Reza Pahlavi was seven when he grasped something was different about him.
Riding in a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Tehran after his father’s coronation in 1967, he noticed that the crowds were not only cheering his parents’ carriage, “I realised they were cheering me,” he recalls. “That was the moment it clicked, that I’m special, or important. It triggered something in my head.
“There was the people’s enthusiasm, love and affection, but at the same time an expectation of what it means to be a crown prince. [And it made me think] what does it entail in terms of all the dedication, sacrifice, responsibility and limitations that you have to accept because of that elevated expectation?”
The adoration did not last. In 1979, Pahlavi was driven into exile by a popular revolution sparked by his father’s misrule. The uprising ended with the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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Yet Pahlavi, 64, still speaks with the self-confidence of one raised to rule. And he now predicts a revolution similar to the one that overthrew his father.
‘A window of opportunity’
Economically strangled at home, militarily bloodied abroad and ideologically moribund, the Islamic Republic is rapidly losing authority even among long-time supporters, he argues. Western governments must seize this moment to assist Iranians to usher in a secular democracy via civil disobedience.
“There is a critical window of opportunity to change history. It may only be open for a few months,” he says. “Now is the time to act. Iran is in a revolutionary, or at the very least, a pre-revolutionary fervour. It’s escalating every day. All the chants you hear on the streets, all the protests, all the demonstrations that specifically call for an end to this regime, death to the dictator, death to the Islamic Republic.
“It is in plain view. Especially on the 46th anniversary of the revolution [which saw official celebrations marred by anti-regime protests this month]. It’s not just isolated to one pocket of resistance here and there,” he tells me during a visit to the Telegraph office to record a special edition of the Battle Lines foreign policy podcast..
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A tall man who bears a striking resemblance to his father, the shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 until the 1979 revolution, Pahlavi has been on a frenetic diplomatic tour of Europe, which included a visit to last week’s Munich Security Conference.
Accompanied by an entourage of guards and advisers, he has for the past fortnight busily worked the corridors of foreign capitals to lobby Western governments to prepare for the collapse of the Islamic Republic. It is not always an easy sell.
Not everyone believes he has the base of support he claims inside the country. Many others within Iran’s exiled opposition movement are suspicious of his supporters’ motives, especially after some of them used social media to attack non-monarchist activists. And many governments are wary of poisoning already delicate diplomatic and political relations with Iran by being seen to host a pretender advocating regime change.
The Munich conference was a case in point. Pahlavi was invited, disinvited, reinvited and finally disinvited again. He was furious, accusing the German foreign ministry of sidelining the Iranian public in the name of appeasing the country’s clerical rulers.
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“I’m just a messenger. By silencing me, you’re silencing the voice of millions of people who are the victims of this regime,” he says, adding that many of those millions inside Iran he claims to represent get “understandably enraged” at Western diplomats compromising in the name of “avoiding some bad scenarios”.
“If there’s any hesitation or reservation for fear of reprisal, that’s… buying into the blackmail game [played] by the regime. Just caving into that means giving carte blanche to the regime, anytime they feel pressure, to use the blackmail card and force governments to back off.”
The families of diplomatic hostages, and the Western diplomats who have the thankless task of trying to balance their own national interests, global nuclear security and getting their jailed citizens home, may beg to differ with that straightforward prescription.
‘Our nation has never been more ready for change’
Still, even critics acknowledge Pahlavi at least has a plan for reform, and a rare degree of public recognition both inside and outside Iran.
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His vision – the one that he wanted to sell to Western governments at the Munich security conference – is that engagement with the regime (he calls it appeasement) has failed, but military action must, if at all possible, be avoided.
“What we’ve been saying to the Americans, the Europeans, is let’s not jump directly from failed diplomacy to contemplating conflict and war,” he says.
