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From Chalabi to Pahlavi: How Tehran Manufactures Distraction to Survive

Written by Shahriar Kia
A city in Iran after being bombed by the US Air Force
A city in Iran after being bombed by the US Air Force

Eight-minute read

On August 29, 2026, Tehran conducted two campaigns simultaneously.

The first was for public consumption. The Revolutionary Guards announced that they have “full control” of the Strait of Hormuz. State television broadcasts Bellicose speeches. Officials insist that the country is standing firm, that Washington has failed, that the ruling establishment remains cohesive and that Iran’s enemies have once again underestimated the endurance of the revolution.

The second campaign was harder to disguise. Masoud Pezeshkian, the regime’s president, said that Iran’s exports and imports have fallen by nearly thirty-five per cent under sanction and the naval blockade. Inflation is running at sixty-six per cent. The blockade is constricting access to foreign currency and commerce. The country’s supreme leader, gravely injured months ago and still unseen in public, is issuing written instructions that the government must confront inflation, unemployment and the cost of living.

More revealing is what the security establishment is saying about the streets.

Iran’s national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, warned this week that the “enemy is seeking to create unrest” over livelihoods, gasoline, unemployment and the economy, and instructed police to identify people encouraging protests online. Hossein Taeb, the former chief of Revolutionary Guard intelligence, has been returned to command of the Basij, the organization designed to put bodies, motorcycles, informants and guns into Iranian neighborhoods when demonstrations begin. The appointment comes amid what the Financial Times describes as heightened concern about another uprising; the regime’s Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei warned on August 31 that the state going to crush dissent, should protests reemerge.

A dictatorship that feels secure does not reorganize its domestic militia around a former intelligence chief while its police commander talks openly about nationwide unrest.

The propaganda is meant to conceal precisely this vulnerability.

For years, Western accounts of Iranian power have concentrated on Tehran’s regional network: armed groups, expeditionary commanders, missiles, drones and the doctrine of “strategic depth.” The emphasis is understandable. These instruments are visible. They explode.

But some of the clerical state’s most consequential operations have produced no explosion at all. They alter what an adversary believes.

They penetrate an opposition organization, manufacture a source, impersonate a dissident, magnify a quarrel, introduce a false choice, encourage one enemy to destroy another, or turn an exile faction into evidence for the regime’s claim that the only alternative to clerical rule is foreign intervention and political chaos.

A militia can attack an adversary. An intelligence operation can persuade an adversary to attack someone Tehran wants removed.

The career of Ahmad Chalabi remains the most spectacular illustration.

In Washington before the invasion of Iraq, Chalabi offered something American officials badly wanted: an Iraqi who could tell them that their own assumptions were correct.

His Iraqi National Congress provided defectors, intelligence, political forecasts and a ready-made narrative for what would follow the destruction of the former Iraqi government.

A year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Washington was investigating whether Tehran had helped steer it toward that result.

Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times in May 2004, that Chalabi’s organization had sent defectors to at least eight Western intelligence services, allowing information originating from the same network to return to American analysts with the appearance of independent corroboration. U.S. investigators were examining whether Iranian intelligence had supported the operation to help persuade Washington to overthrow Tehran’s enemy. The same investigation examined allegations that Chalabi’s intelligence chief had supplied Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence with highly classified information on American troop movements, communications and occupation plans.

The language being used inside the American intelligence community was unusually direct.

“It’s pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” one intelligence source told The Guardian. Then came the more important sentence: “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi.”

Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector, gave The Guardian an earlier recollection. When he met Chalabi in 1997, Ritter said, the Iraqi exile boasted of “tremendous connections with Iranian intelligence” and offered to arrange a meeting with the head of Iranian intelligence.

The New York Times subsequently reported, citing U.S. intelligence officials, that Chalabi had “disclosed to an Iranian official” that Washington had broken the secret communications code used by Iran’s intelligence service. According to the account, the Iranian official transmitted the revelation to Tehran over the compromised channel, enabling American intelligence to see that its penetration had been exposed. The FBI opened an espionage investigation into the disclosure.

And in the Los Angeles Times, Thomas Patrick Carroll, a former CIA clandestine-service officer, summarized what Defense Intelligence Agency sources were then reported to believe: Chalabi’s U.S.-funded Information Collection Program was “a front for Iranian intelligence.” The allegation was that the channel worked in both directions—American secrets moving toward Tehran and Iranian disinformation moving toward Washington.

Chalabi’s own electoral performance later exposed the gulf between his standing in Washington and his standing with Iraqi voters. In the December 2005 parliamentary election, his bloc failed to win a single seat; with 95 per cent of the preliminary tally counted, The Washington Post reported that it remained nearly 8,000 votes short of the roughly 40,000 needed for one seat. Chalabi received just 0.89 per cent of the “special vote” cast by Iraqis abroad, in hospitals, the military and prisons.

Tehran applies the same principle to its own opposition.

