The Absent Supreme Leader: The Architecture of Power Under Mojtaba Khamenei

Introduction: The Leadership Changed. The Machinery Did Not Stop.

 

On 8 March 2026, Mojtaba Khamenei became Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, formally placing him at the apex of a political system whose constitution concentrates extraordinary military, political and institutional authority in the office of the Leader. For years, the central question surrounding Ali Khamenei’s son had been how an individual without a public position proportionate to his reported influence could exercise authority across institutions he did not formally command. Succession changed the terms of that problem. Mojtaba Khamenei was now Supreme Leader. He no longer occupied an undefined position adjacent to supreme authority; he possessed the office from which that authority formally originates.

What followed did not resemble a conventional transfer of leadership. The new Supreme Leader remained absent from public view. No verified new video showed him performing the functions of his office, no televised address established his presence before the country, and statements attributed to him were issued in writing rather than delivered in person. His absence extended even to the funeral ceremonies for Ali Khamenei, where the transfer from one Leader to another might ordinarily have been expected to acquire its most visible political expression. Yet the absence of the new Leader produced no corresponding paralysis in the institutions formally subordinate to him.

The machinery of the Islamic Republic continued to operate. Leadership statements were issued, appointments and extensions of office were approved, judicial powers were exercised, military operations continued, and the government conducted diplomacy during an active conflict. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps publicly treated instructions attributed to the new Supreme Leader as authoritative. Government officials referred to his guidance and approval. President Masoud Pezeshkian later described a lengthy private meeting with Mojtaba and subsequently spoke of increasing interaction with him. The observable record therefore presents two realities that must be examined together: the Supreme Leader has remained largely inaccessible to public observation while the institutional authority attached to his office has continued to function.

Public absence cannot, by itself, establish political incapacity. Nor does the continued production of decisions in Mojtaba’s name establish how personally or continuously he directs them. Reports concerning his injuries, security arrangements and restricted communications provide possible explanations for his disappearance from public life, but the precise effect of those conditions on the exercise of leadership remains difficult to determine. The institutional question is consequently more specific than whether Mojtaba is governing. It concerns the mechanisms through which information reaches him, decisions receive approval and authority returns to the institutions expected to implement it.

That question has acquired greater importance because succession occurred while military and security institutions were accumulating exceptional operational power. Reporting from within the ruling system indicates that senior Revolutionary Guard and security figures assumed a greater role in wartime decision-making after Ali Khamenei’s death. Mojtaba simultaneously entered the office with longstanding relationships across the security establishment and with the reported support of an IRGC whose institutional position had been strengthened by war. This does not establish that the Revolutionary Guard controls the new Supreme Leader. It does make the distribution of authority between the Leader, his Office and the military-security apparatus a central subject of investigation.

The opposite assumption is equally unsupported. The available evidence does not justify treating Mojtaba as a ceremonial figure whose title merely conceals rule by the IRGC. Leadership powers have continued to be exercised in his name, officials have publicly attributed decisions to him, presidential access has been claimed, and elements of the apparatus surrounding the previous leadership have continued to function. What emerges from the first months is not evidence of an empty office, but of a leadership whose operation is unusually difficult to observe: formal supreme authority continues to exist alongside restricted access to the individual who holds it and an expanded operational role for institutions constitutionally subordinate to him.

IranSTO’s previous investigation, Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader, reconstructed the authority Mojtaba exercised before succession. It examined delegated responsibilities, cross-institutional coordination, and the absence of a published mandate capable of explaining the authority repeatedly attributed to him. The present dossier begins where that investigation ended. It does not reconstruct again how Mojtaba accumulated power under his father. It examines what happened to the architecture of power once an individual who had operated within and across that system formally inherited its highest office.

The distinction is fundamental. Before succession, the institutional problem was significant reported authority without a public office capable of explaining it. After succession, Mojtaba possesses the most powerful formal office in the Islamic Republic, while the practical mechanisms through which that office communicates with the rest of the state have become less visible. The title is no longer ambiguous. The transmission of authority is.

The earliest decisions of the new leadership suggest that preservation of the existing system took priority over immediate reconstruction. Officials appointed directly by Ali Khamenei were initially instructed to remain in their positions, allowing important parts of the inherited apparatus to continue operating while the new Leader remained physically absent from public view. Subsequent developments indicate that changes may have begun inside the Office itself, but the public record does not reveal a wholesale replacement of the political, judicial or security establishment inherited from Ali Khamenei. The initial pattern is therefore one of institutional continuity under conditions that make the personal role of the new Leader unusually opaque.

That inherited apparatus matters because the Office of the Supreme Leader had developed into considerably more than an administrative secretariat. Previous IranSTO investigations reconstructed the administrative continuity represented by  Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, the political-security channels associated with The Security Gatekeeper: Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, and the mechanisms of executive follow-through examined in Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader. Mojtaba therefore inherited a leadership environment already equipped with channels for administration, security information, institutional intervention and implementation beyond the immediate boundaries of the Office.

The most opaque part of that machinery is now access itself. Public statements indicate that at least some senior officials have communicated directly with Mojtaba, while other reporting describes a highly compartmentalised environment in which communications may depend upon restricted intermediaries and knowledge of the Leader’s location is tightly controlled. Public evidence does not identify the complete access chain, establish who controls it or reveal how information moves between the Leader and institutions seeking decisions from him. These limitations prevent any responsible conclusion that intermediaries determine Mojtaba’s decisions, but they make mediation central to understanding how the new leadership functions.

Access in such a system is not merely personal proximity. If access to an office possessing authority over the armed forces, senior appointments and some of the state’s most consequential decisions becomes highly restricted, the individuals and mechanisms capable of transmitting information in either direction acquire institutional significance whether or not they possess independent command authority. Understanding the new leadership therefore requires more than identifying who formally holds office. It requires reconstructing the path through which information, approval and implementation move.

The same evidentiary discipline must be applied to the Revolutionary Guard. Formal subordination to the Supreme Leader does not reveal how much operational discretion an institution possesses, just as increased military influence does not prove that the Leader has lost control. The relevant questions concern which decisions require direct leadership approval, which reach the Leader after being developed elsewhere, which remain within established military or security competencies and how disagreements are resolved when the individual constitutionally positioned as final arbiter operates through restricted channels.

This dossier examines the first months of Mojtaba Khamenei’s leadership through that institutional problem. It reconstructs his first observable exercises of authority, the preservation and partial reorganisation of the apparatus inherited from his father, the emerging structure of the new Office, reported channels of access to the Leader, the wartime expansion of military and security power and the relationship between formal command and operational authority. Throughout, it distinguishes documented institutional acts from source-based reporting, official claims of private access from independently observable evidence, and analytical assessments from conclusions the public record cannot yet support.

Important gaps remain. Publicly available evidence does not identify every individual with direct access to Mojtaba, disclose the complete procedure through which his approval is obtained, establish who drafts every statement issued in his name or reveal how frequently he personally intervenes in military, security and political decisions. His precise medical condition and the degree to which it affects his capacity to perform the office also remain unresolved in the public record. These are not gaps that can responsibly be filled with assumptions about either personal rule or IRGC control. They are intelligence gaps that define the limits of what can presently be established.

The central question of this investigation therefore begins only after formal succession is accepted as an institutional fact. Mojtaba Khamenei holds the office of Supreme Leader, and the state continues to exercise authority in his name. What remains to be reconstructed is how that authority now travels through a leadership system in which the individual at its constitutional apex is publicly absent, access to him is unusually restricted, much of his father’s governing apparatus survives, and military and security institutions have emerged from war with an expanded role in the operation of the Islamic Republic.

Chapter 1 — A Leadership Without a Public Leader

 

The formal transfer of supreme authority on 8 March 2026 created an immediate problem for the Islamic Republic. The system had selected a new Leader, but it could not publicly present him performing the role. Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation was announced through the institutions responsible for succession, declarations of allegiance followed across the ruling establishment, and the state began referring to him as Supreme Leader. What did not follow was the public appearance normally expected to demonstrate that a transfer of this magnitude had been completed. The new holder of the Islamic Republic’s highest office remained outside public view.

That absence was especially conspicuous because of the circumstances in which succession occurred. Ali Khamenei had been killed during a war that placed the survival and command structure of the ruling system under exceptional pressure. His successor therefore inherited not only the constitutional powers of the Supreme Leader but the immediate political burden of demonstrating continuity at the apex of the state. Even a brief appearance could have served several institutional purposes at once: confirming the Leader’s survival, demonstrating command, allowing senior officials to be shown receiving his direction and giving the security establishment a visible principal around whom to organise. None of those functions was performed publicly by Mojtaba.

The funeral of Ali Khamenei made the absence more difficult to treat as routine security concealment. Three of his sons, Mostafa, Meysam and Masoud, appeared publicly during the funeral ceremonies, while the son who had just succeeded him as Supreme Leader did not. Mojtaba was also absent from the subsequent burial ceremonies. The significance of this does not depend on speculation about why he failed to attend. The funeral offered the ruling establishment an unusually powerful opportunity to present succession as a completed political fact: the previous Leader could be buried while his successor appeared before senior clerics, military commanders, state officials and the public. Instead, the transfer was represented institutionally through announcements and declarations of allegiance while the individual at its centre remained unseen.

The public record in the months that followed did not resolve the problem. Statements attributed to Mojtaba were released addressing the war, domestic unity, economic policy, religious occasions and relations with foreign powers. Yet the method of communication remained strikingly different from the public leadership practised by his father. Ali Khamenei had frequently addressed officials, commanders, foreign visitors, students, clerics and selected public audiences in settings designed not merely to communicate policy but to demonstrate his physical position at the centre of the ruling system. Mojtaba’s early leadership has produced institutional communication without equivalent public performance. The words and decisions attributed to the Leader are present in the public record; the individual from whom they formally originate is not.

This distinction matters because visibility under the Islamic Republic has never been merely ceremonial. Public meetings involving the Supreme Leader provide information about access, hierarchy and political standing. The frequency of meetings, the identities of those permitted into the Leader’s presence and the language used during those encounters can reveal shifts that formal organisational charts do not record. As IranSTO documented in Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, access itself formed part of the political-security machinery surrounding Ali Khamenei. Public appearances also allowed the state to demonstrate that the constitutional centre remained capable of receiving reports, questioning officials and issuing instructions. Removing that observable layer does not establish that those activities have stopped. It prevents outsiders from observing them.

The absence of new visual or audio material consequently creates an evidentiary problem rather than proof of incapacity. Reports have described serious injuries sustained by Mojtaba during the attack that killed his father, including injuries affecting his face and legs. The precise extent of those injuries, the treatment he has received and their continuing effect on his ability to perform the office have not been independently established. More extreme claims about his medical condition have also circulated, but the available evidence does not justify treating them as fact. His continued absence is consistent with serious injury, intensive security protection or a combination of both, but it cannot establish any of those explanations on its own.

The ruling system has attempted to address the resulting uncertainty through testimony from officials claiming access to the new Leader. The most important public example came from President Masoud Pezeshkian, who stated in May that he had held an extended private meeting with Mojtaba. According to Pezeshkian’s account, the discussion lasted approximately two and a half hours and involved direct conversation with the Supreme Leader. The claim is significant because it weighs against the proposition that Mojtaba had become completely inaccessible to the civilian government.

Its evidentiary limits are equally important. No publicly released photograph or video documented the meeting. No independently observable record established where it occurred, who else was present or the physical condition of the Leader. Pezeshkian’s statement therefore establishes an official claim of direct access, not independent verification of the encounter. That distinction should not be used to dismiss the President’s account, but neither should his account be made to support conclusions beyond what it establishes.

By July, Pezeshkian’s description of his relationship with the Leader introduced another piece of information. He said that interaction with Mojtaba was increasing and should continue to increase so that problems could be addressed with the Leader’s guidance. The wording suggests an evolving access environment rather than the routine pattern of leadership meetings familiar under Ali Khamenei. It does not establish why access had been limited, whether the constraint was medical, security-related or organisational, or which officials besides the President possessed comparable contact. It does, however, reinforce the distinction between the continued operation of leadership authority and restricted access to its holder.

Reporting based on US intelligence assessments presents another part of the picture. Accounts citing American officials have described Mojtaba as operating from an undisclosed location under extraordinary security restrictions, with communications in some circumstances moving through intermediaries or couriers. According to those reports, knowledge of his location and direct access to him have been restricted even among senior figures within the ruling establishment. The underlying intelligence has not been made public, and neither the composition nor control of the reported communication network can presently be established. The reporting therefore cannot reconstruct the architecture of access, but it offers a possible explanation for how formal authority can continue to operate while direct contact with its holder remains unusually limited.

Official Iranian accounts and foreign intelligence reporting need not be forced into an artificial contradiction. Pezeshkian could have received exceptional direct access while other officials relied on intermediaries. Mojtaba could be capable of lengthy private discussions while remaining unable or unwilling to appear publicly. Strict security compartmentalisation could coexist with selective meetings. The available evidence permits several such possibilities and does not justify choosing among them without additional information.

What can be established is narrower but institutionally significant. The Islamic Republic has continued to recognise Mojtaba Khamenei as the source of supreme authority while substantially reducing the observable relationship between the Leader and the institutions operating beneath him. Public evidence identifies decisions attributed to him and officials claiming his guidance, but reveals far less about what happens between a matter entering the leadership environment and an authorised response returning from it.

This creates a different investigative environment from the one surrounding Ali Khamenei. His system was deeply opaque, but repeated public appearances exposed portions of the governing network to observation. Senior officials could be seen meeting him, military commanders publicly delivered reports, changes in access could sometimes be tracked, and statements could be connected to visible meetings and institutional events. None of this made decision-making transparent, but it produced a recurring public record against which other evidence could be tested. Under Mojtaba, much of that record has disappeared.

The disappearance of observable leadership also increases the importance of authentication. When a written statement is issued in the Supreme Leader’s name, publication establishes an institutional act. It does not reveal who drafted the text, how it reached the Leader, whether he amended it, how approval was communicated or which official ultimately authorised its release. Similar questions arise when an appointment, judicial decision or security policy is described as having received leadership approval. IranSTO’s investigation of Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader examined the administrative machinery through which authority was processed under Ali Khamenei. Whether that machinery survived intact, was reorganised around Mojtaba or now operates through a different access structure remains only partially visible.

These questions do not imply that documents issued in Mojtaba’s name are fabricated or that he did not approve them. They identify a stage of the decision process that has become unusually inaccessible to external scrutiny. That distinction matters because speculation about the Leader’s physical condition can obscure the more durable institutional problem. Whether Mojtaba is recovering from serious injuries, being concealed primarily for security reasons or operating under some combination of both, the ruling system has demonstrated an ability to continue exercising supreme authority without routinely exposing the person from whom that authority formally derives.

The first months after succession therefore establish an important boundary for this dossier. Mojtaba Khamenei’s public absence is observable. Claims of private access also exist and cannot responsibly be ignored. The continued exercise of leadership powers demonstrates that the Islamic Republic has not experienced a simple vacuum at the apex. What remains hidden is the machinery connecting these facts: who can reach the Leader, how information reaches him, how his decisions are authenticated, and through which channels those decisions return to the state.

