Breitbart.com reports: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has activated wartime succession planning, empowering a hardline loyalist to oversee national security operations and ordering layered contingency measures to safeguard the regime amid fears of U.S. military strikes and assassination attempts.

A Sunday report in the New York Times citing senior Iranian officials and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, detailed that Ali Larijani — a former Guards commander and current head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council — has effectively taken control of national security operations as tensions with Washington intensify.

Khamenei has reportedly directed aides to create multiple layers of succession for key military and government posts and to prepare for scenarios in which senior leaders, including the supreme leader himself, are killed…”