Why Khamenei Is Dead

By Graeme Wood

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

Celebrating or calling for the deaths of others is wrong, and bad for the soul. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed yesterday by Israel, did so just about every time he spoke in public for 37 years. He handed out Death to Americas and Death to Israels the way other people would say Yo! or How you doin’? The one time I saw him in person, at Friday prayer at Tehran University in 2004, he ended his sermon with these chants and then drove off literally seconds later in the back of an armored sedan, passing so close to me that I could see his car had recently been waxed. Many, many Iranians, as well as Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and Ukrainians, wish Khamenei could be brought back to life for just one minute, so they could give him the finger, or maybe the whole fist. I missed my chance.

 

He was the enemy of many. But he was also an enemy to himself, one of the Iranian regime’s points of vulnerability. During the past two years of conflict with Israel and the United States, Iran experienced a total failure of leadership. It has not experienced failure in every domain. The regime’s missiles partially deterred Israel. Its institutions held fast and didn’t collapse. No units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have defected. But the leadership—that is, Khamenei and his tight circle of loyalists—have performed shambolically.

 

Khamenei negotiated with President Trump in a way that suggested he knew nothing of the current president’s vanity, or contempt for multilateralism. Khamenei and his close advisers behaved, as Robert Conquest used to say, as if controlled secretly by their enemies. They made blunders, such as the decision to sit in a room together for a secret meeting, where they could conveniently be killed in one go, and in the first hours of the war, by an Israeli bombing raid. Israel and the U.S. somehow knew where everyone was, as if they had a listening device implanted in Khamenei’s hearing aid, and trackers installed in the Fitbits, Apple Watches, and artificial pacemakers of every member of the Iranian high command. This intelligence achievement was not only technological—the penetration of devices. It speaks to the basic failure of the Islamic Republic, and of Khamenei himself, to provide a state worth fighting for, rather than selling everyone out. Someone must have been squealing. Khamenei probably appointed the people who betrayed him, and they did so in large part because the regime he represented deserved betrayal.

 

Jaber Rajabi, whom I interviewed before the war, was one such true believer in the Islamic Republic who betrayed it after he smelled the rot. He was naive enough to believe that he could fix the rot by reporting it directly to the supreme leader. Instead he was swatted away, he told me. And if you imagine the small failure of command that Khamenei’s response represented—and then remember that there are probably many others like it—the infiltration of Iran’s top leadership will be less mysterious.

 

Rajabi had, by 2015, come to doubt Iran’s policies in Iraq. He had been part of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and he said he fought on their side because he favored the establishment of a Shiite theocracy that resembled the one in Iran. He was perplexed to find that goal not supported but in fact thwarted repeatedly by Iran. Iran wanted Iraq to remain weak and submissive, and in the meantime, corrupt Iranian officials could suck its resources, profit personally, and leave the country an impoverished mess.

 

Rajabi did not rise up through the normal means—and that meant that he lacked some of the backroom knife-fighting skills that distinguish other, more bureaucratic types. He therefore approached the issue frontally. “I decided to take my proof of these activities directly to the supreme leader,” Rajabi told me. (At this point I am obliged to note that the story he told me is impossible to verify, but certain details make me think it is nonetheless true.)

 

His previous acquaintance with Khamenei had been in passing only: He knew Khamenei’s son Mojtaba because they periodically went to Qom together for religious study, and the supreme leader knew him, if at all, as one of his son’s friends. Rajabi was therefore reduced to meeting Khamenei by ambushing him after evening prayers in his compound. Jaber says he brought a dossier of incriminating documents. In the receiving line after prayers, the supreme leader first addressed Rajabi by the wrong name (“Jabri”). After this inauspicious beginning, Rajabi handed over the dossier. “I was shaking,” Rajabi said. “I was so nervous.”

 

What happened next is predictable to students of the dynamics of authoritarian rule. If you are supreme leader, admission that corruption exists is a sign of incompetence, because you are responsible for everything. There is, moreover, always incentive to promote incompetents, because competent people eventually might get competent at removing you. The incentives all work against the repair of broken systems and against efficient management of hiring and promotion.

 

Khamenei was known to be displeased when asked to referee disagreements between subordinates. He rapidly scanned the document’s executive summary, Rajabi said. “Normally if you hand him something, he hands it to his assistant.” This time he kept the document to himself, and tucked it under his leg. That was the whole interaction. Within weeks, an acquaintance in Iraq told Rajabi that Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force and the most powerful general in Iran, had heard about the document and wanted Rajabi dead. Over the next few years, Rajabi told me, he suffered multiple assassination attempts, the last of them a poisoning that nearly succeeded.

 

Well, that’s one way to manage down. No one familiar with the Islamic Republic will be surprised that the whole system was riddled with people who believed in nothing but their own enrichment and survival, and who achieved their exalted positions through mediocrity. Iran’s leadership was a soft target.

 

The ironic twist in this tale of human resources gone awry is that Khamenei was himself a talented leader in other ways. He looked at first like a nonentity, a caretaker to stand in for his much more charismatic and religiously accomplished predecessor. Instead he outlasted almost every dictator of his generation, and he created a network of proxies so ferocious that no enemy of Iran dared disturb it, until Israel decided it had no choice. He fended off challenges, including popular uprisings, in part because he came to power in a popular uprising of his own and knew instinctively how to neutralize them. And now he’s dead, and all of those accomplishments are crashing down, because the best-planned defenses don’t count for much if the people you trust to run them are ready to sell you out.