For years the clerical establishment possesses an internal political instrument that is almost as useful as repression: reformism.

The promise is familiar. Vote one more time. Elect a different president. Empower the “moderates.” Negotiate with the West. Give the system another chance to correct itself.

Mohammad Khatami embodies the possibility in the late nineteen-nineties. The Green Movement revives part of it in 2009. Hassan Rouhani and the nuclear agreement provide another iteration.

The mechanism keeps political frustration inside the constitutional architecture of the ruling system.

But after the 2017 uprising, when people chanted in the streets that ‘Principlists, reformists, the game is over!’, the mirage of ‘change from inside the regime’ lost all relevance.

Reuters describes the 2022 uprising as sounding the “death knell” for the once influential reform movement. A former official from the Khatami Administration tells Reuters that younger Iranians no longer want reformists; people increasingly believe reformist promises merely helped hard-liners survive by offering changes the system would never permit. Once reform loses its usefulness, the regime needs a different political picture.

Pahlavi offers almost the inverse political model.

Reza Pahlavi is the son of a former dictator whose rule was overthrown by a popular revolution. Tehran understands that he poses no meaningful threat to the regime and has no demonstrated political base inside Iran capable of challenging it. That is precisely what makes his prominence useful rather than dangerous. Amplifying his image through Persian-language media, social media and other channels, cultivating nostalgia for the former monarchy, and presenting him as a leading alternative can be done at little cost to the regime, while fostering the demoralizing impression that Iranians are left with a choice only between the dictatorship of the present and the dictatorship of the past.

After the mirage of reformism ceased to contain public discontent, monarchy became a more useful foil in the regime’s propaganda. Even the state-run Vatan-e Emrooz portrayed Pahlavi’s camp as failing to win support inside Iran, deepening opposition fractures, and ultimately benefiting the ruling establishment; the political value of that framing is to present Iranians with a discouraging binary between the clerical dictatorship and restoration of the previous monarchy.

Reuters reported this summer that Pahlavi’s claims of a grassroots network could not be independently verified. The Financial Times, examining the surge around his candidacy earlier this year, noted both his extraordinary online growth and researchers’ concerns that some of that activity appeared artificially amplified; Reuters separately observed that he did not appear to have a mass organized movement inside Iran ready to take power.

This asymmetry, immense visibility, no organization or grassroot support whatsoever, is precisely what makes the phenomenon so valuable in an information war.

After the January uprising and its repression, Pahlavi changes a position he had maintained publicly for years.

Reuters confronted him with the sequence in July. In 2024 he had told an American conference, “we are not seeking your intervention.” By February of 2026 he was telling Reuters that intervention could save lives. Once American military action began, he called it “the game changer we’ve been waiting for.”

He then supplied Washington with the assurance that has accompanied exile-led regime-change projects before.

In The Washington Post, Pahlavi wrote that Iranians themselves were the “boots on the ground” while American and Israeli force dismantled the machinery of repression. He promised that a successor Iran would restore warm relations with Washington, recognize Israel and avoid the institutional collapse that followed the invasion of Iraq.  He asked foreign governments to be prepared to recognize a transitional government once the ruling system fell.

Chalabi arrives in Iraq with an American ground army. Pahlavi updates the model for the era of air power: foreign forces break the coercive apparatus; the domestic population supplies the ground action; an exile political network presents itself as the bridge into the transition.

The military mechanism is different. The dependency is recognizable. And for Tehran’s propaganda apparatus, it is almost ideal.

For decades, the clerical state tells Iranians that organized opposition is foreign-directed. Now a figure inflated and promoted as an opposition leader asks Washington to use military force and keep asking to finish the work.

State propagandists no longer have to invent the footage. They only have to replay it.

The more complicated part of the story concerns Pahlavi’s relationship with the coercive institutions he wants to inherit.

Reuters asked him directly in July about a 2018 interview in which he had spoken of dialogue with the Revolutionary Guards and Basij. Pahlavi said individuals identifying themselves as Basij members, Revolutionary Guards and military personnel had communicated with him discreetly. This was not an isolated issue. Over the years, he has repeatedly stated that he has been in direct contact with individuals representing or linked to the Revolutionary Guards. His contacts with the IRGC and elements of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus were therefore already a well-known aspect of his activities.

Iranian intelligence has spent decades mastering the penetration of opposition networks. Organizations that rely heavily on unverified claims of insider access, regardless of whether they come from defectors, former officials, former prisoners, or other sources, are particularly vulnerable to infiltration and manipulation.

A U.S. government-commissioned Library of Congress profile of the Ministry of Intelligence describes its methods of penetrating Iranian communities abroad, including recruitment of former opposition figures and a reported technique in which a cooperative individual may temporarily acquire the biography of a political prisoner before emerging abroad as a credible dissident.

The point is not that imprisonment is fictitious. Iranian prisons contain an enormous population of genuine opponents. The intelligence lesson is simpler: a résumé is not a security clearance.

