President Donald Trump must soon decide whether to launch a major war against Iran. Buffeted by large-scale protests that have claimed thousands of lives, the Islamic Republic may be vulnerable to regime change if confronted with military strikes from the United States and Israel.
Whether regime change is a realistic goal for any strategic bombing campaign is another question. There’s reason for doubt. Still, it’s also clear that the mullahs in Tehran are rattled. For the first time in many years, the regime appears insecure. Its collapse, long hoped for by many Iranians, now seems possible if not yet probable.
But what happens the day after?
Even in the best-case scenario, wherein the Islamic Republic quickly implodes, what follows is anybody’s guess.
Prince Reza Pahlavi matters here. The 65-year-old eldest son of the last Shah of Iran has spent most of his life in exile, largely in the United States, thanks to the Islamic Revolution, which deposed his father in 1979. Pahlavi has sharply criticized the Tehran regime for its crimes against protesters and much else. The prince in exile has positioned himself as an alternative to the mullah dictatorship, which ended his family’s control of Iran.
But it’s difficult to gauge his popularity inside Iran. Pahlavi certainly has some support in Iran. Protesters recently have been seen brandishing the pre-1979 Lion and Sun national flag, a symbol of the Shah. But whether that’s sincere support for Pahlavi or merely an effort to get under the regime’s skin is impossible to say.
Most Iranians in the West I’ve spoken with believe that, while Pahlavi has support inside the country, most Iranians want neither the blood-soaked Islamic dictatorship nor the return of the Pahlavis. This hasn’t stopped the prince from energetically campaigning for a major role in Tehran when the Islamic Republic falls. The Trump administration’s position on the pretender prince is ambiguous. On Sunday, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s friend and his special envoy to the Middle East, admitted that he had met with Reza Pahlavi at the president’s direction. Witkoff described the prince as “strong for his country, cares about his country,” adding, “But this is going to be about President Trump’s policies, not Mr. Pahlavi’s policies. I think the president is interested in hearing everyone’s views.”
That’s well short of a White House endorsement.
Moreover, there’s a contingent within the Iranian diaspora that has serious doubts about the Pahlavis. Some view him as a dilettante rather than a serious political figure. One prominent Iranian diaspora activist, a staunch opponent of the Islamic Republic, nevertheless described the prince to me as “vain and naive,” suggesting he was swayed by courtiers. The issue of provocation cannot be avoided. We know that Iranian intelligence aggressively monitors Iranians in exile, seeking to spy on and intimidate regime opponents living abroad. Tehran’s spies have harassed, attacked, and even murdered numerous “enemies abroad” since the 1979 revolution, including in the United States. Given his prestige, Pahlavi is a major target for spying and manipulation by Iranian intelligence.
Some have noticed that Pahlavi’s personality-driven politics frequently divide the Iranian diaspora more than they unite it. And that’s what the IRGC wants. Iranian-American commentator Alireza Nader, an expert on Iranian exile politics, explained this week that Pahlavi’s inner circle includes people with uncomfortable connections to the mullah regime. Some of these numbers seem to want more, not less, division among Iranians in exile. The notion that Pahlavi’s retinue is penetrated and manipulated by Iranian intelligence is taken seriously by the few experts on this subject in the U.S. intelligence community.
It’s hardly far-fetched to suggest that the prince may be the unwitting plaything of Tehran’s spies. Dividing the opposition abroad is one of the top tasks for Iranian intelligence. Repressive regimes commonly employ far-reaching deception to protect themselves, and that’s nothing new.
After Russia’s 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks faced serious opposition abroad, mainly from exiled monarchists living in Europe who plotted a counter-revolution to overthrow Russia’s Red regime. To defeat them, the cunning Soviet secret police penetrated and manipulated the anti-Communist diaspora, dividing it with aggressive provocations. During the infamous Operation Trust in the 1920s, Bolshevik spies conjured up the Monarchist Union of Central Russia, which purported to be an anti-regime group operating underground in Russia. Over several years, anti-Bolshevik emigres across Europe grew convinced that the group was real, indeed a serious threat to the Communist regime. This bitterly divided the exiles and even convinced some of their leaders to infiltrate Russia, where they were quickly arrested and executed.
Iranian spies are often accomplished and cunning — I know so as someone who went up against them in several countries during my time with U.S. intelligence. Their acumen should not be underestimated. The possibility that Tehran is running some version of Operation Trust against exiles in the West must be taken seriously.
Indeed, 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.
WHY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS FOCUSED ON THE DEFENSE INDUSTRIAL BASE
Like the Soviet secret police, the IRGC is perfectly content to kill its enemies in large numbers at home and abroad in order to stay in power. We know that the regime has killed thousands of protesters in Iran in recent weeks, some claim more than 30,000 dead. Regime opponents abroad aren’t necessarily safe either.
At the beginning of this month, Masood Masjoody, a Canadian-Iranian mathematician, disappeared in British Columbia. The 45-year-old Masjoody was a bitter opponent of the mullah regime, and for years, he warned that Iranian emigre groups in Canada were being manipulated by Tehran’s spies. However, Masjoody, a pro-democracy activist, was also a sharp public critic of Reza Pahlavi.
Nobody has seen or heard from Masjoody since Feb. 2, while the prince’s hardcore fans have shed no tears over the missing man. Canadian police are treating Masjoody’s disappearance as a suspected homicide.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
