made by Mojtaba automatically became an order from Ali Khamenei. The available evidence does not support such a conclusion.

It does, however, expose a system in which the distinction could be difficult to test.

Without a published mandate, officials outside the immediate leadership circle had no transparent reference point for determining where Ali Khamenei’s delegated authority ended and his son’s personal influence began.

The same ambiguity complicates retrospective accountability. A formal institution may implement an outcome. A senior official may communicate a priority. A trusted intermediary may coordinate the actors involved. The original authority may still rest with the Supreme Leader.

Without a visible mandate or documented chain of instruction, each participant may appear as only one fragment of a decision whose ownership is difficult to reconstruct.

The problem extends beyond Mojtaba as an individual. It reveals a structural vulnerability in a leadership system organised around the concentration of authority in one office and the personal trust of the officeholder.

The wider the Supreme Leader’s powers, the more consequential any non-transparent delegation of those powers becomes.

The issue is not simply nepotism, although the transfer of leadership responsibilities from the highest officeholder in the Islamic Republic to his son inevitably raises that question. The deeper institutional problem is that the ruling system provided no public mechanism for identifying what had been delegated, examining how it was exercised or attributing responsibility when delegated intervention reached formal institutions.

For investigators, the evidentiary position remains incomplete. Treasury provides a documented public assessment that delegation occurred. It does not provide the missing mandate. The Islamic Republic did not publish one that IranSTO could identify. Leaked material suggests that authorised areas of intervention may have been understood within senior regime circles, but their boundaries remain unavailable.

The next question is therefore practical rather than legal.

A mandate may remain unpublished, but authority becomes visible when other actors respond to it. If Mojtaba’s position depended on responsibilities delegated by Ali Khamenei, the mechanism of that authority must be sought in the way he entered decisions, remained connected to the leadership process and moved among actors occupying different institutional positions.

That mechanism begins with access.

 

Chapter 3 — Access as a Governing Resource

Delegated authority can explain why an individual is entitled to act. It does not, by itself, explain how that authority becomes effective.

A mandate may exist formally, privately or through an understood arrangement, but governing authority depends on the ability to enter decisions while they are being shaped, remain connected to the actors expected to respond and return unresolved matters to the source of authority. In the leadership system built around Ali Khamenei, access was therefore more than physical proximity. It was part of the governing process.

Reuters, drawing on interviews with current and former officials familiar with the Supreme Leader’s decision-making system, described a circle of roughly fifteen to twenty advisers, commanders, clerics and political figures who were consulted according to the issue under consideration. The circle was not presented as a permanent cabinet with fixed membership and published procedures. Relevant individuals could enter discussions, matters could be assigned for follow-up, and participants could move between the leadership environment and the institutions in which action was expected to occur.

The arrangement reflected the personalised character of decision-making around the Supreme Leader. Institutional position mattered, but so did access to the environment in which a problem became a leadership concern.

This distinction explains why access to Ali Khamenei cannot be treated simply as ceremonial privilege. The Supreme Leader occupied the apex of the Islamic Republic’s political and military system. A person who repeatedly participated in discussions around him could acquire knowledge unavailable to officials confined to a single organisation: which matters had reached the Leader, which concerns he considered urgent, where reservations existed and which actors were trusted to pursue a problem.

None of this automatically created independent authority.

It did, however, create an informational and relational advantage that became more consequential when combined with permission to act.

Mojtaba’s position inside this environment appears to have become increasingly significant over time. Reuters reported that he had developed a prominent role in his father’s decision-making process and moved among individuals, political factions and organisations to coordinate particular issues.

The description is notable because it does not place him permanently at the head of the institutions involved. It places him close to the principal while also describing movement among actors occupying separate institutional environments.

Access could make such a role effective in several ways.

The first was informational. An official inside a ministry, military command or state organisation generally encountered a problem through the responsibilities and reporting structures of that body. An individual operating close to the Supreme Leader could encounter the same issue after competing accounts, political considerations or security concerns had entered the leadership environment.

The advantage was not omniscience.

It was position.

Mojtaba’s reported proximity to Ali Khamenei potentially placed him near the point at which separate institutional problems were reframed as leadership concerns. When Reuters’ description of that access is read alongside the Treasury assessment of delegated responsibilities, the distinction becomes important. Knowledge of the principal’s priorities could be connected to a reported capacity to act on his behalf.

The second advantage was relational. A leadership concern might involve actors whose formal responsibilities belonged to different institutions. Understanding the issue was not sufficient. Pursuing it required knowledge of who possessed relevant information, who controlled implementation and which actors had access to the Supreme Leader or his trusted environment.

Reuters’ description of Mojtaba moving among individuals, factions and organisations is relevant here. The reporting suggests that his role did not necessarily end when a matter left his father’s immediate circle. His reported significance was associated with coordination among actors whose formal positions remained separate.

The third advantage was continuity of access.

A messenger carries information in one direction. A participant with continuing access may remain connected as an issue develops. New information can return to the leadership environment. Institutional resistance can become visible. A problem unresolved at one level can be raised again with the principal.

The public record does not permit IranSTO to reconstruct how frequently Mojtaba performed such a function or identify a complete catalogue of matters he personally followed. No systematic public record of his meetings with Ali Khamenei on state affairs has been identified. Nor has IranSTO found evidence establishing claims that Mojtaba controlled all access to his father or monopolised the information reaching the Supreme Leader.

The narrower assessment is better supported.

Mojtaba possessed direct familial access to Ali Khamenei. Treasury assessed that he acted officially on his father’s behalf and held delegated leadership responsibilities. Reuters described him as increasingly central to the decision-making process and moving among individuals and organisations to coordinate particular matters.

Taken together, these sources indicate that his access was connected to a reported governing role rather than merely to private family proximity.

This is where descriptions of Mojtaba as a “gatekeeper” require care.

A gatekeeper controls entry. The evidence reviewed for this dossier more clearly supports participation in the movement of particular matters through the leadership environment. Mojtaba may have influenced access in individual cases, but the public record does not establish that he exercised an exclusive monopoly over who or what reached Ali Khamenei.

Such a claim would also ignore the other channels already identified inside the Office. Golpayegani occupied a recognised position in the formal leadership environment. Hejazi was associated with sensitive political-security access and communications. Military commanders, senior clerics and political figures could enter the decision-making process when their institutional responsibilities or personal relationships made them relevant to a particular issue.

Mojtaba’s reported position appears to have been different.

His access was unusually durable because it originated in his relationship with the principal, while the coordinating role described by Reuters extended outward towards actors occupying separate institutional environments.

The combination matters more than either element alone.

Access without authority may produce influence. Delegated authority without continuing access may produce a limited mandate. In Mojtaba’s case, the available evidence points towards the convergence of both: reported authority to act on behalf of Ali Khamenei and continuing proximity to the decision-making environment from which that authority originated.

This convergence may help explain why his reported involvement appears across otherwise disconnected institutional episodes.

It does not yet define the full mechanism.

The public record remains too incomplete to conclude, at this stage of the reconstruction, that Mojtaba exercised stable cross-institutional command. Nor does repeated access establish responsibility for decisions taken by institutions or officials with whom he interacted. The evidentiary question remains specific in each case: what matter was under consideration, what authority had been entrusted to him and what role did he actually perform?

But the pattern now requires examination beyond the organisational chart.

If delegation supplied a reported source of authority and access kept Mojtaba connected to the principal, the next question is how particular matters were pursued once they involved actors from different parts of the ruling system.

The available evidence points towards small working arrangements, trusted relationships and issue-specific coordination.

Those structures are the next layer of the investigation.

 

Chapter 4 — Coordination Without Office

Delegated authority and direct access do not, by themselves, coordinate institutions. A matter involving the leadership, the security apparatus and a state organisation cannot move through proximity alone. Relevant actors must be brought into the issue, responsibilities must be pursued and unresolved questions must remain connected to the source of authority.

The institutional question is therefore practical: through what arrangements could Mojtaba Khamenei work across organisations without holding permanent command over them?

The conventional answer would be a formal office. A senior official receives a portfolio, staff are assigned and responsibilities are divided through a recognised administrative structure. No equivalent public arrangement was defined for Mojtaba during the period examined in this dossier. The Islamic Republic published no department under his leadership and identified no permanent secretariat responsible for the leadership functions reportedly delegated to him.

The available evidence nevertheless points towards working arrangements built around particular issues, trusted participants and direct access to the leadership environment.

Reuters’ reconstruction of Ali Khamenei’s decision-making process provides part of the context. The Supreme Leader consulted a relatively small circle whose composition could vary according to the subject under consideration. Relevant officials and specialists could enter the discussion, while particular participants could remain involved as a matter moved beyond the immediate leadership setting.

This was not necessarily informal in the sense of being casual. It was informal in relation to the published machinery of government. The authority of the arrangement derived from Ali Khamenei and the purpose of the matter under consideration rather than from a standing cabinet structure with publicly defined procedures.

Such an environment was compatible with Mojtaba’s reported position. If Ali Khamenei had delegated responsibilities to him and Reuters’ description of his coordinating role was accurate, Mojtaba did not require permanent superiority over every institution involved. A matter-specific arrangement could bring together the officials, security actors or institutional specialists required for a particular problem.

One account from inside the system describes this type of structure.

The Reported Five-Member Committee

Mohammad Sarafraz, a former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting and a senior figure within the regime’s broadcasting apparatus, has described his participation in a five-member committee handling sensitive political and security matters connected to Ali Khamenei.

Reporting based on Sarafraz’s public disclosures identifies Mojtaba Khamenei, Hossein Taeb and Hossein Fadaei among the other participants. Sarafraz himself was also a member. IranSTO was unable to confirm independently the identity of the fifth participant from the publicly accessible primary material reviewed for this dossier.

No appointment order, charter, meeting record or official acknowledgement of the committee has been identified. The available material does not establish its duration, whether its membership remained constant or the full range of matters assigned to it. Sarafraz later entered into conflict with figures whose activities he described, including individuals connected to the security establishment. His account must therefore be treated as insider testimony from a former participant, with both the access and limitations that status carries.

Its institutional significance lies less in the exact membership than in the governing method it describes.

According to Sarafraz, sensitive matters associated with the Supreme Leader were handled by a small group bringing together individuals from different parts of the ruling system. Taeb represented a senior security capability. Fadaei had an extensive political-security background and later held a senior inspection role connected to the Office of the Supreme Leader. Sarafraz brought experience from the regime’s domestic and external broadcasting structures.

Mojtaba’s position was different. The public record identifies no corresponding institution that he formally represented. If Sarafraz’s account is accurate, Mojtaba entered the arrangement through the leadership environment itself rather than as the head of a publicly constituted agency.