“There’s a third option and [it is] the best option – the Iranian people. It will be unlike other scenarios of regime change that were poorly implemented and executed, for example Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein. The change of regime in Iran has nothing to do with what the West in particular and America specifically has experienced since 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The regime is at its most vulnerable and weakest state, and at the same time our nation has never been more ready for change.”
It is a message carefully tailored to the phobias of American voters and politicians. They do not have to worry about “boots on the ground” because the Iranian public are the boots on the ground, he says. There need not be a civil war or state collapse as in Iraq or Libya, because a peaceful revolution will bring members of the old regime with it. And there will be no “Talibanisation” of the country, as the Iranian public have tasted theocratic dictatorship and are sick of it, Pahlavi argues.
Many historians believe one of his father’s mistakes was a top-down attempt to enforce Western-style secularism on an instinctively conservative public. Four decades under the Islamic Republic has entirely turned the tables, argues Pahlavi: it is now the public who are secularised, the regime enforcing the unwanted ideology.
There is a striking irony in the shah’s son calling for a re-run of 1979. Does it make for uncomfortable parallels between his own father and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has reigned as supreme leader since 1989, having succeeded Ruhollah Khomeini, the septuagenarian cleric who spearheaded the revolution and devised the concept of a theocracy that still endures today.
“It’s a fair question,” he concedes. “The difference between 1979 and 2025 is, back then, nobody had an understanding of the alternative, as the basic call was the shah has to leave, no matter what. Then we’ll see what happens. Well, guess what? Khomeini happened. Nobody had a clue what he was going to do. By the time everybody figured it out, it was too late.”
Rather like Pahlavi, Khomeini had been in exile before the revolution. Iran watchers – and the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus – are always on the lookout for an anti-regime opposition leader of similar unifying stature.
Pahlavi certainly believes he has the potential to play the role of a central figurehead in the desired transition, and says he has a plan to avoid the mistakes of the last revolution.
“The difference is that this time we’re not only saying that this regime has to go, because everybody knows it has to go, including former reformists who now are on a converging path with us, but it’s also a clear path to the alternative with clear propositions. People this time don’t have to guess – they will know what’s being proposed,” he says.
His specific proposal is for an interim government that will run the country while a constituent assembly is elected to draft a new constitution, on which there would then be a referendum. He claims to have no view on the exact form of that constitution, other than that it must be secular and democratic.
Pahlavi is not alone in believing the Islamic Republic is in serious trouble. Khamenei’s regime is under intense economic pressure at home and has suffered dramatic military setbacks abroad following Israel’s defeat of Hezbollah and the fall of Assad in Syria.
There is a general consensus that the regime has lost both public legitimacy and the faith of a number of insiders, who no longer believe it can be reformed. Its opponents, meanwhile, sense opportunity.
Donald Trump has reimposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran in a bid to force it to abandon its nuclear programme, which is believed to be closer to producing a bomb than ever before.
Should that gambit fail, it seems likely that Israel and the US will launch air and missile strikes on nuclear facilities, something that Pahlavi says should be avoided if at all possible.
“Is there a historic opportunity for change to happen? We believe yes, but I think that the failure of Western policymakers to catch up to where Iran is now could impede our success in finding a resolution to the ultimate problem,” says Pahlavi.
He is a big fan of Trump’s policy of maximum pressure, but says it must be accompanied by “maximum support” for dissenting Iranians inside the country, and encouraging “maximum defections” from the current regime.
Conversations with the president’s team have left him optimistic, despite cuts to US overseas aid that threaten to reduce efforts to scrutinise the regime, with several Iranian media outlets that previously received American funding having been forced to shut down or lay off staff of late. “Marco Rubio is probably the first secretary of state that really understands the issue and the dynamics of the kind of change we’re proposing,” he says.
‘Controlled implosion’
The idea for “maximum support”, Pahlavi says, draws on Western backing for Soviet and Eastern European dissidents in the last decade of the Cold War, or the international pressure that eventually led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.