Reconstructing that machinery must begin with what can actually be observed. Before the hidden communication system can be assessed, the first decisions issued under Mojtaba Khamenei’s authority must be examined to determine what the new leadership actually did with the office it inherited.

Chapter 2 — The First Test of Authority

 

The first meaningful test of Mojtaba Khamenei’s leadership was not whether the Islamic Republic could issue statements declaring him Supreme Leader. It was whether the powers attached to that office would continue to operate after the death of Ali Khamenei. Succession transferred a constitutional position, but the practical authority of the Leader extends through institutions that require decisions, approvals and appointments from the apex of the system. The early record of Mojtaba’s leadership therefore provides the first opportunity to distinguish formal succession from the actual exercise of power.

His first public message as Supreme Leader was issued on 12 March 2026, four days after his selection. The statement appeared while the Islamic Republic remained at war and uncertainty about the new Leader’s condition and location was already developing. Its political function was primarily one of continuity. Mojtaba called for unity, resistance and continued public mobilisation, presenting the conflict as a test of endurance while placing the new leadership within the ideological framework inherited from his father. The statement announced neither a new governing programme nor an attempt to distinguish the new leadership from the previous one. Its immediate function was to demonstrate that the office had acquired a voice even though its new holder remained unseen.

The method of publication was as important as the content. The message was written and communicated through the state’s existing media apparatus rather than delivered personally by Mojtaba. This established a pattern that continued during the following months. The leadership remained capable of producing political direction without requiring the physical appearance of the Leader. Institutionally, the first communication after succession demonstrated continuity of output while revealing almost nothing about the process through which that output had been produced.

A more consequential exercise of authority followed within days. On 16 March, a directive attributed to Mojtaba provided for officials directly appointed by Ali Khamenei to remain in their positions without requiring immediate reappointment. They were instructed to continue their responsibilities within the existing policy framework. The importance of the measure was structural. The death of a Supreme Leader potentially creates uncertainty across a wide range of positions whose authority derives from direct leadership appointment. By preserving those appointments, the new leadership prevented succession from automatically becoming an institutional reset.

The directive also provided an early indication of Mojtaba’s approach to the apparatus inherited from his father. Rather than requiring each component of that system to seek immediate renewal of its authority, the new leadership allowed the existing machinery to continue operating. Direct appointments by the Supreme Leader extend into the judiciary, military establishment, clerical institutions, supervisory bodies and major organisations outside ordinary ministerial control. The decision therefore preserved not simply individual office-holders but an extensive network of institutional authority constructed under Ali Khamenei.

That network had been central to the architecture examined throughout IranSTO’s Regime Atlas. The administrative mechanisms surrounding direct leadership authority were reconstructed in Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, while the political-security channels connecting the leadership environment to coercive institutions were examined in The Security Gatekeeper: Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader. Mojtaba’s continuity directive meant that succession did not immediately dismantle the institutional environment described in those investigations. Whatever changes might later occur around the new Leader, his first response was to preserve the machinery capable of keeping the state functioning.

The directive should not be interpreted as proof that Mojtaba intended to retain every figure appointed by his father indefinitely. A continuity measure issued during wartime can serve a narrower purpose: preventing vacancies, jurisdictional disputes and competition for appointments while a new leadership is still consolidating itself. Subsequent personnel decisions must therefore be examined separately. What the directive establishes is narrower and more defensible. The first observable exercise of Mojtaba’s personnel authority was not a purge or wholesale reconstruction. It was an instruction against institutional disruption.

The same pattern can be observed in the judiciary. In June, Mojtaba approved a request from Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei for the pardon, reduction or commutation of sentences affecting more than two thousand convicted individuals. The action was constitutionally conventional. Article 110 places the pardoning or reduction of sentences, following a recommendation from the head of the judiciary, among the powers of the Supreme Leader. Its significance for this investigation lies not in the existence of the power but in evidence that the established procedure continued to operate under the new Leader. The head of the judiciary submitted a request, leadership approval was reported, and the resulting decision was processed through the formal state apparatus.

The published information about the measure does not justify broader political conclusions. The categories reportedly included individuals convicted through ordinary and revolutionary courts, the Judicial Organisation of the Armed Forces and the state disciplinary system, but the public record does not provide sufficient detail to establish that the decision represented a substantive change in the regime’s treatment of political prisoners or individuals prosecuted in connection with anti-regime activity. It should therefore be treated as evidence of the exercise of a constitutional leadership function, not as evidence of political liberalisation.

That distinction is particularly important given the record of the judiciary under Mohseni-Ejei. IranSTO previously examined his role in the Islamic Republic’s coercive judicial system in Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei and Judicial Terror in Iran. Nothing in the pardon decision establishes a departure from that institutional record. What it demonstrates is that the established relationship between the judiciary and the Office of the Supreme Leader continued to function despite the absence of the new Leader from public view.

Continuity became still clearer in July, when Mojtaba renewed Mohseni-Ejei’s position as head of the judiciary. The decision retained one of the most powerful officials inherited from Ali Khamenei and carried greater institutional significance than the temporary March continuity measure. By this stage, the new leadership had had several months in which to replace the judiciary chief if it intended to signal a major break. Instead, Mohseni-Ejei remained in control of an apparatus central to political prosecution, imprisonment and state coercion.

The evidence does not establish why Mojtaba retained him. The decision could reflect confidence in Mohseni-Ejei, the absence of an acceptable replacement, wartime preference for stability, institutional bargaining or a broader strategy of maintaining continuity while other parts of the leadership were reorganised. The public record cannot distinguish among these explanations. It can establish that one of the most consequential personnel decisions of the early leadership preserved rather than displaced a senior figure from the previous order.

Security governance provides another example, although the formal chain of appointment requires careful distinction. In March, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr became secretary of the Supreme National Security Council following the departure of Ali Larijani. The formal appointment was issued by President Pezeshkian, while reporting described the change as having received the approval of the Supreme Leader. Attributing the appointment directly to Mojtaba would therefore overstate the constitutional role of his office. Its significance lies instead in the interaction between presidential authority and reported leadership approval within an institution central to wartime security policy.

Zolghadr’s background makes the appointment relevant to the emerging institutional balance. A former senior IRGC commander with extensive experience across military, security and state institutions, he represented neither a civilianisation of national security policy nor a movement away from the security establishment. His elevation occurred while reporting indicated a greater operational role for the Revolutionary Guard and senior security figures across the ruling system. The appointment alone cannot establish that the IRGC dictated the composition of the Supreme National Security Council. It does show that continuity under the new leadership included the continued centrality of security-linked personnel.

Mojtaba also began exercising authority in less visible parts of the institutional system. In June, new members were appointed to the board of the Service Centre for Islamic Seminaries for a five-year term. Such an appointment attracts far less attention than a senior security or judicial decision, but it demonstrates the breadth of leadership authority. The Supreme Leader’s institutional reach extends into clerical administration, religious networks and organisations whose political significance is not captured by conventional descriptions of executive government. Given questions surrounding Mojtaba’s clerical standing before succession, appointments touching the seminary establishment may eventually become relevant to assessing his relationship with Qom. This appointment alone, however, does not establish a deliberate strategy of clerical consolidation.

Foreign and military messaging followed the same broader pattern. Statements attributed to Mojtaba addressed the United States, Israel, negotiations and the continuation of resistance during the conflict. By July, the IRGC publicly described one of his messages as carrying binding authority. Such declarations demonstrate the formal hierarchy that the security establishment continues to recognise: the Revolutionary Guard presents itself as acting under the authority of the Supreme Leader even during a period in which its own operational influence has increased.

That public language of obedience cannot resolve the actual distribution of decision-making power. An institution can recognise the constitutional authority of the Leader while possessing substantial discretion over military planning and implementation. Equally, greater operational responsibility does not establish that the IRGC can disregard decisions from the apex. These statements are therefore evidence of how the relationship is publicly constituted, not proof of how individual military decisions are produced. The practical relationship between Mojtaba and the Guard requires separate examination.

Across these early acts, the most striking feature is not the emergence of a distinct Mojtaba doctrine. There was no immediate ideological revision, institutional purge or public programme designed to differentiate the new leadership from the previous one. Instead, the inherited machinery continued to process leadership authority through familiar constitutional and administrative functions. Messages were published, appointments were maintained or approved, judicial requests reached the leadership and received responses, and institutions continued to present their actions as subordinate to the authority of the office.

This pattern narrows the problem identified in Chapter 1. The evidence does not support a description of the post-succession period as one in which the constitutional functions of the Supreme Leader simply ceased to operate. They demonstrably continued. What remains unresolved is the process preceding the public endpoint of each decision. A decree can establish that an appointment received leadership approval. A judicial announcement can establish that the required authorisation was reported. A military statement can establish that the IRGC publicly recognises an instruction attributed to the Leader. None of these records, on its own, reveals how the matter reached Mojtaba, what role he played in considering it or how his decision returned to the institution responsible for implementation.

The first test of authority was therefore passed in a limited but important institutional sense. The office continued to function. The state did not have to invent a new mechanism for every exercise of leadership power, and much of the apparatus constructed under Ali Khamenei remained capable of processing authority under his successor. But continuity of output does not establish continuity of internal structure. The next question is therefore not whether the machinery survived. It is what, precisely, survived inside the Office itself, what began to change, and whether the apparatus now operating around Mojtaba remains his father’s institution or is becoming something different.

 

Chapter 3 — Continuity Before Consolidation

 

The preservation of officials appointed by Ali Khamenei was more than an administrative convenience during succession. It determined the institutional conditions under which Mojtaba Khamenei began to govern. A new Supreme Leader entering office after the violent removal of his predecessor could have used appointment powers to establish an immediate break, replace vulnerable officials or begin constructing an apparatus defined more clearly by loyalty to the new principal. Mojtaba’s first response was instead to prevent the inherited system from becoming unsettled. Existing office-holders remained in place, established chains of authority continued to function, and institutions whose senior personnel derived their positions directly from Ali Khamenei were allowed to continue operating.

This was consequential because direct appointments by the Supreme Leader extend across the ruling system. They include senior positions within the armed forces, judiciary, clerical establishment, supervisory institutions, foundations and organisations operating beyond ordinary ministerial accountability. Ali Khamenei had spent more than three decades constructing and maintaining this network. By the time of his death, leadership authority was embedded not only in the constitutional powers of the office but in a large body of officials whose institutional positions, relationships and careers had developed under his tenure.

Mojtaba therefore inherited something more complicated than a collection of vacancies waiting to be filled. He inherited an operating system of personnel, relationships and institutional memory. Replacing large parts of it immediately would have created opportunities for personal consolidation, but also substantial risk. Every removal could disturb an existing chain of command, create competition among potential successors or weaken an organisation while the Islamic Republic was simultaneously managing war, leadership succession and severe internal pressure. Preserving the existing structure allowed the new leadership to separate the immediate requirement of regime continuity from the longer process of determining which parts of the inherited apparatus would survive under the new Leader.

This is the institutional significance of the March continuity directive examined in Chapter 2. It does not establish that Mojtaba trusted every official appointed by his father, intended to retain the entire apparatus indefinitely or lacked sufficient authority to replace its senior personnel. Its immediate effect was narrower: it removed the need for simultaneous renegotiation of multiple positions at the moment of succession. The inherited state could continue operating while the new leadership assessed it.

The Office of the Supreme Leader illustrates why this mattered. Under Ali Khamenei, the Office had accumulated administrative capacity, political-security channels and mechanisms for following decisions across institutions. IranSTO’s investigation of Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader reconstructed how long-term administrative continuity around the Leader allowed the Office to operate across changes of governments, parliaments and senior state officials. That machinery did not derive its importance solely from Golpayegani as an individual. Its significance lay in the institutional memory, relationships and procedures accumulated around a leadership that had remained in power for decades.

The same problem existed in the security environment surrounding the Office. As examined in The Security Gatekeeper: Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, sensitive access to Ali Khamenei was connected to officials whose importance could not be understood through published organisational charts alone. Information, political relationships and security concerns converged inside a leadership environment before decisions moved towards institutions capable of implementation. Replacing personnel embedded in such a system is more consequential than changing names on an organisational chart because informal procedures, accumulated trust and institutional relationships may disappear with them.

Mojtaba’s position made this inheritance unusual. He did not arrive from outside the leadership environment. IranSTO’s investigation into Mojtaba Khamenei’s delegated authority identified evidence that, before succession, he had already operated across parts of the system surrounding his father, coordinating with political and security actors without holding a public office proportionate to the authority attributed to him. The significance of that history here is specific: Mojtaba inherited an apparatus with which he already had substantial institutional familiarity. He did not have to enter the Office as an outsider learning for the first time how its networks operated.

Familiarity, however, is not the same as ownership. Officials who had served Ali Khamenei possessed their own institutional relationships, histories and sources of influence. Senior military commanders operated organisations with substantial internal capacity. Judicial and clerical officials occupied positions that could not be reduced to personal dependence on the Leader. Succession changed the principal at the apex without automatically transforming every inherited relationship into a personal network belonging to Mojtaba.

The Revolutionary Guard makes this distinction particularly important. The IRGC entered succession not as an institution waiting passively for confirmation from the new Leader, but as an armed organisation whose operational importance had expanded during the conflict and whose senior figures had reportedly played an important role in Mojtaba’s elevation. Preserving command continuity therefore meant that the new Leader initially governed alongside a military-security establishment whose institutional position had already strengthened before his own authority could be publicly demonstrated.

That did not necessarily place the two in immediate conflict. The Islamic Republic has long combined constitutional supremacy at the apex with substantial institutional discretion below it. What succession changed was the history behind that relationship. Ali Khamenei had accumulated decades of personal authority over institutions whose senior personnel he had repeatedly appointed and reshaped. Mojtaba inherited their formal subordination immediately. He did not inherit his father’s decades of personal command simply by inheriting his office.

The retention of Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei provides one of the clearest tests of the distinction between emergency continuity and deliberate preservation. His position initially survived through the broader continuity arrangement, but Mojtaba’s subsequent renewal of his term transformed inherited continuity into a new personnel decision. Mohseni-Ejei was not a neutral administrator awaiting replacement. His career spans the intelligence, prosecutorial and judicial apparatus of the Islamic Republic, and IranSTO has previously examined his role in Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei and Judicial Terror in Iran. Renewing his position preserved an experienced operator at the head of an institution central to the regime’s coercive capacity.

The decision does not reveal Mojtaba’s private reasoning. He may have regarded Mohseni-Ejei as reliable, considered continuity essential during wartime, lacked an acceptable replacement or concluded that institutional stability outweighed the advantages of personnel change. The evidence cannot distinguish among these explanations. What it does establish is that, by the time of the renewal, continuity could no longer be explained solely by the emergency arrangements immediately following succession. Mojtaba had an opportunity to make a new appointment and chose to preserve one of the most consequential figures of the inherited order.

Other parts of the leadership apparatus are less clear. Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and Ali Asghar Hejazi, two figures deeply associated with the machinery surrounding Ali Khamenei, issued a joint message congratulating Mojtaba after his selection. Contemporary reporting identified them through their positions in the Office of the deceased Leader rather than clearly establishing equivalent roles under his successor. Their presence at the moment of transition therefore demonstrates continuity of the old leadership network, but does not establish their permanent place in the new one.

