🤡 Reza Pahlavi: meet the shah wannabe the US & Israel want to install in Iran

Self-proclaimed ‘crown prince of Iran’ Reza Pahlavi is calling for a “nationwide uprising” amid Israel’s strikes, trotting out a 100-day “transitional period” scenario to set up a new “democratic” government.

Pahlavi, 64, is the second child and eldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA & MI6-backed monarch installed in the 1953 coup against democratically elected PM Mosaddegh after his nationalization of Iran’s oil industry.

Sent to the US for military pilot training in 1978, Reza never returned to Iran after the 1979 Revolution triggered by his father’s autocracy, corruption and repression toppled the Shah’s regime.

The Pahlavi family has been accused of stashing up to tens of billions of dollars abroad before the Revolution. The crown prince’s net worth is estimated at $200M to $1B. Besides his part-time anti-government ‘activism’, he is jobless.

👁 Intel links

Reza lives in a gated compound outside Washington, DC with his wife and three daughters, none of whom have ever been to Iran.

He has fostered warm ties with Israel, visiting in 2023, and warmly received by Benjamin Netanyahu and intelligence minister Gila Gamliel.

He’s also schmoozed with US officials and think tanks. Denying links to the CIA, he admitted to AP in 2017 that in his quest to “liberate” Iran, he would be ready to work “with anyone who is willing to give us a hand, whether it is the US or the Saudis or the Israelis or whomever it is.”

Clown Prince 🤡

Even among Iran’s fragmented opposition, support for Pahlavi is restricted to Shah nostalgics looking at Iran’s past through rose-colored glasses.

Known by detractors as the ‘clown prince’, Reza’s existence is actually a boon to Iran’s current government, reminding younger Iranians of the kind of regime the West wants to install in place of the Islamic Republic.

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