Reports have begun to come out of Western media which claim to reveal how the lead-up to the Trump administration’s launching of a war against Iran on Saturday, and the parallel track of negotiations with Iranian officials. This is clearly one side of the story and should not be taken as truth.
One account is from Axios’ Barak Ravid. The strikes were the “culmination of two months in which President Trump pursued both diplomacy and war—on parallel tracks. On Friday, he chose war,” Ravid writes in Axios. The U.S. and Israel had been in a prolonged stage of planning about a decapitation strike, but at the same time, “Trump explored whether military leverage could produce a deal with Iran on his terms” through negotiations. During the whole process, therefore, “ambiguity was itself a strategic asset.”
Ravid reveals that the U.S. and Israel had already agreed on a date to launch the attack—the coming Saturday, Feb. 28, when Khamenei would hold a routine meeting with his top aides at an above-ground compound—and that this had been decided a week before the Geneva meeting between Iranian and American negotiators. “But they faced a specific challenge: keeping Khamenei from suspecting anything and retreating to his underground bunker.” Even though Witkoff and Kushner had already concluded by Feb. 26 that “there was no deal to be had,” they still went through with the meeting in Geneva in order to keep “the Iranians believing diplomacy was alive.”
By Friday Feb. 27, Trump had already made up his mind. Khamenei proceeded to hold his pre-scheduled meeting with officials Saturday morning, as did two other gatherings of Iranian officials in other locations in Tehran—all of which were struck.
“If the Iranians had come to Geneva and given Trump what he wanted, he would have pulled the brakes on the military track. But they were arrogant and thought he wouldn’t take action,” an Israeli intelligence official said.
Ravid further reports that Trump was on the verge of attacking Iran following the Dec-Jan protests, but pulled back, instead sending a massive military buildup to the region. Over the following weeks, the Mossad director visited D.C. twice, along with the Israeli military intelligence chief and the IDF chief of staff—all coordinating what would become Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion. Netanyahu also made multiple visits to Washington along the same lines.
Despite these claims of the precise nature of the strike, painting the picture that Iran was caught entirely unaware, the National American-Iranian Council in a Sunday newsletter added a new bit of information. They reference claims made in Iranian state television that Khamenei had refused requests to relocate or take shelter despite warnings of possible strikes, indicating that he consciously chose to remain steadfast in his posture.