This distinction became more important as reports emerged of changes inside the Office. Reporting in May identified Seyyed Mehdi Khamoushi as the new head of Mojtaba’s Office, apparently replacing Golpayegani. IranSTO has not identified a publicly available leadership decree establishing the appointment with the same evidentiary certainty as formally published appointments elsewhere in the state. The reported change should therefore remain qualified. If confirmed, however, it would represent one of the most significant personnel changes of the transition because the head of the Office sits at the administrative centre of the leadership apparatus.

Evidence concerning Mohsen Qomi provides a clearer indication that at least part of the previous machinery continued under the new leadership. Qomi has publicly operated with responsibility for international affairs in the Office, demonstrating that succession did not produce a wholesale replacement of senior staff. The emerging picture is therefore neither simple preservation nor complete reconstruction. Some components of the inherited apparatus continued, some positions appear to have changed, and the status of others remains publicly unresolved.

This mixed pattern is institutionally more plausible than either extreme. Retaining the entire apparatus indefinitely could leave a successor dependent on personnel whose authority and relationships were formed under his predecessor. Replacing it too quickly could destroy the institutional memory and communication machinery required to exercise power. Selective continuity offers a third path: preserve state capacity first, then gradually determine where personal reconfiguration is necessary. The evidence does not yet establish that Mojtaba is consciously following such a strategy, but the observable personnel pattern is consistent with it.

Wartime conditions make the distinction harder to interpret. Personnel continuity during an external conflict can reflect emergency necessity rather than a stable governing preference. Institutions responsible for military command, intelligence, diplomacy and domestic control cannot be repeatedly reorganised without operational cost. Decisions that appear to demonstrate confidence in inherited officials may therefore reflect the narrower requirement of maintaining state capacity. The evidentiary value of Mojtaba’s personnel choices will increase as the immediate conditions surrounding succession recede: the longer an inherited official remains in place, the less persuasive inheritance alone becomes as an explanation.

There is also an accountability dimension to this transition. The officials and organisations inherited by Mojtaba were not politically neutral components of a new administration. They belonged to a governing structure already associated with extensive repression, judicial coercion and the security response to anti-regime mobilisation. IranSTO’s investigations into the January 2026 mass killings and the broader Architecture of Impunity in Iran documented institutional systems that existed before Mojtaba formally became Supreme Leader. Preserving those institutions does not transfer retrospective responsibility for earlier acts to their successor at the apex, but decisions to retain senior officials become relevant to understanding which components of the coercive system the new leadership chose to preserve after assuming authority.

The distinction must remain precise. Continuing an official in office does not establish Mojtaba’s responsibility for that official’s previous conduct, just as inherited institutional continuity does not prove his personal approval of every operation conducted by the organisation concerned. It does, however, alter the evidentiary position over time. Once a new Leader has acquired both the authority and opportunity to review senior appointments, subsequent decisions to retain, renew or promote particular officials become decisions of the new leadership rather than mere consequences of succession.

The first months of Mojtaba Khamenei’s rule therefore reveal a sequence in which continuity preceded visible consolidation. The inherited apparatus remained functional, major institutions avoided immediate disruption, and senior figures from the previous order continued to exercise authority. At the same time, indications of personnel change inside the Office suggest that preservation was neither necessarily permanent nor universal. The new leadership began by governing through the system it inherited before the full shape of the system it intended to build became visible.

That distinction shifts the investigation from continuity across the state to reconstruction at the centre. The relevant question is no longer simply which officials survived succession. It is what the Office surrounding Mojtaba now looks like, which functions and personnel from Ali Khamenei’s apparatus remain inside it, what has changed, and whether the institution closest to the source of supreme authority is being preserved, selectively rebuilt or reorganised around a new principal.

 

Chapter 4 — The Office Behind the Absent Leader

 

The Office of the Supreme Leader acquires a different institutional importance when the Leader himself cannot be routinely observed. Under Ali Khamenei, the Office already functioned as an interface between the constitutional authority of the Leader and a much larger political, military, clerical and administrative system. Under Mojtaba Khamenei, that intermediary function has become more consequential because direct leadership activity has largely disappeared from public view. Officials continue to invoke the Leader’s instructions, institutions continue to receive approvals and statements continue to appear in his name, but the organisation closest to the source of that authority now operates behind an additional layer of physical and informational restriction.

Reconstructing that organisation is difficult. The Islamic Republic has not published a comprehensive organisational chart identifying the senior personnel surrounding Mojtaba, their precise responsibilities or the procedures governing access to him. Some officials can be placed within the new structure through their public activity. Others are associated with it through source-based reporting. Several prominent figures from Ali Khamenei’s Office participated in the succession without subsequently being confirmed in equivalent positions under his son. The result is an incomplete institutional map, and that incompleteness must remain visible rather than being converted into a definitive list of Mojtaba’s advisers or inner circle.

The starting point remains the apparatus inherited from Ali Khamenei. Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani had served for decades as head of his Office and represented an unusual degree of administrative continuity around the previous Leader. IranSTO’s earlier investigation, Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, reconstructed how his position connected formal administration, correspondence, appointments, institutional relationships and routine leadership business. His significance at succession therefore lay not merely in his title but in the accumulated institutional knowledge attached to decades at the administrative centre of the leadership.

Golpayegani remained visible at the moment of transfer. Together with Ali Asghar Hejazi, he issued a message congratulating Mojtaba on his selection as Supreme Leader. Significantly, contemporary descriptions continued to identify the two men through their positions in the Office of the deceased Leader rather than through newly announced appointments under Mojtaba. Their participation demonstrates that senior figures from the old apparatus remained active during succession. It does not establish that their previous positions automatically transferred unchanged into the new leadership.

Hejazi presents a related but institutionally different problem. His importance under Ali Khamenei arose from the political-security environment surrounding the Leader, including access to sensitive information and relationships extending into the security apparatus. IranSTO reconstructed those functions in The Security Gatekeeper: Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader. His presence alongside Golpayegani during succession indicates that the political-security layer surrounding the previous Leader did not simply vanish with Ali Khamenei’s death. Public evidence reviewed for this investigation, however, does not establish the precise position Hejazi now holds under Mojtaba.

Mojtaba’s own history complicates this transition. As Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader demonstrated, he had operated within the leadership environment before formally inheriting it. Golpayegani, Hejazi and other officials from his father’s apparatus were therefore not strangers to the new principal. Succession altered the formal relationship between an existing participant in the leadership network and officials who had previously served his father. What it did not reveal was whether those officials would become permanent components of Mojtaba’s own Office, temporary custodians of institutional continuity or figures whose influence would decline as the new structure developed.

The clearest evidence of continuity comes from Mohsen Qomi. Public activity after succession has identified him in connection with international affairs in the Office of the new Supreme Leader, providing stronger evidence of continued institutional service than the transitional appearances of Golpayegani and Hejazi. His role is significant because international affairs inside the Leader’s Office intersect with clerical networks, foreign relationships and political channels operating alongside the ordinary diplomatic apparatus. His continued presence demonstrates that at least part of Ali Khamenei’s institutional machinery was incorporated into the structure functioning under Mojtaba.

Qomi has also become one of the officials publicly explaining how leadership authority operates during Mojtaba’s absence. In May, he described protection of the Leader’s life as a security priority while simultaneously presenting Mojtaba as personally supervising matters connected to negotiations and the military field and providing guidance to officials responsible for them. These statements matter because they originate from within the institutional environment of the Leader’s Office. They show how that Office publicly represents the relationship between Mojtaba’s physical isolation and the continued exercise of authority.

Their evidentiary limits are equally important. An Office official’s statement that the Leader supervises negotiations or military affairs establishes the institutional position being asserted; it does not independently reconstruct the decision process. It cannot reveal what information Mojtaba received, how frequently he communicated with negotiators or commanders, which decisions required his personal approval or whether policy options had already been developed elsewhere before reaching him. When the Leader himself cannot be observed performing the functions attributed to him, the distinction between an official account of authority and evidence of how authority actually operates becomes especially important.

The most significant reported change inside the Office concerns Seyyed Mehdi Khamoushi. Reporting published in May identified him as the new head of Mojtaba Khamenei’s Office, apparently replacing Golpayegani. If confirmed, such a change would represent more than routine personnel rotation. The head of the Office occupies a position close to the administrative centre through which leadership correspondence and relationships with institutions can be managed. Replacing a figure who served Ali Khamenei for decades would therefore provide one of the clearest indications that Mojtaba had begun altering the machinery immediately surrounding the Supreme Leader.

The evidentiary record nevertheless requires qualification. IranSTO has not identified a publicly available leadership decree confirming Khamoushi’s appointment with the same clarity available for formally published appointments elsewhere in the state. The reported change should therefore not be elevated into a more certain institutional fact than the available record supports. For this dossier, Khamoushi is best described as the reported head of Mojtaba Khamenei’s Office unless stronger primary documentation becomes available.

His background makes the report institutionally significant even with that qualification. Khamoushi spent years at the head of the Islamic Development Organisation and later the Endowment and Charity Affairs Organisation, placing him within networks connecting clerical administration, religious institutions, state-controlled assets and the political establishment. His career developed inside organisations extending across the religious, economic and political infrastructure of the Islamic Republic rather than within a conventional ministerial bureaucracy. Reporting has also identified family connections linking him to the wider Khamenei network, although those relationships should not themselves be treated as evidence of current political access or influence.

If the reported appointment is confirmed, the combination of Khamoushi and Qomi would point towards selective reconstruction rather than wholesale replacement. Qomi represents institutional continuity; a new head of office would represent change at the administrative centre. The unresolved position of figures such as Hejazi would leave other components of the previous leadership architecture less certain. The resulting structure would therefore resemble neither Ali Khamenei’s Office preserved intact nor a completely new Mojtaba apparatus, but an institution assembled from inherited capacity, continuing personnel and selective replacement.

Vahid Haghanian provides an important comparison because his earlier role demonstrates why formal titles cannot by themselves reveal the complete architecture surrounding a Supreme Leader. IranSTO’s investigation into Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader found that executive intervention on behalf of Ali Khamenei could operate across institutional boundaries without fitting neatly into a conventional bureaucratic model. The survival, reassignment or disappearance of such functions after succession cannot therefore be determined simply by identifying the new administrative head. Replacing the person managing the Office does not necessarily replace political-security access, executive follow-through or specialised channels operating elsewhere around the Leader.

The new Office should consequently not be imagined as a single hierarchical chain running from Mojtaba through one chief of staff to the rest of the state. The historical structure surrounding the Supreme Leader was more complex, and the security conditions of Mojtaba’s leadership create reasons for further compartmentalisation rather than simplification. Administrative management, security protection, international affairs, military communication and personal contact with the Leader may involve overlapping but distinct groups. The public record currently exposes fragments of those functions, not a complete hierarchy connecting them.

This distinction has become more important because the Office may now perform functions that were less visible when the Leader himself appeared regularly before officials. Under Ali Khamenei, a public meeting could establish that a minister, commander or political figure had direct access to the principal. Under Mojtaba, outsiders frequently encounter only the endpoint of the communication process. An official announces that guidance has been received. A statement appears under the Leader’s name. An appointment is described as approved. What occurred between the original request and the authoritative response remains largely hidden.

Administration and access must therefore be treated as separate analytical categories. A senior official inside the Office may possess considerable administrative authority without controlling physical access to Mojtaba. Conversely, an individual trusted to transmit highly sensitive communications may possess no publicly significant title. The available evidence does not establish that the reported head of the Office controls every channel through which political or military matters reach the Leader, nor does it identify who authenticates every sensitive instruction attributed to him. Treating the formal Office as identical to the complete access network would reproduce the same analytical error that obscured informal authority under the previous leadership.

Security conditions provide a plausible reason for this separation. The attack that killed Ali Khamenei demonstrated the vulnerability of the highest levels of the ruling system to direct targeting. Protecting his successor would logically require restrictions on information concerning location, movement and communication. Such restrictions can be operationally rational while simultaneously increasing the institutional importance of those permitted to cross them. As the security perimeter around the Leader becomes tighter, the number of individuals capable of connecting him directly to the institutions he formally commands may become smaller.

The public record does not yet identify that group. Qomi’s statements establish proximity to the institutional leadership but do not prove unrestricted personal access. Pezeshkian has claimed a direct meeting but does not belong to the Office. Reporting concerning Khamoushi indicates a potentially important administrative role without revealing his access privileges. Golpayegani and Hejazi remain relevant to the succession environment without clearly documented current positions. No reliable public source reviewed for this dossier provides a complete roster of individuals authorised to meet Mojtaba personally or transmit sensitive decisions directly between him and senior state institutions.

That absence of information is an intelligence gap, not an invitation to construct an inner circle from reputation. Longstanding relationships with Mojtaba, family connections, previous service under Ali Khamenei or senior positions within the Revolutionary Guard may identify individuals requiring further investigation. None establishes current access on its own. The distinction is particularly important because perceived proximity to an inaccessible Leader can itself become a political resource, creating incentives for actors within a competitive ruling system to exaggerate their access.

What can presently be reconstructed is narrower. Mojtaba inherited an experienced leadership apparatus rather than building an Office from nothing. At least some personnel from the previous structure continued to operate under him. Reporting indicates that the administrative leadership may have changed, while the current positions of other central figures remain unresolved. The Office now functions under security conditions that restrict public observation and may separate administrative authority from physical access to the Leader more sharply than before.

The Office behind Mojtaba Khamenei is therefore not yet visible enough to be described as a completed new architecture. It is better understood as an inherited institution undergoing selective reorganisation while simultaneously adapting to the physical isolation of its principal. Identifying its formal personnel is only the first part of that reconstruction. The more consequential question concerns the smaller network capable of crossing the security boundary around the Leader, carrying information into that environment and returning with decisions recognised by the rest of the state as authoritative.

That is no longer simply a question about the Office. It is a question about access.

 

Chapter 5 — The Access Problem

 

The central problem created by Mojtaba Khamenei’s public absence is not visibility itself. It is access. A Supreme Leader can remain outside public view while continuing to receive information, consult officials and issue decisions. The institutional consequences become more significant when access to that individual is restricted even within the ruling system. Under those conditions, understanding who can reach the Leader, how information enters his protected environment and how decisions return from it becomes necessary to understanding how supreme authority operates in practice.

Public visibility and institutional access have never been identical. Ali Khamenei’s public meetings represented only a fraction of the interactions surrounding his office. Sensitive political and security matters moved through private channels, officials could communicate without appearing publicly, and information could be processed before reaching the Leader. As IranSTO documented in The Security Gatekeeper: Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, control over sensitive information and proximity to the leadership environment could carry institutional significance without appearing in the state’s formal command structures.

What changed under Mojtaba is the extent to which the observable layer contracted. Since succession, the public record has contained statements, approvals, and official accounts of leadership activity, but little direct evidence of the interactions that produced them. The gap between the formal authority of the Supreme Leader and the externally visible process through which that authority is exercised has therefore widened. Institutions continue to act. What has become substantially harder to identify are the points at which information enters the leadership environment and authorised decisions leave it.

President Masoud Pezeshkian’s account provides the strongest official evidence that direct access remains possible. In May, he said that he had met Mojtaba for approximately two and a half hours and emphasised the direct nature of their discussion. If accurate, the account rules out the most absolute model of isolation: one in which the new Leader is inaccessible even to the civilian executive and every communication necessarily passes through intermediaries.

