Key officials in Iran have put forth two potential successors for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — but the names of the selected candidates remain top secret.

Former president and current chairman of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani announced that an Assembly of Experts secret committee had selected the two candidates on June 18. Because of the classified nature of the committee, their names will not be made public. Speaking to the newspaper Ghanoon, Rafsanjani said the decision had been reached after consultation with hundreds of people. He emphasized that the candidates had been selected as part of a contingency plan.

The work of the longstanding committee responsible for the plans is so secret that some of the Assembly’s most prominent figures do not know its inner workings. In summer 2015, Ali Shafiei, Khuzestan’s representative to the governing body, told Ghanoon that one of the Assembly’s key figures had said not even the chairman of the body was informed of its discussions. Citing Rafsanjani’s time as chairman of the Assembly, from July 2007 to March 2011, Shafiei said, “No matter how many times he insisted that he was the chairman of the Assembly of Experts and he must be told, they said that it was a secret, to be kept even from him.”

Rafsanjani, who currently sits on the Assembly as well as chairing the Expediency Council, emphasized that it was not his intention to create a leadership council to succeed the Supreme Leader — in contrast with previous statements he has made about the future of Iran’s governance. The recent comments were an attempt to defend himself against hardliners, who have attacked him for his ideas, and who have reiterated the importance of the Islamic Republic being led by a single supreme leader.

Given what Ali Shafiei said about Rafsanjani’s time as Assembly Leader, there is good reason to believe that Rafsanjani is not one of the two candidates to have been selected by the secret committee.

The Assembly of Experts’ key responsibility is the selection of the next leader. This body consists of six permanent committees. Each committee has 11 sitting members. The Assembly elects committee members to serve for two years. One of the six committees is called the 107-109 Committee, referring to articles 107 and 109 of the constitution of the Islamic Republic. The articles lay out the qualifications for the Supreme Leader.

The full Assembly of Experts meets rarely, so it has passed bylaws to create committees. These groups are tasked with carrying out the Assembly’s duties between meetings. In an interview given in summer 1998, Assembly member Ebrahim Amini said that the job of the 107-109 Committee was to keep the Assembly prepared for its key duties. “In the early years after the Assembly of Experts was formed, this committee met every fortnight,” he said. “Then things slowed down and it met only when there was a need, sometimes once a month, sometimes once every 15 days and perhaps once a week.”

Around the same time, Hasan Taheri Khoramabadi, another member of the Assembly, said that the committee was responsible for reviewing “the qualifications of all possible candidates for the leadership” and that it provided the secretariat with a “confidential report” on the matter. “If the secretariat finds it necessary it can give the report to the Assembly members,” he said.

But contrary to Khoramabadi’s statement and according to a clause in Article 50 of the Assembly’s bylaws, any report by the 107-109 Committee is top secret. The full Assembly must approve it before the report is made accessible to any individual or group. The only exception to this is the supreme leader.

A More Secret Subcommittee

Another clause in Article 50 provides for a three-member special subcommittee, which is selected by the full committee from among its members. This group evaluates the qualifications of possible candidates and submits its reports to the chairman of the committee, who can submit it to the Assembly “at the appropriate time.”

The fact that such a subcommittee even exists was once also top secret. But, in the summer of 2006, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and other Assembly members revealed its existence. “A special group has been formed and of course it is top secret,” Rafsanjani said in an interview. “They do not submit their reports to the Assembly…when necessary they submit their report to the committee’s governing board.”

But, according to Morteza Eghtedaei, a member of the Assembly, the report can only be submitted to the supreme leader. “The three members are elected by members of the 107-109 Committee in a secret ballot,” he said in an interview, also in summer 2006. “They are elected for two years but because their work is secret their term is usually renewed for another two years. They pledge not to talk to anybody, except among themselves and to God. Usually, the members do not change. They meet every week and often travel to various towns and districts, in an unofficial manner and quietly, to investigate and research. Their documents are classified and top secret. This three-member subcommittee does not submit its findings and reports even to other members of the committee. Their documents are kept at the secretariat of the Assembly of Experts as classified documents and even the governing board has no access to them. Only the supreme leader can see them if he wants to, although up to now he has not asked for them.”

Secret Evaluation of Candidates

According to Eghtedaei, the subcommittee has its own lengthy bylaws. They include procedures to gather information about the qualifications of possible candidates by consulting with members of the clergy, and by reviewing candidates' religious treatises and how they have interpreted sharia law. They also gather information about how these candidates argue on points of Islamic law, including by looking at their association with other key political and clerical figures, and at who they meet with privately in their own homes. They also take the lifestyles of the candidates into consideration, ensuring they live simply and appropriately. This and other information is gathered as a way of judging the potential candidate’s faith and piety — without the candidate being aware of such a process.

The subcommittee’s checklist includes: “knowledge, courage, quality of leadership, piety, political vision, positions taken in specific situations, and his stated views about the regime, as well as on domestic and foreign policies.”

Ahmad Jannati, the current chairman of the Assembly of Experts, confirmed the subcommittee existed. “Let’s say there are 10 individuals who are qualified,” he said. The committee ranks and classifies them. Of course their discussions remain secret and even the members of the Assembly of Experts know nothing about them.”

In 2014, Yousef Tabatabai, a member of the Assembly from Isfahan, provided more information about the process the committee follows. “Sometimes a couple of individuals are removed from the list of people under consideration,” he said. “For example, if they commit a political act deemed to be wrong, and it becomes clear that they are no good for the job.”

The members of the secret committee have never been named, and it unclear how often they meet. In late summer 2015, Ghorban Ali Dorri-Najafabadi, a member of the Assembly’s directorate, reported that the three-person 107-109 Committee had met nine times since 2006. In the newly formed Assembly of Experts, the committee members have recently been reinstated for another four years.

But whether or not the subcommittee’s meetings play an important role in choosing the next supreme leader remains unclear.

In his memoirs, influential cleric Mohammad Momen wrote that such a committee existed even before Ali Khamenei was chosen as the supreme leader. According to him, although the committee met in the afternoon of June 3, 1989, one day before the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, it did not choose the supreme leader’s successor on that day. This could be true for the current leader, but the fact remains that a secret committee does meet to discuss the matter — and very few figures at the very top of Iran’s political system know anything about the people involved, or the details of what they discuss and plan for the future of the country.