Iran's top security chief warns of Epstein-linked 9/11-style false flag

ALAli Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, posted a warning on X on March 15, 2026 that : 'I've heard that the remaining members of Epstein's network have devised a conspiracy to create an incident similar to 9/11 and blame Iran for it.' He added: 'Iran fundamentally opposes such terrorist schemes and has no war with the American people.' The post was made on Day 16 of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which had begun on February 28 with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The claim spread rapidly across social media and was reported by major international outlets including Iran International, Middle East Monitor, Al Jazeera, and dozens of regional and South Asian news organizations. No independent evidence confirmed the existence of any such plot. No intelligence agency, government authority, or international security organization issued any warning corroborating Larijani's allegation. The U.S. government did not comment directly on his specific claim.

To understand the weight Larijani's statement carried, his role inside the Iranian system needs context. He was not a peripheral figure or a propagandist — he was the most powerful surviving official of the Islamic Republic at the time he made the claim. Supreme Leader Khamenei had been killed on February 28, as had several other senior figures. Larijani — a former IRGC officer, ex-speaker of Iran's parliament (2008–2020), and former chief nuclear negotiator who had helped finalize the 2015 JCPOA — was widely considered Iran's from roughly December 2025 until his death.

He had been reappointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in 2025 after serving in the same post from 2005 to 2007. The SNSC is the body that coordinates Iran's national security policy — military strategy, intelligence, and diplomatic posture — and reports directly to the Supreme Leader. With Khamenei gone, Larijani's voice carried institutional authority over Iran's wartime decision-making.

The choice of 'the Epstein network' as the named perpetrator of the alleged false flag was analytically striking. In American domestic politics in March 2026, the Epstein files had been a running source of bipartisan controversy for months — involving contested document releases, congressional subpoenas, accusations of DOJ cover-ups, and allegations touching figures across the political spectrum. Iran's use of this framing appeared calibrated to tap into pre-existing American distrust rather than to present verifiable intelligence.

Analysts noted that framing the alleged threat as the work of a shadowy but culturally resonant network — one that large segments of both the American left and right viewed with suspicion — maximized the likelihood the claim would be amplified by U.S. domestic audiences who already distrusted official accounts of major events. had previously been documented using similar tactics: impersonating American activists, setting up fake news websites, and seeding claims designed to exploit existing political fractures.

Larijani's March 15 warning was the most prominent articulation of a false-flag narrative that Iranian officials had been building for weeks. had raised the theme earlier in March, following the public release of an FBI bulletin that contained 'unverified information' that Iran had 'aspired' to conduct a surprise drone attack on targets in 🌴California using UAVs launched from an unidentified offshore vessel. Baghaei posted on X in response to the report: 'Is this a prelude to another false flag incident?'

Baghaei also argued that Iranian drones could not physically reach 🌴California — the Gulf to the California coast is roughly 6,500 miles — and questioned why U.S. officials were publicly circulating what even the FBI described as unverified. The FBI bulletin itself stated agents had 'no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators' of the alleged aspiration. White House press secretary KLKaroline Leavitt called the ABC News report that first disclosed the bulletin 'false information' and said it should be 'immediately retracted.'

Iran's military command separately pushed a related false-flag accusation. The spokesperson for Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters accused the United States and Israel of conducting drone strikes on Gulf Cooperation Council countries using aircraft modeled on Iran's Shahed-136 — rebranded under a system the spokesperson called LUCAS — to simulate Iranian attacks and provide a pretext for drawing additional regional actors into the conflict. Iran's Foreign Minister AAAbbas Araghchi also publicly attributed strikes on Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan to Israeli false-flag operations.

Taken together, the Larijani post, the Baghaei 🌴California response, and the Khatam al-Anbiya accusations constituted a to frame any future attack attributed to Iran — including on American soil — as staged. The purpose was twofold: to preemptively deny responsibility for potential future incidents, and to sow doubt in American and international audiences about the credibility of U.S. government accounts of the war.

The disinformation environment surrounding the Iran war provided fertile conditions for Larijani's claim to spread. Within minutes of Trump's initial announcement that U.S. and Israeli forces had launched strikes on Iran, , including false footage, invented casualty figures, and manipulated imagery. Under Elon Musk's ownership, the platform had been repeatedly criticized for reducing content moderation during breaking international news events.

Larijani's post benefited from this environment. Because it came from an official Iranian government account — not an anonymous source — it appeared more credible than typical disinformation. The specific invocation of the Epstein network gave it a hook that resonated with audiences who viewed the Epstein affair as evidence of hidden elite networks operating outside public accountability. The claim was amplified by outlets across the ideological spectrum without independent verification, illustrating how official-seeming state messaging can spread alongside genuine news.

On March 17, 2026 — two days after his warning — ALAli Larijani was on Tehran, along with his son Morteza Larijani and his aide Reza Bayat. Iran's state media confirmed his death hours after Israel announced the strike. GSGholamreza Soleimani, commander of Iran's Basij militia, was killed in the same operation. Israel said the IDF had been authorized to strike senior Iranian and Hezbollah figures without the usual prior approval process that had governed earlier targeted killings.

Larijani was the highest-ranking Iranian official killed since Khamenei's death on February 28. His death was strategically significant for two reasons: it further degraded Iran's leadership capacity during an active war, and it removed what Bloomberg described as one of the 'few insiders who could help shape a political off-ramp.' Iran launched IRGC ballistic missile and drone strikes on more than 100 Israeli military and security targets in response, describing the operation as direct revenge for Larijani's killing.

Larijani's death gave his March 15 false-flag warning retrospective significance in the media cycle. His invocation of the Epstein network — described by one outlet as a 'cryptic final slap at Donald Trump' — became his last major public message to an American audience before his death. The juxtaposition of the unverified allegation and his killing two days later complicated how the claim could be assessed in public discourse: it could neither be investigated with his cooperation nor easily dismissed without appearing to benefit from his death.

The episode illustrated a recurring challenge in wartime information environments: when a senior official makes an unverified allegation and is then killed by an adversary days later, the claim gains emotional weight that is difficult to separate from its evidentiary basis. noted that the Iran war had produced exactly this kind of information environment — one in which the pace of events outstripped the capacity of any institution to maintain a reliable public record, and in which both states and individuals had strong incentives to control the narrative.

The U.S. government did not directly address Larijani's specific Epstein claim, but the broader pattern of Iranian false-flag accusations drew a response from American officials. National security spokesperson John Kirby and White House press secretary KLKaroline Leavitt both issued statements during the March 12–15 period pushing back against what they characterized as Iranian disinformation about U.S. military operations. The State Department noted that Iran had a documented history of conducting influence operations against American audiences, citing prior indictments of Iranian operatives for targeting U.S. election infrastructure.

Media literacy researchers pointed out that the Larijani claim illustrated the 'firehose of falsehood' technique associated with information warfare: flooding public discourse with multiple simultaneous claims — some true, some false, some unverifiable — so that audiences cannot distinguish reliable from unreliable information and may either disengage entirely or accept narratives aligned with their prior beliefs. Whether Larijani believed his own claim, was repeating intelligence he had received, or was deliberately constructing a counter-narrative remains unknown.