The reported committee is consistent with a matter-specific model of delegation. A problem reaches the leadership level. A limited number of trusted actors with relevant institutional capabilities are brought into the matter. Their organisations continue to exist and may ultimately implement decisions, but discussion, intelligence-sharing or political coordination can occur within a smaller structure built around the leadership priority.

Sarafraz made a further allegation about the relationship between security information and political intervention. As reported by the Middle East Institute, he claimed that intelligence gathered under Taeb, including information concerning the private lives of political figures, was provided to Mojtaba for use in political influence.

IranSTO has not identified documentary records independently establishing the transfers described by Sarafraz. The allegation must remain attributed to him. It does not establish that Mojtaba controlled IRGC Intelligence or possessed general access to its reporting.

It does, however, raise a narrower institutional question: whether a small leadership arrangement allowed information produced by the security apparatus to enter political coordination outside ordinary institutional reporting lines.

The reported committee is not the only evidence suggesting a working structure around Mojtaba.

The Reported Office of Mojtaba Khamenei

A leaked record attributed to a January 2023 meeting of senior IRGC commanders contains an explicit reference to “the office of Haj Agha Mojtaba”. In remarks attributed to Amir Ali Hajizadeh, then commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force, the speaker expresses appreciation for assistance from Mojtaba’s office in overcoming problems faced by the force. The passage refers to support in “provision” and to emphasis and encouragement directed towards achieving improved results.

The document remains publicly unauthenticated and is treated in this dossier as leaked material attributed to senior IRGC figures, not as a verified official transcript. The wording is nevertheless specific enough to raise an institutional question that the published structure of the Islamic Republic does not answer.

What was “Mojtaba’s office”?

IranSTO has identified no public founding instrument for such an office during the period preceding Mojtaba’s succession. No published organisational chart reviewed for this investigation identifies its position within the Office of the Supreme Leader. Its staff, leadership, budget and administrative location remain unknown. No publicly available mandate explains what matters it could accept, which institutions it could contact or what form of assistance it was authorised to provide.

The term should not be overinterpreted. In a personalised leadership environment, an “office” may describe a formally constituted bureau. It may also refer more loosely to the staff surrounding a principal: assistants, intermediaries and trusted personnel responsible for arranging meetings, following matters and maintaining contact with other actors.

The leaked reference does not establish that Mojtaba operated a parallel institution equivalent to the formal Office of the Supreme Leader.

The activity attributed to it, however, appears more substantial than ceremonial support. The remarks attributed to Hajizadeh connect the office to assistance provided to one of the IRGC’s most strategically important forces and refer specifically to provision and follow-through. The meaning of “provision” is not defined. It could concern resources, administrative facilitation, institutional access or another form of support. The public evidence does not permit a more precise finding.

If the record is authentic, its significance lies partly in the ordinary manner in which the office is mentioned. A senior commander appears to refer to Mojtaba’s office as an understood participant in the institutional environment, without explaining its existence or its involvement with the Aerospace Force.

This does not establish the office’s legal basis.

It suggests recognition.

Recognition is central to delegated authority. An unpublished mandate can still operate if relevant actors understand who is authorised to enter a matter and what authority stands behind that intervention. From outside the leadership environment, the arrangement may appear undefined. Inside it, practical boundaries may be understood through direct instruction, repeated involvement or knowledge of the principal’s wishes.

The same leaked record contains another relevant passage. A speaker discussing Mojtaba reportedly refers to areas in which he had permission to become involved and assist. The language does not establish the terms of a formal mandate, but it is consistent with the possibility that senior regime figures understood his involvement as authorised in particular matters rather than derived from a single permanent portfolio.

The reported committee and the reference to Mojtaba’s office must remain analytically separate. No evidence establishes that the office administered the committee, that the committee formed part of the office or that either arrangement maintained permanent authority over the institutions with which its participants interacted.

What connects them is not a verified organisation.

It is a governing method.

In both accounts, sensitive authority appears to acquire practical capacity through trusted actors and matter-specific arrangements rather than through a publicly visible jurisdiction. The reported committee brought together individuals with different institutional capabilities around leadership matters. The reported office appears, in the leaked record, as a working structure capable of assisting with a problem affecting the IRGC Aerospace Force.

Neither arrangement required Mojtaba to replace the institutions involved.

He did not need to command the Aerospace Force to assist with a matter affecting it. He did not need to head IRGC Intelligence to receive information from a security figure, if Sarafraz’s account is accurate. Nor did he need to replace the recognised managers of the Supreme Leader’s Office to participate in a small structure handling a matter connected to Ali Khamenei.

The relevant function was coordination around a leadership priority, not permanent institutional substitution.

Such arrangements also help explain why authority of this kind can leave limited public traces. The formal institution may record the final appointment, order or operational act. It may not record the smaller leadership structure in which the problem was framed, information was exchanged or obstacles were addressed before implementation.

This does not permit investigators to infer responsibility from presence alone. It does mean that conventional records may reveal only the final stage of a process whose earlier coordination occurred elsewhere.

The available evidence does not allow IranSTO to map Mojtaba’s working staff, identify the fifth member of the committee or reconstruct a complete catalogue of the matters assigned to him. The organisational status of the reported office and the meaning of its assistance to the Aerospace Force remain intelligence gaps.

The pattern is nevertheless becoming clearer.

Treasury identified delegated leadership responsibilities. Reuters described coordination among individuals and organisations. Sarafraz described a small, trusted structure handling sensitive leadership matters. A leaked record refers to Mojtaba’s office and to areas in which he had reportedly been permitted to intervene.

Taken separately, each source is incomplete. Read together, they support an institutional assessment that Mojtaba’s reported authority may have operated through flexible, matter-specific arrangements built around access, trust and recognition by relevant actors.

That method introduces another question.

Coordination depends not only on identifying officials capable of acting. It also depends on deciding who can be trusted with information, responsibility and access to sensitive institutional positions.

The next layer of the investigation is therefore personnel loyalty as an instrument of institutional control.

Chapter 5 — Loyalty as Institutional Infrastructure

Coordination depends on people.

In a system that handles sensitive political and security matters through small groups, trusted intermediaries and unpublished channels of authority, the reliability of individuals becomes part of the governing mechanism itself. An official who leaks information, resists an intervention or remains aligned with a competing centre of influence can disrupt a process that may never have been formally constituted.

Where authority travels through trust, personnel are not merely employees of an institution. They become part of the infrastructure through which information, instruction and institutional responsiveness are maintained.

This distinction is important when examining claims concerning Mojtaba Khamenei’s involvement in personnel matters. Public discussion has often reduced the issue to patronage: the Supreme Leader’s son placing allies in powerful positions. Patronage is a relevant possibility in any personalised political system. A leaked record attributed to senior IRGC commanders, however, presents a more explicitly security-driven rationale.

In that discussion, the placement of trusted individuals is connected to information leakage, internal reliability and concerns over penetration of sensitive structures.

The record, attributed to a January 2023 meeting, emerged after the nationwide uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in morality-police custody. By then, the Islamic Republic’s security establishment was confronting not only sustained public opposition but visible anxiety about its own internal condition. The leaked discussion includes references to dissatisfaction among personnel, the sale or transfer of information and declining trust within the forces.

The document remains publicly unauthenticated. Its relevance here lies in the institutional logic of the conversation it purports to record.

In remarks attributed to Hossein Nejat, a senior IRGC commander with longstanding roles in the regime’s security system, the controversy surrounding Mojtaba is connected to efforts to place known and trusted individuals at key points inside state bodies. The stated concern is information transfer and leakage.

The logic is therefore not simply that loyalists should be rewarded.

It is that strategically positioned personnel can reduce uncertainty inside institutions regarded as vulnerable.

If authentic, the record describes a security conception of personnel management built around personal reliability. Information vulnerability produces distrust. Distrust creates pressure to identify individuals whose loyalty is already known. Those individuals are then placed at points where access to information, decision-making or implementation is considered sensitive.

Loyalty becomes a method of controlling institutional risk.

Governments and security organisations routinely vet personnel assigned to sensitive roles. The issue here is not vetting itself. It is the apparent movement from institutional reliability towards network-based trust. Professional clearance is ordinarily attached to defined procedures and identifiable authorities. The model described in the leaked discussion appears more personalised: the relevant individual is not merely qualified or cleared, but known and trusted within a political-security network connected to the leadership.

That difference has consequences.

When trust is attached to networks rather than impersonal procedures, personnel placement can extend influence into an institution without formally reorganising it. The head of the organisation may remain unchanged. Its statutory responsibilities may remain intact. Yet trusted individuals at critical points can affect which information travels upward, which warnings receive attention, how quickly a leadership concern is acted upon and whether resistance inside the institution is reported through alternative channels.

The leaked record does not provide a verified list of individuals placed through Mojtaba’s involvement. IranSTO has identified no documentary personnel file establishing that he personally selected a defined group of commanders or civilian officials through a systematic placement programme.

Political proximity is not evidence of appointment responsibility.

This boundary is particularly important in relation to senior IRGC figures. Mojtaba’s reported relationships with Hossein Taeb and other members of the security establishment have generated extensive speculation about his influence over appointments. A relationship with a powerful official does not prove responsibility for that official’s appointment. Formal appointment powers remained distributed through the Supreme Leader and relevant command structures.

Where direct documentary evidence of Mojtaba’s intervention is unavailable, the chain of appointment remains unresolved.

The January 2023 record is more useful because it does not require investigators to construct a catalogue of “Mojtaba’s men” from secondary reporting. Instead, it presents a reported internal discussion of the rationale behind trusted placement itself.

In the remarks attributed to Nejat, Mojtaba is connected to efforts to facilitate the movement of trusted individuals into key positions. The significance lies in the mechanism described by a senior security figure, not in an externally assembled list of alleged loyalists.

Other passages in the same record suggest that the process was contested even within senior IRGC circles.

Remarks attributed to Yadollah Bouali criticise new arrangements affecting particular military forces and refer to changes made on the basis of Mojtaba’s views and by forces under his direction. The concern, as presented in the transcript, centres on the displacement of experienced personnel and the risk that changes to established security arrangements could produce severe consequences.

If authentic, the disagreement complicates the image of a single, uncontested command system. Some participants appear to have understood trusted placement as necessary in an environment of leakage and internal vulnerability. Others were concerned that personnel and organisational changes associated with Mojtaba’s involvement could remove experienced officials and damage operational capability.

Loyalty and competence were not necessarily aligned.

