Mike Baker

It's Tuesday, the 26th of May.

Look at that, we're almost to the end of the month.

Welcome to the President's Daily Brief.

I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage.

All right, let's get briefed.

First up, months into Operation Epic Fury, Iran's leadership is reportedly still operating from bunkers and secret hideouts, with regime paranoia and communication breakdowns now reportedly slowing negotiations with Washington.

Well, that and the fact that the Iranian regime is masterful at slow rolling any negotiations.

Later in the show, British forces are preparing for a possible mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, including the deployment of autonomous mine hunting systems if a deal with Iran does in fact move forward.

Plus, a devastating suicide bombing targets a train carrying Pakistani security personnel and their families, killing more than 30 people in the country's volatile Balochistan province.

And in today's Back of the Brief, another sign of warming relations between Washington and Caracas as the head of U.S.

Southern Command visits Venezuela while Marines conduct an embassy response drill in the capital.

But first, today's PDB Spotlight.

As the world waits to see whether the U.S.

and Iran can finally hammer out a deal to end the conflict, new reporting, at least according to U.S.

officials, suggests that one of the biggest obstacles may not be Washington's demands or even disagreements over sanctions or uranium enrichment, although let's be clear, those are big obstacles.

It may simply be also the fact that Iran's leadership can barely communicate with itself.

According to CBS News, U.S.

intelligence officials believe that Iran's supreme leader, Moshtaba Khamenei, is still hiding in an undisclosed location, cut off from direct contact with much of the outside world and relying instead

on a complicated network of couriers to relay messages between himself and senior officials.

And according to the report, the arrangement has become so cumbersome that it is supposedly slowing negotiations with the Trump administration.