The New Republic

Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Iranian shah, closes his speeches
about Iranian democracy with a signature flourish: "This is a cause
I believe in and am committed to see to fruition, even if it were
at the expense of my own life." At public appearances, his
plainclothes security force searches bags for bombs and stands over
the crowd like guards watching the prison mess.This isn't paranoia, which famously afflicted his father. Since
Ruhollah Khomeini ascended to power in 1979, Iran's ayatollahs have
methodically whacked their opponents. In 1991 goons slashed the
throat and wrists of the 76-year-old former Prime Minister Shahpour
Bakhtiar, using knives filched from his own kitchen. One year later
a hit squad entered a Greek restaurant in Berlin filled with
Kurdish activists, screamed, "You sons of whores," then sprayed the
room with Uzi fire. In both cases, European investigators fingered
the Islamic Republic of Iran. At least 80 exiled dissident leaders
have been assassinated since 1979.

During the mullah's first two decades in power, this disappearance
of opposition leaders coincided with the disappearance of
opposition. Though Iranian exiles in Paris and Los Angeles kept
predicting the regime's imminent demise, inside the country there
was not a single significant public demonstration until 1998, when
protests broke out after an Iranian World Cup victory over the
United States. They were followed in 1999 by student riots over the
shutdown of a reformist newspaper. And this year the
anti-government protests have grown more frequent and more
militant--instead of championing Iran's reformist president,
Mohammed Khatami, in his battles against hard-line clerics, the
activists now frequently denounce him as part of the system.
Throughout the fall of 2001 student protests flared up in Tehran.
After Iranian victories in this year's World Cup qualifying
matches, women tossed off their chadors, and men unveiled the
prerevolutionary flag and chanted, "We love America!" To make sure
no one missed the point, demonstrators dialed contacts at the CIA
and held their cell phones in their air so U.S. intelligence
officials could hear the chants. Among them: "Reza Pahlavi is our
spiritual leader!"

For years Iran-watchers have dismissed Pahlavi's pretensions to
leadership. "I don't take him very seriously," says Bar-Ilan
University's Barry Rubin. You can understand the skepticism:
Although his father's regime still has die-hard supporters, they
don't represent a growing fraction of the Iranian polity; many
Iranians remember the shah as repressive and corrupt. But to see
Reza Pahlavi as simply a restorationist underestimates his appeal.
His is a story of reinvention, the tale of a prince who lost his
title, fortune, and the love of his people, and in the process came
to appreciate the virtues of democracy. He has bucked the crude
monarchism of many of his supporters and serves up frank criticism
of his father's regime. In fact, with Khatami's support eroding,
Pahlavi's moment may soon arrive. He's rallying the fractious
diaspora opposition and supersaturating Iran with posters and video
messages calling for insurgency. Once exiled as the successor to a
discredited throne, he has become Iran's most unlikely, and most
important, spokesman for democracy.

In 1974, when Reza Pahlavi was 14 years old, his father, the shah,
was diagnosed with lymphoma. As a result, the teenager's
monarchical apprenticeship went into overdrive. The shah sent Reza
on state missions to Egypt and England. He even designed his son
his own school. But all the while, the shah's rapid modernization
efforts, fueled by profits from rising oil prices, were mingling
with blatant corruption to produce a massive cultural backlash. As
Fouad Ajami has written, "Overnight, it seemed, villagers were
hurled into cities and the balance of the country--moral,
physical-- ruptured.... The newly urbanized, the half-educated, the
bewildered came together to topple the old order in a season of
wrath and chaos."

In 1979 Reza Pahlavi joined his father in exile, beginning five
years of nomadism--Morocco, Mexico, Panama, Bahama Islands, Egypt,
and back to Morocco. In 1980, three months after his father's death
and on his twentieth birthday, the prince claimed the title of
shah. Seated at a marble table in a 400-room palace in suburban
Cairo, he declared his "readiness to accept full responsibility as
the lawful king of Iran." But it was a fantasy. The shah's old
henchmen lived off Pahlavi's allowances and hatched quixotic
restoration schemes--for instance, invading the Iranian island of
Kish. According to Bob Woodward's biography of CIA chief William
Casey, the spymaster went so far as to propose that the Agency
undertake a covert campaign to install Pahlavi. The young Reza was
a vehicle for other people's ambitions. Says Bill Royce, the former
head of Voice of America's Farsi Division, Pahlavi "wasn't yet his
own man."

But Pahlavi earnestly worked to improve himself. While in Morocco he
took correspondence courses in politics from the University of
Southern California. He sought out supporters of the
revolution--his father's political adversaries-- from the left and
the right. One of his closest advisers, a former anti-shah activist
named Hormoz Hekmat, told me, "He used to talk and say to me,
'Invite your leftist friends and have some vodka and talk and eat.'
... Where his father liked to have sycophants, he likes to be with
intellectuals. He likes confrontation."

