Who Was Really Running Iran?
Notes on the Middle East, No. 1
I keep returning to a question about Iran that I think gets at something larger than Iran.
When Ali Khamenei was killed in the joint US-Israeli strikes, the assumption among most Western observers was that the succession would be chaotic, contested, a drawn-out power struggle among senior clerics and IRGC factions. That isn’t what happened. The Assembly of Experts, reportedly under heavy pressure from the IRGC, moved within days to name Khamenei’s son Mojtaba as the next Supreme Leader, and they did it while the country was still under active bombardment. The question I keep circling is whether that speed tells us the outcome was planned all along, or whether something else is going on, something that implicates how we read power in this part of the world more broadly.
This newsletter is an attempt to think through questions like that one, in public, at the pace they arrive. I’ve spent years working on the intellectual agenda for rooms where Gulf sovereign wealth funds and the biggest names in global finance sit together and try to make sense of the world, and the Middle East has always been central to that work. What I haven’t done, until now, is force myself to write about the region, which is a different discipline entirely, one that makes you commit, makes you find out where your understanding is solid, where it’s thinner than you thought. I’d rather do that honestly than perform expertise that goes beyond what I actually know.
So: Mojtaba. Here is what I find genuinely puzzling about him.
The Islamic Republic was born from a revolution that dismantled dynastic rule, and that was the entire point of the enterprise. The Pahlavis, a monarchy backed by Washington, were replaced by a clerical republic that derived its legitimacy from God and the people rather than bloodlines. Father-to-son succession is, within that founding logic, practically heretical, and Khamenei himself reportedly opposed it.
And the son in question does not look, on paper, like someone the system should have elevated. Mojtaba is 55 years old and has never held government office. His theological credentials are, by the standards of Iranian clerical hierarchy, thin. He spent three decades operating without a title, without a public role, and by most accounts without much of a public presence at all. What he had was proximity to his father and the informal networks he built from that proximity: relationships with IRGC commanders, with Assembly members, with the constellation of figures who orbited the Office of the Supreme Leader.
The speed of the succession invites a clean reading: this was a contingency plan, long prepared, executing on schedule. I’m drawn to that interpretation and also a little suspicious of it. Trump himself told us the strikes had “knocked out most of the candidates”, which means the senior clerics and established figures who would normally populate a succession conversation were already dead. About 40 senior officials were killed in the opening strikes alone. Mojtaba may have been the plan all along, or he may have been the last viable option in a field the strikes had already collapsed. The truth probably involves both, in proportions we can’t yet see clearly, and I want to resist the temptation to make the story tidier than it actually is.
What does seem clear is that Mojtaba’s informal networks were what allowed the succession to happen at all under those conditions. Whatever else was going on, the formal system did not produce this outcome; the informal one did.
When Trump announced the strike results, he was, probably without intending to, revealing something important about how American intelligence had been thinking about Iranian succession.
The United States had a mental map that centered on visible figures: senior clerics, established administrators, men with formal roles and public profiles. And it’s worth pausing here, because I don’t think the problem was that they didn’t see Mojtaba. The CIA had been tracking the movements of senior Iranian leaders, including Khamenei, for months. Anyone surveilling Khamenei’s inner circle with any seriousness over a period of years would have seen Mojtaba the way anyone watching the Trump White House would have seen Jared Kushner: obviously central, regardless of title. The intelligence community almost certainly knew he was a principal.
The deeper failure, if there was one, may have been in how they assessed what the system would do with him. The theological and ideological barriers to dynastic succession were real and well-documented, and I suspect the prevailing assessment was that those barriers would hold, that the Islamic Republic’s founding mythology was too strong to permit a father-to-son transfer of power even if the son happened to be the most connected figure in the regime. That turned out to be wrong, and it’s the more interesting kind of intelligence failure: they understood his influence and misjudged how the institution would behave under the stress of a decapitation strike. Which is, if you think about it, a much more common way that sophisticated people get things wrong.
I see versions of this in my own professional world all the time, people who understand every node on the org chart, can map the formal power structure of any institution with real precision, and still get blindsided when the institution does something the chart didn’t predict. The formal architecture is legible. The informal one, the thing that actually determines outcomes under stress, is much harder to see.
There is a concept in organization theory, one I’ve spent years thinking about in the context of how major institutions actually function versus how they present themselves, sometimes called the shadow org chart.
Every institution has one: the map of who actually makes decisions, who actually gets listened to, who holds informal veto power over things that nominally belong to someone else. The shadow org chart and the official org chart almost never match, and in most organizations the gap between the two is a source of dysfunction. What makes Iran unusual is that the gap appears to have been the succession mechanism itself.
Mojtaba’s power grew entirely through proximity, through the slow accumulation of trust inside a system that prizes loyalty above almost everything else. The Islamic Republic spent thirty-five years building a structure in which the shadow org chart was the operative chain of command, even if no one would have described it that way, and when the crisis came it was the shadow chart that held, the formal one barely registering.
I want to be careful with this framework, because it can explain too much. Every surprise looks inevitable in retrospect once you have the right lens. The shadow org chart is a useful way to think about how Mojtaba was positioned; it is less useful as a prediction of what happens next, when the informal networks that elevated him will be under enormous strain from every direction at once. Still, if the reading is even partially right, it raises an uncomfortable question: how many other things about how Iran actually works have we been misreading because we kept looking at the official chart?
Mojtaba now occupies a position that is close to ungovernable.
He inherits a country under active military attack, a succession that the most constitutionalist elements of the clerical establishment will view as illegitimate, and his father’s vow of qisas (retribution, life for life) against a Trump administration that now carries the weight of both Soleimani’s killing and Khamenei’s. He inherits an IRGC whose command structure is reportedly in partial disarray and a public that was already in the streets before the bombs fell. And he must make, almost immediately, the hardest strategic decision an Iranian leader has faced in decades: escalate, or find a path toward de-escalation that doesn’t read, domestically, as surrender.
The most compelling analysis I’ve read argues that Mojtaba may be better positioned to make a deal than anyone, and the reason is lineage. There is no evidence he is a moderate. But he is the son of the martyr, and if he decides that the regime’s survival requires compromise, he can frame that compromise as a continuation of his father’s project rather than an abandonment of it. Whether he makes that choice, or whether Washington and Jerusalem target him before he gets the chance, may determine what this region looks like for the next generation.
I started with Mojtaba because his rise captures the question I want this newsletter to keep circling: the gap between how power appears and how it actually operates. That gap is wide in this part of the world, and I encounter versions of it constantly in the rooms I work in, where very smart people make decisions based on maps that may not match the territory. Closing that gap, even partially, even imperfectly, seems like the most useful thing I can try to do here.
I won’t always get it right, but I’ll tell you when I’m guessing, update when I’m wrong.
More soon.
Notes on the Middle East is written by Karlo Dizon. He works in global capital and geopolitical strategy. These are his personal views.