TEHRAN, Iran — While Iranian diplomats and officials have been working for the past two months in successive meetings to lower the walls of distrust between Iran and the governments of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany, or P5+1, the revelation of that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who enjoys a special sanctity in the Iranian power structure, had been bugged by the Americans has not been met with a strong reaction from Iran.

The most recent reports based on former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's documents show that the NSA had bugged Khamenei during his trip to the Kurdistan region in 2009, a month before the presidential elections. According to these documents, when the NSA became aware of Khamenei’s trip to the Kurdistan region of Iran, it organized a mission with advanced espionage technology under the code name Dreadnought.

In this mission, not only was the supreme leader’s trip monitored, but also his speeches, the conversations of his security detail, his pilots, and his airplane and helicopter mechanics' wireless conversations. The NSA also bugged the wireless conversations of the leader's security detail. The goal of this bugging was said to be to find “communications fingerprinting,” which would have facilitated NSA efforts to monitor the leader's future conversations and connections.

One political analyst in Iran said, “I was shocked to hear this news.” He continued, “I have no doubt that those close to the supreme leader and the supreme leader himself are very furious over it. The interesting thing is that he and his supporters who have championed him over the past 25 years since he came to power made him out to be invulnerable. But now, he has been bugged. If one were to examine this news, it would deal a sharp blow to the prestige of Iran's leader.”