Outside the Beltway

Iran War: Actionable Intelligence

Now we know why it started when it did.

James Joyner · Wednesday, March 4, 2026 · 4 comments

Marc Caputo and Bark Ravid, reporting for Axios (“Exclusive: The Trump-Netanyahu call that changed the Middle East“):

Last Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called President Trump with a stunning tip: Iran’s supreme leader and his top advisers were all set to meet at one location in Tehran on Saturday morning. They could all be killed in a single devastating airstrike, Netanyahu told Trump and his team, according to three sources briefed on the discussion.

The Feb. 23 call — held from the White House Situation Room and unreported until now — was a pivotal moment that set the Iran war in motion. It answers the question that lawmakers, MAGA skeptics and world leaders have all been asking since Saturday: why now?

The answer: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his inner circle were irresistible targets of opportunity that neither Trump nor Netanyahu wanted to pass up.

Trump was already leaning toward striking Iran before learning the new intelligence about Khamenei. What he hadn’t decided was when — until Netanyahu called.

The Feb. 23 call was part of months of intensive coordination between the two leaders, who met twice and spoke by phone 15 times in the two months leading to the war, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
The U.S. and Israel had considered striking a week earlier than Saturday, but postponed for intelligence and operational reasons, including bad weather.

An initial CIA check, conducted at Trump’s direction, confirmed the information about Khamenei gathered by Israeli military intelligence.

Preparations accelerated as Trump told Netanyahu he would consider moving forward — but first came the president’s State of the Union address the following night. U.S. officials said Trump made a “deliberate decision” not to focus excessively on Iran so as not to spook the ayatollah and drive him underground before the strike could be executed.

By Thursday, the CIA had fully “confirmed that these people were all going to be together, and we needed to take advantage of it,” a source said.

That same day, Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff called from Geneva after hours of talks with Iranian officials and delivered a blunt verdict: negotiations were going nowhere. “If you decide you want to do diplomacy, we will push and fight to get a deal. But these guys showed us they weren’t willing to make the deal you will be satisfied with,” a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the call said Trump was told.

Trump was now convinced of two things: the intelligence was solid, and diplomacy was dead. On Friday at 3:38 p.m. EST, he gave the final order.

Eleven hours later, bombs fell on Tehran, Khamenei was killed and the war had begun.

This explains not only the timing but also why Iran was barely mentioned in the SOTU speech. Certainly, if Trump was already leaning toward an attack, the opportunity to decapitate the top of the chain of command in one fell swoop was irresistible.

I remain skeptical that the negotiations were real. Given that Trump himself pulled out of JCPOA and re-initiated sanctions, Iranian officials had little incentive to trust any promises made by U.S. officials. And I don’t know what it is they could have realistically offered, anyway, that was substantially better than what they had conceded in that deal.

And, of course, I’m still skeptical that there’s a plan for a better state of the peace. I shed no tears for Khamanei and his gang of thugs. But who will replace them? The exiled crown prince? Some lower-ranking member of the current regime?