News Don't miss out on the headlines from News. Followed categories will be added to My News. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, no longer trusts his phone, and who could blame him? Iran’s phone traffic is the most heavily eavesdropped in the world.
And in recent weeks pagers and walkie-talkies used by the Tehran-backed Hezbollah and the Ayatollah’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have been infiltrated and booby-trapped by the Israelis. The result: a significant layer of Iran’s wider security establishment have had their ears and eyes blown out while checking their devices. So when the Ayatollah was tipped off that the head of Hezbollah, the Shia-seminarian Hassan Nasrallah - his long-time friend and placeman in Beirut - was about to be targeted by the Israelis, he scrawled a message rather than phone him.
The urgent advice to his fellow Islamic revolutionary: get out of Lebanon as fast as possible to the safety of Iran. The letter was delivered by a trusted Revolutionary Guard general, Abbas Nilforoushan, to Nasrallah’s supposedly bombproof shelter on September 27. Both men died soon afterwards in a bunker-busting Israeli airstrike.
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivering a rare Friday sermon in Arabic, defended this week's missile attack on Israel that deepened fears of a regional war and praised allies' defiance. Picture: AFP That assassination has deeply affected the 85-year-old Ayatollah. In the age of drone surveillance i.