That tension is common in personalised security systems, but it becomes especially consequential during periods of institutional stress. A leadership facing internal leaks may interpret established networks as compromised. Replacing experienced officials with more trusted individuals may reduce one perceived vulnerability while creating another. Institutional memory can be lost. Professional relationships can be disrupted. The measures intended to increase regime security can generate new forms of organisational fragility.

The reported involvement of Mojtaba in this environment also returns the investigation to the question of delegated authority.

Another speaker in the leaked meeting reportedly defended Mojtaba’s involvement by referring to matters in which he had permission to enter and assist. The wording does not define the source, duration or boundaries of that permission. It does suggest that the defence of his involvement rested on authorisation rather than solely on his relationship to Ali Khamenei as a son.

This language is consistent with, but does not prove, the delegation model identified by the US Treasury. The Treasury designation and the leaked transcript remain separate sources with different evidentiary status. Together, they require investigators to consider whether some personnel interventions were understood inside the regime as falling within authorised areas of Mojtaba’s involvement.

Personnel placement would be compatible with this form of authority.

Mojtaba did not require an independent statutory power of appointment to affect a personnel outcome. An intermediary acting with the Leader’s approval could identify a concern, communicate a preference, facilitate the advancement of a trusted individual or remain involved while the formal appointment moved through recognised channels.

The official record might show who signed the appointment.

It might not show who identified the candidate, characterised an incumbent as unreliable or carried the issue into the leadership environment.

This is why personnel loyalty should be treated as institutional infrastructure rather than merely as a list of personal allies.

A list encourages investigators to ask whether official A was “Mojtaba’s man” or commander B was “close to the Leader’s son”. Those questions may be relevant, but they can obscure the broader system. The more important question is whether trusted placement allowed leadership-linked networks to maintain visibility and influence inside institutions whose formal chains of command remained unchanged.

Trusted personnel can perform several functions. They may provide early warning when dissent or resistance develops inside an organisation. They may ensure that politically sensitive information reaches the leadership through an alternative channel. They may accelerate a matter delayed by ordinary bureaucracy or reassure the leadership that an institution will remain responsive during a crisis.

None of these functions requires the trusted individual to occupy the highest position in the organisation.

The same arrangement can support political surveillance, factional intervention and the exclusion of professionally qualified personnel whose loyalty is considered uncertain. Sarafraz’s allegations concerning security-derived information entering a small political circle illustrate the potential consequences when intelligence, personal trust and political coordination overlap.

The public evidence does not establish the full extent of such practices or permit every reported episode to be attributed to Mojtaba. It does show why trusted personnel would matter to an actor whose reported role crossed institutional boundaries.

The security environment of the Islamic Republic made this logic increasingly important. Repeated protests, factional conflict and concerns about penetration created a permanent demand for political reliability.

In that environment, loyalty became operational: who received sensitive information, who was present when a crisis was assessed, who could be trusted to carry a leadership priority and who remained responsive when formal institutions came under pressure.

Mojtaba’s reported role in facilitating trusted placements therefore fits the pattern reconstructed in the previous chapters. Delegation provided a possible source of authority. Access connected him to the principal. Matter-specific arrangements created a vehicle for coordination. Trusted personnel could extend that coordination into institutions without requiring him to take formal control of them.

The evidence remains incomplete. IranSTO cannot identify every individual placed through Mojtaba’s intervention, determine the scale of any systematic personnel network or establish that all changes criticised in the leaked meeting were implemented at his direction.

The narrower finding is nevertheless significant.

Within the governing environment described by senior regime insiders and the leaked IRGC record, loyalty was treated as a response to information vulnerability and institutional distrust. Mojtaba was reportedly associated with efforts to place trusted individuals at key institutional points.

If the record is accurate, his role was not limited to moving between existing officials. It also concerned who occupied sensitive positions inside the structures through which leadership priorities travelled.

The consequences become clearest when this form of authority enters a formal institution whose appointed chief believes he remains responsible for its management.

Mohammad Sarafraz’s final period at the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting provides one of the clearest available examples of that collision.

 

Chapter 6 — When Informal Authority Enters a Formal Institution

In November 2014, Ali Khamenei appointed Mohammad Sarafraz as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. The position was not peripheral. Under Article 110 of the Constitution, appointment and dismissal of the head of the state broadcasting organisation belongs directly to the Supreme Leader.

Sarafraz therefore entered IRIB with one of the clearest formal mandates available in the Islamic Republic. He had been selected by the highest authority in the ruling system to manage an organisation under that authority’s direct constitutional supervision.

Less than two years later, he resigned.

The significance of Sarafraz’s account lies not in the fact that a senior regime official lost an internal power struggle. Such conflicts are common inside the Islamic Republic. What makes the episode institutionally important is the structure of the conflict he describes.

The formally appointed head of a leadership-controlled institution encountered intervention by actors connected to IRGC Intelligence and the Office of the Supreme Leader. He appealed through channels leading back to the same leadership authority that had appointed him. He ultimately left office without identifying a transparent chain of authority governing the pressures he believed had been directed against his administration.

Sarafraz later documented his version of these events in The Story of a Resignation and subsequent public disclosures. His testimony must be approached as the account of a participant in the system rather than an independent observer. He had held senior positions in the Islamic Republic’s broadcasting apparatus for decades and, by his own account, participated in sensitive political-security arrangements connected to the leadership environment. His later conflict with Hossein Taeb and other figures he described is relevant to assessing his testimony.

It does not remove the evidentiary value of a former institutional chief explaining how he understood the pressures operating against him while still inside the regime.

According to Sarafraz, one of the central disputes concerned commercial and managerial matters inside IRIB and intervention by IRGC Intelligence under Hossein Taeb. He described pressure surrounding a major commercial tender and alleged that security-linked actors interfered with the organisation’s internal processes.

The details of the commercial dispute are not the principal subject of this dossier.

The institutional response is.

Sarafraz wrote that he contacted Taeb directly and described writing to the Office of the Supreme Leader. The dispute did not produce, in his account, a clear institutional ruling defining the authority of IRGC Intelligence to intervene in IRIB’s management or protecting the authority of the organisation’s formally appointed president.

Eventually, Sarafraz raised the matter directly with Ali Khamenei.

His description of that meeting is unusually revealing. Sarafraz told the Supreme Leader that he believed he was confronting what amounted to a hidden government within the government: a structure with money, media and security capabilities.

The phrase was Sarafraz’s own interpretation of the actors opposing him. It is not independent evidence of a single covert organisation. Its significance lies in what it reveals about the institutional chief’s understanding of the conflict. The president of IRIB believed that a combination of capabilities was operating against his administration in a form he could not contain through the institution he formally controlled.

Sarafraz’s position should have been structurally strong. Ali Khamenei had appointed him. He led an organisation constitutionally tied to the Supreme Leader. He possessed sufficient access to present his complaint to Khamenei personally.

Yet his account does not describe the leadership system resolving the conflict through a visible determination of jurisdiction. He did not emerge from the meeting with a publicly identifiable directive establishing where IRIB’s managerial authority ended and where the security apparatus could intervene.

This is the point at which the episode becomes relevant to Mojtaba Khamenei.

In Sarafraz’s account of a later meeting with Hossein Taeb, he told the intelligence chief to convey his thanks to Hossein Mohammadi and “Haj Agha Mojtaba” for helping to create the conditions that led to his departure from IRIB. According to Sarafraz, Taeb did not respond by rejecting the association. He instead asked what Sarafraz intended to do after leaving the organisation.

The exchange, as recorded by Sarafraz, does not prove that Mojtaba ordered his removal.

It does establish that Sarafraz himself, while describing a conflict he had experienced as the formally appointed head of IRIB, placed Mojtaba within the group of actors he believed had contributed to the circumstances of his exit.

That distinction must remain explicit.

IranSTO has identified no order signed by Mojtaba directing Sarafraz’s resignation or dismissal. No publicly available meeting record reviewed for this dossier establishes that Mojtaba instructed Taeb or Hossein Mohammadi to remove the IRIB president. Sarafraz’s statement is evidence of his understanding of the network operating against him. It is not documentary proof of a direct command.

The network he describes is nevertheless institutionally significant.

Hossein Taeb represented the security dimension. By the period described by Sarafraz, Taeb had become one of the most powerful figures in the IRGC’s intelligence apparatus. His organisation possessed investigative and coercive capabilities outside IRIB’s management structure. Sarafraz’s conflict with Taeb therefore placed the head of a state broadcasting institution against a security actor whose authority derived from a different part of the ruling system.

Hossein Mohammadi occupied another position. A former senior IRIB official, he later became a deputy in the Office of the Supreme Leader and was associated with the leadership’s cultural and media environment. His career placed him across the institutional boundary at issue: he had deep experience inside the broadcasting organisation and a senior role within the leadership environment surrounding Ali Khamenei.

Sarafraz’s account also describes a small group of individuals exercising significant influence over IRIB news and identifies them as trusted by the Office of the Supreme Leader and by Mohammadi. The precise formal authority of these individuals over the organisation’s president is unclear from the public record.

Their reported position illustrates the problem examined in the previous chapter: trusted personnel inside a formal institution may create channels of influence that do not correspond to the institution’s visible hierarchy.

Mojtaba’s reported presence in this network was different again.

He did not hold Taeb’s security command. He did not occupy Mohammadi’s recognised deputy position inside the Office. He was not the president of IRIB. Yet Sarafraz placed him alongside those actors when explaining the forces he believed had contributed to the conditions surrounding his resignation.

The episode therefore brings together several forms of authority already identified in this Regime Atlas collection. A formal institution had a leader appointed directly by Ali Khamenei. A security actor entered a dispute involving the institution’s internal affairs. A senior official connected to the Supreme Leader’s Office occupied a long-established interface with the broadcasting environment. Mojtaba, whose delegated responsibilities and coordinating role were never publicly defined by the Islamic Republic, appeared in the former president’s account as part of the surrounding network.

The formal organisational chart does not explain how these actors related to one another.

Sarafraz’s attempts to seek resolution make that gap particularly visible. He contacted Taeb. He wrote to the Office. He reached Ali Khamenei directly. Yet the account he later published identifies no transparent adjudication of the institutional conflict.

The same principal sat above the formal institution and the leadership environment into which Sarafraz appealed.

That structural fact matters.

If an institution’s chief encounters pressure through channels connected to the leadership system, appeal to the Supreme Leader is not necessarily an appeal to an external arbiter. It may be an appeal to the political centre around which the competing actors themselves are organised.

Sarafraz’s account does not establish that Ali Khamenei personally designed every intervention he described. Nor does it establish that the actors named by Sarafraz operated as a single permanent organisation under unified command.

It exposes a different institutional problem.

