Iran International
The mission to rescue an American pilot downed in Iran showed how a tactical success can open wider strategic possibilities, sharpening debate over how far the United States may expand its footprint inside Iran.
The operation may have cost the United States several military assets, but it also forced Iran to reveal what it considers key terrain, according to former intelligence officer Michael Pregent.
A veteran with more than 28 years of experience in security and terrorism in the Middle East, Pregent believes that in scrambling to protect what it thought would be the next landing zone, Iranian forces exposed troop movements and defensive priorities that US planners may now be able to exploit.
“You can see movement of assets to protect key terrain that we may not have thought was key terrain but the regime does, and that gives an opportunity to exploit the situation," Pregent told Iran International.
"The establishment of this base now changes that focus. It's not just about fixed airstrips. Air bases that the US can take over—now it's just flat terrain, because that's what this was.”
For Pregent, the deeper implication is what the mission revealed about the regime’s internal weakness.
“It indicates a lack of command and control of regime forces due to the degradation, due to key leaders being taken out… the regime wasn't able to do anything about it. And that says something.”
That reading is echoed, though more cautiously, by Farzin Nadimi, a defense and military expert on Iran at the Washington Institute, who says the rescue proved American reach but also exposed how fragile that success was.
The mission itself was among the most daring US operations of the war so far. Special operations forces moved deep into Iran under cover of darkness, crossed mountainous terrain to reach the stranded weapons systems officer, and rushed him toward extraction before dawn.
But the operation nearly unraveled when two transport aircraft were unable to take off, forcing commanders to improvise a new extraction plan in real time to avoid leaving roughly 100 troops stranded inside Iran.
US troops destroyed the disabled MC-130s and four additional helicopters inside Iran rather than risk leaving sensitive equipment behind.
Ahead of the mission, the CIA reportedly ran a deception campaign inside Iran, planting false information that US forces had already found and moved the missing officer. As the rescue unfolded, US forces also jammed communications and struck key roads near the location to keep Iranian forces away.
"Over the past several hours, the United States military pulled off one of the most daring search and rescue operations in US history," Trump said in a statement. The airman was injured, but Trump said "he will be just fine."
For Nadimi, that near miss is the real takeaway.
“It was a very successful operation… It showed real reach, real flexibility, and real results. But at the same time, it also showed… that the mission could very well have failed. And that would leave almost 100 troops in the middle of Iran," he told Iran International.
That warning now carries added weight as the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile remains unresolved.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had estimated Iran held roughly 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels before the latest round of strikes, much of it still unaccounted for.
But when asked whether the rescue mission could make a future operation to secure that stockpile more likely, Nadimi is blunt.
“I think the simple answer is no.”
His assessment is that a mission to secure more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium would require a fundamentally different scale of operation: heavy engineering equipment, excavation teams, perimeter defense, airlift support and the ability to seize and hold key terrain for days or even weeks.
Yet the political lesson may be moving in the opposite direction.
Shahram Kholdi, a Middle East historian whose own Iranian conscript service to the regular army (Artesh) gives him firsthand insight into how the Islamic Republic prioritizes the IRGC and Basij in any domestic theater, says the operation may strengthen the hand of those in Washington arguing that half measures are no longer enough.
“Those so-called hawks now have a stronger view… to convince the president not to go in half-baked anymore… we are going to see blows that would be interdisciplinary actions.”
The Islamic Republic's rush to capture the downed airman may reinforce arguments among hawks that future operations should combine overwhelming air power with more deliberate ground-enabled missions, according to Kholdi.
The rescue not only brought both men home but also demonstrated that Washington can execute complex operations deep inside Iran—leaving the far bigger question of how, and how far, it may use that lesson next.
His death matters because he sat at the junction of two of the system’s most sensitive functions: guarding the Guards from infiltration and directing the intelligence arm accused of crushing dissent.
In March, Washington’s Rewards for Justice program offered up to $10 million for information on Khademi and other senior IRGC figures, a sign that he was seen abroad not just as an internal operator but as a high-value intelligence target.
