For a brief moment last year, Ali Khamenei’s life hung in the balance.
Israeli officials had a fleeting opportunity to assassinate the Ayatollah during the 12-Day War with Iran. Ultimately, it was Donald Trump who stayed their hand and forced Iran and Israel to strike an uneasy truce.
Eight months later, as negotiations to curb Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes stalled, the US president ran out of patience – and Khamenei ran out of time.
Iranian state media confirmed Khamenei was killed at a meeting alongside at least five other senior regime figures in central Tehran on Saturday morning, when Israeli forces dropped dozens of bombs on his compound.
Simultaneous strikes took place in at least two other locations across the city in an attempt to cut off the head of the snake.
Footage verified by The Telegraph shows plumes of smoke rising high over Tehran from the wreckage of Khamenei’s office and compound, thick enough to block out the sun.
Satellite images show much of the building had been reduced to rubble, from which the once Supreme Leader’s body, riddled with shrapnel, was reportedly dragged.
Both Mr Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, are said to have been shown pictures of his corpse.
Khamenei had become increasingly reclusive since his brush with death last year: even his posts on social media had become sporadic.
And the bunker in his compound lies so deep that the lift is said to take more than five minutes to descend to it. Opportunities would have been rare, but his enemies only needed one.
Israel and the US were forced to rush their plans when they saw the chance to decapitate the Iranian regime.
In retrospect, it seems naive for the regime’s top figures to concentrate in just a couple of locations, particularly when the US has amassed the largest military force in the Middle East since the Iraq War.
They weren’t expecting an attack at about 8.10am local time (4.40am UK). One senior defence official described it as a “massive, wildly bold daytime attack” that “hit the senior leaders right out of the gate”.
And the regime was caught off-guard on a “Saturday morning during Ramadan and on Shabbat in the daytime”, the official told Fox News.
Shabbat is the Jewish day of rest, which made action from the Israeli side unlikely. And observant Muslims have been fasting from dawn to sunset for more than a week during Ramadan.
As a result, the official continued, there was a “deliberate decision to accelerate the timeline” of the strike.
Help from the Saudis
Israel also reportedly had support from an unlikely partner: Saudi Arabia.
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, made multiple private phone calls to Mr Trump over the past month pushing for a US attack, according to The Washington Post.
Despite his public support for a diplomatic solution, in talks with the US, the crown prince reportedly said that Iran would become stronger and more dangerous if Washington did not strike immediately.
A senior figure in the Trump administration has also claimed the president’s hand was forced because Iran was preparing a pre-emptive attack. At least one intelligence source has denied the claim, however.
The CIA, meanwhile, had been tracking the Ayatollah for months, learning his locations and patterns, people familiar with the operation told the New York Times.
The American agency learned of the Saturday meeting and, critically, that Khamenei would be present. The CIA passed this intelligence to Israel.
On this basis, the US and Israel adjusted the timing of their attack and struck on Saturday morning in broad daylight.
Initially, Iran’s leadership had claimed the Ayatollah had been moved safely out of Tehran. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign affairs minister, had claimed he was still alive – “as far as I know”.
It was not to be. Khamenei had been saved last year by Mr Trump’s intervention and survived an assassination bomb plot in 1981 that essentially paralysed his right arm. Now he was out of luck.
Before that, as rumours spread about Khamenei’s fate, it fell to Mr Trump to confirm Khamenei’s death and eulogise him as “one of the most evil people in history”.
“This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS,” he wrote on social media.
“He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do.”
Inner circle may have betrayed him
Precisely what tracking systems Mr Trump was referring to is, as yet, unclear. Some have speculated there was a spy within the Ayatollah’s inner circle who would eventually bring him down.
The US has a “wide variety of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that could have been used to track Khamenei”, said Ryan Brobst, a deputy director at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.
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