The formal chief could identify the actors he believed were interfering with his institution. He could reach the Supreme Leader. He could describe the conflict. What he could not identify, at least in the account he later published, was a transparent jurisdictional structure capable of determining whose authority prevailed and on what basis.

This is where informal authority becomes more than personal influence.

A formal institution possesses an identifiable head and visible administrative hierarchy. Yet actors outside that hierarchy may carry security capabilities, leadership access, trusted personnel relationships or authority derived from the principal. Their interventions can affect the institution without formally replacing its chief.

The result is not necessarily a parallel government in the literal sense suggested by Sarafraz’s phrase.

It is a system of overlapping channels whose boundaries are difficult to reconstruct.

For the formal chief, the practical problem is immediate. An intervention may come from an actor he does not command. The actor may be connected to the same Supreme Leader who appointed him. The institution’s internal hierarchy may provide no mechanism for resolving the conflict because the source of the intervention lies outside it.

For investigators, the problem appears later.

The official record may show that Sarafraz resigned. It may identify his successor and preserve the formal appointment history of IRIB. Those records do not, by themselves, explain the sequence of pressures, interventions and relationships that preceded his departure.

Sarafraz’s testimony supplies one account of that hidden sequence.

It remains testimony.

Its value lies in the institutional detail provided by a former participant who occupied the formal position at the centre of the conflict. Its limitation is that IranSTO has not identified the internal communications, leadership records or security documentation required to independently reconstruct every interaction he described.

The appropriate finding is therefore narrower than an allegation that Mojtaba “controlled IRIB” or “removed Sarafraz”.

The evidence reviewed for this dossier does not establish either claim.

What Sarafraz’s account demonstrates is that a formally appointed institutional chief understood Mojtaba to be part of a network of security and leadership-linked actors whose interventions had materially affected the environment in which he could continue to manage the organisation.

That is a different claim.

It is also the more important institutional one.

The case provides a practical example of how authority without a clearly published jurisdiction may intersect with a formal institution. Mojtaba did not need to become president of IRIB. He did not need to appear in its organisational chart. He did not need to sign Sarafraz’s resignation.

If Sarafraz’s account accurately reflects the conflict he experienced, Mojtaba’s significance lay in his reported presence within the network surrounding the institutional pressure.

The formal institution remained visible.

The channels acting upon it did not.

This distinction moves the investigation beyond a single conflict at IRIB. The same analytical problem arises wherever a leadership-linked actor can enter matters involving institutions with their own commanders, ministers or appointed chiefs.

The question is no longer whether Mojtaba occupied a hidden office equivalent to those institutions.

It is what kind of authority allowed him to become relevant at the points where their jurisdictions intersected.

The evidence examined so far provides the components of an answer.

Delegation.

Access.

Matter-specific coordination.

Trusted personnel.

And repeated involvement at institutional boundaries.

The next chapter tests whether these components can be understood as part of the wider governing structure already reconstructed inside the Office of the Supreme Leader.

Chapter 7 — Beside the Office, Above It, or Through It?

The Sarafraz case exposes a problem that extends beyond IRIB. Several actors connected to Ali Khamenei could enter the same institutional dispute through different routes, each carrying a different form of authority.

A security chief acted through the intelligence apparatus. A senior official of the Office of the Supreme Leader occupied an established position within the leadership environment. Another Office figure appeared in the communication of the final leadership decision. Mojtaba Khamenei, according to Sarafraz, was part of the surrounding network but held no publicly defined office, explaining his place within it.

The natural temptation is to impose a hierarchy on this arrangement.

Mojtaba was the Supreme Leader’s son. The US Treasury described him as holding delegated leadership responsibilities. Multiple accounts placed him close to powerful security figures. From those facts, it is easy to construct a hidden pyramid in which the recognised officials of the Office ultimately reported to him.

The available evidence does not establish such a pyramid.

IranSTO has identified no public record showing that Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani formally reported to Mojtaba. No appointment instrument reviewed for this dossier places Ali Asghar Hejazi under Mojtaba’s authority. No documentary evidence establishes that Vahid Haghanian received a standing set of instructions from Mojtaba or served as his executive subordinate.

The absence of such evidence does not prove that private instructions never passed between them. It means a formal or stable hierarchy cannot be reconstructed from the public record.

This limitation matters because each of the three officials occupied a position that already gave him direct relevance to the Supreme Leader.

Golpayegani did not require Mojtaba to justify his position as head of the Office. His authority was attached to a publicly identifiable administrative role surrounding Ali Khamenei.

Hejazi’s access to sensitive political-security matters was rooted in his longstanding relationship with the Supreme Leader and a recognised position within the leadership environment. His role combined trust with institutional location inside the Office.

Haghanian presented another variation. His role involved special assignments, intervention beyond the physical boundaries of the Office and executive follow-through on matters associated with Ali Khamenei’s priorities. He could enter other institutional environments without becoming their permanent head, but the public record still connected him to a recognised position around the Supreme Leader.

Treating these figures simply as Mojtaba’s subordinates would erase the independent sources of authority that made them institutionally significant.

Mojtaba’s reported position differs from all three.

The evidence reviewed for this dossier does not show him managing the formal administration in Golpayegani’s place. It does not establish that he controlled the political-security channel associated with Hejazi or simply inherited Haghanian’s executive function.

Yet the record repeatedly places Mojtaba in matters that intersected with these environments.

Treasury identified delegated leadership responsibilities. Reuters described him moving among individuals, factions and organisations to coordinate particular issues. Sarafraz placed him within a network of security and leadership-linked actors surrounding a dispute inside IRIB. The leaked IRGC record refers to a working office associated with him, authorised areas of involvement and assistance provided to the Aerospace Force.

The result is a position that cannot be accurately described as simply inside or outside the Office.

Mojtaba was inside the leadership environment because his reported authority originated in his relationship with Ali Khamenei and because the available evidence places him within the Supreme Leader’s decision-making process. He remained outside the Office’s visible senior management structure because no equivalent public position defined his jurisdiction.

At the same time, his reported activities intersected with actors whose functions were administrative, political-security and executive.

The distinction becomes clearer if the Office is treated not simply as a bureaucracy but as part of a wider leadership system.

A bureaucracy is reconstructed primarily through departments, titles and reporting lines. A leadership system must also be reconstructed through access, trust, delegation and the routes by which a principal’s priorities enter institutions with their own formal jurisdictions.

The Office of the Supreme Leader contained bureaucratic structures. The evidence assembled across this Regime Atlas collection indicates that the governing environment around Ali Khamenei also relied on personalised channels that operated alongside and through those structures.

This helps explain why overlapping functions could coexist without forming a single hidden chain of command.

Golpayegani could manage the Office while political-security information moved through another channel. Hejazi could remain close to sensitive security matters while Haghanian pursued a special assignment beyond the Office. Mojtaba could enter a matter authorised by Ali Khamenei without becoming the permanent superior of the officials or commanders involved.

Their common point was the principal.

Ali Khamenei stood at the centre of each relationship.

This structure offered practical advantages to the leadership. A matter did not need to move through a single bureaucratic route before reaching the Supreme Leader. Different channels could provide information, pursue an issue or connect the leadership to actors capable of responding. A problem involving several organisations could be addressed without creating a new permanent body whose jurisdiction required public definition.

The same arrangement created uncertainty below the leadership level.

A formal chief might not know whether an intervention reflected personal influence or delegated leadership authority. A commander might understand that Mojtaba had permission to enter a particular matter while disagreeing with personnel changes associated with his involvement. An Office official might communicate a leadership decision without having participated in the smaller arrangement that shaped it.

Each actor could see only part of the process.

For investigators, the fragmentation is more serious. The documentary record may preserve the formal appointment, final order or institutional act. It may not preserve the conversations, delegated interventions and smaller arrangements through which the matter acquired leadership attention and moved towards implementation.

Responsibility can become dispersed across actors described separately as advisers, coordinators, messengers or implementers while the principal source of authority remains removed from the visible act.

This is why the question of whether Mojtaba stood above the Office cannot be answered through status alone. His family relationship and reported delegation placed him unusually close to Ali Khamenei, but proximity to the principal is not equivalent to administrative command over the institution surrounding him.

The evidence supports significant authority.

It does not support the conclusion that Mojtaba formally directed every senior Office official.

Nor is it sufficient to say that he stood beside the Office. That description implies an external parallel structure. The leaked reference to “Mojtaba’s office” raises the possibility of a working staff, but no evidence reviewed for this dossier establishes a separate leadership bureaucracy operating independently of the Office built around Ali Khamenei.

Mojtaba’s reported activities repeatedly intersected with the same people, security relationships and decision-making environment examined throughout this collection.

“Through the Office” is closer, but still incomplete.

Some of his reported authority may have travelled through Office personnel and leadership-linked networks. The Sarafraz case shows figures associated with the Office appearing in the same institutional conflict as Mojtaba and security actors. Reuters’ description of his coordination among individuals, factions and organisations, however, suggests movement beyond a single administrative channel.

The available evidence therefore supports a more complex assessment.

Mojtaba operated within the wider leadership system, across channels that included but were not limited to the formal Office.

His authority was relational to the principal and contextual to the matter.

This model helps explain why the public record surrounding Mojtaba remained so difficult to interpret. Observers searching for a title found none equivalent to the scale of influence being reported. Those searching for a single institution under his control encountered contradictory claims. Those attempting to identify a formal chain of command repeatedly reached evidentiary gaps.

The problem may not have been that the correct organisational chart remained hidden.

A conventional chart may have been incapable of representing the governing arrangement.

The first four dossiers in this collection now reveal four different ways in which authority moved around the Supreme Leader. Administration created institutional continuity. Political-security access connected sensitive information and trusted channels to the leadership. Executive follow-through carried priorities into other institutional environments. Delegated coordination allowed a trusted actor to remain involved when a matter crossed organisational boundaries.

These functions could overlap because they were organised around the same source of authority.

The deeper institutional finding is not that the Office lacked structure. It is that the leadership system cannot be understood solely as a vertical bureaucracy. The available evidence points towards an environment in which recognised offices coexisted with personalised channels of access and delegation. Authority could be formal in one part of a process, relational in another and expressed through an institution whose officials did not necessarily see the complete chain.

Mojtaba Khamenei’s place in that system was therefore neither a conventional office nor a simple position above the Office.

His reported significance appears at the points where institutional jurisdictions met and where a leadership concern required continuity between actors who did not otherwise share a chain of command.

That boundary-crossing function is the next layer of the investigation.

