Smoke rises over Tehran’s presidential compound. The airstrikes apparently killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Uncredited photo from AP)

UPDATED As U.S. and Israeli forces launched their joint offensive against Iran early Saturday, President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the country’s Islamic regime. “Take over your government,” he exhorted them. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny . . . This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

That moment may be now, especially since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is dead, killed in air strikes that devastated the presidential complex in Tehran, Trump declared on his Truth Social account. Iran has not confirmed the deaths of Khamenei and the other senior officials, and a spokesperson for the prime minister’s office issued a statement warning the public to be aware of “psychological warfare” waged by the United States and Israel.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the dead also included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohammed Pakpour; Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh; Ali Shamkhani, senior advisor to Khamenei; and Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces.

Sources tell SpyTalk that the Trump administration’s intent resembles what happened in Venezuela in January—to lop off Iran’s unpopular clerical leadership and invite the next level of officials to cooperate with Washington, however repressive it may remain. Regime change, in other words, would not include opposition figures who’ve led the huge protests that have roiled the country for months. Any IRGC officials who lay down their arms would be offered “immunity,” Trump said when announcing the start of “Operation Epic Fury,” hinting that U.S. intelligence already has made such overtures to that effect. “So lay down your arms, you will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death,” he said.

In any event, the regime’s opponents inside Iran appear cowed after government forces killed as many as 30,000 demonstrators in the past few months. And with the Iranian opposition abroad deeply divided, the prospect of any popular uprising toppling the remainder of Iran’s clerical leadership looks dim, according to veteran Iran- watchers both in and out of the government.

“In terms of really getting rid of this entire ruling class, lock, stock and barrel, without having any sort of really well-organized opposition with roots in the country is low,” Jon Alterman, the long-time director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the SpyTalk podcast on Thursday. Alterman was also a key State Department expert on the Middle East in the Clinton administration and says he has met with the Iranians many times over the past 30 years.

But some others, like Mark A. Fowler, a 22-year CIA veteran who rose to the number two position on Iran within the agency, say this is the moment for the Trump administration to do whatever it can to empower a popular opposition. In addition to its air campaign, he urges the administration to facilitate communication between Iran’s opposition groups.

“Iran’s youth are highly technically literate—when motivated to fight back, they are certain to find their own way to break through the regime’s constraints.,” Fowler said in a recent commentary that ran in The Washington Post. Once the recent demonstrations began in December, the Trump administration flooded Iran with Starlink satellite systems to facilitate communication among regime opponents.

But that’s a heavy lift, experts caution. Last month, Khamenei ordered his security forces, along with imported Shia militias from Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan, to fire on country-wide anti-government street demonstrations, which began in protest against Iran’s crumbling economy but soon morphed into calls for the government’s ouster. While the Iranian government placed the death toll at the end of January at 3,117, The Guardian, citing shared data from a network of more than ...