When Major General Mohsen Rezaei was summoned to an undisclosed location outside Tehran this week, he had no idea who he was going to meet until he arrived.
The secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council was about to see a man many had come to believe was dead – Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since he took the most powerful office in the Islamic Republic.
Three days earlier, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker, made the same secret journey.
Before him came Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the judiciary chief and Masoud Pezeshkian, the president.
The meetings are growing more frequent, and that, Iranian officials and analysts told The Telegraph, is the point.
Four senior figures have now been received by the leader, each emerging to describe, in near-identical terms, an encounter with a man in full command.
After months largely out of public view, Iran is staging a carefully choreographed show of its supreme leader, signalling that he is alive, well and in the driving seat.
“His health is improving, and he wants to tell the clerics who say we cannot run a system with an invisible supreme leader that he is in charge of everything,” one Iranian official said.
A second official said the meetings were calculated.
“He intentionally met the heads of all three branches of power and the top security official to make sure the country is run the way he wants, because there has been confusion and there has not been a single voice speaking for Iran recently,” he said.
“It is his attempt to unite the country and the power centres and bring in his authority. We should not forget that he is very new, and even some in the clergy, until recently, did not like the idea of him as leader.”
Those who have met him have been rolled out to attest to his good health.
Mr Ghalibaf, who is also the country’s chief peace negotiator, told parliament that he “is in full health”, describing a leader “strong, energetic, hopeful, with solidity and inner calm”.
Mr Mohseni-Ejei said he had found him “in the utmost solidity and health”, insisting that “the same courage and unshakeable steadfastness that were manifest in the martyred leader are evident in him”.
Pressed by US journalists at the United Nations in September on whether the supreme leader was still functioning, Mr Pezeshkian cited a seven-hour meeting between the two and declared him to be “in perfect health”.
At a cabinet meeting this week, Mr Pezeshkian pointed to a recent directive from the Ayatollah setting out Iran’s conditions for ending the “no war, no peace” stalemate. He called it “a major and important message” that mapped out “the horizon ahead for the country”.
He told ministers and government agencies to cut costs and boost productivity to ensure the country remained prepared for changing circumstances. Mr Pezeshkian said Iran had to prove it possessed “a high capacity for resilience” and would “stand with strength and cohesion against any threat, sanction or foreign pressure”.
The enemy, he added, “should not imagine that by piling on pressure and threats they can weaken the will of the Iranian nation or force the country into surrender”.
A supreme leader and several commanders have been killed in conflicts with the US and Israel, forcing his successor to govern through intermediaries and written directives for his own protection.
According to official readouts from each meeting with top officials, the supreme leader was said to be focused on relieving the hardship of ordinary Iranians, forging unity among a fractious political class, and ending the debilitating stand-off with the US and Israel.
Iran’s annual inflation rate hit 76.8 per cent in October, with prices in the southern province of Hormozgan, on the front line of the embattled strait, rising even faster.
Mr Ghalibaf said the supreme leader wanted Iranians to be able to afford basic goods and singled out the welfare of “the armed forces and the fighters at the front” as a priority.
Mr Mohseni-Ejei was directed towards a “decisive, swift and non-discriminatory” campaign against corruption.
Underlying it all is the question of if or when Mr Khamenei will appear in public.
In the summer, a deputy head of Iran’s Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), promised the imminent release of images and proof of life as pressure for a public appearance mounted.
Esmail Kowsari, a hardline MP, has gone so far as to claim the leader slips anonymously into public gatherings to see the mood of the nation for himself.
He explained that “in the current wartime conditions and the terrorist threats of America and the Zionist regime, a direct appearance is not advisable for now”.
Others see potential pitfalls attached to his public invisibility.
“He has to meet more people because he does not have his father’s charisma,” said a political science professor at a university near Tehran, who offered several reasons for the leader’s continued absence.
Separately, the longer he stays away the more emboldened the IRGC could become.
“He may be worried that the IRGC has sidelined him and is using his name to do whatever they want.”
But governing a country from the shadows has never been straightforward.
“An Islamic state, from the age of the Prophet until now, has always been hard to run in secret, and we do not have many such cases in history,” the Iranian professor added.
But he acknowledged that the leader may be too unwell to appear in public or still bear lasting injuries from the strikes that killed his father and much of his immediate family, including his wife.
“Some Islamic jurisprudence says the leader should be sound in body, even good-looking, and brave,” he said. “So he would have reason to worry about how he is seen.”
Not everyone in the country reads the ramping up of the leader’s reported activity the same way..
One Iranian analyst said it should be understood “within the framework of new methods of safe governance and the rebuilding of direct communication”, rather than as a prelude to conflict.
Many fear the “secret visits” could give away the supreme leader’s hideout, leading to an assassination attempt by the US which could spell the end of the regime.
That is the paradox now at the centre of Iranian politics.
The claim that the Ayatollah remains at the helm depends on two things Tehran cannot fully control: the leader’s recovery and the patience of a population being asked to accept assurances from a handful of men that he is in charge.
For the moment, the message from those rooms is singular and insistent.
As one official told The Telegraph, the purpose of each clandestine meeting with ministers is the same – to demonstrate, to anyone who still doubts it, ‘that [Mr Khamenei] is running the country and is in full charge”.
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