Chapter 8 — Authority Across Institutional Boundaries

The difficulty in locating Mojtaba Khamenei within the Office of the Supreme Leader cannot be resolved by assigning him to one of its recognised functions. The evidence examined in this dossier does not identify him as an alternative head of administration, a replacement for the Office’s political-security channel or a permanent executive operator carrying a defined category of assignments.

His reported activities repeatedly crossed these environments without settling inside any one of them.

This distinguishes Mojtaba from the three senior figures examined earlier in this Regime Atlas collection. Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani occupied an identifiable institutional domain. His authority was attached to the administration of the Office and the continuity of its formal relationship with the wider ruling system. Ali Asghar Hejazi operated within a political-security environment shaped by sensitive access, communications and relationships with security actors. Vahid Haghanian’s function was visible in assignments requiring intervention, representation or executive follow-through beyond the Office itself.

The boundaries around each role were not always transparent. Their activities could overlap, and the public record remains incomplete. Even so, the available evidence allowed a dominant institutional function to be identified in each case.

Mojtaba is different because crossing boundaries appears to have been part of the function itself.

Reuters described him moving among individuals, political factions and organisations to coordinate matters. The US Treasury assessed that Ali Khamenei had delegated part of his leadership responsibilities to him and that Mojtaba acted officially on his father’s behalf. Sarafraz placed him inside a small arrangement handling sensitive political and security matters and later identified him among the actors he believed had contributed to the conditions surrounding his departure from IRIB. The leaked record attributed to senior IRGC commanders refers to Mojtaba’s office, assistance involving the Aerospace Force, the placement of trusted personnel and areas in which he had reportedly been permitted to intervene.

These sources do not describe a single jurisdiction.

They describe movement.

The distinction is fundamental. Conventional bureaucratic authority normally begins with an institutional boundary. A ministry has a field of responsibility. A military command has forces and operational duties. An intelligence organisation has collection, assessment or security functions. Even where officials abuse their authority or intervene beyond formal jurisdiction, the office itself provides a starting point for reconstructing the basis on which they acted.

Mojtaba’s reported role appears to have operated differently.

The starting point was not a defined institutional domain but a relationship to the principal. A matter connected to Ali Khamenei could involve several actors. If Mojtaba was entrusted with that matter, his apparent function was to remain connected to the leadership concern while moving among the institutional environments relevant to it.

IranSTO assesses this function as connective authority.

The term does not imply formal command over every connected actor. It describes the capacity to maintain continuity between a principal decision-maker and actors occupying different institutional jurisdictions when a matter crosses organisational boundaries.

The authority lies not in ownership of every institution involved, but in the recognised ability to remain connected to the matter as it moves between them.

A security official may possess intelligence. A military commander may control operational resources. An Office official may maintain access to the leadership environment. A state organisation may possess the administrative authority required for implementation. None of these actors needs to report permanently to the coordinator for coordination to occur.

The significance of the connective actor lies in the relationship between the issue, the principal and the actors capable of responding.

This model is consistent with the matter-specific decision-making environment described in reporting on Ali Khamenei’s inner circle. Relevant individuals could enter a discussion according to their institutional position or expertise. Particular participants could remain involved as an issue moved beyond the immediate leadership setting.

In such a system, an individual with direct access to the Supreme Leader and delegated responsibilities could provide continuity as a matter moved from leadership concern to institutional contact and, where necessary, back towards the principal.

The available evidence does not establish that Mojtaba performed this function in every major political or security decision. It does not support the claim that all institutional coordination around Ali Khamenei passed through him. Nor can the incidents examined in this dossier be used to reconstruct a complete catalogue of the responsibilities reportedly delegated to him.

The scope of his mandate remains an intelligence gap.

What can be reconstructed is a recurring institutional pattern.

Mojtaba appears inside the leadership decision-making environment. He is described as coordinating among otherwise separate actors. He is associated, in insider testimony, with a small structure dealing with sensitive matters. A leaked record refers to a working office around him and to assistance provided in an IRGC context. The same record connects him to trusted personnel placement and contains language concerning permitted areas of intervention. In the Sarafraz case, his name appears within a conflict involving a formal institutional chief, IRGC Intelligence and senior figures connected to the Office of the Supreme Leader.

The recurrence across institutional boundaries is more analytically significant than any single allegation.

This is also why the extensive political debate over whether Mojtaba “controlled” particular organisations can be misleading.

Control is a demanding institutional claim.

To establish control over the IRGC, IRIB, the Basij or another state body, investigators would need evidence demonstrating command, systematic decision authority or the capacity to direct the institution as a whole. The public evidence reviewed by IranSTO does not establish such comprehensive control.

Comprehensive control, however, may not have been necessary for Mojtaba’s reported role to be consequential.

An individual entrusted with a particular leadership concern could affect an institution at the point relevant to that concern. He might participate in a small group examining the issue, contact actors possessing the necessary capabilities, facilitate assistance, remain involved in personnel questions or carry unresolved problems back towards the Supreme Leader.

The institution would continue to operate under its formal leadership.

The intervention would be selective.

Matter-specific authority is therefore central to the model.

This may help explain the apparently contradictory descriptions of Mojtaba that accumulated over two decades. Some accounts portrayed him as one of the most powerful individuals in the Islamic Republic. Others pointed to the absence of a major formal position and questioned claims of comprehensive control.

Both observations can coexist if his authority became operational according to the matter entrusted to him.

Outside those matters, the formal institution retained its hierarchy. Within them, direct access to the Supreme Leader and recognised delegation could give Mojtaba a significance disproportionate to his published position.

The resulting system was not necessarily administratively chaotic. To insiders familiar with the leadership environment, the boundaries of a particular intervention may have been sufficiently understood. Direct instruction from Ali Khamenei, repeated patterns of involvement or knowledge of Mojtaba’s relationship to a matter could have signalled the authority behind his participation.

The ambiguity becomes most visible to outsiders and to officials whose institutional responsibilities collide with a leadership channel they do not fully control.

Sarafraz’s experience illustrates the latter problem. He possessed a formal mandate over IRIB but described interventions involving actors whose authority originated elsewhere. The leaked IRGC record, if authentic, suggests a different form of internal tension: senior commanders discussing Mojtaba’s involvement, with some defending authorised areas of assistance and others raising concerns about the consequences of changes associated with his views or personnel.

In both cases, the friction appears at the institutional boundary.

Boundaries are where connective authority becomes visible because they are where formal jurisdictions stop.

A ministry can act within its portfolio. A military force can operate through its command structure. An Office official can exercise the responsibilities attached to a recognised position. The need for cross-institutional coordination emerges when a leadership priority does not remain within those limits.

At that point, an issue must either pass through a formal coordinating institution or be carried across the boundary through another mechanism.

The evidence examined in this dossier indicates that Mojtaba may have served as one such mechanism when matters had been entrusted to him.

This should not be mistaken for an assertion that he replaced the administrative, political-security or executive functions identified in the previous dossiers.

The evidence points instead towards complementarity and overlap. A matter involving Mojtaba could still require an Office channel. Sensitive information could still move through security actors with their own direct relationships to Ali Khamenei. Executive follow-through could still be carried by another trusted figure.

The leadership system did not need to consolidate every function under Mojtaba for his role to be consequential.

His value to the system may have been precisely the opposite.

Because his reported authority was not confined to a single visible portfolio, it could be adapted to the matter under consideration. Delegation from the principal supplied a reported basis for intervention. Direct access maintained connection to the source of authority. Trusted relationships reduced the institutional distance between actors. A working staff or matter-specific group could provide organisational capacity where necessary.

The institutional advantages are clear.

The Supreme Leader could pursue sensitive matters without permanently restructuring the state. Actors from different organisations could be brought into a leadership concern. Multiple channels of information and intervention could remain available. A trusted intermediary could continue following an issue even as responsibility for individual acts moved among formal bodies.

The accountability consequences are equally significant.

Selective intervention leaves a fragmented record. The institution implementing a decision records its own act. A commander may record an operational response. An appointment may carry the signature of the formal appointing authority. A leadership official may communicate the final decision.

The connective actor may appear only in testimony, meeting accounts or communications that never become public.

If the mandate itself remains unpublished, investigators must reconstruct not only what happened but why separate institutions began acting around the same leadership concern.

This creates the possibility of institutional contribution without visible decision ownership.

The phrase requires precision.

It does not mean that Mojtaba can be held responsible for every action taken by an institution with which he had contact. Contact is not command. Coordination is not automatically criminal responsibility.

Any accountability assessment concerning a specific event would require evidence of knowledge, authority, contribution and a demonstrable relationship between the individual’s conduct and the institutional act under investigation.

The problem is that connective authority makes those evidentiary questions harder to answer.

When responsibilities are delegated through unpublished boundaries and exercised across institutional lines, the material required to attribute decision-making may be distributed among several organisations or remain inside the leadership environment. A formal chain of command can be examined from superior to subordinate. Connective authority requires investigators to reconstruct meetings, communications, information flows, personnel relationships and the sequence through which a matter acquired leadership attention.

This has direct implications for future IranSTO investigations.

Questions concerning electoral intervention, protest repression, intelligence coordination or other security decisions cannot be answered merely by demonstrating that Mojtaba knew a commander or appeared within the same political network. The inquiry must be narrower and more demanding: was the matter within an area entrusted to him? What information reached him? Which actors did he contact? What action did he request, facilitate or follow? How did the institutions involved understand the authority behind his intervention?

Those questions are particularly important in relation to episodes of mass repression.

The presence of a boundary-crossing coordinator inside a leadership system does not establish participation in a specific crackdown. It does, however, identify the evidentiary route investigators must follow when attempting to reconstruct responsibility. Intelligence briefings, leadership meetings, communications with security commanders, matter-specific arrangements and records of intervention become more important than the absence of Mojtaba’s name from a formal operational command chart.

This dossier does not attempt to resolve those separate accountability investigations. The January 2026 mass killings, the decision-making chain surrounding the nationwide communications shutdown and Mojtaba’s relationship to the security structures active during that period require their own evidence base.

They should not be compressed into an institutional dossier simply because the same individual may be relevant to each.

The present finding is structural.

Mojtaba Khamenei’s reported significance inside Ali Khamenei’s leadership system did not depend on permanent command of every institution he encountered. The evidence instead points towards authority capable of becoming operational at institutional intersections: where a leadership priority required information from one body, action from another and continued connection to the Supreme Leader.

His apparent function was the ability to operate where formal jurisdictions met.

That function also changes the way his later succession must be understood.

If Mojtaba spent years exercising delegated responsibilities, coordinating actors and operating across the leadership system, his eventual movement to the apex of the Islamic Republic cannot be examined simply as the sudden political elevation of a previously peripheral cleric.