The account reveals much less about the access mechanism itself. It does not identify who arranged the meeting, where it occurred, what security procedures surrounded it or whether officials from the Leader’s Office participated. No photograph or video was released that would allow the encounter to be independently observed. Pezeshkian’s statement therefore supports an official claim of direct presidential access without establishing how such access is obtained or whether comparable access exists for other senior officials.

His later description adds an important temporal dimension. By July, Pezeshkian said interaction with Mojtaba was increasing and should continue to increase. The wording suggests an access environment developing under conditions in which contact had previously been constrained. It does not identify the reason. Medical recovery, physical security, wartime compartmentalisation and organisational restructuring remain possible explanations whose individual effects cannot presently be separated.

Source-based reporting concerning US intelligence assessments describes a more restrictive environment beyond such exceptional encounters. According to accounts citing American officials familiar with the intelligence picture, Mojtaba has operated from an undisclosed location under tightly controlled access, with communications in some circumstances depending on a network of couriers. The reporting has also indicated that some senior figures did not know his location and lacked a direct means of reaching him. If accurate, these conditions would represent a substantial change in the practical relationship between the Supreme Leader and parts of the ruling establishment.

The underlying intelligence has not been publicly released. IranSTO cannot independently establish the composition of the reported courier network, determine how frequently it operates or identify the officials participating in it. The term courier itself should not be made more precise than the evidence permits. It could describe physical delivery of documents, trusted intermediaries carrying verbal instructions, secure movement of electronic material or different procedures according to the sensitivity and urgency of the communication. Public reporting does not currently allow those mechanisms to be reconstructed.

The significance of the reporting lies elsewhere. At the level of a source-based intelligence assessment, it indicates that communication security has become part of the architecture of leadership. The attack that killed Ali Khamenei demonstrated that adversaries could penetrate the security environment surrounding the highest level of the Islamic Republic. Restricting knowledge of Mojtaba’s location, reducing predictable communications, and compartmentalising contact would therefore have an obvious protective rationale. A system designed around such restrictions may sacrifice speed and administrative convenience in exchange for reducing the possibility that communications expose the Leader.

Security rationality does not eliminate institutional consequences. A system that reduces the number of people capable of reaching the Supreme Leader necessarily increases the significance of those who remain within the permitted communication chain. This does not mean that intermediaries control Mojtaba or determine his decisions. It means that access becomes a scarce institutional resource. The ability to place information before the Leader, obtain a response or establish that an instruction genuinely originated from him can acquire political importance even where the intermediary possesses no formal authority over the substance of the decision.

This represents an inversion of the institutional problem examined before succession. IranSTO’s previous investigation, Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader, used connective authority to describe how Mojtaba could operate across institutional boundaries without formally commanding every organisation involved. After succession, Mojtaba himself became the constitutional principal. The connective problem now runs in the opposite direction: between the principal and the institutions seeking access to his authority.

That inversion creates several stages at which institutional influence can potentially enter the process. Information may be selected before it reaches the protected leadership environment. Recommendations may arrive already reduced to a limited set of options. Urgency may determine which matters receive direct attention and which are resolved under existing authority elsewhere in the system. A response may then require interpretation, authentication and transmission before an institution acts upon it. None of these stages proves manipulation. They identify the points at which mediation becomes consequential when the relationship between the principal and the officials acting under his authority cannot be directly observed.

The Office examined in Chapter 4 is likely to participate in some of these processes, but the evidence does not establish that the administrative hierarchy and the protected access network are identical. A head of office may manage correspondence and institutional relationships without controlling sensitive military communications. Security officials may possess physical access without administering routine leadership business. A president may receive an exceptional meeting while ministers rely on other channels. Senior IRGC commanders may operate through procedures unavailable to civilian institutions. The available record does not permit these routes to be assembled into a single hierarchy.

This is also why the concept of an inner circle requires caution. Political proximity can take several forms under conditions of restricted access. An official may be personally trusted without knowing the Leader’s location. Another may possess physical access but little influence over economic or diplomatic policy. A third may communicate frequently through protected channels without meeting Mojtaba at all. Treating these different relationships as membership in a single inner circle would conceal the structure investigators are trying to reconstruct.

Authentication presents a separate and potentially more consequential problem. The Islamic Republic continues to issue statements and decisions in Mojtaba’s name, and publication through recognised official channels gives those acts institutional effect. The less visible question is how participants inside the system establish authenticity before publication or implementation. Under conditions of extreme physical security, institutions require some mechanism for distinguishing an instruction originating from the Supreme Leader from an intermediary claiming to represent his position. The public record reviewed for this investigation does not disclose that mechanism.

This should not be confused with an allegation that statements attributed to Mojtaba are fabricated. IranSTO found no public evidence sufficient to establish such a conclusion. The issue is procedural rather than accusatory. An instruction can be authentic even when outsiders cannot reconstruct the process by which its authenticity was established. The opacity matters because a closed political system still requires its own internal rules for determining who is entitled to communicate the Leader’s position and what constitutes a valid expression of supreme authority.

The administrative architecture inherited from Ali Khamenei provides some context. IranSTO’s investigation of Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader examined an organisation capable of processing leadership authority across changes elsewhere in government. Under Mojtaba, that machinery faces an additional requirement: it must preserve the flow of leadership business while protecting the principal from communication patterns and physical exposure capable of revealing his location. Administrative efficiency and security compartmentalisation may therefore operate in tension with one another.

Foreign negotiations illustrate the potential cost. Reporting has described difficulties obtaining responses from Mojtaba during negotiations because of restricted communication arrangements. Such accounts do not establish that a particular delay changed the substance or outcome of negotiations. They do show how a security architecture designed to protect the Supreme Leader can become a governing constraint when diplomatic decisions require rapid political authorisation.

Military decision-making raises the same problem more sharply. War produces situations in which operational command cannot depend on continuous detailed communication with a physically protected political principal. Doctrine, standing authorities, delegated powers and established command structures necessarily become more important when communication with the apex is constrained. This need not eliminate supreme command. It can instead change its practical form, moving some interactions away from continuous direction and towards the approval of strategic objectives, political limits or recommendations developed within the military-security apparatus.

The public evidence does not yet establish how far this process has developed under Mojtaba. It does make the question unavoidable. If communications are severely restricted while military and security institutions possess substantial wartime responsibilities, constitutional hierarchy alone cannot explain how individual decisions are produced. The frequency, direction and substance of interaction between the Leader and institutions capable of acting without constant intervention become central to any reconstruction of practical command.

Restricted access also has consequences beyond military efficiency. The Supreme Leader functions as an arbiter among institutions and factions whose interests do not always coincide. When access is unequal, the sequence in which competing accounts reach the Leader can itself matter. One institution may frame a dispute before another responds. A recommendation may arrive with information already selected by the body producing it. A security concern may narrow the range of participants permitted to present alternative assessments. None of these possibilities demonstrates that the Leader is controlled by those around him. They illustrate why the architecture of information becomes politically consequential when access to the final arbiter is scarce.

No public evidence currently identifies a single individual or institution controlling that architecture. The courier reporting does not identify its controller. Office officials claiming leadership supervision do not establish exclusive access. Pezeshkian’s account demonstrates individual contact without revealing the system governing everyone else. Nor does the available record establish that the IRGC, Mojtaba’s family, the formal Office or any particular security organisation monopolises the boundary surrounding him. The identity of those responsible for managing that boundary remains one of the most important intelligence gaps in the reconstruction of the new leadership.

That gap also limits conclusions about personal rule. Mojtaba may receive extensive information and personally make consequential decisions despite his isolation. He may simultaneously rely more heavily than his father on recommendations developed by officials possessing greater direct knowledge of military, diplomatic and economic conditions. These propositions are not mutually exclusive. Restricted access does not necessarily diminish formal authority, but it can alter the conditions under which that authority becomes informed and actionable.

The institutional significance of the access problem therefore lies in mediation rather than disappearance. Mojtaba Khamenei remains the formal source of supreme authority, but the route connecting him to the state has become less visible, more restricted and potentially more dependent on a limited number of protected channels. The evidence does not establish who controls those channels or how much influence they exercise over the substance of decisions. It does establish that locating authority on a constitutional chart is no longer sufficient to explain how that authority operates.

The next question follows directly. If access to the Supreme Leader has become more restricted while military and security institutions have acquired greater responsibility for immediate decision-making, the practical relationship between command and approval may also have changed. Determining whether Mojtaba directs, authorises, modifies or primarily assents to decisions developed elsewhere requires examining the institution whose operational power became most consequential during the transition: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

 

Chapter 6 — From Command to Assent?

 

The constitutional position of the Supreme Leader leaves little ambiguity about the formal hierarchy of military power in the Islamic Republic. Article 110 places supreme command of the armed forces with the Leader and gives the office authority over the appointment and dismissal of senior military commanders. On paper, the relationship is vertical. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular armed forces and the wider security establishment operate beneath a political-religious authority constitutionally positioned above them. Mojtaba Khamenei inherited that hierarchy when he became Supreme Leader. What he did not automatically inherit was the form of personal command through which his father had exercised it.

Ali Khamenei’s authority over the security establishment developed across decades. He appointed successive generations of commanders, mediated disputes within the ruling system, received military and security officials directly and accumulated personal knowledge of institutions whose senior leadership depended upon his continued confidence. His authority was constitutional, but its practical strength also derived from duration. By the end of his rule, the relationship between Leader and security establishment had been shaped by more than three decades of appointments, removals, crises, wars, internal repression and repeated demonstrations that senior officials ultimately operated beneath a principal with a long institutional memory.

Mojtaba entered the same constitutional position under almost opposite conditions. He became Supreme Leader during war, remained physically absent from public view and inherited a security establishment already operating under exceptional pressure. The Revolutionary Guard did not become powerful because of succession. It entered the transition as one of the strongest institutions in the Islamic Republic, with extensive military, intelligence, political and economic capacity accumulated under Ali Khamenei. War increased the immediate value of that capacity at precisely the moment when the new Leader had the least opportunity to establish a comparable record of personal command.

This difference is central to understanding the first months of the new leadership. Source-based reporting from individuals familiar with decision-making inside the Islamic Republic has described a wartime system in which Revolutionary Guard commanders and senior security officials acquired greater influence over immediate strategic choices. The reporting suggests that, in at least some areas, Mojtaba’s role may involve approving or assenting to decisions substantially developed within institutions possessing the operational information and capacity to act. The underlying reporting does not provide a complete decision record, and the distinction between command and assent must therefore remain an analytical question rather than a settled description of every policy process.

The distinction nevertheless matters. Command and assent are not synonyms. A Leader exercising detailed command can initiate policy, demand alternative options, intervene repeatedly during implementation and alter decisions as circumstances change. A Leader operating primarily through assent may still possess the decisive authority to approve, reject or modify a proposed course of action while much of its substantive development occurs elsewhere. Constitutional hierarchy can therefore remain formally intact even as the institutional location of initiative shifts downward.

Such a shift would not require a deliberate transfer of power from Mojtaba to the IRGC. Wartime governance can produce it through practical necessity. Military operations generate specialised information and require decisions on timelines that cannot always be managed through continuous intervention by a physically isolated political principal. Commanders possess intelligence, operational planning capacity and established procedures that allow them to develop options before political approval is sought. Restricted communication with the Supreme Leader increases the relative importance of those capabilities without necessarily reducing his formal authority.

The access architecture examined in Chapter 5 makes this possibility more consequential. If communication with Mojtaba depends upon tightly controlled channels, matters reaching him may arrive at a later stage of development than they would in a system allowing more routine interaction between principal and commanders. Recommendations may already contain operational assumptions, preferred options and institutional judgments before the Leader encounters them. This does not establish that Mojtaba simply approves whatever is placed before him. It means that the architecture preceding final approval can influence the choices available at the apex.

The distinction between initiative and final authority is therefore more useful than asking whether Mojtaba or the IRGC “really” rules. A military institution can formulate an operation, determine its practical requirements and recommend a course of action while remaining subject to political limits imposed by the Supreme Leader. Conversely, a Leader may possess genuine veto authority while exercising less influence over the initial construction of policy if subordinate institutions control much of the information, expertise and operational capacity from which available choices are produced.

The public record currently provides stronger evidence for increased military initiative than for the disappearance of leadership authority. The IRGC continues to describe itself as subordinate to the Supreme Leader and publicly invokes Mojtaba’s instructions. Statements issued in his name have addressed the war and broader strategic questions, while officials associated with his Office have represented him as supervising negotiations and military affairs. These claims demonstrate that the ruling system has not publicly reorganised itself around an autonomous military command independent of the Supreme Leader.

Public declarations of obedience cannot, however, establish the internal distribution of power. The IRGC has long framed its political and military activity through loyalty to the Supreme Leader while exercising substantial discretion in domestic security, regional operations and institutional politics. Formal subordination and operational autonomy are not mutually exclusive. The relevant question is therefore not whether commanders acknowledge Mojtaba’s authority. They do. It is how much of the substance presented for his approval has already been developed within the military-security system.

The difference between strategic boundaries and operational decisions illustrates the problem. A Supreme Leader may determine whether escalation is politically acceptable, establish broad objectives or prohibit certain actions without selecting individual targets, approving every tactical movement or managing the timing of each operation. The greater the operational tempo, the more decision-making capacity must exist below the apex. Under Ali Khamenei, decades of accumulated personal authority made formal command and individual influence difficult to separate. Under Mojtaba, the distinction is more visible because the constitutional principal is new, physically isolated and governing alongside institutions with mature command structures of their own.

The history reconstructed in Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader provides relevant background but should not be mistaken for evidence of present military command. Before succession, Mojtaba had established relationships with senior security actors and reportedly operated across institutional boundaries connected to the leadership environment. Those relationships may have reduced the unfamiliarity another successor would have faced, but they did not give him decades of experience as commander-in-chief. Pre-existing access to the security establishment and post-succession authority over it are institutionally different forms of power.

The IRGC itself entered the new period after decades of expansion beyond a conventional military role. Its reach extends into intelligence, internal security, strategic industries, regional operations and parts of the economic system. IranSTO’s investigations into the IRGC front-company network,  illicit finance in regional proxy-group funding and the IRGC terror infrastructure in Europe document dimensions of an institution whose capacity extends well beyond battlefield command. Increased IRGC influence after succession must therefore be assessed across the governing system rather than measured solely by asking who authorises individual military operations.

The Supreme National Security Council provides one institutional arena in which these different forms of authority converge. Its membership brings together the presidency, military leadership, senior government officials and representatives of the Supreme Leader. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr’s appointment as secretary during the early period of Mojtaba’s leadership placed a former senior IRGC commander with extensive security experience at the administrative centre of that body. The formal appointment came from President Pezeshkian, with reporting indicating leadership approval. Zolghadr’s appointment does not establish IRGC control over the Council. It reinforces a broader pattern in which figures formed within the security establishment remain central to institutions through which wartime policy is coordinated.