“For example, what can be done to make sure that Iranians have access to information and are not cut off from the world [via] the internet?”
The second idea, concerning defections, is about the practicalities of running a revolution and minimising bloodshed: the more people who can be peeled away from the regime – bureaucrats, politicians, middle- and lower-ranking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), military and security personnel – the more likely the regime’s fall will be a relatively peaceful one. In 1979, the Iranian army’s decision to declare neutrality was key to the success of the revolution.
For evidence that the process is underway, he points to Mehdi Nasiri, a former close ally of the supreme leader and editor-in-chief of Kayhan, the most important pro-regime newspaper. Nasiri recently publicly voiced support for Pahlavi.
“He has been talking to me and that’s the beginning of that process of convergence. There are many like him who know that the impasse has been created, that you can no longer sustain the concept of reform from within,” he says. People like Nasiri prove that more and more people want to sweep away the Islamic Republic altogether, Pahlavi claims.
“We don’t want to encourage a scenario that leads to anarchy, rather a controlled implosion. But it cannot happen unless you have the tacit collaboration of military and paramilitary forces,” he says, before warning change will mean accountability for a select few.
“Those who have their hands soiled with the blood of the people will have to face justice one day. But I’m not talking about kangaroo trials.
“And beyond that, those who are neither corrupt nor criminally responsible should know that they have a place in the future, so they don’t have to think they are condemned to stick to the regime.”
Pahlavi is certainly qualified to discuss the dynamics of change. Born in 1960, the first son of Mohammad Reza and Farah Pahlavi, the then Shah and empress of Iran, his life was transformed by the political upheaval the Iranian revolution brought about.
He acknowledges that his childhood was unusual. Raised in the royal palace in leafy north Tehran, his future as king was laid out early.
He uses the word “grooming” to describe how his education was mixed with briefings on royal protocol and attending lavish official ceremonies with his parents.
It was a life of unimaginable privilege and luxury – football lessons with the national team, scuba diving with the navy. His parents encouraged him to roam Tehran, and later the rest of the country, at will, sometimes trying to escape his own security detail.
“They never kept me from trying something. They knew I loved flying, and from the very beginning they said, ‘Why not? Go ahead.’ I started flying when I was about 12. My first solo flight was on a trainer for military pilots, when I was nearly 13,” he recalls.
“In retrospect, of course, you realise, oh my god. I mean, imagine all of those opportunities, some of which I may not have had, had I not been who I was at the time.”
The realisation that such privilege also came with an enormous burden of responsibility first hit him on the day of his father’s coronation, and only grew over time.
“Call it a sense of awareness but I never rebelled against accepting that responsibility,” he says. It’s something he guesses is common to a royal upbringing. “I bet if you asked King Charles, he would have a similar story,” he adds.
A life built in exile
The day after finishing high school, Pahlavi flew to the US to begin formal training as a fighter pilot. He was at flight school in Texas when he received the news in January 1979 that his father had abdicated and fled to Egypt.
Widespread discontent with runaway inflation, inequality, corruption, the brutality of the shah’s secret police and anger among conservatives over secularisation resulted in a popular uprising.
He did not see it coming, he acknowledges. Neither, Pahlavi argues, did most of those demanding change. But by the end of 1978, the uprising had achieved unstoppable momentum.
In February 1979, a month after the shah fled, Khomeini returned from exile in France and proclaimed the Islamic Republic.
Pahlavi and his family subsequently bounced from country to country – Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, Panama and the US – in search of a safe harbour, and in constant fear of being traded for American hostages held in Iran by the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, they began to receive news of the execution of royalist officials, many of whom had been close friends. Eventually, they ended up in Cairo, where the shah died of cancer in July 1980, at the age of 60.
Pahlavi spent years searching for clarity on what to make of his life. The same year his father died, he dropped out of college in Massachusetts, where he had been studying for an undergraduate degree. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, he contacted the head of the Iranian air force to offer his services as a fighter pilot. He was turned down by the new authorities, who feared a royalist conspiracy.