The institutional question is whether succession created his authority or formalised an authority that had already been developing around the Supreme Leader for years.

 

Chapter 9 — From Delegated Authority to Succession

Succession changed Mojtaba Khamenei’s formal position.

It did not create his institutional relevance.

For years before the death of Ali Khamenei, the available evidence had already placed Mojtaba inside the leadership environment. The US Treasury assessed that part of the Supreme Leader’s responsibilities had been delegated to him. Reuters described an increasingly central role in his father’s decision-making process and a function involving coordination among individuals, factions and organisations. Mohammad Sarafraz placed him inside a small structure dealing with sensitive political and security matters. Leaked material attributed to senior IRGC commanders referred to his office, assistance involving the Aerospace Force and areas in which he had reportedly been authorised to intervene.

Each source carries its own evidentiary limitations. Together, they describe an individual whose institutional significance preceded his movement to the apex of the Islamic Republic.

This distinction matters because succession is often analysed primarily as a contest for office. The questions are familiar: who possesses sufficient clerical standing, which factions support particular candidates, what role the Assembly of Experts will play and whether the IRGC will accept the outcome.

Those questions concern the formal and political process through which a Supreme Leader emerges.

They do not necessarily explain the institutional experience accumulated by a potential successor before the office becomes vacant.

Mojtaba entered the succession question from an unusual position. He lacked the long public executive career of a president, the visible command history of a senior IRGC officer or the formal administrative profile of the recognised head of the Supreme Leader’s Office. His clerical standing was also contested by critics who questioned whether his religious credentials were proportionate to the office he might inherit.

The evidence examined in this dossier points to a different form of preparation: prolonged exposure to the internal operating environment of the leadership itself.

That experience cannot be reduced to family proximity. Access to Ali Khamenei may have provided the initial condition, but the reported activities surrounding Mojtaba extended into delegated responsibilities, political-security relationships, sensitive leadership matters and coordination across institutions.

If the Treasury assessment was accurate, he had already acted officially on behalf of Ali Khamenei. If Reuters accurately reconstructed his role, he had spent years moving among actors whose cooperation mattered to the functioning of the ruling system.

Succession therefore formalised a relationship with governing authority that had developed before succession.

It did not mean that Mojtaba had possessed the full authority of the Supreme Leader while his father was alive.

The evidence reviewed by IranSTO does not support such a conclusion. Ali Khamenei remained the constitutional and political principal around whom the leadership system was organised. The authority examined in this dossier derived its institutional significance from that fact. Mojtaba’s access, reported coordinating function and permitted areas of intervention mattered because the actors around him understood the source of authority behind his involvement.

The death of the principal fundamentally alters such an arrangement.

Delegated authority depends on an authorising figure. The delegated actor intervenes because the principal has entrusted him with a matter or because surrounding actors recognise his relationship to the source of final authority. Once the principal disappears, the previous delegation cannot simply be assumed to continue unchanged.

The source of authority must change.

Succession moved Mojtaba from an environment in which his reported authority derived from Ali Khamenei to one in which the supreme office itself became the formal basis of his authority.

The distinction is more than semantic.

Before succession, an investigation into Mojtaba’s intervention required a threshold question: was he acting within a matter entrusted to him by Ali Khamenei? After succession, the formal source of leadership authority no longer required attribution to his father. The office itself supplied the institutional basis from which leadership powers could be exercised.

But formalisation created a new problem.

The connective authority reconstructed in this dossier had developed inside a system with Ali Khamenei at its centre.

Mojtaba’s reported significance came partly from his ability to remain connected to that centre while moving among actors occupying different institutional environments. The principal stood above the Office, the security apparatus, the armed forces and the political institutions with which those actors were associated.

Once Mojtaba became the principal, the relationship changed.

A coordinator can rely on the authority of the person behind him. A Supreme Leader must establish that final authority converges on the office he now occupies.

This distinction is particularly important in relation to the IRGC.

Mojtaba’s reported pre-succession relationships with security figures may have provided access, familiarity and working connections across the regime’s coercive institutions. They did not necessarily establish independent command over those institutions. Before succession, the authority behind an intervention could ultimately be traced to Ali Khamenei. After his death, Mojtaba’s relationship with senior commanders had to operate under a different institutional logic.

The intermediary had become the officeholder expected to stand above them.

This creates a problem that succession analysis often misses.

Longstanding relationships with commanders can prepare a successor to navigate a security system. They can provide knowledge of personalities, rivalries and institutional capabilities. A figure already known inside the leadership environment may possess advantages unavailable to an external candidate entering the supreme office without equivalent relationships.

The same history can also create dependence.

An intermediary develops influence through cooperation with actors who possess their own institutional resources. Intelligence officials control information. Military commanders control forces. Office officials control administrative channels and access. The intermediary may connect these capabilities without personally owning them.

Succession elevates the intermediary above those institutions formally.

It does not erase their organisational weight.

Before succession, Mojtaba’s institutional problem was authority without a transparent office. His interventions were difficult to attribute because the Islamic Republic did not publicly define the boundaries of his mandate.

After succession, the formal office is visible.

The unresolved question is whether formal office produced independent control over the networks, commanders and leadership channels through which his earlier authority had operated.

This dossier does not attempt to reconstruct the entire post-Ali Khamenei leadership system.

The circumstances of succession, Mojtaba’s survival, his location during the strike that killed his father, his subsequent public absence and the changing relationship between the Office and the IRGC raise separate intelligence questions. Public evidence concerning several of those matters remains incomplete or contested.

They require a dedicated investigation rather than speculation inserted into a dossier focused on the pre-succession structure of Mojtaba’s authority.

The narrower finding is already consequential.

Mojtaba did not arrive at the apex of the Islamic Republic as an institutionally unknown cleric suddenly selected to occupy his father’s position.

For years, credible reporting and an official foreign sanctions assessment had placed him inside the operating environment of the leadership. He had reportedly received delegated responsibilities, participated in leadership decision-making processes, coordinated among actors and developed relationships across the security and political structures surrounding Ali Khamenei.

Succession changed the source and formal location of that authority.

The son who had operated through authority derived from the principal became, formally, the principal himself.

But institutional systems do not reset when a title changes hands.

The networks, overlapping channels and personalised relationships examined throughout this collection do not disappear merely because the individual at the apex changes. They must be dismantled, absorbed, reorganised or persuaded to converge on the new principal.

Golpayegani’s administrative environment, Hejazi’s political-security channels and Haghanian’s executive function were products of the leadership system built around Ali Khamenei. Mojtaba inherited not merely an office but a governing structure shaped over decades around his predecessor’s personal authority.

His own history inside that structure gave him an advantage an external successor could not easily reproduce.

He had already operated within its relationships.

It also left him with a problem that no delegated intermediary needs to solve.

The authority examined in this dossier had been connective because Ali Khamenei remained the final point of convergence. Once Mojtaba entered the supreme office, he could no longer rely on his father’s authority as the reason other actors recognised his intervention.

The governing system now required those channels to converge on him.

Succession therefore formalised Mojtaba Khamenei’s authority while changing the institutional test applied to it.

The question was no longer whether Ali Khamenei had permitted his son to enter a matter.

It was whether the institutions and networks that had learned to work with Mojtaba as an intermediary would recognise him as the independent source of final authority.

That is the unresolved consequence of delegated authority becoming supreme office.

Chapter 10 — Institutional Findings

The evidence examined in this dossier does not produce a complete organisational chart of Mojtaba Khamenei’s pre-succession authority.

No public mandate defines the responsibilities reportedly delegated to him. No verified internal directive establishes the full jurisdiction of the office associated with him in leaked material. The available record does not identify every matter he coordinated, every official with whom he worked or the precise boundary between authorised intervention and personal influence.

These are substantial intelligence gaps.

They do not prevent institutional findings where separate bodies of evidence converge. The purpose of the findings below is not to convert unresolved allegations into fact. It is to identify the characteristics of the governing system that remain visible after unsupported claims are separated from the available record.

Finding One — Formal Office Was Not the Sole Source of Authority

Mojtaba’s pre-succession significance cannot be explained through a conventional senior state position. For much of the period examined, no publicly defined office corresponded to the breadth of activity attributed to him. Yet the US Treasury assessed that he acted officially on behalf of Ali Khamenei, while Reuters placed him inside the Supreme Leader’s decision-making environment and described a role involving coordination among individuals, factions and organisations.

The institutional implication extends beyond Mojtaba.

Within the leadership system built around Ali Khamenei, authority could derive from a recognised relationship to the principal as well as from a published office. Formal position remained consequential, but it was not the sole route through which an actor acquired relevance across institutions.

Office-based and principal-based authority could coexist.

Finding Two — Ali Khamenei Delegated Leadership Responsibilities Without Publicly Defining Their Institutional Limits

The US Treasury stated in 2019 that Ali Khamenei had delegated part of his leadership responsibilities to Mojtaba. IranSTO has identified no corresponding public mandate defining the responsibilities transferred, the duration of the arrangement or the institutional boundaries within which Mojtaba was authorised to act.

Article 110 of the Constitution permits the Supreme Leader to delegate duties and powers. That legal capacity does not establish the content of a particular delegation.

The precise responsibilities entrusted to Mojtaba remain unidentified in the public record reviewed for this dossier.

The finding is therefore limited but consequential: a documented foreign government assessment identified delegated leadership responsibilities, while the institution from which those responsibilities reportedly originated did not publicly define their scope.

This created authority without transparent jurisdiction.

Finding Three — Direct Access to the Supreme Leader Functioned as a Governing Resource

Access to Ali Khamenei was not merely a symbol of personal status. In the decision-making environment reconstructed by Reuters and examined across this Regime Atlas collection, proximity to the Supreme Leader could provide access to discussions, priorities and actors drawn from different parts of the ruling system.

Mojtaba’s direct relationship with Ali Khamenei gave him a position that officials confined to individual institutions did not share. When combined with reported delegation, that access could become operational. An individual aware of the Supreme Leader’s concern, able to remain connected to the leadership process and capable of moving among relevant actors possessed a governing resource even without permanent command of the organisations involved.

The evidence does not establish that Mojtaba monopolised access to his father or controlled all information reaching him. Other channels existed and have been reconstructed in previous dossiers.

The narrower finding is that Mojtaba’s access was connected to a reported coordinating role and cannot be treated solely as family proximity.

Finding Four — Cross-Institutional Coordination Allowed Authority to Operate Beyond Formal Organisational Jurisdictions

Reuters’ description of Mojtaba moving among individuals, factions and organisations is consistent with a function centred on institutional intersections. The evidence examined in this dossier repeatedly places him in environments involving actors whose formal responsibilities belonged to different parts of the ruling system.

