The Twilight of the Iranian Revolution
Two days before the election, on February 19th, the Iranian government finally announced that two citizens had died of the coronavirus. In the Tehran newsroom, bitter laughter broke out. “We reported deaths before we even reported any infections,” the reporter told me. “But that’s life in the Islamic Republic.” By then, hundreds of sick patients were crowding the hospital in Gorgan. So many bodies piled up that a local cemetery hired a backhoe to dig graves. “It was worse than treating soldiers on a battlefield,” the second doctor said.
Soon, Iran became a global center of the coronavirus, with nearly seventy thousand reported cases and four thousand deaths. But the government maintained tight control over information; according to a leaked official document, the Revolutionary Guard ordered hospitals to hand over death tallies before releasing them to the public. “We were burying three to four to five times as many people as the Ministry of Health was reporting,” Azad said. “We could have dealt with this—we could have quarantined earlier, we could have taken precautions like the ones the Chinese did in Wuhan—if we had not been kept in the dark.” On February 24th, Iraj Harirchi, the deputy health minister, appeared at a press conference and denied covering up the scale of infections. He looked pale and flustered, and he repeatedly wiped sweat from his brow. The next day, he, too, tested positive.
In mid-March, the Washington Post published satellite photos of newly dug mass graves. A few weeks later, inmates rioted at prisons across the country, terrified that they were trapped with the virus, and guards opened fire, killing at least thirty-five. As the pandemic devastated an economy already weakened by sanctions, Iran asked the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan of five billion dollars. It was the first time in nearly sixty years that the government had appealed to the I.M.F., which it has historically described as a tool of U.S. hegemony.
With the country spasming, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran’s theocratic system, suggested that the United States and its allies had deployed a biological weapon. “Americans are being accused of creating this virus,” he said, during a speech in March. “There are enemies who are demons, and there are enemies who are humans, and they help one another. The intelligence services of many countries coöperate with one another against us.”
Even as Khamenei spoke, the virus was spreading to the highest levels of the regime, which is heavily populated by elderly men. At least fifty clerics and political figures were infected, and at least twenty died. The Supreme Leader was said to be closed off from most human contact, but his inner circle was still susceptible; two vice-presidents and three of his closest advisers fell ill. The virus, which seemed able to reach anyone, sharpened a sense of crisis among ordinary Iranians. Khamenei, who has led the country since 1989, is eighty years old and a prostate-cancer survivor, rumored to be in poor health. What will become of the country when he dies?
My host told me that the country has reached a decisive phase. Public confidence in the theocratic system—installed after the Iranian Revolution, in 1979—has collapsed. Soon after Khamenei took power, he promised Iranians that the revolution would “lead the country on the path of material growth and progress.” Instead, Iran’s ruling clerics have left the country economically hobbled and largely cut off from the rest of the world. The sanctions imposed by the United States in 2018, after President Trump abrogated the nuclear agreement between the two countries, have aggravated those failures and intensified the corruption of the governing élite. “I would say eighty-five per cent of the population hates the current system,” my host said. “But the system is incapable of reforming itself.”
Speculation about Khamenei’s longevity is rampant in the senior levels of government and the military. “The struggle to succeed him has already begun,” my host said. But Khamenei has spent decades placing loyalists throughout the country’s major institutions, building a system that serves and protects him. “Khamenei is like the sun, and the solar system orbits around him,” he told me. “This is my worry: What happens when you take the sun out of the solar system? Chaos.”
his February 11th, the forty-first anniversary of the revolution, a celebration was scheduled for downtown Tehran. I was at a restaurant in the city that morning, when a waitress overheard me discussing plans to attend. “You’re going?” she asked with a sneer. “They force people to be there—they blackmail them. They tell people that if they don’t go they will lose their jobs.”
As a reporter for a newspaper called Hamshahri, he wrote a series detailing how businessmen and senior government officials exploited the country’s closed market to enrich themselves. One memorable article asked why nearly all of Iran’s chadors—the head-to-toe cloaks worn by most women—were imported. “The reason for this,” he told me, “is that powerful people, in the government and out, get rich from the imports and by blocking competition.”
During the Green Movement, the Guard and its plainclothes militia, known as the Basij, were instrumental in crushing dissent. According to Abbas Milani, the director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford and a former political prisoner in Iran, the uprising amounted to a political anointment. “Clearly, the regime believed it was going to lose control, and the I.R.G.C. and the Basij saved the day,” Milani said. “The result is that the I.R.G.C. now has the upper hand. Khamenei knows that without the I.R.G.C. he’d be out of a job in twenty-four hours.”
