I sat down with former U.S. intelligence officer Malcolm Nance to answer the two questions everyone's asking: is Mojtaba Khamenei actually alive, and is Iran's leadership fracturing?
On the first: Nance's read is yes, he's alive and functioning. Not because of what Iran is saying, but because of what it's doing.
The coordinated strikes on Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE, multiple targets hitting within an hour of triggering events, show a command structure that's alert at the top. You can't fake that kind of operational timing with a dead or incapacitated leader.
On the fracture narrative: Nance calls most of it "rumint," rumor dressed as intelligence.
The NYT story about Mojtaba hesitating until Iran's president and central bank governor warned him of economic collapse? Nance says it reads like it passed through a Pakistani intermediary polishing it for Western consumption, not a direct account from inside the IRGC.
His baseline: the IRGC is the real government of Iran. These are men who've buried their families to the revolution and answer to no one but it. No economic warning changes decisions in that room.
The fracturing narrative gets attached to every closed regime under pressure. It's usually wrong.
@MalcolmNance
