Iran needs regime change — I’d die for it, says Shah’s son

Reza Pahlavi thinks the Republic’s leaders have never been weaker. He says the people want him back, 46 years after his father was overthrown

Christina Lamb, Chief Foreign Correspondent

Crown prince, where are you?” chants a crowd gathered in the streets of Tehran. “Come to our aid!”

It seems a surprising demand. Reza Pahlavi, 64, the eldest son of the last shah, has not set foot in Iran since he was in his teens. His father was forced to flee the country when nationwide protests against his ostentatious lifestyle and repression turned into the Islamic Revolution.

But so desperate is the situation in Iran that the man born heir to the Peacock Throne is now seen by many as a saviour. When last month he posted on social media an address to mark Nowruz, the Persian new year, calling on his countrymen to “imagine a new Iran”, demonstrations calling his name erupted across the country.

Reza Pahlavi gives a speech in Los Angeles in 2023 in support of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran

DAVID PASHAEE/MIDDLE EAST IMAGES/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Pahlavi’s father, the Shah of Iran, ruled for 38 years until the revolution in 1979

GETTY IMAGES

The United States held talks with Iran in Oman on Saturday but Pahlavi argues that rather than trying to reform the regime, now is the time to topple it.

“Never in these 46 years has the regime been as weak as it is today,” he tells me. “We believe that we are on the eve of finally liberating ourselves and there’s an alignment of the planets creating this window of opportunity.”

Western support is crucial, although he is quick to add he is not calling for boots on the ground, following failed western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. “What is critical is to provide support to those protesting while maintaining pressure on the regime.”

“The choice is not simply between a nuclear deal and military intervention,” he adds. “The better option is backing the Iranian people to bring about the democratic change they are seeking. What is needed is regime change to replace the warmongers with the peacemakers.”

Protesters march in Whitehall, London, against the Islamic Republic regime and in support of Reza Pahlavi

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He does not believe that 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the supreme leader, is serious about altering course.

“It would be very unlikely that that the regime will cave in to whatever the deal is that Donald Trump thinks of,” says Pahlavi. “It’s not a real estate deal in southern Manhattan where you’re acquiring a new skyscraper.”

Instead the “desperate and divided” Iranian leadership “will use these nuclear negotiations to delay and buy time for its own survival”, he says. “This regime has proven it cannot and will not fundamentally change its behaviour.

“Western governments need to understand that hoping for liberty, justice, equality and human rights under a religious dictatorship is never going to happen. Four decades should be enough time for them to realise that you cannot solve the problem diplomatically.”

President Trump has warned that if Tehran refuses a deal “there will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before”. The United States has already moved six B2 bombers — almost a third of its stealth bomber fleet — on to its naval base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in January, 2020, visiting the family of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by the United States

KHAMENEI.IR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Although Pahlavi agrees with what Trump in his first term called “maximum pressure” — when he imposed sanctions and assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the powerful commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — he argues this should be accompanied by “maximum support” for anti-regime protests.

A combination of economic crisis, social pressure and geopolitical events in the Middle East has produced what he calls a “perfect storm”.

Iran’s so-called axis of resistance — a network of proxies in the Middle East — is in tatters after the fall of Iran’s regional ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria and an Israeli onslaught that has greatly weakened Hezbollah and Hamas.

Israel also claims to have destroyed much of Iran’s air defences in strikes in October. The Houthis are still active in Yemen but the Trump administration has been carrying out waves of bombings on their strongholds.

At home the economy is a mess, partly because of sanctions but also because of years of chronic mismanagement and corruption. The Iranian rial has fallen to a record low of one million to the dollar, inflation is running at 32 per cent and frequent power cuts are forcing schools and factories to close.

The regime is deeply unpopular. A vicious crackdown put an end to the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that filled the streets for months following the murder in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022. At least 901 people were executed last year according to the UN, including 40 in just one week in December.

But localised protests continue and an estimated one in five women in Tehran are ignoring the hijab law and walking around with their hair uncovered.

“The regime is doing its repression to intimidate but they know that they can’t stop the revolts,” says Pahlavi. “The fear is gone. People are beyond that point.”