The distinction between institutional influence and command becomes particularly important when examining domestic coercion. Mojtaba inherited security institutions already equipped for surveillance, communications control, detention and lethal force and already implicated in extensive repression. IranSTO’s investigation into the January 2026 mass killings documented a coercive apparatus operating across multiple institutions before Mojtaba formally inherited the supreme office. This dossier does not attempt to assign him retrospective responsibility for those earlier events. It does establish the institutional baseline from which responsibility for subsequent decisions would have to be examined.

For future accountability, the distinction between command and assent will therefore be consequential. Formal position at the apex cannot by itself establish responsibility for every act committed by subordinate institutions. Equally, the absence of a detailed operational order does not establish that the Leader played no role. Investigation of a specific operation would require evidence concerning what information reached Mojtaba, what recommendations were presented, whether he approved, rejected or modified them, what authority had previously been delegated and how commanders understood the limits of their discretion. The architecture reconstructed here identifies where those questions must be asked; it cannot answer them in advance.

The same evidentiary discipline is necessary when assessing claims that Mojtaba has become a puppet of the Revolutionary Guard. The description compresses a complicated institutional relationship into a simple hierarchy that the available evidence does not establish. A puppet would possess little meaningful capacity to reject the preferences of the institution controlling him. Public evidence does not reveal how frequently Mojtaba rejects military recommendations, whether significant disagreements have occurred or how disputes between the Leader and commanders are resolved. Without such evidence, claims of complete IRGC control go beyond what the record can support.

The opposite proposition, that succession left the relationship between Leader and Guard essentially unchanged, is equally difficult to sustain. Mojtaba lacks his father’s decades of accumulated command authority. His access environment is more restricted. The IRGC’s wartime operational position has expanded, senior security figures remain embedded across decision-making institutions, and source-based reporting describes a greater role for commanders in developing policy. These differences are substantial even if the constitutional hierarchy remains formally unchanged.

The emerging model is therefore one in which the location of final authority remains stable while the distribution of initiative may have shifted. Mojtaba can remain Supreme Leader, commander-in-chief and final political authority while relying more heavily on military and security institutions to define the choices placed before him. In such a system, assent is not equivalent to powerlessness. The ability to reject a proposal, impose strategic limits or replace a commander remains substantial. But it is different from a form of leadership in which the principal dominates both the production of policy and its final authorisation.

Whether this arrangement is temporary remains unresolved. Wartime conditions favour operational decentralisation and can magnify the authority of military institutions beyond what survives under more stable conditions. Mojtaba’s physical recovery, changes inside his Office or future appointments of commanders more personally dependent upon him could alter the balance. Conversely, institutions that acquire greater autonomy during a crisis do not necessarily surrender it once the immediate emergency recedes. The first months of the new leadership therefore provide evidence of a changed balance, not proof of a permanent constitutional transformation.

This uncertainty is precisely why the relationship between Mojtaba and the IRGC cannot be understood through a one-directional model of control. The Guard possesses operational capacity, institutional reach and a reported role in the succession that strengthened its position at the beginning of his rule. Mojtaba possesses the constitutional office from which the Guard derives its formal command hierarchy, senior appointment structure and political claim to act under supreme authority. The relationship contains asymmetry, but also dependence in both directions.

The question that follows is therefore no longer simply whether the IRGC became more powerful after Mojtaba Khamenei’s succession. The available evidence indicates that it did. The more difficult question is what kind of political relationship develops when a new Supreme Leader depends upon a strengthened military-security establishment for operational capacity while that establishment continues to depend upon the Supreme Leader for constitutional authority, senior appointments and the legitimacy of acting in his name.

That relationship is better understood as a developing structure of mutual dependence.

 

Chapter 7 — The IRGC and the Supreme Leader: Who Depends on Whom?

 

The relationship between Mojtaba Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps cannot be adequately described as a contest between two separate centres of power. The institutions are formally unequal: the Supreme Leader stands above the IRGC in the constitutional hierarchy, appoints its senior command and holds supreme command of the armed forces. In practice, however, Mojtaba entered office at a moment when the Guard possessed military capabilities, intelligence networks, coercive institutions and political influence that the new Leader could not independently reproduce. The result is a relationship in which constitutional supremacy and operational dependence can exist simultaneously.

This relationship did not begin with succession. Mojtaba had developed connections with the Revolutionary Guard and wider security establishment during his father’s leadership, and those connections formed part of the institutional environment reconstructed in Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader. That history does not establish that the Guard controlled him before he became Leader. It establishes that Mojtaba arrived at the apex with established relationships inside an institution whose importance increased further during the crisis surrounding succession.

The circumstances of his elevation strengthened the significance of those relationships. Source-based reporting on the succession described senior Revolutionary Guard figures as influential in the process that resulted in Mojtaba’s selection. The internal negotiations remain only partially visible. The public record does not provide a complete account of which commanders advocated for him, what alternatives were considered or whether political commitments accompanied their support. The evidence nevertheless indicates that senior military-security actors were part of the political environment in which succession was resolved rather than passive observers awaiting the completion of an isolated clerical procedure.

Support during succession can shape the balance of a new leadership without creating a relationship of ownership. An institution that helps secure the elevation of a political principal may expect continued access, protection of its institutional interests or influence over strategic policy. The principal, once installed, simultaneously acquires powers capable of reshaping that institution. Mojtaba’s relationship with the Guard therefore began with leverage in both directions. The IRGC possessed an established organisation and an immediate wartime capacity he needed; Mojtaba acquired constitutional powers over command and appointments that the Guard could not formally generate for itself.

For the new Leader, the most immediate value of the IRGC was capacity. Ali Khamenei’s death occurred during a conflict requiring military operations, intelligence assessment, internal security, protection of critical infrastructure and the defence of senior officials. None of these functions could be improvised by a newly installed leadership apparatus. They depended on organisations already capable of operating under crisis conditions. The Revolutionary Guard and the wider security establishment therefore supplied much of the institutional capacity through which the ruling system could survive the transition.

That capacity extends far beyond conventional military command. The IRGC has developed networks across intelligence, internal security, strategic industries, regional operations and sanctions-resistant commercial structures. IranSTO has documented elements of this wider infrastructure through investigations into the IRGC front-company network, Iran’s shadow banking and non-SWIFT sanctions-evasion architecture, and illicit finance in regional proxy-group funding. The Guard’s political importance cannot therefore be measured solely by the role of commanders in wartime meetings. It derives partly from control over institutional capabilities on which other components of the ruling system depend.

Domestic coercion provides one of the clearest examples. The Supreme Leader may possess ultimate political authority, but the practical capacity to monitor, contain and repress organised opposition resides within security and coercive institutions. IranSTO’s Iran Mass Killings 2026 Report documented the operation of a multi-institutional coercive apparatus during the January 2026 repression, before Mojtaba formally became Supreme Leader. The relevance here is institutional rather than retrospective: Mojtaba inherited command over a system whose capacity for domestic control already depended heavily upon organisations embedded within the military-security establishment.

The dependence, however, runs in the opposite direction as well. The Revolutionary Guard’s exceptional position inside the Islamic Republic rests on more than weapons, intelligence and organisational capacity. Its senior command operates within a constitutional structure centred on the Supreme Leader, while its political role is publicly justified through ideological obedience to that office. The Guard presents itself not as an autonomous military government but as the armed defender of a political-religious order whose highest authority is the Leader. Mojtaba’s succession therefore preserved something the IRGC could not reproduce without fundamentally altering the system: a recognised constitutional principle at the top of the existing hierarchy.

This was visible in the Guard’s public language after succession. IRGC statements treated instructions attributed to Mojtaba as authoritative and continued to frame military activity through loyalty to the Supreme Leader. Such declarations do not prove that commanders lack independent institutional interests or operational discretion. They nevertheless perform a political function. They place the Guard’s coercive power within an established chain of authority and allow an institution with enormous practical capacity to present itself as exercising state power under supreme command rather than ruling openly in its own name.

That distinction matters because direct military rule would create a different institutional problem for the Islamic Republic. The system has spent decades embedding military power within a clerical constitutional structure rather than formally replacing that structure with a junta. The Supreme Leader provides an apex beneath which the Guard, judiciary, presidency, clerical establishment and other institutions can remain parts of a single political order. A strengthened IRGC can therefore possess substantial practical power while retaining an interest in preserving the architecture that protects its privileged position.

Mojtaba has the inverse interest. A Supreme Leader whose physical absence already creates uncertainty cannot easily accommodate the emergence of an openly autonomous military centre. Public declarations of obedience reinforce the proposition that the constitutional hierarchy remains intact even as the practical distribution of initiative becomes more complicated. The Guard’s recognition of Mojtaba therefore serves the new Leader just as preservation of the security establishment serves the Guard.

Personnel authority is one of the clearest points at which this interdependence can eventually be tested. The Supreme Leader possesses formal power over senior military appointments, providing Mojtaba with a mechanism through which he could gradually reshape the security establishment around his own leadership. But appointment power is not costless. Removing experienced commanders during war can disrupt operational continuity, disturb entrenched networks and generate competition among potential successors. Formal authority consequently creates leverage without guaranteeing that it can be exercised at any moment without institutional consequences.

Future appointments will therefore provide stronger evidence about the direction of the relationship than declarations of loyalty alone. If Mojtaba gradually replaces senior commanders with figures whose advancement is more directly associated with his own leadership, inherited military power may become increasingly personalised around the new principal. If the existing command establishment remains largely intact while accumulating further operational autonomy, dependence on inherited security structures may deepen. The early months of succession are insufficient to establish which pattern will prevail.

Disagreement would provide an even stronger test, but reliable evidence is scarce. Public reporting indicates increased IRGC influence while revealing far less about cases in which Mojtaba and senior commanders preferred different outcomes. This is one of the most consequential intelligence gaps in the present investigation. Institutional power becomes easiest to observe when preferences diverge. Evidence that Mojtaba rejected a major military recommendation would demonstrate something different from evidence that commanders forced through a policy over his objection. Evidence that proposals were repeatedly modified before reaching him would reveal yet another form of influence.

The absence of visible disagreement cannot be treated as evidence of harmony. The Islamic Republic has strong incentives to conceal conflict at the apex, particularly during war and leadership transition. Decisions presented publicly as unified may follow substantial internal bargaining. The restricted access architecture surrounding Mojtaba makes such bargaining even harder to reconstruct because outsiders cannot routinely observe which commanders, security officials or political actors interact with him before consequential decisions are announced.

The same evidentiary restraint must be applied to the succession itself. The reported role of senior IRGC figures in Mojtaba’s elevation makes it reasonable to investigate whether political understandings accompanied their support. It does not establish that such a bargain existed. IranSTO has identified no publicly available documentary evidence establishing commitments made by Mojtaba to the Guard in exchange for support or a negotiated division of authority concluded during succession. Claims of a secret pact therefore remain outside the factual findings of this dossier unless stronger evidence emerges.

What can be observed is a convergence of institutional interests. Mojtaba needed a functioning security establishment capable of preserving the ruling system during war and succession. The Guard benefited from a Supreme Leader whose elevation preserved the constitutional architecture within which its authority had expanded for decades. Both had reasons to avoid an immediate confrontation over the practical limits of supreme authority while the regime faced external attack and internal vulnerability. Mutual dependence provides a more defensible explanation for this early alignment than either complete personal command or complete military capture.

This convergence also helps explain why continuity dominated the first months of the new leadership. Mojtaba’s preservation of much of the inherited apparatus reduced the risk of institutional conflict while his own authority remained difficult to demonstrate publicly. The Guard, meanwhile, continued to recognise his supreme position while exercising substantial operational responsibility. The arrangement allowed both sides to defer questions that may become more contentious once the immediate crisis recedes.

The roots of this interdependence predate Mojtaba. Ali Khamenei presided over the long expansion of the Revolutionary Guard from a revolutionary military organisation into a central pillar of political, security and economic power. The architecture Mojtaba inherited was therefore already interdependent. What changed was the position of the principal within it. Ali Khamenei had decades to appoint commanders, manage their careers and shape the institutions whose expansion he authorised. Mojtaba inherited both the Guard’s power and the consequences of that expansion at once.

This is why succession cannot be understood simply as replacing one Supreme Leader with another. The institutional balance accumulated under the father became the starting position of the son. Mojtaba inherited constitutional supremacy, but also organisations possessing entrenched capabilities, personnel networks and institutional interests of their own. His ability to transform formal authority into durable personal command will depend partly on whether he can reshape those organisations without damaging the capabilities on which his leadership relies.

The IRGC faces the inverse problem. Greater operational power can increase its influence, but openly displacing the Supreme Leader would jeopardise an institutional order that has historically protected the Guard’s privileged position. As long as Mojtaba provides constitutional continuity, appointment authority and an ideological apex beneath which military power can operate, the Guard has reasons to preserve the office even if it exercises greater practical discretion than under his father.

The relationship is therefore better understood as an unstable distribution of different forms of power. Mojtaba possesses constitutional authority, senior appointment powers and the political position through which the ruling system claims unity at the apex. The IRGC possesses coercive force, operational capacity, intelligence infrastructure and institutional reach that the new Leader cannot independently reproduce. Neither possesses everything required to govern the system alone without substantially changing the system itself.

Whether this interdependence develops into renewed personal supremacy, durable military autonomy or a more collective security-led leadership remains unresolved. The answer will depend on personnel changes, access, the duration of wartime conditions and, above all, what happens when the preferences of the Supreme Leader and senior security institutions no longer coincide. Until such conflicts become observable, claims that either side has completely subordinated the other remain ahead of the evidence.

The first months of Mojtaba Khamenei’s rule therefore reveal a relationship organised less around a settled hierarchy of practical power than around reciprocal necessity. The Supreme Leader requires the Revolutionary Guard to provide much of the coercive and strategic capacity through which the state operates. The Guard continues to require the Supreme Leader as the constitutional source of command, appointments and political authority beneath which that capacity can be exercised.

But the Leader and the Guard do not constitute the entire ruling system. Between and around them remain officials inherited from Ali Khamenei, security intermediaries, clerical actors, political executives and individuals whose influence may depend less on formal office than on proximity to the new principal. Determining whether Mojtaba has begun assembling a leadership network of his own therefore requires moving beyond the institutional relationship with the IRGC and examining the people who now appear closest to the centre.

 

Chapter 8 — A New Inner Circle, or the Old State Reassembled?

 

Every succession creates an incentive to identify a new inner circle. The assumption is understandable: a new principal reaches the apex, trusted associates move closer to power, inherited officials lose access and a recognisable group gradually emerges around the successor. Mojtaba Khamenei’s first months as Supreme Leader do not yet fit that pattern cleanly. The available evidence identifies individuals and institutions participating in the new leadership, but it does not establish a bounded personal circle that has displaced the governing network inherited from Ali Khamenei.

Part of the difficulty lies in defining what an inner circle means under present conditions. Physical proximity, political influence and institutional authority are no longer easily interchangeable. An official may occupy one of the most powerful positions in the state without possessing routine direct access to Mojtaba. Another may communicate with him through protected channels while holding a less prominent public position. A military commander may substantially influence the options reaching the Leader without belonging to his personal staff. Under these conditions, a conventional list of “Mojtaba’s closest advisers” would create a degree of certainty that the evidence does not support.