But conversing with critics wasn't the only thing that weaned
Pahlavi from his father's autocratic legacy. He also lost his
money. In 1980 Pahlavi recruited Ahmad Ali Massoud Ansari, his
distant cousin and former high school teacher, to tend his $25
million inheritance. It wasn't a wise move. Millions were shuffled
into the accounts of Ansari's friends and family. When other
advisers questioned Ansari, Pahlavi would reply, "No, I trust him."
One day, in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, however,
Pahlavi decided to answer the charges once and for all. He went to
the vaults of a Geneva bank to look over his papers. He searched
the safety deposit box for his financial documents but found none.
Then the bank's director asked him to leave, informing the young
monarch that Ansari had issued an order forbidding Reza from viewing
his own documents. After some investigation, Reza found that his
$25 million had been reduced to $27,000. "All the rest was gone,"
an adviser, Colonel Ahmad Oveyssi, later told the London Observer.
Ansari detailed his exploits in a 1992 kiss-and- tell memoir called
Me and the Pahlavis--a book that the Islamic Republic happily
permitted to circulate widely.

Pahlavi responded to the humiliation of bankruptcy not with
bitterness, but with modesty. Along with his grand estate and
motorcades, he abandoned royal titles. His supporters and aides
began to refer to him not as "his majesty," but as "R.P.," and he
discouraged them from bowing in his presence. In fact, he became a
full-fledged suburban American man, married with children, an NFL
fan. His friend Mahnaz Afkhami told me, "He's a regular guy. I was
in a movie house in Bethesda and ran into him with his wife and a
friend. He was wearing a T- shirt. I see him shopping in the
Safeway."

Pahlavi's politics followed his lifestyle. "He began stressing the
message and critique of totalitarianism and the alternative style
of a new democratic regime rather than stressing himself as the
alternative," another of his advisers says. He now speaks merely of
constitutional monarchy. "Something like Sweden, Norway, the
Netherlands," he says. (Spain's Juan Carlos II, who guided his
country from fascism, is an old family friend and political mentor.)
Even then Pahlavi promises that he wouldn't serve unless the
electorate voted for a constitutional monarchy in a national
referendum. Says Azar Nafisi, an Iran scholar at Johns Hopkins's
School of Advanced International Studies who is not affiliated with
Pahlavi, "If he has a fault, it's that he's not always forceful
enough."

Indeed, over the years, Pahlavi has faded in and out of the public
eye. During the Iran-Iraq War he muted his antigovernment
activities in the name of patriotism. When Khatami took office in
1997, he laid low while the reformists challenged the conservative
establishment. "There was not enough room or space for aggressive
public activism," says Afkhami. But as Khatami's challenge from
within the system has stalled in the face of intransigence of
conservative mullahs, Pahlavi has grown more vociferous. To counter
fears about his family's authoritarian legacy, he has become
aggressively candid, the John McCain of Middle Eastern monarchs.
After his speeches to exile groups and college students, he opens
up the floor for questions, and remains after the questioning ends
to debate all comers one-on-one. He readily acknowledges his
father's flaws. "[E]xcesses have been committed before the
revolution.... There was ... a lack of political liberty," he says.
And he is trying hard to win over public opinion back home. He
spends hours each week on the phone to Iran, sometimes cold-calling
potential allies in the clergy and military. He regularly appears
on NITV and PARS TV, popular Farsi satellite stations run out of
Los Angeles and beamed into Iran, urging Iranians to nonviolently
take to the streets against the regime. His office in suburban
Washington supplies a clandestine network of activists in Iran with
posters of his visage and video messages on CD-ROM. "Unlike his
father," says Nafisi, "he's had to prove himself."

Ideologically, Pahlavi has made his message as broad as possible,
focusing on the major point on which most exile opposition groups
agree: a new secular constitution. "I don't care if the referendum
on Iran's future results in a republic or constitutional monarchy,"
he says. "It is simply important that believers in secular
democracy come together to achieve that goal." And one reason
Pahlavi's star is on the rise is that secular democracy is
increasingly the rallying cry inside Iran as well. In 1997, when
the voters elected philosopher Mohammed Khatami, the most liberal
candidate the ayatollahs could stomach, the idea of an Islamic
democracy--a political system that allowed greater freedom but kept
Islam at its core--held great promise. With his talk of "dialogue
of civilizations"--a repudiation of Khomeini's Great-Satan attitude
toward the United States--Khatami caught the imagination of the
Iranian public and Western journalists. The Washington Post's John
Lancaster called him "Ayatollah Gorbachev," predicting he would
usher in Iranian perestroika.