And Tehran’s influence operations do not depend solely on recruiting prominent people. They manufacture political identities.

Researchers have documented regime-linked accounts pretending to belong to opposition factions. Research published in the Journal of Democracy has described impostors posing as monarchists or ethnic separatists to disrupt exile activism. An Atlantic Council commentary this year similarly noted evidence of Iran’s cyber apparatus posing as “fake monarchists” to inflame arguments around Pahlavi.

Then, in June of this year, the theoretical problem became a concrete security problem in France.

French authorities prohibited a major NCRI demonstration after security services warned of an increased threat from monarchist activists. According to an intelligence assessment seen by Reuters, threats included calls to block the MEK march and references to weapons and explosives.

The French assessment added an extraordinary possibility: some of the threats could have originated from the Iranian ruling authorities, “acting through opportunistic proxies.”

The phrase deserves attention.

An opportunistic proxy does not need to sit in a Tehran office. It needs to perform a function Tehran can exploit. This is where the political culture around Pahlavi matters more than the question of individual biographies.

Reuters documented violent and threatening behavior by self-identified supporters against other Iranian dissidents in London, The Hague and elsewhere. Pahlavi condemned the violence and said provocateurs masquerading as supporters could also be involved. But Reuters also confronted him with language coming from much closer to his leadership circle.

In January, Saeed Ghasseminejad, one of Pahlavi’s closest advisers, posted: “You’re either with Prince Reza Pahlavi or with the Islamic Republic.” He added that someone weakening the “field commander” was an agent of the enemy.

The political function of such rhetoric remains the same. Every Pahlavi opponent becomes a suspected regime collaborator. Every MEK supporter becomes an enemy. Every ethnic activist can be called a separatist.

The security state’s favourite political vocabulary—loyalty, infiltration, treason and enemy agents—thus migrates into the language surrounding a movement presented to Iranians as an alternative to the current regime.

The result is not merely political noise. It is demoralization.

By repeatedly presenting the Pahlavi current as the principal alternative to the clerical regime, Iranians are confronted with a bleak and deliberately constricted picture of their political future: either the dictatorship that rules them today, or a return to the dictatorship they overthrew in 1979.

For people being asked to risk arrest, torture or death by taking to the streets, that is a powerful message of futility. Why rise again, if the apparent outcome is simply a return to another form of authoritarian rule? Why endure another uprising, if the future is portrayed as a choice between the present dictatorship and the previous one?

For Tehran, the value of such a narrative is obvious. It drains political change of hope.

It turns the idea of an uprising from a path towards freedom into an apparently endless cycle in which one dictatorship merely replaces another. And it encourages Iranians to conclude that the enormous personal cost of resistance may lead nowhere.

The clerical dictatorship does not need people to believe in it. It only needs them to lose faith in the possibility of something fundamentally different.

This is why an article published by Vatan-e Emrooz in April of 2025 is interesting now, not because the newspaper deserves to be treated as an oracle but because subsequent events give its language a different resonance.

The hard-line paper singled out the monarchist current for intensifying fractures and concluded that Pahlavi and his supporters had ultimately benefited the ruling system “whether knowingly or unknowingly.”

The regime’s own propagandists had already described the desired political effect.

Turn Pahlavi’s visibility into a warning directed at Iranians themselves: risk your life against the clerical dictatorship, the message implies, and another autocracy may be waiting on the other side.

That is more useful to Tehran than another quarrel among exile factions, because it aims at the decision that matters most—the decision of people inside Iran whether to join an uprising.

This does not require a single master operation. Iranian intelligence has rarely depended upon one. It requires an ecosystem.

That is the connection between Chalabi and Pahlavi. Not personality. Function.

Chalabi gives Washington a route by which American military power removes Tehran’s most formidable neighboring state adversary.

Pahlavi’s usefulness operates differently. When faith in reform collapses, his movement helps replace the old illusion—change from within—with another political distraction: that Iran’s future must be organized around a binary choice between the mullahs and restoration, between the existing dictatorship and a foreign-assisted return of the former ruling dynasty.

Tehran’s predicament on August 29 was and remains therefore more serious than its broadcasts suggest.

It is a survival system. The regime must persuade a population that increasingly rejects it that overthrow is either impossible or worse than endurance. It must persuade foreign governments that there is no coherent democratic force capable of replacing it.

Ahmad Chalabi’s story demonstrates what can happen when an adversary succeeds in shaping the information that precedes a foreign government’s decision.

The politics surrounding Reza Pahlavi demonstrates the domestic corollary: what can happen when an authoritarian state succeeds in shaping the alternatives its population and the outside world are invited to imagine.

The clerical dictatorship does not need everyone to believe its propaganda. It needs enough people to doubt everyone else.

And at a moment when American ships are constricting its ports and its own police commander is warning of an uprising, doubt may be the most valuable strategic asset Tehran has left.

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