An early attempt to style himself as the rightful king in exile was largely ignored by the rest of the world. Plots for a royal restoration came to nothing. Eventually, he and his mother moved to New England, where he studied for a degree in political science from the University of Southern California.
In 1985, he met Yasmine Etemad Amini, a fellow Iranian exile eight years his junior, when a mutual friend picked them both up from Washington Dulles airport. They married the following year and settled in the Washington DC area, where they have lived ever since.
The couple have three daughters – Noor, Iman, and Farah – who he says, in many respects, live normal American white-collar lives. Noor is working in biotech, Iman for American Express and Farah is finishing an undergraduate degree at Michigan State University.
Like many immigrant parents, he has tried to keep them in touch with their heritage, but has discovered that it’s not easy to learn to read and write in Farsi if you’re not immersed in it.
Yasmine, who spent the first decade of marriage working as a lawyer, has emerged as a philanthropist and public figure in her own right. She created and, until 2014, ran a foundation providing health care for Iranian children, and tirelessly uses social media to campaign for her husband.
Pahlavi credits her with making much of his project possible. She has also stirred controversy, however, most recently with an Instagram post referring to her husband as a king – despite his own public reluctance to claim the throne back.
“She’s almost like the lioness defending the den, and on the other hand, she’s very unfiltered. She says what she believes,” he says.
‘Iranians want the time of the shah, but not the shah’
If he is right about the regime’s imminent collapse, then his family’s long exile might soon be over.
But could he be doomed to become an Iranian Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of a romantic but impossible cause who simply did not understand the country he wanted to return to?
He strongly rejects the comparison. “Not based on the evidence,” he says, adding young Iranians have hope and expectation of change.
“It’s amazing the amount of popularity that exists in this generation, in terms of the respect for my grandfather and what my father tried to do.”
It’s difficult to measure the truth of that assertion. Pahlavi currently runs probably the most prominent, active and politically competent operation in a fractious opposition scene. A sampling of Iranians in exile reveals broad consensus that he also enjoys support inside the country, if simply because of name recognition.
Yet sympathy for the crown prince and anger at the current regime is not the same as desire for a return to the monarchy.
“Iranians want the time of the shah, but not the shah,” says one who believes Pahlavi has an important constitutional role to play in a future transition.
Another more recent exile thinks Pahlavi is viewed by most Iranians inside the country as a bit silly but mostly benign, and a million times preferable to Maryam Rajavi of the MEK, the other organised exiled dissident faction that courts Western politicians, but is widely hated inside the country.
Others, however, express unease at the contradiction between Pahlavi’s own unifying, conciliatory rhetoric and the behaviour of some of his followers, who have openly called for both a full royal restoration and bloody revenge against those who overthrew the monarchy in the first place. No one wants to get rid of the IRGC only to restore the shah’s secret police, remarked one.
The rapid collapse of an opposition coalition built to support Woman Life Freedom protests in 2022 has also dented his claim to be a unifying figurehead and alienated some non-monarchist dissidents.
Pahlavi himself studiously avoids the question of a royal restoration. He has ceased styling himself as returning king, instead posing as a kind of frontman for the transition.
The question of monarchy or republic, he has long said, should be a question for the Iranian public. He says it should be decided in a referendum after the current regime has fallen and a secular democracy has been established.
Though he never expressly rules out a return to the Peacock Throne, Pahlavi is clear that he is not interested in running for public office.
But making Iran a secular democracy, he says, is his full-time job. There is really nothing he would rather be doing with his life. Except perhaps one thing, that is.
“Flying,” he says, when asked what he misses of his earlier years. “There’s something special about that moment of getting into a cockpit. A sense of freedom. I try to do it whenever I have the opportunity, but there is less and less time for it.”
You can listen to the full interview on The Telegraph’s Battle Lines podcast.
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