Washington: Ronen Bergman, Adam Goldman, Julian Barnes
The US-Israeli war against Iran has fractured the Iranian government, complicating its ability to make decisions and coordinate larger retaliatory attacks, according to officials familiar with US and Western intelligence assessments.
Several dozen Iranian leaders and their deputies have been killed since the war began four weeks ago. Those who survive have had difficulty communicating and are unable to meet in person, for fear of having their calls intercepted by the United States or Israel and being targeted in an airstrike.
While Iran’s security and military agencies continue to function, the government’s ability to plan new strategies or policies has been weakened.
The Trump administration has said a new government is in charge in Iran and has pressed it to make a quick deal. But the more degraded Iranian government decision making becomes, the more difficult it will be for it to negotiate with American envoys or make significant concessions.
With different leaders in place, Iranian negotiators may have little knowledge about what their government is willing to concede, or even whom precisely to ask.
What is more, American officials say hard-liners within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps have become more influential in Iran, exerting more power than the religious leadership nominally in charge.
But whether someone emerges to make a deal, and whether that person can persuade other officials to agree to it, is far from clear.
Former American officials say Iran will make a deal when it suffers enough economic pain from the war. While the damage has been severe, Iran may not yet feel as though it is losing, according to current and former officials.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump threatened to expand the war if a deal was not quickly reached, suggesting that US forces might try to take Kharg Island, Iran’s main hub for oil exports.
Iran’s compromised communications have caused confusion and paranoia among the surviving government leaders, who fear that their calls and messages are being intercepted by Israeli intelligence, officials say.
As a result, they have been reluctant to make calls, according to officials briefed on Western intelligence assessments.
Israel began the war with a strike on the leadership compound that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and much of the national security leadership.
A number of lower-level officials seen by the United States as more pragmatic were also killed in the strike, US officials said.
Trump himself made reference in interviews that potential candidates to lead Iran had been killed.
The attack severed many connections between security, military and civilian policymakers, according to Western officials and others briefed on government assessments.
It is unclear how much control the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is exerting over the government. He has not been seen in public, and US and Israeli intelligence agencies believe he was wounded during the war.
Some intelligence officials believe that Khamenei may be more of a figurehead, and that the surviving leadership of the Revolutionary Guards is making the decisions.
A senior US military official said Iranian command and control has been badly degraded by American and Israeli strikes.
Still, the official and a senior intelligence official said, before the war Iran built a decentralized control system that allows local commanders in different regions of the country to make their own strike decisions, even in the absence of direct day-to-day orders from Tehran.
The United States is targeting those local commanders, the senior military official said.
Nevertheless, Iran has proved it can still launch substantial offensive strikes.
But the retaliatory attacks have not been as large, or as effective, as they might have been because of the problems in the Iranian government. Given the decimation of its leadership, former US officials say, Iran has been unable to launch larger barrages of missiles that could more easily overwhelm defenses. Instead, regional commands have had to muster counterattacks without coordinating with one another.
Trump has expressed frustration with what he has portrayed as mixed messaging from the Iranian leadership.
“The Iranian negotiators are very different and ‘strange,’” Trump wrote on social media on Thursday. “They are ‘begging’ us to make a deal, which they should be doing since they have been militarily obliterated, with zero chance of a comeback, and yet they publicly state that they are only ‘looking at our proposal.’”
Over the weekend, Trump said the campaign of airstrikes had resulted in new leadership in Iran and again claimed progress in talks.
“It’s a whole different group of people,” Trump said on Sunday. “So I would consider that regime change, and frankly, they’ve been very reasonable.”
In a social media post on Monday, Trump offered optimistic assessments of the current government but also threatened to expand the war by targeting energy and civilian infrastructure. He said that if a deal was not reached shortly, and if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed, he would attack Iran’s electrical generation plants, oil wells and desalination plants.
People briefed on intelligence assessments said Trump’s frustration reflected the inability of the current Iranian government to coordinate a response and make a decision about the American peace proposals.
Israeli officials have said the communication problems in Iran are not dissimilar to the problems with hostage negotiations during the Gaza war. In Gaza, offers from the United States and Israel went to Hamas leaders in Qatar, and then were conveyed in written notes to leaders in Gaza, a time-consuming process that introduced confusion.
The New York Times