A more useful approach is to identify the principal institutional nodes through which the new leadership operates and then distinguish institutional relevance from personal proximity. The presidency, judiciary, Supreme National Security Council, Revolutionary Guard, surviving elements of Ali Khamenei’s apparatus and the partially reconstructed Office around Mojtaba all intersect with leadership authority. They do not form a single organisation beneath him, and there is no evidence that they possess equal access or influence. Together, however, they constitute the governing environment through which the new Supreme Leader currently exercises authority.

Masoud Pezeshkian occupies an important position in that environment because he has made the clearest public claim of extended direct access to Mojtaba. His account of a private meeting lasting approximately two and a half hours, followed by his statement that interaction with the Leader was increasing, provides evidence of a developing relationship between the presidency and the new leadership. It does not establish membership in a personal Mojtaba faction. The presidency possesses its own constitutional responsibilities, political interests and institutional base. What the evidence supports is governing access, not personal political dependence.

That distinction also prevents civilian participation from being misread as evidence that the balance between civilian and security institutions remains unchanged. Pezeshkian can possess meaningful access to the Supreme Leader while the IRGC simultaneously exercises greater influence over wartime strategy. The presidency remains necessary for diplomacy, economic administration and formal executive action even when substantial strategic initiative originates elsewhere. These are overlapping forms of authority rather than positions within a single hierarchy of personal influence.

Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei represents a different institutional relationship. His authority as judiciary chief is directly connected to appointment by the Supreme Leader, and Mojtaba’s decision to renew his position transformed inherited continuity into an affirmative personnel choice. IranSTO’s earlier investigation, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei and Judicial Terror in Iran, documented the coercive institutional record that preceded succession. His retention demonstrates that Mojtaba has so far chosen to preserve an experienced judicial-security figure at the head of an institution central to political prosecution and domestic coercion. It does not establish that Mohseni-Ejei belongs to the Leader’s personal circle.

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr occupies another intersection. As secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, a former senior Revolutionary Guard commander sits within one of the principal institutions connecting the presidency, military establishment and Supreme Leader on national security policy. The Council cannot be reduced to an extension of the IRGC, and Zolghadr’s position does not establish privileged personal access to Mojtaba. His career is relevant for a different reason: it demonstrates how figures formed within the security establishment can move across institutional boundaries and remain useful to a governing system in which military and civilian structures increasingly overlap.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf belongs to the same broader landscape without providing evidence of a comparable relationship with the Leader. His position derives from the legislature, while his career remains deeply connected to the Revolutionary Guard and security establishment. As parliament speaker, he occupies a major institutional node in legislation, elite bargaining and relations between elected bodies and the leadership. Public evidence reviewed for this investigation does not establish that Ghalibaf enjoys privileged physical access to Mojtaba or belongs to a private advisory group around him. Including him in a supposed inner circle based on prominence alone would therefore confuse institutional importance with personal proximity.

Taken together, these cases reveal a governing elite that cannot be divided neatly into civilian, clerical and military categories. Individuals with IRGC backgrounds occupy civilian and security institutions. Clerical officials operate organisations controlling significant administrative and economic resources. Officials associated with the Leader’s Office maintain relationships extending far beyond the formal boundaries of that institution. The network surrounding the Supreme Leader is consequently better understood through functions and relationships than through titles alone.

Ali Khamenei’s Office had already demonstrated this problem. IranSTO’s investigations into Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader and Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader identified different forms of power operating around the same principle. Administration, political-security access and executive follow-through were related but distinct functions. The survival of that institutional logic matters more than whether every individual who performed those functions under Ali Khamenei retains precisely the same position under his successor.

Evidence concerning Mojtaba’s Office points towards selective reorganisation rather than the emergence of a completely new personal apparatus. Mohsen Qomi provides evidence of personnel continuity. Seyyed Mehdi Khamoushi has been reported as the new head of the Office, although the publicly available appointment record remains incomplete. Golpayegani and Hejazi were visible during succession without their long-term positions under Mojtaba being publicly clarified. As Chapter 4 established, these fragments are sufficient to identify change and continuity at the centre, but not to reconstruct a definitive new hierarchy.

This is where the distinction between personal networks and institutional networks becomes essential. Mojtaba did not arrive at the leadership without relationships of his own. Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader reconstructed evidence of longstanding interaction with political and security actors and authority crossing formal institutional boundaries before succession. Those relationships may eventually form the foundation of a more personalised leadership network. The evidence available during the first months of his rule does not establish that this transformation has already occurred.

Indeed, the distinction between “Mojtaba’s people” and “Ali Khamenei’s people” may be unusually difficult to draw. Mojtaba spent years operating close to his father’s leadership environment. Officials formally serving Ali Khamenei could therefore have developed independent relationships with his son long before succession. A figure retained after March 2026 might simultaneously represent continuity from the previous leadership and an existing relationship with the new one. These categories are not mutually exclusive.

The problem is especially acute within the security establishment. Commanders and security-linked officials who accumulated authority under Ali Khamenei may also possess longstanding relationships with Mojtaba. Their survival cannot automatically be classified either as evidence that the new Leader remains dependent on his father’s personnel or as proof that he has successfully consolidated a personal network. Determining which interpretation applies would require evidence about access, appointment preferences, frequency of consultation and behaviour during disagreements that is not presently available.

Loyalty provides little help in resolving the question. Public allegiance to a newly selected Supreme Leader recognises the constitutional hierarchy of the Islamic Republic; it does not establish personal dependence on Mojtaba. Senior officials can recognise his authority while retaining their own institutional bases, longstanding networks and interests formed before succession. A credible reconstruction of a personal inner circle therefore requires more than public declarations, continued employment or participation in leadership institutions.

Even direct access is insufficient on its own. Pezeshkian’s claimed meeting demonstrates contact without establishing personal alignment. An Office official may meet the Leader because administrative responsibilities require it. A military commander may communicate through protected channels because operational necessity demands it. What would matter more is frequency, exclusivity and consequence: who repeatedly reaches Mojtaba when others cannot, who can introduce issues into his decision environment, whose recommendations consistently become policy, and who retains access when institutional interests conflict. Public evidence remains particularly weak on precisely these dimensions.

The absence of a clearly visible personal circle may partly reflect the conditions of succession. Mojtaba entered office during war, while reportedly recovering from serious injuries and operating under extraordinary security restrictions. Attempting to replace a functioning elite under those circumstances would have imposed substantial institutional risk. Officials already managing the judiciary, parliament, security institutions and leadership administration possessed capacity that could not be recreated immediately. Reliance on inherited actors may therefore reflect the requirements of regime survival rather than a long-term preference for distributed governance.

Mojtaba’s pre-succession role provides another explanation. Unlike a successor arriving primarily from the clerical establishment, presidency or judiciary, he had spent years operating close to the leadership environment without holding a conventional public executive office. His pre-existing network consequently overlapped with the apparatus he inherited. Personal continuity and institutional continuity may therefore have occurred simultaneously, making the emergence of a visibly separate Mojtaba faction less necessary than it would have been for an outsider.

The broader structure of the state further limits how much any personal circle could replace. The President, parliament speaker and judiciary chief occupy positions necessary to the formal operation of the system. The Supreme National Security Council coordinates institutions whose cooperation is essential during war. The IRGC possesses military, intelligence and coercive capabilities unavailable to the Leader’s personal staff. The Office performs leadership functions that ordinary ministries cannot absorb. Even a highly personalised Supreme Leader must therefore govern through institutional nodes whose relevance does not depend entirely upon personal loyalty.

For the present stage of succession, the concept of a reassembled state is consequently more useful than that of a new inner circle. After Ali Khamenei’s death, the Islamic Republic did not visibly construct an entirely new governing elite around his successor. It reconnected existing institutions, personnel and capabilities to a new principal. Some officials remained, some positions appear to have changed, and communication channels adapted to exceptional security conditions. Elements of Mojtaba’s earlier network exist inside that arrangement, but much of the capacity through which he governs remains inherited.

This configuration need not be permanent. Consolidation would provide opportunities to replace senior officials, promote trusted intermediaries and reduce dependence on actors whose institutional authority predates the new leadership. Changes inside the Office may represent an early stage of that process. Future appointments across military, judicial, clerical and security institutions will therefore provide stronger evidence than the transitional period itself about whether Mojtaba is constructing a personnel architecture recognisably his own.

The opposite trajectory is also possible. If wartime conditions persist and the security establishment retains broad operational authority, Mojtaba may continue governing through a distributed structure in which no compact personal circle acquires the dominance associated with the later years of Ali Khamenei’s leadership. Under such a model, the Supreme Leader could remain the formal apex and final arbiter while substantial initiative remains dispersed among military, security, executive and institutional actors.

The evidence does not presently justify choosing between those trajectories. What it establishes is a transitional structure in which the old state is more visible than a new personal court. Mojtaba sits at its apex, but the institutions surrounding him retain histories, capacities and networks developed before his succession. Some actors appear to have gained importance, others remain from the previous leadership, and the composition of the group possessing routine and consequential access to the Leader remains unknown.

The question of who belongs to Mojtaba Khamenei’s inner circle is therefore premature if inner circle implies a stable and exclusive group governing beneath him. The more defensible finding is that the new leadership currently operates through a reassembled version of the existing ruling system while selective changes occur inside the apparatus closest to the Leader. The next task is to separate those inherited elements from developments that can genuinely be attributed to the new leadership.

Only then can continuity under Mojtaba Khamenei be distinguished from change.

 

Chapter 9 — What Changed After Ali Khamenei?

 

The death of Ali Khamenei changed the individual occupying the most powerful office in the Islamic Republic without dismantling the institutional system constructed around that office. That distinction is central to understanding the first months of Mojtaba Khamenei’s leadership. Succession did not create a new constitutional order, dissolve the coercive institutions inherited from the previous Leader or replace the governing elite with a new political class. Much of the machinery survived. What changed more substantially was the environment in which that machinery now operates: the visibility of the Leader, the architecture of access to him, the relationship between personal direction and institutional initiative, and the relative position of the military-security establishment.

The clearest continuity is constitutional. Mojtaba inherited the same formal powers held by his father. The Supreme Leader remains commander-in-chief, retains authority over senior appointments and occupies the apex of a system in which major military, judicial, clerical and supervisory institutions are connected directly or indirectly to the leadership. No constitutional reconstruction was required to accommodate succession. The office transferred to a new holder, and institutions began treating decisions issued under his authority as exercises of the same supreme powers.

Institutional continuity extends much further. The judiciary remained under Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, whose tenure Mojtaba subsequently renewed. The Revolutionary Guard remained central to military and security power. Existing leadership appointees were initially instructed to continue their duties. Senior officials formed under Ali Khamenei continued to occupy positions across parliament, security institutions, clerical organisations and the administrative state. At the level of personnel and institutional capacity, the first months therefore resembled preservation more than reconstruction.

This continuity matters because the apparatus Mojtaba inherited was the product of decades of institutional development. IranSTO’s investigations into Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader and Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader reconstructed different functions surrounding the previous leadership. Administration, security access and executive follow-through had become embedded capacities rather than merely personal attributes of Ali Khamenei. His death removed the principal around whom those capacities had developed; it did not automatically remove the capacities themselves.

The same applies to the coercive state. Security organisations retained personnel, institutional memory and operational infrastructure. The judicial apparatus continued functioning. Intelligence, surveillance and communications-control systems developed under the previous leadership did not require recreation by Mojtaba before they could continue operating. The institutional architecture documented in IranSTO’s Iran Mass Killings 2026 Report and The Architecture of Impunity in Iran therefore forms part of the state Mojtaba inherited rather than a system created after his succession.

That continuity must not collapse the chronology of responsibility. Mojtaba’s accession cannot retroactively make him responsible for operations conducted under his father. The relevant evidentiary position changes after 8 March 2026. From that point onward, coercive institutions operate within a constitutional structure whose apex is Mojtaba Khamenei. Investigation of subsequent abuses must therefore examine what information reached him, what authority had been delegated, which appointments or policies he maintained, what instructions or approvals can be attributed to him and how subordinate institutions understood the limits of their discretion. Institutional inheritance defines the command environment in which those questions arise; it does not answer them automatically.

Against this extensive continuity, the most visible change is almost paradoxically an absence: the publicly observable Leader has disappeared. Ali Khamenei governed through a deeply opaque system, but his own position within it was repeatedly demonstrated. Officials met him, commanders reported to him, political actors sought visible access, and speeches connected the principal to identifiable political and institutional events. Mojtaba’s leadership has removed much of this observable layer. Authority continues to emerge from the office while the individual occupying it remains largely inaccessible to public scrutiny.

This is not merely a change in political theatre. It changes the evidence through which power can be reconstructed. A photograph of commanders meeting Ali Khamenei did not disclose what they discussed, but it established access. Repeated audiences allowed changes in proximity to be tracked. Public speeches could be compared with preceding meetings, institutional developments and subsequent decisions. Under Mojtaba, investigators increasingly encounter the endpoint of leadership activity without observing the interaction that preceded it.

The second major change follows directly from the first: access has become part of the governing architecture itself. Reports describing extraordinary security restrictions, undisclosed locations and communication through intermediaries indicate that protection of the Leader is no longer simply a security function surrounding government. It may shape how government operates. Pezeshian’s accounts demonstrate that direct contact remains possible, but they do not reveal a routine access system comparable to the observable patterns surrounding Ali Khamenei. Who can reach Mojtaba, under what circumstances and through which mechanisms remains one of the central intelligence gaps of the new leadership.

The third change concerns the Office closest to the principal. Mojtaba inherited an apparatus built over decades around officials whose functions had become deeply embedded in Ali Khamenei’s system of rule. Evidence reviewed in this dossier indicates selective continuity rather than either wholesale preservation or wholesale replacement. Mohsen Qomi provides evidence of continuing institutional service, while reporting concerning Seyyed Mehdi Khamoushi points towards a possible change at the administrative head of the Office. The positions of other central figures from the previous leadership remain less certain.

The significance of these changes lies less in the individual names than in the institutional process they may represent. A successor who immediately dismantled the inherited Office would risk destroying administrative memory and trusted channels required to exercise power. A successor who never altered it could remain dependent on a structure whose senior personnel accumulated authority under another principal. The emerging pattern suggests an apparatus preserved sufficiently to function while parts of the environment closest to Mojtaba are gradually being reconsidered. Whether this constitutes a deliberate strategy of selective consolidation remains unproven.

A fourth change concerns the balance between the Supreme Leader and the security establishment. The Revolutionary Guard was already one of the most powerful institutions in the Islamic Republic under Ali Khamenei. Its military, intelligence, political and economic expansion long predates succession. What changed was the position from which the new Leader encountered that power. Mojtaba inherited constitutional command immediately. He did not inherit the decades of accumulated personal authority through which his father had managed successive generations of commanders.

War magnified that difference. Military and security institutions acquired greater responsibility for immediate operational decisions while the new Leader operated under restricted access and extraordinary physical security. As Chapters 6 and 7 established, this does not support a binary choice between personal rule and IRGC rule. The more consequential development is a possible redistribution between institutional initiative and final authority. The Guard may exercise greater influence over the production of strategic options while the Supreme Leader retains authority to approve, reject or constrain them.

The fifth change is therefore the widening distance between formal authority and accumulated personal authority. Ali Khamenei’s long tenure made the distinction increasingly difficult to observe. Senior officials had spent years or decades operating inside a political order shaped by his appointments and preferences. Mojtaba acquired the constitutional powers of the same office in a single act of succession, but personal authority over inherited institutions cannot be transferred with equal immediacy.