But now Khatami really is looking like Gorbachev--a reformer, not a
revolutionary. Khatami was, after all, trained in the conservative
seminaries of Qum. As Fred Halliday noted in these pages ("Mohammed
and Mill," October 5, 1998), his writings on Western philosophy
followed praise of John Locke with passages about the hollowness of
secularism. Then there's the fact that he has close allies with
long histories of abetting Lebanese Hezbollah, and he has made no
bones about "defend[ing] the values of the revolution"--a
revolution that many Iranians now view the way Russians viewed the
Bolshevik revolution in 1991. And even if Khatami sincerely wanted
to overhaul Iran's strange theocratic-democratic political system,
the limits of his power have been made abundantly clear. The
ayatollahs have aborted every one of his tentative steps toward
perestroika. While Khatami promised to lift the ban on satellite
television, the regime has gone door-to-door ripping dishes from
roofs and balconies. Despite his pleas for tolerance, according to
the Paris-based Reporters without Frontiers, Iran has more
journalists in prison than any country in the world. And under
Khatami's watch, dialogue of civilizations hasn't replaced the
excoriation of civilizations. When 4,000 attended a Tehran vigil at
the Swiss Embassy for victims of September 11, government-aligned
militias broke it up. In November the conservative head of the
powerful judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmud Shahrudi, created a committee
to confront political officials "if ever they called for starting
dialogue with the United States."

Today there are indications that Khatami's supporters are growing
disillusioned. Even his deputies, like Mohammed Ali Abtahi, warn
that "people will lose confidence in the system" without more
substantive reforms. During the soccer riots protesters screamed,
"Death to the Islamic Republic" and "Death to Khatami." For the
past two months students have gathered for anti- Khatami rallies in
the sports hall at Tehran's Amir Kabir technical university to
chastise Khatami, chanting, "Moderation is a hindrance to reform."
"There's no opinion polling," says Michael Rubin of the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, "but the events of the past months
are a big deal."

It is secularism, not liberal Islam, that is now sweeping Iranian
society. Instead of turbans, the rage among young Iranians is Major
League Baseball hats. Googoosh, a Barbra Streisand-like diva of
'70s Iranian pop, has recently resurfaced as an icon, thanks to
satellite broadcasts and smuggled recordings. Men have begun to don
the necktie, a once-banned symbol of the shah's modernizing
influence. "They have embraced Pahlavi and indulge nostalgia," says
Bill Samii, editor of Radio Free Europe's "Iran Report," "because
it's such a slap in the face of the regime." Even Western
correspondents in Tehran who once swooned for Khatami have begun to
note Pahlavi's increasing strength. As The Wall Street Journal's
Hugh Pope and Peter Waldman put it, he has "emerg[ed] as an
important figurehead of the nascent rebellion." And there's another
sign of Reza Pahlavi's resurgence: The Iranian government fears
him. Pahlavi's recent statements condemning the regime's human
rights record have evoked apoplectic responses from ayatollahs in
the government-run newspaper. The mullahs have even vigorously
protested former King Zahir Shah's return to Afghanistan because,
Iran watchers argue, they worry it might set a precedent for
Pahlavi. "Of course there are other opposition figures," says
Rubin, "but many people may perceive him as the only credible
alternative."

All of which puts Washington in a tricky position. From America's
point of view, Pahlavi should be a deeply attractive figure. He's a
liberal who, with our help, could challenge a regime in Tehran that
sponsors Hezbollah, defends Hamas, and is developing weapons of
mass destruction. He calls the United States a "true beacon of
freedom"; he has even quietly met with Israeli officials. When I
interviewed him, he took my notebook, wrote the words "secular
democracy," and underlined them twice. Yet the risk-adverse
diplomats in Foggy Bottom remain entranced by the prospect of
dtente with the Khatami regime. "We have been in discussions with
the Iranians at a variety of levels and in some new ways since
September 11," Colin Powell remarked last month after shaking hands
with Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi.

It's not hard to understand Foggy Bottom's behavior. Pahlavi doesn't
have an army, he's been outside the country for decades, and even
supporting him obliquely might wreck a dialogue with Tehran that
could, perhaps, enhance America's influence in the region. On the
other hand, the regime in Tehran looks weaker today than it has in
more than 20 years. And symbolically, Pahlavi has become its most
potent opponent. Earlier this month I traveled with him to a
basement set of the Voice of America's (VOA) Farsi TV service. He
was there for a live broadcast of "Political Roundtable," hosted by
Ahmad Baharloo, an exiled anchor with a Ted Koppel stack of hair.
Pahlavi spent an hour fielding calls from Iran. Phoning Baharloo is
not like dropping a line to Larry King. It's an expensive act of
resistance that could land you in the prison. (A VOA official
estimated that a call to the States costs several hundred dollars.)
One of Pahlavi's aides translated the calls for me in real time. A
veteran of the Iran-Iraq War announced in a teary voice that he had
"nothing in my life." A dissident cleric from Isfahan claimed, "In
my city the electricity is out because they know you're here. I'm
getting you with radio and battery. Please send more of your
pictures and statements. Send it to us and we'll distribute it." A
woman pleaded, "I need to ask you to come as soon as possible. Iran
is like gas, ready to blow up. Do something before we blow up."
Pahlavi stared at the camera and reprised his line: "I'll fight
until death."

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