For years, Reza Pahlavi has presented contacts inside Iran’s military and security establishment as a central pillar of his strategy for political transition. Rather than describing these as occasional anonymous messages, he spoke at various times of daily contact with military “representatives,” telephone calls, faxes, a secure defection platform, “large sections” of the security forces signaling loyalty, and ultimately over 160,000 applicants.

Yet in a Reuters interview recorded on July 14, 2026, just one day after the British government announced that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would be outlawed under newly enacted state-threat legislation, Pahlavi offered a starkly different account. He denied ever communicating with the Guard’s senior command, claiming his earlier references merely concerned individual members who discreetly contacted him via social media direct messages.