SEYMOUR HERSH ON COMING WAR IN IRAN

WHAT I HAVE BEEN TOLD IS COMING IN IRAN

The initial battle plan for a new war

SEYMOUR HERSH

JUN 20, 2025

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei attends a ceremony on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the death of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian revolution, at the Khomeini Mausoleum in Tehran on June 4. / Photo by Iranian Leader Press Office/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images.

This is a report on what is most likely to happen in Iran, as early as this weekend, according to Israeli insiders and American officials I’ve relied upon for decades. It will entail heavy American bombing. I have vetted this report with a longtime US official in Washington, who told me that all will be “under control” if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “departs.” Just how that might happen, short of his assassination, is not known. There has been a great deal of talk about American firepower and targets inside Iran, but little practical thinking, as far I can tell, about how to remove a revered religious leader with an enormous following.

I have reported from afar on the nuclear and foreign policy of Israel for decades. My 1991 book The Samson Option told the story of the making of the Israeli nuclear bomb and America’s willingness to keep the project secret. The most important unanswered question about the current situation will be the response of the world, including that of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who has been an ally of Iran’s leaders.

The United States remains Israel’s most important ally, although many here and around the world abhor Israel’s continuing murderous war in Gaza. The Trump administration is in full support of Israel’s current plan to rid Iran of any trace of a nuclear weapons program while hoping the ayatollah-led government in Tehran will be overthrown.

I have been told that the White House has signed off on an all-out bombing campaign in Iran, but the ultimate targets, the centrifuges buried at least eighty meters below the surface at Fordow, will, as of this writing, not be struck until the weekend. The delay has come at Trump’s insistence because the president wants the shock of the bombing to be diminished as much as possible by the opening of Wall Street trading on Monday. (Trump took issue on social media this morning with a Wall Street Journal report that said he had decided on the attack on Iran, writing that he had yet to decide on a path forward.)

Fordow is home to the remaining majority of Iran’s most advanced centrifuges that have produced, according to recent reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to which Iran is a signatory, nine hundred pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent, a short step from weapons-grade levels.

The most recent Israeli bombing attacks on Iran have made no attempts to destroy the centrifuges at Fordow, which are stored at least eighty meters underground. It has been agreed, as of Wednesday, that US bombers carrying bunker bombs capable of penetrating to that depth, will begin attacking the Fordow facility this weekend.

The delay will give US military assets throughout the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean—there are more than two dozen US Air Force bases and Navy ports in the region—a chance to prepare for possible Iranian retaliation. The assumption is that Iran still has some missile and air force capability that will be on US bombing lists. “This is a chance to do away with this regime once and for all,” an informed official told me today, “and so we might as well go big.” He said, however, “that it will not be carpet bombing.”

The planned weekend bombing will also have new targets: the bases of the Republican Guards, which have countered those campaigning against the revolutionary leadership since the violent overthrow of the shah of Iran in early 1979.

The Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes that the bombings will provide “the means of creating an uprising” against Iran’s current regime, which has shown little tolerance for those who defy the religious leadership and its edicts. Iranian police stations will be struck. Government offices that house files on suspected dissenters in Iran will also be attacked.

The Israelis apparently also hope, so I gather, that Khamenei will flee the country and not make a stand until the end. I was told that his personal plane left Tehran airport headed for Oman early Wednesday morning, accompanied by two fighter planes, but it is not known whether he was aboard.

Only two thirds of Iran’s population of 90 million are Persians. The largest minority groups include Azeris, many of whom have long-standing covert ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis. Jews make up a small minority group there, too. (Azerbaijan is the site of a large secret CIA base for operations in Iran.)

Bringing back the shah’s son, now living in exile in near Washington, has never been considered by the American and Israeli planners, I was told. But there has been talk among the White House planning group that includes Vice President J.D. Vance, of installing a moderate religious leader to run the country if Khamenei is deposed. The Israelis bitterly objected to the idea. “They don’t give a shit on the religious issue, but demand a political puppet to control,” the longtime US official said. “We are split with the Izzies on this. Result would be permanent hostility and future conflict in perpetuity, Bibi desperately trying to draw US in as their ally against all things Muslim, using the plight of the citizens as propaganda bait.”

There is the hope in the American and Israeli intelligence communities, I was told, that elements of the Azeri community will join in a popular revolt against the ruling regime, should one develop during the continued Israeli bombing. There also is the thought that some members of the Revolutionary Guard would join in what I was told might be “a democratic uprising against the ayatollahs”—a long-held aspiration of the US government. The sudden and successful overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was cited as a potential model, although Assad’s demise came after a long civil war.

It is possible that the result of the massive Israeli and US bombing attack could leave Iran in a state of permanent failure, as happened after the Western intervention in Libya in 2011. That revolt resulted in the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi, who had kept the disparate tribes there under control. The futures of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, all victims of repeated outside attacks, are far from settled.

Donald Trump clearly wants an international win he can market. To accomplish that, he and Netanyahu are taking America to places it has never been.