RUTHFULLY YOURS

As Khamenei was forming his views, the country was in tumult. In 1953, an American-backed coup had displaced Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister. He was replaced by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who dominated the country, with help from the U.S. and from a ruthless force of secret police. In the years that followed, an exiled ayatollah named Ruhollah Khomeini raised an increasingly fervid opposition, built around the idea that a state led by clerics, answerable only to God and set against Western notions of modernity, could lift up the country after decades of humiliation.

Khamenei embraced this revolutionary world view and began travelling the country, urging clerics to rouse their congregants. Soon after, he got married, and his wife, Mansoureh, was struck by his intense conviction. “In the first months of our marriage, my husband asked me, ‘How would you feel if I was arrested?’ ” she said, in a 1993 interview with an Iranian women’s magazine. “I was very upset at first. But he spoke about the clashes, the risks and problems, and how this is the duty of all people, and that convinced me completely.”

Khamenei was imprisoned six times by the Shah’s secret police, including a stint, in 1974, at a Tehran prison euphemistically named the Joint Anti-Sabotage Committee. Houshang Asadi, a cellmate there, remembers him as a kindly if austere man, gentle enough to feed one of his fellow-prisoners after a session of torture. Khamenei would read the Quran aloud and sob, lost in the words of the Prophet, or simply peer at the sky through the bars of his cell. Asadi, an atheist, preferred to pass the time by entertaining his cellmates with a large repertoire of jokes. “Whenever I told a sex joke, Khamenei didn’t like it,” Asadi said when I met him in Paris, where he lives in exile. “I told them anyway, because everyone else liked them. He would plead with me to stop.”

After the Shah fled, in 1979, and Khomeini became the country’s Supreme Leader, Khamenei was named the deputy defense minister, and the Friday prayer leader for the city of Tehran. He started amid a crisis. Not long before, a group of young zealots had stormed the American Embassy and taken fifty-two hostages, most of them diplomats, whom they accused of being spies. The siege lasted four hundred and forty-four days and destroyed any hope of an early American-Iranian rapprochement.

Khamenei opposed the seizure at first, but endorsed it when it became impossible to undo. John Limbert, a political officer who was among those held at the Embassy, recalled that, several months into the ordeal, Khamenei visited with a camera crew, intending to show that the hostages were well treated. Limbert tried to turn the tables, pretending that he was hosting Khamenei in his home. “I apologized for not being able to offer him anything to eat or drink, and for the really bad conditions,” Limbert told me. “He didn’t apologize, but he was confused and embarrassed. He knew I was taunting him.”

The revolutionary government had established itself, but it was not fully in control. In 1980, Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, sent his army across the border, beginning a catastrophic war that lasted eight years and killed as many as a million people. Within Iran, the leftist groups that had once fought alongside the Islamists were excluded from power; when Khomeini led a crackdown on his former allies, some of them fought back. Among them was the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an extremist group bolstered by funding from Saddam. The M.E.K. established a vast camp in Iraq, where a cultish atmosphere prevailed, with spouses banned and members required to record their sexual thoughts in special notebooks. From across the border, the group launched a campaign of assassination and terror attacks.

In June, 1981, as Khamenei prepared to give a sermon at Tehran’s Abouzar Mosque, a bomb, planted in a tape recorder and placed in front of him, exploded. He was gravely wounded; according to his own account of the incident, his pulse stopped. He lost his hearing in one ear and the use of his right arm. Afterward, he gave a bluff assessment of the injury’s effects: “I won’t need the hand; it would suffice if my brain and tongue work.” But people who knew him said that he seemed changed. The relative who grew up with him noted that he shakes hands only with his left hand. “For forty years, he’s had a piece of meat hanging from his body, and it still causes him pain,” he said. “This personal experience made him deeply angry inside—it gave him a grudge against people.” A few months after the attack, Khamenei was elected President.

Eight years later, Khomeini died, leaving the revolution without a unifying figure. According to Iran’s constitution, the Supreme Leader would be chosen by a group of senior clerics known as the Assembly of Experts. Khamenei was a member of the assembly, but not a highly placed one and not a favorite for the job. His selection was engineered by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the dominant political leaders of his time, who replaced Khamenei as President; many believe that he saw Khamenei as easy to manipulate. When the choice was announced, Khamenei made a show of proclaiming his lack of expertise in Islamic theology. “I am truly not worthy of this title,” he told the assembly. “My nomination should make us all cry tears of blood.” Skeptics regarded this as a classic display of taarof, a Persian tradition of overweening, even insincere politeness.

The job gave Khamenei nearly absolute power: control of every branch of the government, command of the armed forces, and supervision of the judiciary. He proved to be a nimble and energetic autocrat, creating a parallel structure for each institution. “This is how he kept everyone weak,” Mehdi Khalaji, a former Shiite cleric in Iran who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. Khamenei also oversaw the country’s largest concentrations of wealth: an array of institutional funds, built on property seized from the Shah’s élite, which came to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

By this time, Khamenei and Mansoureh had four sons and two daughters; he moved the family into a house in central Tehran, at the end of Palestine Street, and walled it off from the public. The compound eventually grew to contain some fifty buildings, but Khamenei presented himself as an ascetic, dressing and eating simply. “We do not have decorations, in the usual sense,” Mansoureh told the women’s magazine. “Years ago, we freed ourselves from these things.” (There were no pictures of her accompanying the interview. In four decades, she has never been seen in a photograph.)