His pre-succession history reduces but does not eliminate that problem. As reconstructed in Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader, he had already operated across parts of his father’s political and security environment and maintained relationships with important actors inside the system. He therefore entered office with unusual familiarity with the machinery he inherited. Yet delegated influence beneath Ali Khamenei and final responsibility above the entire ruling system remain institutionally different forms of power.

A sixth change concerns mediation. Intermediaries mattered under Ali Khamenei, but they operated around a principal whose participation could often be observed independently of them. Under Mojtaba, mediation has become more difficult to separate from leadership because outsiders frequently cannot observe the point at which the principal enters the decision process. Officials communicate guidance attributed to him. The Office releases statements. Institutions announce approvals. Military bodies invoke his instructions. The missing element is often the path connecting those outputs to Mojtaba personally.

This does not justify treating intermediaries as substitute rulers. No evidence reviewed for this investigation establishes that an Office official, family member, security figure or IRGC commander possesses exclusive control over communication with Mojtaba or can independently issue instructions accepted throughout the state as though they originated from him. The significance of mediation is narrower but substantial: when direct access is scarce, the ability to transmit information, communicate decisions and authenticate authority becomes more institutionally valuable.

A seventh potential change lies in the composition of the governing network, although the evidence remains preliminary. The first months have not produced a clearly identifiable Mojtaba faction displacing the senior elite inherited from his father. As Chapter 8 found, the old state is more visible than a new personal court. Existing institutions have been reconnected to a new principal, selected personnel appear to be changing, and Mojtaba’s own pre-existing relationships overlap with parts of the apparatus he inherited. Succession has therefore altered the arrangement of the existing state more clearly than it has created a new ruling class.

Against these procedural changes stands considerable ideological continuity. Mojtaba’s early statements have not introduced a major public reinterpretation of the political order inherited from Ali Khamenei. The language of resistance, external enemies, regime unity and preservation of the existing system remains recognisable. No public programme has attempted to distinguish the new leadership fundamentally from the ideological foundations of the previous one. The mechanics of leadership have changed more visibly than its declared political purpose.

The same continuity extends into the economic and international infrastructure sustaining the regime. Sanctions-evasion mechanisms, commercial networks and security-linked financial structures developed before succession did not disappear with Ali Khamenei. IranSTO has previously examined components of these systems through investigations into Iran’s shadow banking and non-SWIFT sanctions-evasion architecture, the shadow fleet sanctions-evasion system and tracing Iran’s illicit finance. These networks illustrate a broader point: leadership succession changed the principal at the apex without requiring the institutional state beneath him to be rebuilt.

This distinction matters particularly in external analysis, where authoritarian systems are easily over-personalised. The death of a ruler who dominated political life for decades naturally creates expectations of rupture. But the Islamic Republic under Ali Khamenei had developed institutions capable of surviving him. Coercive capacity survived. Financial networks survived. Military structures survived. Administrative mechanisms survived. The constitutional office itself survived. Succession demonstrated the extent to which those structures had become institutionalised beyond the individual who had shaped them.

Yet describing Mojtaba’s leadership as simply Ali Khamenei’s system under another name would obscure the significance of what has changed. The same institutions are now operating beneath a principal with a different history, a different degree of accumulated authority and radically different conditions of visibility and access. The Revolutionary Guard entered the transition from an unusually strong operational position. Parts of the Office appear to be changing. Communication with the apex has become more restricted. These differences affect how power moves even where the institutions through which it moves remain recognisable.

The most consequential transformation may therefore be procedural rather than constitutional. The formal architecture of supreme authority has survived, but the route through which that authority becomes informed, communicated and implemented has become less visible and potentially more dependent upon institutional mediation. The constitutional diagram still places the Leader at the apex. It says considerably less about where policy is initiated, who can reach the principal, how competing recommendations arrive before him or through which channels his final authority returns to the state.

Whether this is primarily a wartime adaptation or the beginning of a durable post-Ali Khamenei model remains unresolved. A physically recovered and politically consolidated Mojtaba could increase direct interaction with officials, alter senior appointments and gradually construct a more personalised command structure. Alternatively, the current distribution of initiative could harden into a system in which the Supreme Leader remains constitutionally supreme while military, security and administrative institutions exercise greater practical autonomy beneath him.

The evidence available during the first months cannot decide between those possibilities. It can establish the baseline against which future developments should be measured. The institutions survived. The constitutional office survived. Much of the governing personnel survived. The coercive and financial infrastructure survived. What changed was the relationship between the individual at the apex and the machinery beneath him.

The transition from Ali Khamenei to Mojtaba Khamenei should therefore be understood neither as regime transformation nor as perfect continuity. It is succession within an existing authoritarian architecture whose components demonstrated an ability to survive the death of the man who dominated them for decades. Mojtaba inherited that architecture, but he has not yet reproduced his father’s relationship with it.

The institutional question is no longer whether the old system survived. It did.

The question is what form of Supreme Leadership is now emerging from inside it.

 

Chapter 10 — Institutional Findings: The Architecture of the New Leadership

 

The first months of Mojtaba Khamenei’s tenure do not reveal the disappearance of supreme authority. They reveal a change in the conditions under which that authority is exercised. The constitutional office remains intact. Institutions continue to recognise decisions issued in the Leader’s name, senior appointments remain subject to leadership authority, and the military-security establishment continues publicly to acknowledge the Supreme Leader as the apex of command. What has become substantially less visible is the process connecting Mojtaba personally to those institutional outcomes.

This distinction is the central finding of the investigation. Public absence should not be confused with institutional absence. Mojtaba has remained outside normal public observation, but the state has not behaved as though the office were vacant. Leadership messages have been issued, appointments preserved or renewed, judicial procedures requiring supreme approval have continued, and senior officials have publicly described receiving his guidance. The evidence therefore does not support a model in which the Islamic Republic operates without a functioning Supreme Leader while merely using Mojtaba’s name as a constitutional device.

The evidence does not support the opposite model of uninterrupted personal rule either. The public record cannot establish that Mojtaba routinely initiates the decisions attributed to him, personally reviews every consequential matter reaching the leadership or exercises the degree of intervention that Ali Khamenei accumulated over decades. Restricted communications, the absence of observable meetings and the expanded wartime role of military-security institutions make that assumption equally difficult to sustain. Final authority and continuous personal direction are not the same thing.

The architecture emerging from the evidence can instead be reconstructed through four interconnected layers: constitutional authority, access, institutional initiative and implementation. Mojtaba occupies the first by virtue of the office he holds. The second consists of the people, security procedures and communication channels capable of connecting institutions to the Leader. The third consists of organisations with sufficient information, expertise and capacity to formulate decisions or policy options before they reach him. The fourth consists of the institutions capable of converting authorised decisions into action. Under Ali Khamenei, these layers frequently converged around a highly experienced and publicly visible principal. Under Mojtaba, the boundaries between them have become more consequential.

The constitutional layer is the clearest. Mojtaba inherited the formal powers of the Supreme Leader without a corresponding reduction in their scope. He possesses authority over senior appointments, the armed forces, and the other functions constitutionally assigned to the office. The exercise of those powers after succession demonstrates that the formal machinery survived. Analysis focused exclusively on his disappearance from public view therefore risks overlooking the continuing institutional significance of the position he occupies.

The access layer is substantially more opaque. Evidence indicates that direct contact is possible, while source-based reporting describes extraordinary restrictions surrounding Mojtaba’s location and communications. These propositions can coexist if access is selective rather than absent. The unresolved question is consequently not whether anyone can reach the Supreme Leader, but who can reach him routinely, through which mechanisms, and under whose control.

No public evidence reviewed for this dossier establishes a single gatekeeper controlling that system. Officials inside the Office, security personnel, senior military figures and individuals from Mojtaba’s pre-existing network may participate in different channels, but none can presently be identified as possessing exclusive control over access. Claims that a particular individual or institution controls Mojtaba through his isolation therefore exceed the available evidence.

The historical significance of gatekeeping nevertheless makes the intelligence gap important. IranSTO’s investigation of Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader demonstrated that access and sensitive information possessed institutional value around Ali Khamenei even when the Leader remained publicly visible. Under Mojtaba, the same functions potentially acquire greater significance because physical protection and communication security have narrowed the observable routes connecting institutions to the apex.

The administrative machinery surrounding that access appears to combine inheritance with selective reorganisation. Mojtaba acquired an Office containing institutional memory accumulated during his father’s long tenure. Some elements continued after succession, while reporting indicates change at parts of the administrative centre. IranSTO’s earlier investigation of Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader provides the baseline against which that transition can be assessed. The evidence presently supports neither a description of the new Office as an unchanged continuation of Ali Khamenei’s apparatus nor a claim that Mojtaba has already replaced it with an entirely personal institution.

The institutional-initiative layer is where the most consequential redistribution may be occurring. The Revolutionary Guard and wider security establishment entered succession with operational capabilities built over decades and strengthened by wartime necessity. These institutions possess intelligence, specialised expertise, planning capacity, command structures and coercive resources unavailable to the Leader’s personal Office. They can therefore shape policy before the constitutional principal is required to approve, reject or modify it.

This does not establish military government. The distinction developed in Chapter 6 between initiative and final authority remains essential. An institution capable of constructing the options presented to the Supreme Leader can exercise substantial influence without possessing final constitutional authority over them. Mojtaba can remain the decisive political principal while depending more heavily than his father on policies and operational choices developed within the military-security establishment. The resulting structure fits neither straightforward personal rule nor a conventional junta.

The implementation layer remains distributed across the state. The Office of the Supreme Leader does not itself conduct military operations, administer the judiciary, operate the executive bureaucracy or exercise the full coercive capacity of the regime. Supreme authority becomes consequential because institutions beneath the apex translate decisions into action. IranSTO’s investigation of Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader demonstrated how executive follow-through under Ali Khamenei could cross institutional boundaries without requiring the Office formally to absorb the organisations involved. The same analytical distinction remains necessary under Mojtaba even if the personnel and communication mechanisms have changed.

Taken together, these four layers produce an architecture in which formal supremacy and practical dependence coexist. Mojtaba requires institutions capable of supplying information, developing policy and implementing decisions. Those institutions continue to require the constitutional authority, senior appointments and political protection supplied by the Supreme Leader. The clearest example is the IRGC: it possesses operational capacity the Leader cannot independently reproduce, while Mojtaba occupies the office through which its senior command hierarchy and public claim of obedience remain organised.

Mutual dependence should not be confused with equal power. Different forms of authority cannot be placed on a single scale. The Supreme Leader can possess the formal authority to remove a commander while facing substantial institutional costs if he exercises it. A commander can dominate the production of operational options while remaining unable to reproduce the constitutional function performed by the Leader. Military operations, senior appointments, diplomacy, internal repression and clerical politics may therefore produce different distributions of practical influence within the same overall hierarchy.

Other institutions fit into this architecture through specialised relationships rather than membership in a single inner circle. Pezeshkian’s reported access indicates that the civilian executive has not been excluded from the leadership process. Mojtaba’s renewal of Mohseni-Ejei demonstrates deliberate continuity at the head of the judiciary. The Supreme National Security Council connects civilian and security institutions to strategic decision-making. None of these relationships, considered alone, establishes the complete distribution of power. Together they reinforce the picture developed in Chapter 8: the new leadership operates through a reassembled state rather than an already identifiable personal court.

This has direct implications for accountability. Mojtaba inherited coercive institutions with established command structures, operational practices and documented records of repression. IranSTO’s Iran Mass Killings 2026 Report and The Architecture of Impunity in Iran reconstruct parts of that system before his formal succession. Those earlier acts cannot simply be attributed retrospectively to the new Leader. From 8 March onward, however, the institutional chain operates under a different constitutional principle.

Formal command alone is insufficient to establish individual criminal responsibility for every act committed beneath that principal. Any case-specific assessment would require evidence concerning knowledge, orders, approvals, delegated authority, reporting chains and responses to known abuses. Physical isolation, however, cannot itself establish non-involvement. If evidence demonstrates that information reached Mojtaba, that he authorised a policy, maintained relevant authority after becoming aware of conduct or deliberately retained officials whose actions were known to him, his absence from public view would not diminish the evidentiary significance of those acts.

Several intelligence gaps therefore become tests of the model developed in this dossier. The first concerns authentication: how institutions establish that a sensitive instruction genuinely represents the Leader’s decision. The second concerns access: which individuals possess routine physical or secure contact with Mojtaba. The third concerns the division of responsibility between the Office and security institutions. The fourth concerns disagreement: what happens when Mojtaba and senior military-security figures prefer different outcomes. The fifth concerns personnel: whether future appointments begin replacing inherited officials with figures whose authority is more directly connected to the new leadership.

These questions distinguish emergency continuity from durable institutional change. A Leader who gradually reshapes senior appointments, constructs a recognisable personal Office and expands direct interaction with institutions would be moving towards greater personal consolidation. A Leader who remains isolated while inherited institutions retain broad initiative would be moving towards a more distributed structure in which formal supreme authority coexists with substantial institutional autonomy.

Time therefore becomes an evidentiary variable. Continuity immediately after succession can be explained by crisis management. The same explanation becomes progressively weaker as opportunities for deliberate personnel and institutional choices accumulate. Officials retained for months or years increasingly become officials the new leadership has chosen to retain. New appointments reveal preferences unavailable at the moment of succession. Patterns of access that persist after the immediate security emergency will similarly provide stronger evidence about the permanent architecture of the new leadership.

The institutional model emerging from this investigation can therefore be described as mediated supreme authority.

The term does not imply that Mojtaba Khamenei is ceremonial, incapacitated or controlled by intermediaries. Nor does it imply that the institutions beneath him have acquired sovereign authority of their own. It describes a system in which constitutionally decisive authority remains concentrated in the Supreme Leader while its practical exercise is increasingly observable through layers of mediation: protected access, inherited administration, institutional policy formation and distributed implementation.

This model differs fundamentally from the connective authority identified in IranSTO’s previous investigation, Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader. Before succession, the institutional problem concerned an individual capable of connecting institutions and exercising significant reported influence without possessing a public office sufficient to explain that authority. After succession, the direction of the problem reversed. Mojtaba now possesses the most powerful formal office in the system. What requires reconstruction is the network connecting that office back to the institutions expected to receive, interpret and execute its authority.

The difference between these two models captures the institutional transformation produced by succession. Before 8 March, Mojtaba’s authority was difficult to explain because his formal position was insufficient to account for the influence attributed to him. After 8 March, his formal authority became unambiguous while the practical mechanisms through which it operates became unusually difficult to observe.

The opacity did not disappear when Mojtaba Khamenei acquired the title. It changed location.

That finding also defines the limits of the present assessment. The Islamic Republic has demonstrated that its leadership architecture can survive the violent removal of a long-serving Supreme Leader. It has not yet demonstrated what equilibrium will emerge once the emergency conditions surrounding succession recede. Mojtaba may consolidate personal authority. The military-security establishment may preserve greater operational autonomy. The system may instead stabilise around a mediated arrangement in which neither development fully displaces the other.

