TEHRAN, July 13 -- For weeks before US forces struck Iran on July 8, Donald Trump had offered a specific and personal explanation for his military posture: Iran had made him its number one assassination target, and he had ordered that if anything happened to him, Iran would be bombed unlike anything it had seen before.

That rationale, according to Tehran, never entered the room where US and Iranian intermediaries were actually talking.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said Monday that Washington had never raised the alleged assassination threat through any channel of communication. "This issue has never been the subject of our negotiations," Baghaei told reporters at a briefing in Tehran, responding directly to a questi...