JNS
“If you want to change the system, you have to kill Khamenei and the bayt before you do anything else,” Saeid Golkar told JNS.
As the Trump administration considers renewed military strikes against Iran, one question facing policymakers is who is calling the shots in Tehran.
In January, Iran International, a UK-based opposition outlet, reported that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has moved into an underground bunker amid security fears.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that day-to-day control in Iran has largely passed to Ali Larijani, the country’s most senior defense official as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
But a new report from United Against Nuclear Iran argues that despite Khamenei’s physical isolation, he continues to be the primary source of authority in the Islamic Republic through his control of the bayt-e rahbari, his 4,000-man private office that serves as a state within the state.
One of the report’s authors, Saeid Golkar, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a senior adviser at UANI, told JNS that fatally weakening the Islamic Republic would likely require striking at both Khamenei and his inner cadre in the bayt.
“Imagine you are dealing with an onion,” Golkar said. “If you want to peel it gradually, it becomes very difficult. You start to cry. But if you smash the center of it, then you tear out the onion much more easily.”
The report describes Khamenei, his family and his personal office as the “nerve center” of the Iranian regime.
They not only call the shots on questions like Khamenei’s own succession, selecting candidates for president and ultimate control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but also control 60-65% of Iran’s economy through institutions like the quasi-public bonyad religious trusts that answer directly to Khamenei and employ millions of Iranians.
Golkar told JNS that this institutional network means that limited strikes from the bottom up on IRGC commanders, like the ones that the United States and Israel carried out in June, or a top-down single strike on Khamenei are unlikely to produce regime change.
“You have to target about 1,000 people,” Golkar told JNS. “Then the system will collapse.”
“Having said that, killing Khamenei is the most important element,” he said. “There are a lot of institutions in Iran, but all of these institutions depend on one person. They were created around that person.”
In that sense, he said, Iran was unlike Venezuela, where the U.S. military operation to arrest Nicolás Maduro seems to have produced positive results in allowing Washington to reach agreements with Maduro’s successor.
“If you want to kill Khamenei—just Khamenei, without touching the bayt or without killing his son or that core—then this bayt, this office that is run by his son would very easily be able to manipulate the Assembly of Experts and with the support of the IRGC pick another leader,” Golkar told JNS.
Khamenei has four sons. His second-oldest son, Mojtaba, is “considered the most politically influential” and “often described as his father’s potential successor,” according to the report.
“The system will continue. Weaker, but will continue,” Golkar said. “Unfortunately, there is no possibility that this succession will lead to the emergence of so-called ‘moderate clergy’ as the supreme leader.”
UANI’s report concludes that as long as Khamenei and his inner circle remain in power, “meaningful political transformation inside Iran is unlikely.”
“For any meaningful change to occur in the Islamic Republic—including regime change—the bayt and its extensive apparatus must be significantly weakened through a combination of sanctions, cyber operations and military measures,” the report says. “Until this takes place, the supreme leader’s iron grip over the regime will endure, regardless of Khamenei’s disappearances.”
“He can stay in a bunker for as long as he wants and the system works through the bayt,” Golkar told JNS. “Israel tried to peel from the outside. You have to go directly. If you want to change the system, you have to kill Khamenei and the bayt before you do anything else.”