In symbolic terms, one of the men tasked with stopping penetration of the state was himself reached in the middle of Tehran.
A security man from the inner system
Khademi was one of the least public senior figures in Iran’s power structure. Iranian and regional reports have described him as being from the Fasa area in Fars province, while official and semi-official outlets have referred to him under different versions of his name, including Majid Khademi and Majid Hosseini, reflecting the opacity that surrounds senior intelligence officials.
Unlike many top IRGC commanders, he does not appear to have built his standing mainly through front-line war command. He rose instead through the quieter, more secretive world of protection, vetting and internal security.
From internal monitoring to the top intelligence job
Khademi was appointed head of the Defense Ministry’s intelligence protection organization in 2018. In 2022, after a major shake-up inside the IRGC following a series of security failures and reported Israeli penetrations, he was made head of the Guards’ Intelligence Protection Organization.
He was promoted again in June 2025, after the killing of his predecessor Mohammad Kazemi, to lead the IRGC Intelligence Organization itself.
That move put him in charge of a body the US Treasury later said had been “instrumental” in violently suppressing protests through mass violence, arbitrary detentions and intimidation.
That progression is part of what makes his killing significant. Khademi had spent years policing the system from within before ending up at the top of one of its most feared coercive institutions.
Why his role was so sensitive
The IRGC’s Intelligence Protection Organization and its Intelligence Organization do different jobs, but together they form a core part of the Islamic Republic’s security state.
The first looks inward – loyalty, secrecy, infiltration and internal discipline – while the second has been linked to domestic repression and political-security cases.
Khademi mattered because he had moved through both worlds. He was not simply another general; he was a custodian of the regime’s inner files, vulnerabilities and suspicions.
That means his loss is not only personal or symbolic, but potentially institutional, at least in the short term. This is an inference from his portfolio and the structure of the IRGC, rather than a point Iranian officials have conceded.
How Khademi framed tighter control
Khademi gave a rare interview in February to the website of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and it offered a blunt window into how he saw the country.
He framed the January uprising not as a domestic revolt against the state, but as a foreign-backed plot, and presented mass preemption as routine intelligence work.
In that interview, he said the Guard had summoned 2,735 people linked to what he called anti-security networks, “counseled” 13,000 others, seized 1,173 weapons and identified 46 people allegedly tied to foreign intelligence services. He also said authorities had received nearly 500,000 public tips and reports by the end of the month.
Those figures are important less as verified facts than as a statement of doctrine. In his telling, the answer to unrest was wider surveillance, earlier intervention and a larger dragnet.
He also recalled Khamenei telling him to “pay attention to intelligence work” because “this period is like the year 60” – a reference to the early 1980s, one of the Islamic Republic’s bloodiest and most repressive phases.
The line is revealing because it shows the regime was reading the moment through the lens of existential internal threat, not ordinary dissent.
Khademi said Khamenei had stressed “two types of infiltration”: one deliberate and one broader current of people advancing the enemy’s aims without necessarily knowing it. Read plainly, that is the language of a state that sees not only organized opponents but also ordinary social and political currents as security problems.
Another revealing part of the interview was his insistence on the “national information network,” the state-backed effort to tighten control over Iran’s internet and communications space. That linked Khademi directly to the Islamic Republic’s broader push for censorship, digital control and isolation of the domestic information sphere.
A telling figure of the post-crackdown state
Khademi’s rise after the 2022 reshuffle suggested that the Islamic Republic wanted a harder, more security-centered figure to restore trust after repeated failures. His career embodied a system trying to repair itself through tighter internal control.
His death therefore lands on two levels at once. It removes a senior official tied to repression, and it exposes the vulnerability of a security apparatus that has long defined itself through secrecy, discipline and counter-penetration.
Why the killing matters now
Khademi was not just another uniformed commander. He was a product of the Islamic Republic’s hidden architecture – the part built to monitor loyalty, protect secrets and suppress threats before they reached the street.
His killing is more than the loss of one official. It is a blow to a man who personified the Islamic Republic’s effort to defend itself from within – and a reminder that even those charged with hunting infiltration have not been beyond its reach.
