The Iranian Exile Who Would Be King

In early February, while much of the world was focused on a looming war in the Persian Gulf, an outspoken Iranian exile named Masood Masjoody disappeared in Canada. Days later, 10 other well-known diaspora figures were tagged in a menacing anonymous message on X: “Soon you’ll have to find the corpses of many.” But when Masjoody’s body was found in March, the investigation did not point toward the Islamic Republic. Instead, the Canadian police brought murder charges against two followers of Reza Pahlavi, the 65-year-old son of Iran’s last shah and the most prominent leader in the Iranian opposition. Masjoody, a fierce critic of Pahlavi’s, had been denouncing the prince’s movement for months and had singled out the two suspects by name, saying that they were plotting to silence him. The murder, in other words, appears to have been part of a war within the Iranian opposition—one that pits Pahlavi against a growing host of critics who see him and his movement as dangerously autocratic. This rift has revolved in part around Pahlavi’s decision to hitch his movement to Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In late February, well before the American and Israeli military campaign against Iran began, Pahlavi and his supporters telegraphed their eagerness for war, claiming that more than 100,000 defectors were waiting to help the former crown prince usher in a new era. Pahlavi seemed almost to expect the kind of welcome granted to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who flew back from exile to Tehran in 1979 and was greeted by millions of adoring people and the banner headline, “He Has Returned.” Pahlavi has not returned. More than two months into the war, the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked, and the Iranian regime is still firmly in place. Pahlavi and many of his supporters have made clear that they feel betrayed by the peace talks now under way and are hungry for more air strikes. “The war didn’t go according to my liking,” one prominent Pahlavi supporter who is on the board of the prince’s nonprofit posted on X, adding that the regime’s people were “animals” and that Tehran “should have been bombed with 5,000 targets daily.” The prince’s critics, meanwhile, have lashed out more angrily than ever, calling him an Israeli stooge, a fascist, a dullard presiding over a noxious, warlike cult. “A man with inherited privilege, no serious achievement, a talent for drifting with the wind, and a remarkable ability to keep millions emotionally invested while delivering little beyond contradiction, illusion, and disappointment,” Nik Kowsar, a well-known journalist and cartoonist who was once close to Pahlavi, wrote in April. These bitter judgments are the expression of a split that has been widening for years. Some say that Pahlavi stands out from a feckless opposition movement as the only viable alternative to the Islamic Republic. In the past decade, Pahlavi has employed young advisers who have adopted MAGA-style tactics and openly embraced Israel. The prince’s acolytes credit this approach with elevating him from a quixotic royal aspirant to a real contender for leadership in a future Iran. And it does seem to have made a difference: Thousands of protesters inside Iran chanted Pahlavi’s name during the enormous protests that began in late December. [Arash Azizi: The Iranian opposition’s urgent task] But Pahlavi’s campaign, like the populist movements it emulates, has a thuggish edge that is alienating many potential supporters even as it energizes his base. Although Pahlavi continues to say that he favors a diverse and democratic opposition, his advisers and followers, many of them committed monarchists, routinely threaten and insult anyone who is not entirely loyal to the man they see as a future king. “You are either with Prince Reza Pahlavi or with the Islamic Republic,” Saeed Ghasseminejad, the prince’s economic adviser, posted on X earlier this year. “They’ve been inciting hatred against Pahlavi’s critics for years now, and they’ve been warned this would result in something bad,” Alireza Nader, a policy analyst who was once close to the prince, told me. Masjoody’s killing appears to have vindicated those warnings. It has also sharpened the contradiction at the heart of Pahlavi’s movement: The former crown prince says that he wants a democratic future for Iran, but his aides and supporters treat him like a monarch whose word cannot be questioned. One prominent Iranian American in the tech industry who, like several others, asked not to be named because of the climate of online harassment, told me of a stark division in the wealthy networks in which Pahlavi has tried to raise money: “Some say Pahlavi’s the only one. Others say, ‘Why replace one dictator with another?’” Some of Pahlavi’s older associates told me that they are baffled by the belligerent rhetoric of his aides and supporters. They speak of Pahlavi as a kind and decent man whose political brand was always rooted in nonviolent resistance. He was a devotee of Gene Sharp, an American theorist of nonviolence whose work helped guide democracy movements around the world. Pahlavi’s motto for decades was “Today, only unity,” signaling his belief in a cohesive opposition front against the regime. The makeover appears to have begun about 10 years ago, when Pahlavi brought on two new deputies—Ghasseminejad and another young adviser named Amir Etemadi—who were openly aligned with autocratic movements in the United States and abroad. Ghasseminejad spent eight years as an economic analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a right-wing think bank based in Washington, D.C., that has for years been closely allied with Netanyahu and his government. The younger men had a flattering message for their new boss. They grew up in Iran under the Islamic Republic; Pahlavi, by contrast, has not set foot in his native country since 1978, before the revolution that overthrew his father. They knew firsthand that Pahlavi’s brand was changing inside Iran. The hatred of the Pahlavi dynasty that fueled the 1979 revolution had faded, and a nostalgia for prerevolutionary Iran began to spread. The London-based satellite-television channel Manoto, founded in 2010, broadcast gauzy images and documentaries about the zaman-e shah—“the era of the shah”—featuring carefree Iranians at parties and on beaches, with rarely any mention of SAVAK, the shah’s brutal secret-police agency. Pahlavi’s new advisers believed that the prince was poised to capitalize on this nostalgia, and on a newly revolutionary mood that came alongside it. Ghasseminejad declined to meet with me, but in emailed responses to my questions he told me that Iran has gone through a “fundamental political transformation” over the past decade because Iranians have lost faith in the idea that the regime could be reformed. A movement to overthrow the ruling clerics has spread, he wrote, and Pahlavi has “actively represented and cultivated” those insurgent forces, using a patriotic language rooted in “Iran’s glorious heritage.” Some former members of Pahlavi’s circle seemed to endorse Ghasseminejad’s comments. “Saeed is a smart guy, and he understood the dynamic of what motivates Iranians, at least the Persian majority,” one person who knows Pahlavi and the advisers well told me. He asked not to be named, saying that he did not want to become a target of the prince’s supporters. But Pahlavi’s advisers also appeared to be anointing him as a king—the heir to Iran’s “glorious heritage” of a 2,500-year-old monarchy. And that seems to have entailed going to war against anyone who did not acknowledge his primacy. One person who has worked with Ghasseminejad and Etemadi told me that these advisers to Pahlavi believe that “crushing the opposition is as important as fighting the regime. They really believe Pahlavi can’t be effective unless he’s the only voice.” Ghasseminejad and Etemadi did not take long to start making enemies. In 2018, Kowsar, who was close t…