This does not establish command over those institutions.

It identifies coordination as a distinct institutional function.

An actor operating with recognised leadership authority does not need to replace a commander, agency head or Office official in order to remain involved as a matter crosses organisational boundaries. The relevant function may be to connect the issue to the Supreme Leader, identify actors capable of addressing it, maintain contact as the matter moves between institutions and return unresolved questions to the leadership environment.

The distinction between command and coordination is essential for future accountability investigations. Demonstrating that Mojtaba knew or communicated with a security actor does not establish responsibility for that actor’s conduct. Investigators must reconstruct the matter being coordinated, the authority under which Mojtaba acted and his contribution to the institutional outcome.

Finding Five — Small, Trusted and Matter-Specific Arrangements May Have Provided Operational Vehicles for Delegated Authority

Mohammad Sarafraz described participation in a five-member structure handling sensitive political and security matters connected to Ali Khamenei. The publicly available record provides no official charter for the reported committee, does not establish its complete membership beyond dispute and does not define the full range of its responsibilities.

The account nevertheless describes a governing method consistent with the wider decision-making environment reconstructed in this dossier: a limited number of trusted actors with different institutional capabilities brought together around matters associated with the Supreme Leader.

The leaked reference to “Mojtaba’s office” raises a separate question. IranSTO has identified no public organisational instrument defining that office, its staff or its jurisdiction. The leaked record, if authentic, indicates that senior IRGC figures understood the office as capable of assisting with matters involving the Aerospace Force.

The reported committee and the office cannot be treated as parts of a single verified structure.

Their institutional relevance lies in the governing method they may reveal: delegated authority acquiring practical capacity through small, trusted and matter-specific arrangements rather than through a permanent public bureaucracy.

The evidence supports this as an institutional assessment.

It does not yet permit the structures themselves to be fully mapped.

Finding Six — Personnel Loyalty Functioned as Institutional Infrastructure

The leaked January 2023 IRGC record connects the placement of known and trusted individuals at sensitive institutional points to concerns about information leakage and internal reliability. Mojtaba is reportedly associated with facilitating such placements.

IranSTO has not identified evidence sufficient to compile a verified list of officials personally installed by Mojtaba. Describing an individual as “close to Mojtaba” does not establish responsibility for that person’s appointment.

The more defensible finding concerns the function of trusted placement.

In a leadership system dependent on personalised channels, strategically positioned personnel can affect information flow, institutional responsiveness and visibility into internal resistance without altering the organisation’s formal hierarchy.

Loyalty can therefore become institutional infrastructure.

The same mechanism creates risk. Personal trust may displace professional competence, institutional reporting may be bypassed and personnel networks may facilitate political surveillance or factional intervention. The disagreement reflected in the leaked IRGC record, if authentic, indicates that senior regime figures themselves contested the consequences of personnel changes associated with Mojtaba’s involvement.

Finding Seven — Overlapping Channels of Authority Obscured Decision Ownership

The Sarafraz case provides the clearest practical example examined in this dossier.

A leader-appointed institutional chief described interventions involving IRGC Intelligence, figures connected to the Office of the Supreme Leader and actors he associated with Mojtaba. He appealed through several channels and ultimately left office after the leadership decision concerning his resignation was communicated through Ali Asghar Hejazi.

The case does not establish that Mojtaba ordered Sarafraz’s removal.

It reveals the gap between a visible formal decision and the less visible process preceding it.

The public record identifies the head of IRIB, the constitutional authority responsible for appointing him and the outcome of his tenure. Sarafraz’s testimony describes an intervening process in which the authority behind pressures affecting his administration was considerably harder to locate.

Where multiple leadership-linked channels enter a matter, the institution implementing the final act may leave the clearest documentary trace while earlier coordination remains outside the formal record.

Decision ownership becomes fragmented at precisely the point where responsibility requires reconstruction.

Finding Eight — Mojtaba’s Apparent Function Was Connective Rather Than Conventionally Bureaucratic

The evidence reviewed for this dossier does not establish that Mojtaba formally commanded the Office of the Supreme Leader, the IRGC, the Basij or IRIB as institutions.

Nor does it establish a hidden vertical hierarchy in which Golpayegani, Hejazi and Haghanian served as his subordinates.

The recurring function is different.

Mojtaba appears at institutional intersections. He was reportedly present inside the leadership decision-making environment, moved among actors and organisations, participated in a small structure dealing with sensitive matters and was associated in leaked material with a working office, trusted personnel placement and authorised areas of intervention.

IranSTO assesses his apparent pre-succession function as connective authority: the capacity to maintain continuity between the Supreme Leader’s priorities and actors occupying different institutional jurisdictions when a matter crossed organisational boundaries.

This authority derived its reported significance from the principal rather than from permanent command of the institutions involved.

The assessment remains subject to the unresolved scope of the delegation itself.

It must not be extended to matters for which evidence of Mojtaba’s participation has not been established.

Finding Nine — Succession Formalised Authority the State Had Never Transparently Defined

Mojtaba did not enter the leadership system as an institutionally unknown figure at the moment of succession.

The available evidence indicates that he had spent years operating inside that system, holding reported delegated responsibilities and developing a coordinating role across parts of the political and security environment.

Before succession, the principal evidentiary problem was the absence of a transparent mandate corresponding to that authority. After succession, the formal office became visible.

The previous institutional relationships did not disappear.

This produces the final finding of the dossier.

The Islamic Republic allowed leadership authority to develop around Mojtaba without publicly defining the jurisdiction through which it operated. His later elevation formalised the position of an individual whose relationship with governing authority had already been built through delegation, access and cross-institutional coordination.

Succession gave the authority a title.

It did not explain its history.

The Institutional Model

Taken together, these findings extend the reconstruction of the Office of the Supreme Leader developed across the first four dossiers of this Regime Atlas collection.

The leadership system cannot be understood solely as a vertical bureaucracy.

Its administrative layer created continuity and managed the formal leadership environment. Its political-security channels connected sensitive information and trusted relationships to the Supreme Leader. Its executive function allowed leadership priorities to be pursued beyond the immediate Office.

Mojtaba’s reported role reveals an additional mechanism: delegated authority capable of remaining connected to a matter as it moved across those environments and into institutions with separate formal jurisdictions.

These were not separate ministries.

Nor does the evidence establish a fixed hierarchy among the individuals through whom these functions have been reconstructed.

They were overlapping components of a leadership system organised around the same principal.

Ali Khamenei’s position allowed different channels to coexist because their authority ultimately converged on him. A formal Office official could exercise responsibilities attached to an appointment. A political-security actor could maintain sensitive access. An executive operator could pursue a special assignment. A delegated intermediary could remain involved when a matter required coordination among actors who did not share a chain of command.

The structure combined formal institution with personalised authority.

That combination created flexibility for the leadership and opacity for everyone attempting to reconstruct how a decision moved.

The organisational chart identified offices.

It did not necessarily identify the full route of authority.

This is the institutional significance of Mojtaba Khamenei’s pre-succession role.

His case does not demonstrate that formal institutions were irrelevant. The IRGC, IRIB, the Basij and the Office of the Supreme Leader retained their own hierarchies, capabilities and institutional interests. Nor does the evidence support replacing those structures with a theory of universal secret control by the Supreme Leader’s son.

The finding is more precise.

The leadership system could generate authority at the intersections between institutions.

Delegation connected an actor to the principal. Access connected him to the leadership process. Matter-specific arrangements connected relevant capabilities. Trusted personnel could maintain responsiveness inside formal organisations. Coordination allowed a leadership concern to remain connected as responsibility for individual acts moved between institutions.

IranSTO defines the resulting function as connective authority.

For institutional analysis, the model explains why Mojtaba’s reported significance repeatedly exceeded the explanatory value of his public title.

For accountability investigations, it identifies the evidentiary problem.

A final order may reveal the institution that acted. A formal appointment may identify the official who signed. An operational record may identify the commander responsible for implementation.

None of those documents necessarily reveals who remained connected to the matter before the final act, what information reached the leadership environment or how actors from separate institutions came to act around the same priority.

Connective authority cannot be presumed.

It must be reconstructed.

That requires evidence of the matter entrusted, the information received, the actors contacted, the intervention made and the relationship between that intervention and the institutional outcome.

The absence of Mojtaba’s name from a formal command chart is therefore not proof of responsibility.

It is not proof of irrelevance either.

The institutional record must be followed across the boundaries where authority moved.

 

Conclusion — The Authority the State Never Defined

For more than two decades, the simplest question about Mojtaba Khamenei was also the one the Islamic Republic never clearly answered.

What was his position?

The formal structure of the state offered no title proportionate to the authority repeatedly attributed to him. He did not head the Office of the Supreme Leader. He did not command the IRGC or the Basij. He was not publicly identified as the permanent head of a national security institution.

Yet his name repeatedly appeared around leadership decision-making, political disputes, security relationships and matters crossing institutional boundaries.

Calling Mojtaba “powerful” never resolved the contradiction.

It merely gave the contradiction a name.

The evidence examined in this dossier supports a more precise institutional assessment. Mojtaba’s reported authority did not depend on permanent command of every institution with which he became associated. Its significance derived from his relationship to the principal, the leadership responsibilities reportedly delegated to him and his ability to remain involved when matters moved among actors occupying different institutional jurisdictions.

IranSTO defines that function as connective authority.

The definition is deliberately narrower than control.

Control requires evidence of command over an institution or its decision-making machinery. Connective authority describes the recognised capacity to maintain continuity between a principal decision-maker and actors in separate institutional environments as a matter moves across organisational boundaries.

That distinction explains why Mojtaba’s pre-succession role remained so difficult to locate on an organisational chart.

The chart identified offices.

His reported authority followed matters.

Delegation supplied a reported source of authority. Access connected him to Ali Khamenei’s decision-making environment. Small, trusted arrangements may have provided working structures. Personnel relationships could extend responsiveness into formal institutions. Coordination allowed a leadership concern to remain connected as responsibility for individual acts moved among bodies with separate chains of command.

The available evidence does not establish that Mojtaba controlled all of those bodies.

It does establish why the absence of such control does not resolve the institutional question.

A connective actor does not need to sign the final order, command the implementing force or replace the head of an institution to become relevant to the path by which a matter moves towards action.

That is also where the accountability problem begins.

The evidence required to attribute responsibility cannot be replaced by reputation. Mojtaba’s proximity to Ali Khamenei, his reported relationships with security figures or his presence within a leadership network do not establish responsibility for a specific institutional act.

Presence is not participation.

Participation is not coordination.

