Over the weekend, joint U.S.-Israeli air and missile strikes began against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
These strikes have, thus far, inflicted grave damage, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and many other senior officials. Iran’s fourth-rate navy has been mostly sunk, too. Tehran’s already limited conventional military capacity has also been significantly eroded.
However, the precise aim of this war remains nebulous. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially asserted that their objective was regime change. Yet, Trump administration officials have subsequently offered a range of outcomes, not necessarily involving the total fall of the regime. Amid such uncertainty, there’s one player in this drama who seems to know exactly what he wants. That’s Reza Pahlavi, the 65-year-old Iranian crown prince, who’s spent most of his life in exile in the United States since the 1979 revolution, which deposed his father, the last Shah of Iran.
This column last week profiled the crown prince, recommending caution regarding his obvious political ambitions. No doubt Pahlavi has a following inside Iran, but how popular he is there remains difficult to assess. Given the choice, according to savvy Iran-watchers, most Iranians prefer neither the Islamic Republic nor a return to the failed monarchy. Rather, they seek democracy.
Moreover, there’s good evidence that Iranian intelligence has exploited the crown prince, a political neophyte, by surrounding him with people under Tehran’s influence. Dividing the opposition abroad is a standard tactic of repressive regimes. Specifically, I cautioned:
“One of the unpleasant scenarios that must be considered is that, if the mullahs feel their regime is in peril, particularly if Trump unleashes a major war against Tehran and protests continue, they may offer Pahlavi an olive branch to birth some version of a “national unity government.” That would be another IRGC deception scheme to play upon the prince’s vanity, creating the fiction of some sort of power-sharing while the thuggish IRGC keeps its hands on the real reins of power in Iran. This possibility is taken seriously by Iran-watchers in Western intelligence agencies.”
As if on script, this week the crown prince has moved toward exactly that scenario. Just hours after U.S. and Israeli bombs started to fall on Iran, Pahlavi gave an interview to Fox News in which he asserted that “now we have the beginning of the very end of the regime,” adding: “This is like full decapitation of the regime, and ultimately what will expedite its total collapse. The Iranian people have suffered too much to settle for anything less than that.” Pahlavi explained that he has been working with anti-regime elements inside Iran to facilitate the transition to something new. Pahlavi echoed that sentiment in a subsequent interview with CBS News. He is clearly positioning himself as the necessary transitional figure who’s popular inside the country, even with the country’s ethnic minorities.
But is any of that true?
The White House has doubts, despite the crown prince’s effort to flatter Trump. On Tuesday, the president said the prince “looks like a very nice person,” yet added, “Some people like him, and we haven’t been thinking too much about that. It would seem to me that somebody from within, maybe, would be more appropriate.”
Israel seems far more comfortable with Pahlavi. For months, pro-Israel media voices have touted Pahlavi as a viable alternative to the doomed Islamic Republic. Israeli media outlets are now depicting the prince as the wise helmsman of Iran’s transition to freedom, even that country’s own Nelson Mandela, who led South Africa out of apartheid. Others highlight Pahlavi’s alleged appeal to Iran’s plentiful minorities (few realize that the country of over 90 million is only slightly more than half Persian by ethnicity).
Pahlavi’s official visit to Israel in April 2023, where he met with Netanyahu and other top politicians, certainly raised Tehran’s ire. That the crown prince was accompanied during his visit by Gila Gamliel, Israel’s then-minister of intelligence, revealed official imprimatur while demonstrating the pretender prince’s relationship with Mossad, which views Pahlavi as its vehicle to facilitate regime change.
It bears noting that Trump’s resistance to Pahlavi’s charms may prove fleeting. After all, Netanyahu was able to pressure the White House into joining Israel’s war of choice against Iran. Perhaps, then, he can persuade Trump that the crown prince offers an easy way out of their Iran war. Since the Pentagon is running out of precision munitions at a troubling rate, raising global readiness concerns for the U.S. military, the Trump administration may be seeking off-ramps before the end of this month.
Ironically, the IRGC may be thinking along similar lines. The mullahs, too, may be seeking off-ramps from a painful war that they have no ability to win in conventional terms. However, the IRGC is showing no signs of capitulation yet. Their boss, Mohammad Pakpour, was killed over the weekend by U.S.-Israeli bombs, yet his newly named successor at the head of the IRGC, Ahmad Vahidi, formerly headed the Quds Force, which is the IRGC’s foreign terrorism arm. Vahidi is suspected of involvement in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, as well as the bombing of the AIMA Jewish center there two years later. Together, these attacks killed 114 people.
THREAT FROM IRANIAN RETALIATION STRIKES SPREADS ACROSS MIDDLE EAST, TARGETING EMBASSIES AND AIRPORTS
As bombs keep falling, the IRGC will be tempted to parley with the eager crown prince, who desperately wants to come home to lead the regime transition. If that happens, Pahlavi will likely be no match for the cunning IRGC and its spies, particularly as he already appears to be surrounded by pro-regime operatives.
Yesterday, a statement appeared, allegedly from hundreds of university professors in Iran, denouncing the Islamic Republic as illegitimate while endorsing Reza Pahlavi’s democratic transition plan. Who exactly is behind this letter? The Trump administration’s skepticism regarding the pretender prince appears wise and justified.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