He cites footage in February of a young woman sitting naked on a police car in the middle of Tehran in plain view. “What does that tell you?” he asks. “I don’t give a damn anymore — come and get me, arrest me, torture me, execute me. It’s that that sort of resolve. We’ve never seen it in 46 years.”

After years of comfortable exile in Maryland with a wife and three now grown-up children, he has clearly decided it is time to take a more active role. He is in touch with the mothers of some of the young people killed in the protests and says he is increasingly contacted by regime insiders too.

“Defections are beginning to increase because those like the security forces who are standing as the last bastion that Khameini thinks he can rely on, are saying hey, we don’t want to go down with that sinking ship.”

“And a lot of lower-level commanders know their children are on the street protesting,” he adds. “So imagine if the regime says turn your guns on these kids?”

To encourage such defections, he is eager to set out his programme for transitional justice. “We need to assure them that we are not coming with a sense of revenge but reconciliation. People will have recourse to justice and it will not be kangaroo trials or the way Khomeini executed ministers and army officers after the revolution.”

Pahlvai could potentially play a similar role to that of Juan Carlos in Spain in ending the fascist rule of General Franco, ascending the throne in 1975 and abolishing the dictatorship with the support of Franco’s own military.

He insists he is not looking to restore the Peacock Throne nor run for office. “I’m not a candidate for anything,” he says. “I am not the destination but the road.”

Many Iran analysts question whether he has the support inside Iran that he claims. His father’s reign was notoriously out of touch, exemplified by hosting one of the most lavish parties the world has ever seen. Held in the ancient ruins of Persepolis in 1971 and rumoured to have cost $200 million, he hired French architects to build tents, imported thousands of songbirds, and flew in waiters from Maxims in Paris to serve feasts to foreign rulers and royals including Prince Philip. All while famine was rife across much of the country.

Critics point to a gilded childhood, growing up in the Niavaran Palace in Tehran with its private cinema and vast rooms decorated with art, including works by Salvador Dali and Picasso. When Pahlavi left in 1978 to train as a pilot at a military flying school in Texas, he stopped en route in London for ten days at Buckingham Palace, going to Royal Ascot with the Queen and Prince Charles, a jaunt that saw them riding down the Mall together in a carriage. “The relation goes way back,” he says.

Six months later, in January 1979, his father was forced out. Pahlavi’s life was then marked by tragedy — a cousin was assassinated in Paris in December 1979, the following July, his father died of cancer in Egypt, and his younger sister and brother later both took their own lives, traumatised, he says, by being in the palace while protesters shouted “death to the Shah”.

Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, centre, with Prince Charles and the Queen Mother at Royal Ascot in 1978

CLIVE LIMPKIN/DAILY MAIL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Pahlavi concedes that there were problems in Iran under his father. “Nobody denies that. I don’t deny that. But was it worth the consequences?”

Now he dreams of the day he can return “because my life has been breathing and thinking Iran for the past 46 years”.

He insists that he was in touch with the masses when he lived in Iran, driving around the country in a Mini Cooper given to him by his grandmother, meeting ordinary people from rice farmers to fishermen.

“Yes, I was the crown prince and lived in the palace blah blah blah … but I really spent a lot of time incognito.

“What I most hear from the youth today is — please forgive our parents for what they did. Our generation is not going to make the same mistakes that the previous generation did. They highly regret the fact that the revolution happened because of its consequences.”

Even his critics admit he is the only person who has nationwide name recognition.

“They don’t see anybody else capable of being the centre of focus,” he says. “People know me. Some are of the age that when I was born they celebrated the day when the crown prince was finally provided to the nation. I was their adopted son. Today I’m people’s father. All this Gen Z … when they send me a text or message on various platforms they call me father and that heartens me.”

“That’s important because it gives me the moral authority to pick up the phone and if I were to call any commander on the battlefront or minister in his office or leader of a union in Isfahan or Tabriz, and say this is Reza Pahlavi they immediately know who it is. I don’t think anybody else has that capability.”

It is he says a “huge responsibility” as well as putting a target on his back for a regime known for carrying out operations overseas.

“I’m willing and we’re all willing to give our lives for the cause,” he adds. “My job right now is to step in as an honest broker and say let us work together for an implosion of the regime. Hopefully we’ll get there before the regime has a chance to chop my head off.”