Senior Iranian military and security officials have been photographed wearing smartwatches, drawing fresh criticism of their basic security discipline after years in which Israel has tracked and killed Iranian commanders through the devices around them.
The images were posted on X on Friday by Ali Gholhaki, a conservative commentator with ties to Iran's security establishment. Some Iranian outlets describe him as close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.
They show smartwatches on the wrists of three men: Gholamreza Jalali, who heads the Passive Defense Organization, the body that protects Iran's critical infrastructure; Reza Farahi, a Defense Ministry official; and Ali Shamkhani, the former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
Shamkhani was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes on February 28, on the first day of the current war. He had survived an Israeli strike in June 2025.
Asked about his watch by a Fars News reporter, Jalali asked whether people had smart televisions at home and said his device was effectively the same thing.
Gholhaki rejected the comparison. The man in charge of protecting the country's critical infrastructure, he argued, faces a different order of risk from an ordinary citizen, and such devices are hard to justify for senior security officials when Israel has repeatedly exploited electronic lapses to track Iranian personnel.
استفاده مدیران ارشد امنیتی_نظامی کشور از ساعت‌های هوشمند عجیب است، از این باب که دشمن درجه اول‌مان اسرائیل است که از کوچکترین لغزش، بهترین استفاده را می‌کند؛ تصویر «مرحوم شمخانی» _دبیر شورای دفاع در ۹ اسفند ۱۴۰۴ و همچنین دبیر شعام بمدت ۱۰ سال_ که پس از جنگ ۱۲ روزه در مراسم ختمی… pic.twitter.com/T5XirJAXTe
— Ali Gholhaki (@aghplt) October 2, 2026
Smartwatches can transmit location and activity data through GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or a paired phone, and some carry microphones and other sensors.
The US military has long restricted location-tracking devices, smartwatches included, in operational areas because they can expose movements and routines; in 2018, a fitness app's public heat map revealed the outlines of American bases from soldiers' running routes.
'Careless use'
The row touches a much larger argument inside the Islamic Republic about repeated intelligence failures.
During the 12-day war in June 2025, Iran's Cyber Security Command banned officials and their security teams from using any device connected to public communication or telecommunications networks, Fars reported, as concern grew that mobile tracking was being used for targeted assassinations.
The directive named smartphones, laptops and smartwatches, and warned that switching a device off might not prevent it from being located.
It came too late. The New York Times later reported, citing Iranian and Israeli officials, that Israel tracked and targeted senior Iranian leaders and nuclear scientists in that war by hacking the phones of their bodyguards and drivers.
On June 16, 2025, the Supreme National Security Council met in a bunker deep beneath a mountain in western Tehran; none of the officials carried phones, but the Israelis found the meeting through the phones of the bodyguards who had driven them there. The bodyguards had long been exempt from the strict phone bans imposed on the commanders themselves, even after earlier assassinations.
Gholhaki tied the smartwatches directly to those failures, arguing that complacency had helped Israel and the United States kill senior military, security and political figures in successive wars. He called for fundamental changes in security practice and renewed his demand for a broad postwar inquiry into how the failures happened.
Gholhaki himself was among a group of Telegram channel operators arrested by the Revolutionary Guards' counterintelligence arm in 2022, accused of disturbing public opinion and publishing classified documents.
A blogger on death row
The judiciary has shown no such tolerance for ordinary Iranians accused of far smaller breaches.
Marziyeh "Sevda" Ebrahimi Shamsabadi, a 33-year-old blogger from Bandar Abbas who has been held since March, was sentenced to death in August by a Revolutionary Court on charges including insulting the supreme leader, intelligence activity on behalf of hostile governments, and taking and sending photographs to Persian-language media abroad.
One allegation concerned a photograph she was said to have taken, from a distance, of a site hit by a missile. She was held in solitary confinement for 20 days and faced severe pressure during interrogation.