What can already be established is narrower but significant. Succession did not leave an empty space at the top of the Islamic Republic. It produced a Supreme Leader governing through a state whose institutional capacity survived his father and whose most powerful organisations possess resources, expertise and autonomy that the new principal must manage rather than recreate.

The defining feature of the emerging architecture is therefore not the disappearance of supreme authority.

It is the mediation of supreme authority.

Conclusion — The Leader Is Hidden. The System Is Not.

 

Mojtaba Khamenei inherited the highest office of the Islamic Republic under circumstances unlike those in which his father had exercised it. He entered the leadership during war, after the violent removal of Ali Khamenei, without the decades of accumulated personal command that had allowed his predecessor to dominate the institutions beneath him. He then disappeared from public view. Yet the system surrounding the Supreme Leader did not disappear with him. It continued to appoint, approve, communicate, punish, negotiate and conduct military operations while recognising Mojtaba as the constitutional authority at its apex.

That distinction is the central finding of this investigation. The absence of the Leader has not produced the absence of leadership authority. Nor does the continued operation of the state establish that Mojtaba exercises power in the same manner as Ali Khamenei. The evidence instead points towards a system in which supreme authority remains formally concentrated at the top while the practical production, transmission and implementation of decisions has become more mediated, more compartmentalised and more dependent on institutions whose capacity predates the new Leader.

The architecture Mojtaba inherited explains why this was possible. Ali Khamenei left behind more than a constitutional office. His rule produced administrative machinery capable of processing leadership authority, security networks capable of controlling access and information, military institutions capable of operating independently at substantial scale, a judiciary capable of sustaining coercion and a governing elite accustomed to functioning through the authority of the Supreme Leader. IranSTO’s Regime Atlas investigations into Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader, and Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader reconstructed different components of that machinery before succession. Mojtaba did not have to create it. He inherited it.

That inheritance explains the priority given to continuity. The Islamic Republic survived succession not by immediately constructing a new state around Mojtaba, but by reconnecting an existing one to a new principal. Officials remained in place, institutional chains continued operating, and the coercive and security apparatus survived the transition. Selective reorganisation appears to have begun around the leadership, but the governing system itself was not dismantled and rebuilt.

What changed most clearly was the relationship between the principal and the machinery beneath him. Ali Khamenei presided over an opaque political system while remaining personally observable within it. Mojtaba’s leadership has so far reversed part of that relationship. The office remains visible through its outputs while the individual occupying it is largely hidden. Statements appear, approvals are announced, and officials invoke his guidance, but the process connecting those outcomes to Mojtaba personally is substantially harder to reconstruct.

This is why the institutional question is more important than speculation about his location. The evidence does not establish that Mojtaba is incapable of governing. Nor does it establish that he exercises continuous personal direction over the institutions acting in his name. The unanswered questions concern the machinery between those two propositions: who reaches him, what information reaches him, who constructs the options placed before him and how decisions attributed to him are authenticated and transmitted back through the state.

No evidence reviewed for this dossier establishes that a single gatekeeper, family member or institution has captured that machinery. Claims that Mojtaba is merely a name behind which others rule therefore exceed the available record. So do claims that he has already reproduced the personal supremacy associated with the later decades of Ali Khamenei’s rule. The evidence supports neither an empty throne nor an established personal dictatorship.

The Revolutionary Guard demonstrates why neither model is sufficient. Its wartime operational importance, intelligence infrastructure, coercive capacity and institutional reach give it leverage no new Supreme Leader could easily bypass. Yet the Guard continues to operate beneath a constitutional order centred on the Supreme Leader and publicly grounds its authority in obedience to that office. Mojtaba requires capabilities concentrated within the IRGC; the IRGC continues to benefit from a Supreme Leader capable of supplying constitutional command, senior appointments and a political apex beneath which military power can be exercised without the Guard having to rule openly in its own name.

The resulting relationship is one of mutual dependence, but not necessarily equilibrium. The balance may differ across military operations, diplomacy, internal security, appointments and political arbitration. It may become visible only when the preferences of Mojtaba and senior commanders diverge. Until reliable evidence of such disagreements emerges, claims of either complete military capture or complete personal command remain ahead of what can be demonstrated.

This is also what makes Mojtaba’s transformation from unofficial actor to Supreme Leader institutionally unusual. IranSTO’s previous investigation, Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Delegated Authority Inside the Office of the Supreme Leader, examined a figure whose influence was difficult to reconcile with his lack of a formal public office. Succession resolved that contradiction while creating another. Mojtaba now possesses an office powerful enough to explain virtually any formal authority attributed to him. What remains obscure is the mechanism through which that authority becomes government.

The model developed in this dossier is mediated supreme authority. Mojtaba is not absent from the constitutional structure; he occupies its apex. But between that apex and the institutions acting beneath it lies an architecture of protected access, administrative processing, institutional initiative and distributed implementation. The opacity that once surrounded Mojtaba’s unofficial authority did not disappear when he acquired the title. It changed location.

That distinction also matters for accountability. Mojtaba inherited coercive institutions with established records rather than neutral organisations waiting to acquire political direction from a new Leader. IranSTO’s Iran Mass Killings 2026 Report and The Architecture of Impunity in Iran document elements of that system before his succession. Those earlier acts cannot simply be reassigned to Mojtaba because he later inherited supreme authority. From the moment he assumed office, however, decisions to retain senior officials, maintain coercive structures, approve policies or respond to subsequent abuses became part of the record of his own leadership.

Physical isolation does not erase responsibility where evidence establishes knowledge, approval or command. Constitutional supremacy, equally, does not by itself prove personal responsibility for every subordinate act. Future accountability requires the same reconstruction demanded by the political analysis: information must be connected to decision, authority to decision, authority to implementation and implementation to the individuals capable of directing, preventing or responding to it.

The remaining intelligence gaps are therefore not marginal uncertainties. They concern the core of the new leadership: the group with routine access to Mojtaba, the authentication of sensitive instructions, the division of responsibility between his Office and the security establishment, the handling of disagreement with senior commanders and the personnel choices through which inherited authority may gradually become personal authority. These are the points at which future evidence is most likely to alter the assessment developed here.

Time will make those choices increasingly difficult to explain as inheritance alone. Every appointment will reveal more about whom Mojtaba trusts. Every removal will test his willingness and ability to challenge established power. Every retained official will increasingly represent a decision of his own leadership rather than merely a survivor of his father’s. Continued isolation will increase the institutional significance of intermediaries; renewed visibility would expose parts of an access architecture that currently remains hidden.

The dossier should therefore be read as an early reconstruction of a leadership still being formed, not as a description of a settled post-Ali Khamenei order. The Islamic Republic has demonstrated that its institutional architecture can survive the violent removal of a Supreme Leader who dominated it for decades. It has not yet demonstrated what equilibrium will emerge once the emergency conditions of succession recede.

What can already be rejected is the assumption that Ali Khamenei’s death left the Islamic Republic without an operating centre of authority. The machinery he helped construct proved capable of surviving him. But Mojtaba’s elevation did not simply reproduce his father’s leadership either. The constitutional office survived more completely than the personal system through which Ali Khamenei had dominated it.

The transition has therefore produced something more consequential than a change of name and less definitive than a new political order. Mojtaba inherited a functioning authoritarian architecture whose strongest institutions already possessed substantial capacity of their own. His challenge is to convert constitutional supremacy into durable personal authority without destabilising the organisations on which his rule depends. Their challenge is to preserve their accumulated power without making the Supreme Leader politically redundant.

For now, neither has displaced the other. The Islamic Republic continues to operate through the authority of a Leader the public rarely sees, through institutions whose power is considerably easier to observe than his own decision-making, and through communication channels that remain largely hidden from external scrutiny.

The individual at the apex has changed. The machinery survived. What is still being decided inside that machinery is how much of the power inherited by Mojtaba Khamenei will ultimately become his own.

 

References & Resources

 

Constitutional and Institutional Sources

1. Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran — Article 110.
   Constitutional framework defining the powers of the Supreme Leader, including supreme command of the armed forces, appointment and dismissal of senior military commanders, and authority concerning judicial pardons.
   Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran — English text
2. Office of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
   Official institutional archive consulted for leadership statements, decrees, appointments and communications attributed to the Supreme Leader.
   Office of the Supreme Leader — English archive

International Reporting

1. Reuters. “‘Interaction’ with Iran’s injured Supreme Leader increasing daily, president says.” 21 July 2026.
   Used for President Masoud Pezeshkian’s description of increasing interaction with Mojtaba Khamenei; Mojtaba’s reported facial and leg injuries; his continued absence from public view; the absence of publicly released voice recordings, photographs or appearances since succession; and reporting concerning IRGC support for his elevation. (Reuters)
   Reuters — 21 July 2026 report
2. Reuters. “How the absence of Iran’s new supreme leader is becoming a liability for the Islamic Republic.” 10 July 2026.
   Used for the investigation’s assessment of Mojtaba Khamenei’s prolonged public absence, reported injuries, reliance upon the inherited leadership apparatus and Revolutionary Guard, and the political consequences of governing without direct public visibility. (Reuters)
   Reuters — 10 July 2026 report
3. Reuters. “Iran’s supreme leader pledges revenge for slain father and predecessor.” 11 July 2026.
   Used to document written leadership communications attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei and the continuing absence of a corresponding public appearance or independently observable delivery by the Supreme Leader. (Reuters)
   Reuters — 11 July 2026 report
4. Reuters. “Slain Iranian leader buried as successor remains out of sight.” 9 July 2026.
   Used for Ali Khamenei’s burial, Mojtaba Khamenei’s continuing absence from public view, his reported injuries and security concerns surrounding the new Supreme Leader. (Reuters)
   Reuters — 9 July 2026 report
5. Reuters. “Mass grief in Iran at Khamenei funeral after US, Israel war killing.” 4 July 2026.
   Contemporary reporting on Ali Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies and Mojtaba Khamenei’s continued absence following the attack in which he was reportedly injured. (Reuters)
   Reuters — 4 July 2026 report
6. Reuters. “Who might succeed in Iran’s theocratic system of power?” 28 February 2026.
   Contemporary reporting immediately following Ali Khamenei’s death, used as a baseline for the constitutional succession process, the temporary leadership arrangement and the institutional position of the IRGC during the transition. (Reuters)
   Reuters — 28 February 2026 succession report
7. CBS News. Jennifer Jacobs. “Iran’s supreme leader is holed up in undisclosed location, U.S. intelligence says.” Updated 24 May 2026.
   A central source for the access analysis in this dossier. Citing US officials familiar with intelligence assessments, CBS reported that Mojtaba Khamenei was operating from an undisclosed location with highly restricted outside access and was being reached through what officials described as a network of couriers. The report also linked restricted communication with the Leader to delays in Iranian government responses during negotiations. IranSTO treats these claims as attributed intelligence reporting rather than independently established facts. (CBS News)
   CBS News — 24 May 2026 report

Previous IranSTO Institutional Research

1. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Connective Authority.” 14 July 2026.
   The preceding dossier in this investigation. It reconstructs Mojtaba Khamenei’s pre-succession delegated authority, cross-institutional relationships and the distinction between formal office and practical influence. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Mojtaba Khamenei and the Architecture of Connective Authority
2. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The Administrative Gatekeeper: Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani and the Administrative Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader.” 30 June 2026.
   Used as the institutional baseline for the administrative machinery, organisational continuity and access architecture inherited from Ali Khamenei’s Office. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani investigation
3. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The Security Gatekeeper: Ali Asghar Hejazi and the Hidden Security Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader.” 3 July 2026.
   Used for the reconstruction of political-security access, sensitive information channels and gatekeeping surrounding the Office of the Supreme Leader. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Ali Asghar Hejazi investigation
4. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The Invisible Executive: Vahid Haghanian and the Executive Architecture of the Office of the Supreme Leader.” 7 July 2026.
   Used to establish the executive layer through which leadership priorities could be translated into cross-institutional coordination and implementation under Ali Khamenei. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Vahid Haghanian investigation
5. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “Iran Mass Killings 2026 Report.” January 2026.
   Used to establish the coercive institutional architecture inherited by Mojtaba Khamenei. The present investigation does not use pre-succession conduct to attribute retrospective responsibility to Mojtaba.
   Iran Mass Killings 2026 Report
6. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The Architecture of Impunity: How UN Human Rights Procedure and Criminal Inaction Shield Atrocity in Iran.” 25 February 2026.
   Used for the broader institutional and accountability framework surrounding repression and the persistence of coercive structures across leadership succession. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   The Architecture of Impunity
7. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei and Iran’s Judicial Terror System.” 9 February 2026.
   Background research concerning Mohseni-Ejei, the judiciary and the coercive institutional structure inherited by the new leadership. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei investigation

IRGC, Financial and Institutional Infrastructure

1. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “IRGC Front Company Network.” 21 November 2025.
   Background institutional research concerning the IRGC’s economic and commercial reach.
   IRGC Front Company Network
2. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “‘Shadow Banking’ and Non-SWIFT Financial Channels.” 20 December 2025.
   Used as background for the sanctions-resistant financial architecture operating beneath the political system inherited by the new Supreme Leader. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Shadow Banking and Non-SWIFT Financial Channels
3. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “Illicit Finance in Regional Proxy Group Funding.” 28 June 2026.
   Background research concerning the financial and institutional reach of Iran’s regional security architecture. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Illicit Finance in Regional Proxy Group Funding
4. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “The IRGC Is Not a Military Force, It Is a Terror Infrastructure.” 16 February 2026.
   Used for the broader institutional analysis of the IRGC’s military, security, political and transnational functions. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   IRGC Terror Infrastructure investigation
5. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “Maritime Sanctions Evasion and Iran’s Shadow Fleet.” 28 June 2026.
   Background research concerning the sanctions-evasion infrastructure that survived the leadership transition. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Iran Shadow Fleet investigation
6. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “Tracing the Murky Maze: Illicit Financial Flows from Iran and the Conceptual Ambiguity of ‘Illicit’.”
   Background research concerning illicit financial flows, informal value-transfer systems, shell structures and sanctions-evasion mechanisms. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Tracing Iran’s Illicit Finance

Supplementary IranSTO Research

1. Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory. “Mojtaba Khamenei: The Shadow Heir and the Architecture of Hidden Power.” 12 February 2026.
   Earlier IranSTO investigation concerning Mojtaba Khamenei’s reported financial interests, informal political influence and position within the succession environment. It should be read separately from the present institutional reconstruction, which concerns the exercise of authority after succession. (Iran Sanctions & Trade Observatory)
   Mojtaba Khamenei: The Shadow Heir and the Architecture of Hidden Power

Methodological Note

This dossier distinguishes between verified institutional acts, official claims, source-based reporting and analytical inference. Reporting based on unnamed intelligence, security or political sources is attributed accordingly and is not presented as independently verified fact. Where the available public record does not establish the identity of decision-makers, intermediaries or communication mechanisms, the uncertainty is retained rather than resolved through speculation.

The investigation also draws upon systematic open-source analysis of official statements, institutional announcements, public appearances and absences, appointment records, contemporary news reporting, sanctions documentation and IranSTO’s previous institutional research. The absence of publicly available evidence is treated as an intelligence gap rather than evidence that an event or relationship did not exist.

All online resources last accessed: 25 July 2026.