Farnaz Fassihi

We were sort of milling about.

Looking for seats, trying to connect to the Wi-Fi, I asked a young Secret Service agent to take me to the bathroom.

A moment later, we were both in there washing our hands, making chitchat, and suddenly we heard all this yelling, all this commotion, and he looked at me, his eyes grew wide, and we both darted out of the bathroom, turned the corner, and there were probably five or six agents with guns drawn pointed right at our chest like this, and in about

Two seconds, they sort of assessed that we weren't a threat and then began yelling at us to get down and to cross the hall.

And we had no idea what we were walking into.

One of the things that made it such a crazy scene was that the people who were running around the hallways with basically machine guns were also wearing tuxedos and suits because

so many of the agents were dressed up like party guests.

And so you really had no idea what was going on because every which way you looked, you didn't know, you know, who had a gun, what was going on.

Cabinet members were running across the hall.

It just felt like total chaos.

Thank you for having me, Michael.

It's one of those historic days that I think if for every Iranian, whether you're a supporter of the government or you're an opponent, whether you live inside or you live outside, this is a new day.

This is a new Iran.

From the moment we started hearing about Mr. Khamenei being potentially killed, my phone started buzzing.

I was getting text messages and phone calls from my friends and family members.

And I was also getting text messages and calls from some of my sources in Iran who were asking me, do you know anything?

Is the news true?

Is he gone?

What have you heard?

No matter what side of the divide you were on, this was a monumental moment.