This excerpt comes from chapter two and discusses the opportunities for insiders and the new royalty of the Iranian Republic.
After the Revolution
One generation after the revolution, established stakeholders had emerged in the new political system. Some of those who helped build the government and its intelligence and security services remained a tightly knit cohort. As one observer noted, “If you are an insider, you can pick any job you want. If you are an outsider, you have to wait outside the doors of government offices.”
However, many insiders fell out of favor with the ruling elite, and some regretted their role in creating a system they saw as increasingly cruel. Similarly, some men and women who were part of the brutal state machinery of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union later regretted their participation. In 1946, standing as a prisoner in the dock at Nuremberg, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer expressed regret for his role in building and maintaining the Nazi empire. This act of contrition, whether sincere or feigned, may have spared him the gallows. Anticommunist literature is rich in themes of guilt. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon explores the mindset of men wracked by guilt for being part of the KGB, and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate introduces Commissar Krymov, beset by self-doubt as he withers in Lubyanka prison.
Similarly, some clerics who helped create the revolutionary state later regretted their role in a revolution that turned septic. One was Ayatollah Montazeri, who helped draft the nation’s new constitution based on velayat-e faqih, or rule by Islamic jurists, a concept that “enshrined a political role for Islamic clerics.” Later, Montazeri advocated for freedoms and human rights in Iran and accused Iran’s leaders of imposing a dictatorship in the name of Islam. Montazeri appealed to the morality espoused by anti-Pahlavi clerics before the revolution, but Khamenei and his cadre mocked him for his simplicity. Around the same time, Montazeri learned that, under Khomeini’s orders, almost four thousand prisoners serving time for earlier convictions had been put to death. “This is not what we fought for,” he lamented.
Montazeri began to feel painfully responsible for his role in enshrining velayat-e faqih. He carried guilt for helping create the Guards and publicly apologized for his actions. This public declaration of guilt separated him from most of his contemporaries, who profited from the revolution.
A New Royalty
A generation after its founding, the Guards’ leadership became intertwined through marriages among political and financial leaders. There were echoes of the past. In ancient Rome, the Julians and Claudians intermarried and treated much of the empire as a family possession. Millennia later, there would be an Iranian dynastic saga of Khomeinis, Rafsanjanis, and Khatamis. Khomeini sired seven children, most of whom married the daughters or sons of government or clergy leaders. Khomeini’s surviving children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren married into prominent Shia families, including that of Imam Mousa al-Sadr, the founder of AMA:L, the precursor to Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Dr. Ali Larijani is the son-in-law of a senior leader of the revolution. His brother, Sadeq Larijani, married a woman whose brother is a prominent parliamentarian. Mohammad Ali Jafari married the sister of the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces. Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Kharrazi, the secretary general of the Hezbollah-Iran organization and an elite member of the regime, is the brother-in-law of Ali Khamenei's son and the brother of the former Iranian ambassador to France and the current director of the Iran Diplomacy website. Other prominent families married into the Guards’ political, military, and economic leadership. The Larijanis are also very wealthy. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sadeq Larijani was worth at least $300 million as of this writing. Some of the Guards, young and rebellious men in the 1970s and 1980s, became senior and powerful citizens of Iran two generations later. As their beards turned gray, they passed the leadership torch to their sons.
Summary
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students seized the American embassy and held its personnel hostage for 444 days. This date is celebrated annually in Iran, but some Western commentators mark it as the beginning of an Islamic revolution that has metastasized into a global threat. Khomeini embodied the revolution he led, creating the Guards to enforce his values and legacy. Khomeini possessed a dark charisma that many Westerners found difficult to understand. Angry and shrill, he appealed to latent nationalism, economic redistributionism, and religious fervor. This allure waned quickly for all but the most devoted. When Khomeini died in 1989, Middle East observer Daniel Pipes wrote, “Good news for Iran: The Lenin of Islam is gone.” However, Khomeini’s ideology continued to influence the Guards as a legacy.
Like the dark, penal empires of the Soviet and Nazi regimes, Iranian prisons became black holes of misery into which intellectuals, enemies, and innocents were pulled, many never to return. The Guards, merciless and swift, targeted perceived enemies of the revolution or of Islam. In February 2019, Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei called on the Guards to intensify their search for enemy infiltrators, warning that all levels of the regime had been penetrated by foes and must be “fundamentally cleansed.” In summer 2019, he proposed a plan to upgrade the judiciary that would suppress political dissent “without delay.”