The most visible symbol of the I.R.G.C.’s strength is the Basij, whose members can be seen on street corners in every Iranian city. A less visible measure is its manipulation of the economy. When the clerics took hold, after the revolution, they secured control of large sectors of the economy, including oil production, factories, and ports. During the next two decades, an array of state-owned enterprises were privatized—but, rather than going to skilled businesspeople, many of them were acquired by the I.R.G.C. and its associates. Today, elements of the Guard are thought to own construction companies, oil refineries, and mines, along with a nineteen-story luxury mall in a posh neighborhood of Tehran. No one is entirely sure how much of the economy the group controls; credible estimates range from ten per cent to more than fifty. One indication of its wealth came in 2009, when its investment arm paid $7.8 billion for a majority stake in the Telecommunication Company of Iran; the I.R.G.C.’s total budget, on paper, was only five billion. In Iranian society, the Guard has grown into an untouchable élite. “They have their own schools, their own markets, their own neighborhoods, their own resorts,” a former senior Middle Eastern intelligence officer told me. “The neighborhoods look like a carbon copy of Beverly Hills.”
But sanctions imposed by the West had a perverse effect. Because few countries could trade with Iran, the businesses that the I.R.G.C. controlled came to exercise near-monopolies within the country. As the U.S. and its allies policed international shipping, the I.R.G.C. tightened its hold on the sea-lanes and the airports, where oil smuggling and drug trafficking were flourishing.
The Baktiyaris were sick of the revolution, even though Pouya’s father had fought in the Revolutionary Guard for five years during the Iran-Iraq War. Pouya, who was hoping to marry soon and build a life, loathed it most. “Pouya loved poetry and nature—he saw beauty in everything,” Nahid told me. “He also loved history, and he used to say these clerics have ruined our country. He used to say, ‘We’ve never had such a terrible time, ever, in our history.’ ” The protests quickly became an outlet for broader frustrations. “We can see that the government is spending our money on other countries, sending it to Hamas, to Syria and Hezbollah,” Nahid said. “The protests weren’t about gasoline. They were about protesting the same bunch of people in charge for forty years, deliberately seeking a fight with the U.S. It is these people who have turned Iran into a pariah state. We cannot have any fun—Iran is a joyless religious dictatorship. We are forced into fake identities.”
The November demonstrations were remarkably distinct from those in 2009. The earlier protests were led by the middle class and by university students, and took place largely in major cities. The more recent demonstrations were begun by workers, the regime’s traditional base, and spread rapidly throughout the country. They also turned violent; in many cities, demonstrators burned stores and trashed police stations. “The 2009 protests showed that the regime had lost the middle class,” a shop owner who witnessed protests in his Tehran suburb told me. “The protests in November show that they’ve lost the working class, too.”
The regime struck back brutally. “It happened very fast,” a Western diplomat in Tehran told me. “The government switched off the phones and the Internet and responded massively—and the whole thing was over in three days. I think the regime was genuinely afraid.” Iranian authorities confirmed that some seven thousand people had been arrested, but they have not disclosed the number of civilians killed. Amnesty International estimated the death toll at three hundred; Reuters, citing unnamed officials close to Khamenei, put the number at fifteen hundred.
In a nearly unprecedented sign of unrest, the demonstrators began to fight back. According to Iranian news accounts, at least six police officers and soldiers were killed, apparently by protesters. Four of them were shot to death, even though civilians are largely forbidden to have guns; others were stabbed. Security forces encountered resistance in such areas as Kurdistan and Khuzestan, which border neighboring countries. A YouTube video, purportedly taken in Khuzestan, shows security forces shooting civilians as they flee into a marsh. “That suggests there is some kind of organized resistance,” Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, in Washington, said. “Ordinary civilians don’t hide in a marsh.”
Away from direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic, Iranians carry on a parallel existence. It is a crime for women to leave the house without a hijab, but, in the well-off sections of northern Tehran, it is not uncommon to spot women walking down the street with their hair defiantly exposed. So many areas of private life fall under the state’s purview that flouting the law is hard to avoid. In 2014, six Iranian men and women recorded themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy,” and posted the video on YouTube, with the title “Happy We Are from Tehran.” The authorities arrested them for violating laws that prohibit dancing with the opposite sex. They were sentenced to a year in prison and ninety-one lashes apiece.
At times during my visit, Tehran reminded me of Eastern Europe in the eighties, when ordinary people, constrained by a sclerotic communist system, coped by living as if the state did not exist. One night, I attended a dinner party in a middle-class neighborhood of Tehran. Iranian music drifted from the stereo. Women wore skirts and leather boots, their hair uncovered. Bottles of arrack and wine, homemade but delicious, were arrayed on a table. One of the men told me that illicit parties were so common that he had been making a living as a d.j. Almost every party received a visit from a police officer, who said, usually with a wink, that the music was too loud. “I give him some money, and he goes away,” the man told me. Another man complained about the daily struggle of making his business work in an unpredictable and corrupt system, with chronic shortages of material and unruly inspectors pushing for bribes. “Plan for the next quarter?” he said. “I can’t plan for tomorrow morning.” In Iran, some of the most intense unrest comes from frustration with the regime’s intrusions into private life.
