Mahmoud Nabavian said on Iran's state broadcaster that he had seen secret correspondence from Mojtaba Khamenei claiming Iran's negotiating team had overstepped its mandate. The deputy chair of Iran's national security council made the remarks in a live interview that was cut off, then pulled from the archive an hour later.
That sequence turned a political claim into a broadcast dispute within minutes. The state broadcaster said Nabavian's statements were evidence of a legal violation and worthy of legal prosecution, while members of the camp of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf called for the leaker to be identified.
IRIB cuts the interview
Nabavian linked the secret correspondence to a message he said Khamenei wrote to the negotiating team. He said the letter stated: “What was agreed upon in the Pakistan talks is completely different from what was supposed to happen and was a condition for the legitimacy of the talks, and the talks must be stopped.” The interview then stopped, and the archive disappeared an hour later.
The broadcaster's response moved the episode beyond a political disagreement. Its language pointed to a possible legal case, and the removal of the archive made the exchange harder to revisit publicly.
11 conditions and the strait of Hormuz
Nabavian also said Khamenei had set 11 conditions for continuing the negotiations. Those conditions, as Nabavian described them, included compensation from the US, maintaining the right to uranium enrichment, lifting sanctions, releasing Iran's frozen assets, and full sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz.
He further said Khamenei emphasized “Iran’s monopoly on the management of the strait of Hormuz, collecting tolls from passing vessels, restrictions on enemy ships, and allocating the revenues from the tolls to the people, families of martyrs, and veterans.” He added that Khamenei ordered the waterway reopened only when the US agreed to pay compensation.
Masoud Pezeshkian and the leaked letter
On Thursday, Khamenei published a letter to Masoud Pezeshkian. In that letter, Khamenei said he took a different view on the outcome of the talks to the president but had deferred to his judgment on certain conditions. Nabavian said the line he quoted showed a sharper break: the version he described linked the talks' legitimacy to stopping them.
That is where the dispute sits now. Nabavian, a supporter of the Paydari or Stability Front, says he saw secret correspondence that exposed a mandate problem inside the negotiating team; the broadcaster says his public remarks crossed a legal line. Whether the correspondence Nabavian described actually exists and what it says remains the unresolved point hanging over the censored interview.