Coordination is not command.

But the opposite error is equally serious.

The absence of Mojtaba’s name from a final order or formal operational command chart cannot, by itself, establish that he was irrelevant to the process preceding the act.

If his authority was connective, investigators must reconstruct the matter itself.

What information reached the leadership environment? Was the issue within an area entrusted to Mojtaba? Which actors entered the process? What did he request, facilitate or follow? How did those actors understand the authority behind his intervention? Where did the matter move next?

Those questions cannot be answered through organisational charts alone.

They require the second map identified in this dossier: a map of access, delegation, trusted arrangements, personnel relationships and movement across institutional boundaries.

That method will be essential in the separate investigations that remain open.

Mojtaba’s relationship to specific episodes of mass repression, the security decision-making chain, communications shutdowns and financial structures associated with his network cannot be resolved by extending the conclusions of this dossier beyond their evidence.

Each requires its own reconstruction.

The present investigation establishes the institutional starting point.

Before succession, Mojtaba Khamenei was not simply a politically influential son waiting outside the formal state. The available record places him inside the operating environment of Ali Khamenei’s leadership system and identifies reported authority derived from delegation by the Supreme Leader.

The precise boundaries of that authority remain unknown.

The full structure of the office associated with Mojtaba remains unknown.

The complete range of matters entrusted to him remains unknown.

These are intelligence gaps.

They do not make the mechanism entirely unknowable.

The first three dossiers in this Regime Atlas collection reconstructed identifiable functions around Ali Khamenei: administrative continuity through Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, political-security access through Ali Asghar Hejazi and executive follow-through through Vahid Haghanian.

Mojtaba reveals a different feature of the same leadership system.

Authority could exist without a stable public location.

It could derive from the principal, become operational through recognised access and move across institutions without creating a permanent public hierarchy above them.

This was not an anomaly outside the Office of the Supreme Leader.

It was a product of the governing system built around it.

Succession changed Mojtaba’s formal position. The intermediary became the officeholder. Authority previously associated with delegation acquired the supreme office as its formal institutional basis.

But succession did not explain the history of that authority.

Nor did it erase the networks and channels through which Mojtaba had reportedly operated before reaching the apex of the Islamic Republic.

Those questions now belong to the next stage of the investigation.

This dossier began with a missing position on the organisational chart.

It ends with a different conclusion.

The chart was not merely incomplete.

It was insufficient.

The Islamic Republic had built a leadership system in which significant authority could operate through delegation, access and cross-institutional coordination without a publicly defined mandate corresponding to its reach.

Mojtaba Khamenei was one of the clearest products of that system.

The state never publicly defined his authority.

The record shows where investigators should look for it.

 

References & Sources

Official and Government Documentation

U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control. “Treasury Designates Supreme Leader of Iran’s Inner Circle Responsible for Advancing Regime’s Domestic and Foreign Oppression.” 4 November 2019.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm824

The designation states that Mojtaba Khamenei acted in an official capacity on behalf of Ali Khamenei, that the Supreme Leader had delegated part of his leadership responsibilities to his son, and that Mojtaba worked closely with the IRGC Quds Force and the Basij. This dossier uses the designation as the principal public source for the reported delegation of leadership responsibilities. The underlying intelligence supporting each element of the assessment has not been publicly disclosed.

Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Article 110. English translation available through the Constitute Project.
https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iran_1989

Article 110 defines the principal duties and powers of the Supreme Leader, including supreme command of the armed forces and the appointment or dismissal of senior military and state officials. The final provision of Article 110 provides that the Leader may delegate part of his duties and powers to another person. The article also identifies the appointment and dismissal of the head of the Islamic Republic’s radio and television organisation among the Leader’s powers.

Investigative and International Reporting

Hafezi, Parisa, and Angus McDowall. Reuters. “Iran leader Khamenei sees his inner circle hollowed out by Israel.” 17 June 2025.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-leader-khamenei-sees-his-inner-circle-hollowed-out-by-israel-2025-06-17/

Reuters reconstructed Ali Khamenei’s decision-making environment through interviews with individuals familiar with or participating in leadership meetings. The report describes an inner circle of approximately fifteen to twenty advisers, commanders, clerics and political figures convened according to the issue under consideration. It states that Mojtaba Khamenei had become increasingly central to the process and had developed a role cutting across personalities, factions and organisations to coordinate specific issues.

Hafezi, Parisa, and Angus McDowall. Reuters. “Iran’s new leader, still silent, was elevated by the Revolutionary Guards.” 10 March 2026; updated 11 March 2026.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-new-leader-still-silent-was-elevated-by-revolutionary-guards-2026-03-10/

The report examines Mojtaba Khamenei’s succession and his longstanding relationships with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is used in this dossier as post-succession context concerning Mojtaba’s elevation, his longstanding relationships with the IRGC and the institutional environment surrounding his movement into the supreme office.

Radio Farda / Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “Shirin Ebadi Calls Iran ‘Incorrigible’.” 28 April 2019.
https://en.radiofarda.com/a/shirin-ebadi-calls-iran-incorrigible-/29908636.html

The report records Mohammad Sarafraz’s direct appointment by Ali Khamenei to head the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting in November 2014 and his departure from the position on 11 May 2016, less than two years later. It is used in this dossier to establish the basic chronology of Sarafraz’s tenure independently of his later account of the institutional conflict surrounding his resignation.

Insider Testimony and Leadership-Network Reporting

Sarafraz, Mohammad. Revayat-e Yek Este’fa [The Story of a Resignation]. Publicly released in electronic form, 2019.

Sarafraz’s account describes the institutional conflict surrounding his final period as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, his disputes with Hossein Taeb and security-linked actors, his appeals to the Office of the Supreme Leader and Ali Khamenei, and his understanding of the roles played by Hossein Mohammadi and Mojtaba Khamenei in the circumstances preceding his departure.

IranSTO treats the work as insider testimony by a former senior regime official and participant in the events described. It is not treated as independent documentary proof of direct orders by Mojtaba Khamenei.

Abdi, Marie. Middle East Institute. “Moving to a post-Khamenei era: Cutthroat competition within the supreme leader’s office.” 29 February 2024.
https://mei.edu/publication/moving-post-khamenei-era-cutthroat-competition-within-supreme-leaders-office/

The analysis examines Mohammad Sarafraz’s disclosures concerning a reported five-member committee handling sensitive political and security matters associated with the Supreme Leader. It identifies Mojtaba Khamenei, Hossein Taeb and Hossein Fadaei among the reported participants and discusses Sarafraz’s allegation that security-derived information concerning political figures was provided to Mojtaba for political use.

The committee has not been publicly acknowledged through an official charter, appointment order or published institutional record.

Leaked Material and Open-Source Reporting

Iran International. “Leaked Document Reveals Questions About Role Of Khamenei’s Son.” 22 March 2023.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202303226935

The report examines a 44-page document attributed to a 3 January 2023 meeting of senior IRGC commanders and clerics with Ali Khamenei. The leaked record contains reported remarks concerning Mojtaba Khamenei’s role, his office, assistance involving the IRGC Aerospace Force, trusted personnel and areas in which he had reportedly been permitted to intervene.

The document has not been independently authenticated in the public domain. IranSTO therefore treats it as leaked material attributed to senior IRGC figures and does not present the transcript as a verified official record.

IranWire. “Meeting of IRGC Commanders with Khamenei: Alarm Bells of Collapse in the Supreme Leader’s Office.” [Persian-language report]. 19 March 2023.
https://iranwire.com/fa/features/114911-%D8%AC%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%87-%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%87%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%B3%D9%BE%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%86%D9%87%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%82%D9%88%D8%B3-%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%88%D9%BE%D8%A7%D8%B4%DB%8C-%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%A8%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A8%D8%B1%DB%8C/

IranWire examined the leaked record attributed to the January 2023 meeting and reported on the claimed institutional setting and exchanges contained in the material. Its reporting is used to cross-check the context and date of the leaked record and the broader concerns raised by senior IRGC figures in the attributed meeting.

Previous IranSTO Institutional Research

Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The Administrative Gatekeeper: Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader.” The Regime Atlas — Collection One: The Office of the Supreme Leader.
https://iransto.com/mohammad-mohammadi-golpayegani-office-of-the-supreme-leader/

The dossier reconstructs the administrative continuity, formal access and bureaucratic environment surrounding the Supreme Leader and provides the institutional baseline used for comparison with Mojtaba Khamenei’s unpublished mandate.

Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The Security Gatekeeper: Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader.” The Regime Atlas — Collection One: The Office of the Supreme Leader.
https://iransto.com/ali-asghar-hejazi-security-architecture-office-supreme-leader/

The dossier examines political-security access, sensitive information channels and the relationship between the leadership environment and security institutions.

Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The Invisible Executive: Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader.” The Regime Atlas — Collection One: The Office of the Supreme Leader.
https://iransto.com/vahid-haghanian-office-of-the-supreme-leader/

The dossier reconstructs executive follow-through, special assignments and intervention beyond the immediate Office. Its findings are used to distinguish executive implementation from the connective authority identified in the present investigation.

Methodological Note

This dossier distinguishes between formal institutional records, official foreign government assessments, source-based investigative reporting, insider testimony and publicly unauthenticated leaked material.

The U.S. Treasury designation is treated as a documented government assessment of Mojtaba Khamenei’s delegated leadership responsibilities, not as disclosure of the complete underlying intelligence record. Reuters reporting is used to reconstruct the reported decision-making environment around Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba’s coordinating role within it and the post-succession institutional context. Mohammad Sarafraz’s disclosures are treated as insider testimony by a former senior participant whose later conflicts with figures he described require explicit evidentiary qualification. The January 2023 IRGC record is treated as leaked material attributed to senior regime figures and not as an independently authenticated official transcript.

Where the public record does not establish the scope of Mojtaba Khamenei’s mandate, the structure of his reported office, responsibility for a specific appointment or participation in a particular security decision, IranSTO identifies the issue as an intelligence gap rather than filling the absence with inference.

The institutional model of “connective authority” developed in this dossier is an analytical assessment derived from the convergence of separate evidence concerning delegation, access, cross-institutional coordination, trusted working arrangements and personnel relationships. It should not be interpreted as evidence of command, institutional control or responsibility in any specific case without a separate reconstruction of the relevant decision process.

The same evidentiary distinction applies to questions of institutional contribution. Evidence that an individual maintained contact with officials, participated in a leadership-linked arrangement or remained connected to a matter does not by itself establish responsibility for the resulting institutional act. Any such assessment requires evidence concerning knowledge, authority, contribution and the relationship between the individual’s conduct and the decision or action under investigation.