Several Iran experts in the U.S. told me that they believed the regime might resume negotiations after the Presidential elections this fall. Their reasons for optimism varied. Some argued that, if Trump lost, the nuclear deal could be revived; others said that, if Trump won, Khamenei would have no choice but to negotiate. Iranian officials rejected both scenarios, telling me that the Supreme Leader would never again make a deal. “The United States can’t be counted on to keep its word,” Mohammad Marandi, a professor at Tehran University, told me.
Over time, there have been hints that the regime is maintaining covert capabilities. The most recent ones surfaced in 2018, after Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, carried out a brazen plot to steal nuclear secrets from a secure warehouse in Tehran. Arriving in a semi truck before midnight, a team of agents broke into the facility and, using high-intensity torches, cut open safes. For six hours, they carted off documents and CDs, leaving just before an armed guard was due to begin his morning shift. According to a former senior U.S. intelligence official, the Iranian military launched an enormous dragnet operation, but the Israelis escaped across the border into Azerbaijan. Another former intelligence official told me that several members of Iran’s security forces were arrested afterward. “There was a big purge,” he said.
When reports of the raid emerged, Iranian officials said that the whole thing was a hoax, and that the documents were phony. The Israelis maintain that “the archive,” as they call it, was a history of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program until 2003, when the regime claimed to have largely suspended it. According to a Western expert, the documents detailed the existence of two nuclear sites that had been hidden from inspectors; one had produced uranium hexafluoride, a material used in the enrichment process, and the other was a facility for testing weapons components. Western officials couldn’t determine whether the sites were active, but, when international inspectors, alerted by the Israelis, asked to visit them, the Iranians refused—and razed the testing facility. “There was a rush to clean up the site,” the expert told me.
Last spring, Iran announced that it was abandoning the constraints imposed by the nuclear agreement, and stepped up its enrichment of uranium. A Western official who tracks the program told me that, at the current rate, the Iranians could have enough enriched material for a bomb in less than seven months. David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, estimates that it could take half that long. Constructing a sophisticated weapon with the enriched uranium would likely require twelve to eighteen months more. A crude device could be ready to test much sooner, though—perhaps in the Iranian desert. Such a device probably couldn’t be launched at an enemy, and would likely use much of the enriched uranium that Iran has. But, the Western official said, “the world would suddenly look quite different.”
Thus far, Iranian leaders apparently have not begun working to weaponize a nuclear device. Yet the uncertainty has refocussed Western intelligence analysts on a pressing question: Will Khamenei decide to build a weapon?
Most analysts I spoke to believe that he will not, unless the regime faces an existential threat from outside the country. But if he dies? “The day he’s gone, then I think all options are on the table,” the Western official said.
Khamenei’s first choice is likely to be his son, Mojtaba, a cleric in Tehran. In recent years, Khamenei has elevated Mojtaba’s profile and given him more responsibility in overseeing the government. But many Iranians believe that, after Khamenei departs, the I.R.G.C. will become enmeshed in selecting a new Supreme Leader. Some expect the Guard to try to rule outright. Several former commanders have already assumed prominent political roles, aided by the institution’s ability to spend its vast resources on favored candidates. “The I.R.G.C. is not going to take over all of a sudden,” Alfoneh, of the Arab Gulf States Institute, said. “It’s a slow-motion coup that’s been in the works for years.”
Most people I spoke with believed that the Guard would maintain a façade of clerical rule. Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s Chief Justice, is frequently mentioned as a candidate.
Still, some Iranians believe that many of the I.R.G.C.’s senior officers want to steer the country in a direction closer to that of China: strict politics, but a freer market. The reformist leader I spoke to, who is in touch with several I.R.G.C. officers, believed that one of the generals would ultimately emerge as a benevolent strongman—“our Napoleon”—to guide Iran toward greater prosperity. The government would be run by technocrats, not clerics, and the generals would loosen controls on freedom of speech and dress. “They want to reach out to the middle class,” he said. “Think about it: the moment they get the clerics out of government, they would be incredibly popular.”
That prediction struck many Western experts as overly optimistic. The reform-minded officers inside the I.R.G.C. probably make up only one of several factions, which exist in a state of internal rivalry and dissension. If those factions are unable to agree on a Supreme Leader, then the process could go out of control. “I think the selection of a new leader needs to happen quickly—it’s a twenty-four-hour thing,” a Western diplomat in Tehran told me.
Even as Iranians speculate about who will succeed Khamenei, many believe that, whoever becomes Supreme Leader, the revolution is no longer salvageable.
Isolated and dysfunctional, the Islamic Republic had reached a dead end, she said: “The regime has lost all popular support, and yet it is incapable of change. The result is that the Iranian people have lost hope. We are hopeless now.”