The Distant Promise of Iran’s Would-Be King
Reza was eighteen when the Islamic Revolution overthrew his family’s rule in 1979. At the time, he was training to be a fighter pilot in Lubbock, Texas, as part of his preparations to become a modern king. The Pahlavis, in exile, were vilified, but the family still seemed bound to project Reza’s image as the dynastic heir to the Iranian monarchy. The Empress, based between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Paris, remained socially enmeshed in European royal circles, but Reza remained in the United States, earned a degree at the University of Southern California, then lived in a suburb of Potomac, Maryland. In a podcast in 2023, he admitted that although he had always insisted he was fighting to overthrow the regime, he had never considered returning to Iran permanently. “My children live here,” he said. “My friends live here. Everyone I know is here. If I had to go back, what should I go back to?”
In the early 1980s, when Pahlavi was in his twenties, Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah’s last ambassador to the United States, brokered meetings between Pahlavi and American officials. “At the time, the Americans hoped to achieve results with Reza, but they quickly lost confidence in him,” Tino Zahedi, one of Ardeshir’s cousins, told me. “They didn’t believe he could rule.” In subsequent years, reports surfaced of Pahlavi accepting funds and support from the CIA and various Arab monarchies to carry out his small-scale political operations. (Pahlavi always denied this.) Ardeshir Zahedi eventually parted ways with him, later saying that accepting financial support from foreigners and essentially asking them to drop bombs on their own country was un-Iranian.
For years, Pahlavi kept up appearances, insisting that he was the rightful crown prince of Iran, refusing to recognize the abolition of the Pahlavi monarchy, and issuing messages to the nation on the occasion of the Persian New Year. But he was not a decisive political figure. To those who knew his father, he cut an odd figure, neither common nor stately, but a suburban Maryland man who shopped at the mall and attended a weekly poker game in Bethesda. He seemed resigned to exile and unsure whether he could change the minds of the Iranians from a distance. “He is a good person, but he is indolent, and he knows it himself,” said an Iranian close to Washington who knew Pahlavi in the 1980s.
In 2001, I interviewed Pahlavi for Timeand I found it impressive. I was based in Tehran then, as an American-born foreign correspondent, and most of the Islamic Republic officials I encountered were slovenly, undereducated, and lecherous. Some were downright sinister; others piously refused to look women in the eyes. Next to them, Pahlavi seemed dignified, knowledgeable and worldly. My lasting memories of that encounter were how normal and decent he seemed, qualities that seemed valuable in Iran, where nothing was decent or normal.
The country, for its part, is experiencing a series of convulsions. Various reform and feminist movements were pushing the regime to relax its militant foreign policy, oppressive dress codes, and censorship of civil society. In 2009, when an election was stolen from a reform candidate and given to a hard-liner, millions of people marched peacefully in the streets. In response, the regime killed dozens of people, and arrested and tortured many others. The younger generation born after the Revolution learned that modest internal change would never happen.
The following year, a London-based television channel called Manoto began broadcasting directly to Iran in Persian. The network had gained access to the vast pre-revolutionary archives of Iranian state radio and television, allowing it to produce a sophisticated stream of content – documentaries, biopics, concerts – that escaped the authoritarian grip of the Shah’s regime and showcased the wealth and promise of pre-revolutionary Iran. It quickly became one of the most watched channels in the country. Seven years later, Iran International, a well-funded pro-Pahlavi news network, emerged in London. Today, he covers Pahlavi’s every move with near reverence. “Considerable sums have been spent on the militarization of the Iranian population through these networks,” Nasr said. “And Reza Pahlavi was the beneficiary. They created massive nostalgia for that era and positioned him as the person who could bring the Iranians back there.”
One of the great challenges of the Islamic Republic was to reconcile its Islamist project with the history of Iran. For nearly twenty-five centuries, the Persian Empire and the modern nation-state of Iran were ruled by monarchy. The ancient idea of Iran was that of a distinct people bound within a separate empire, protected and ruled by powerful shahs. farra subtle concept that Yale historian Abbas Amanat described as “a royal charisma divinely bestowed upon a ruler of good quality.” The king was “the shadow of God on earth”, but he could also lose his farrif he failed to defend the kingdom or if he ruled as a tyrant.
