Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was driven to an undisclosed Tehran location, taken from his own car and seated in the back of a tinted-window vehicle beside a man he could not see in the dark, who mumbled a few words. Pezeshkian has been demanding to see the new Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei who took over on March 9 and had threatened to resign if he was rebuffed again. The meeting was scheduled for two hours, but was all over in a few minutes. The president later asked his own aides what had happened and whether the voice he had heard really belonged to Iran's new supreme leader, Iran International reported on August 4, citing sources familiar with the episode.

The meeting - the only known encounter between Pezeshkian and Mojtaba Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's third supreme leader - contradicts the version the president gave in public. In mid-May, Pezeshkian told a gathering of trade association representatives he had spent two and a half hours with the new leader “in a cordial atmosphere.” Iran International's sources said the real encounter lasted only minutes, granted after Pezeshkian threatened to resign, held away from the leader's usual residence, with guards refusing him a handshake and the exchange carried entirely by voice in the dark before he was asked to leave. A request for a second meeting, this time at the leader's residence, has so far been denied.

A leader nobody has seen or heard

In the roughly five months since Iran's Assembly of Experts selected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father, not a single audio recording or video of him has been released - only written statements. US President Donald Trump has put the odds Khamenei is dead at 90%; Israel's government says he is alive. Even Iran's own foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said publicly that he has not seen Khamenei and that only a limited number of people have. Hardline Kayhan-aligned commentary and street-level clerics have instead leaned on formulas like “he is in perfect health” without ever citing direct observation - the same pattern that has surrounded every official statement on his condition since the war began.

Khamenei's father, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the joint US-Israeli strike that IntelliNews reported ended his three-decade rule; his funeral was repeatedly postponed before Iran finally settled on a burial site. According to detailed Iranian reporting compiled by IranWire, several members of the Khamenei household were killed alongside him in the February 28 strike on the family's residence, including his wife and two aides, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel and a Mr Mesbah - though officials have never published a full, consistent list of the dead.

Mojtaba's own condition has been the subject of a slow-drip, contradictory information campaign ever since. Officials moved in stages from “a few scratches” to “superficial injuries” to specific stitch counts and, eventually, surgery - almost always citing hearsay rather than direct observation, according to IranWire's reporting. Iran's health ministry said in March he received a few stitches to his head, face and leg and was discharged from Sina Hospital within 24 hours; parliamentarian Mohsen Zanganeh said he never required hospitalisation at all. The New York Times, citing four senior Islamic Republic officials, reported a starkly different picture: one of Khamenei's legs had undergone surgery three times and he was awaiting a prosthetic, his face and lips were severely burned, and he had also undergone hand surgery. CNN separately reported sourcing describing a fractured foot and facial lacerations from the war's opening day, and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said publicly he believes the new leader was “wounded” and “likely disfigured.”

One claim in circulation - that Khamenei has been left blind - appears to trace to a rhetorical flourish rather than a medical report: hardline MP Mahmoud Nabavian told a April 17 street rally only that “to the blind frustration of all enemies, the Agha is in perfect health,” an idiomatic turn of phrase about his enemies' frustration, not a statement about his eyesight. No sourced report reviewed for this story describes an actual loss of vision; the leg injury and prosthetic, by contrast, rest on named US and Iranian sourcing and have not been officially confirmed or denied by Tehran.

A resignation he isn't allowed to repeat

The strain between president and leader's office has spilled into public view. A family relative of Khamenei's by marriage said on social media this week that the leader has formally warned Pezeshkian that his next resignation attempt - the 28th, by the relative's count - will be accepted rather than talked down, matching Iran International's own earlier reporting that Pezeshkian sent a formal resignation letter in late May, driven by what he described as the Revolutionary Guards' complete control over how the country is actually run.

That institutional tension runs through Iran's parallel diplomatic track too. Pezeshkian has publicly defended renewed engagement with Washington - including the memorandum of understanding he signed alongside Trump - as “the product of the collective wisdom” of Iran's Supreme National Security Council rather than his own initiative, after the Assembly of Experts' leadership board dismissed hopes of a US deal as futile and called for legal action against “voices of surrender.” Tehran has repeatedly denied talks with Washington even as state agencies reported they had resumed, a pattern of “deny first, negotiate later” that has recurred often enough to become its own recognised feature of Iranian diplomacy, with Foreign Minister Araghchi at one point describing a trip to Iraq as a private religious visit even as backchannel talks proceeded in Muscat.

A president who cannot resign, in other words, now serves a leader he cannot see - and, by his own account, cannot even be certain he has actually met.