In office, though, Khamenei moved fiercely against his enemies. He continued the regime’s efforts to assassinate turncoat exiles, killing as many as a hundred and sixty people worldwide. He also helped preside over a murderous campaign against the M.E.K., in which tens of thousands of members were executed. Khamenei, still convinced of the power of literature, made dissident writers and intellectuals a special target, banning books, closing newspapers, and imprisoning artists. “Poetry must be the vanguard of the caravan of the revolution,” he decreed.

Over the years, reformers in and out of the government pushed to strengthen the rule of law, to allow the press greater freedom, and to curtail abuses by security forces. Time and again, Khamenei sabotaged any serious effort at liberalization. One of the most notable moments came in 1997, when a reformist candidate named Mohammad Khatami won the Presidency in a landslide. As Khatami began to pursue his agenda, he encountered immediate resistance from inside the regime. Early in his term, the country was shaken by what became known as the Chain Murders: the killing of about eighty artists and dissident intellectuals, some of whom were mutilated, stabbed, or given lethal injections. The press, seizing on the new freedom that Khatami allowed, produced a series of exposés, revealing that the murders had been carried out by operatives from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, largely to terrorize Khatami’s most articulate supporters.

In response, the Iranian government closed the newspaper Salam, which had reported vigorously on the scandal. Protests began at Tehran University, and quickly spread to colleges around the country. Khamenei had initially expressed revulsion at the murders, but, when it became clear that the protesters threatened his power, he turned on them. Security forces attacked a dormitory at Tehran University, killing four students, wounding three hundred, and arresting four hundred more. Khamenei was unmoved. “Officials in the government, especially those in charge of public security, have been emphatically instructed to put down the corrupt and warring elements with insight and power,” he said. Khatami, rendered virtually powerless, left office in 2005.

This February 11th, the forty-first anniversary of the revolution, a celebration was scheduled for downtown Tehran. I was at a restaurant in the city that morning, when a waitress overheard me discussing plans to attend. “You’re going?” she asked with a sneer. “They force people to be there—they blackmail them. They tell people that if they don’t go they will lose their jobs.”

A parade wound down Independence Boulevard for more than two miles. Along the way, placards proclaimed the victory of the revolution, and on every block hung portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei. The festivities seemed subdued, though, with small bands of marchers shepherding kids bundled against the cold. Some of the attendees dutifully cried “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” But when Hassan Rouhani, the country’s President, came to the lectern in Freedom Square there was barely a murmur. Most people carried on talking to one another. “Rouhani promised that after the nuclear deal most of our problems would be solved,” a woman named Majideh told me. “We decided to believe in a miracle. Look what happened.”

The sense of unreality didn’t stop at the parade; it accompanied me throughout my time in Iran. Even the circumstances of my arrival seemed cynically managed. I’d been asking for years for permission to visit, only to be refused. Then, in February, I got an unanticipated call from the Iranian Interests Section, in Washington, informing me that a visa had been approved. (Some Iranians suggested that, with international tensions high and the pandemic still in its early stages, the regime wanted to make a show of confidence.) The visa, I was told, took effect immediately and would expire in six days. I ran for the airport.

In Tehran, I was met by a pleasant, capable woman, assigned by a government contractor to be my guide. The arrangement was designed to limit my contact to people approved by the government. It meant that the most revealing conversations were those I set up on my own, with Iranians willing to risk meeting me after my minder had gone home for the evening. There weren’t many takers. Early in my visit, a Tehran lawyer, who quietly supports women’s-rights initiatives, offered to bring together activists from four separate organizations. They all refused. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

The dissidents who agreed to meet me spoke of surviving waves of reform and repression. One night, I met Bahman Ahmadi Amouee, a journalist and an activist, at a quiet restaurant, where we shared a meal of kebab koobideh, an Iranian specialty of minced lamb and spices. In the late nineties, when Khatami loosened constraints on the press, Amouee made the most of it. As a reporter for a newspaper called Hamshahri, he wrote a series detailing how businessmen and senior government officials exploited the country’s closed market to enrich themselves. One memorable article asked why nearly all of Iran’s chadors—the head-to-toe cloaks worn by most women—were imported. “The reason for this,” he told me, “is that powerful people, in the government and out, get rich from the imports and by blocking competition.” Amouee’s pieces were read and discussed all over Tehran; criticizing the government was an exhilarating novelty. Khatami wasn’t thrilled, Amouee said, but “he tolerated it.”

Amouee also covered the Presidential election of 2009, which turned out to be the starkest test of Khamenei’s commitment to popular rule. The election pitted a conservative incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against a well-liked challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Almost immediately after the polls closed, the authorities declared Ahmadinejad the winner—seemingly too soon for the votes to have been counted. Iranians, especially those from the educated middle class, poured into the streets to protest that the outcome had been rigged. It was the beginning of what came to be called the Green Movement.

Amouee and his wife, Jila Baniyaghoob, a journalist and a women’s-rights activist, joined the protests. “The regime stole the election,” he said. “The people wanted their dignity.” But, as the demonstrations gained strength, the security forces swept in, arresting, beating, and killing protesters. Khamenei expressed regret for the violence, but also made it clear that the protesters were going too far. “They are not related to the candidates,” he said. “They are related to the vandals, to the rioters.” On the ninth day of protests, police came to Amouee’s home and arrested him and Baniyaghoob for spreading anti-government propaganda. She was sentenced to a year in prison; he was sentenced to five. For the first three months, he was confined to a closet-size solitary cell, where the lights were always on—“white torture,” he called it. “I couldn’t feel anything, I couldn’t smell anything. I just wanted to talk to someone, but there was no one. I talk in my mind, sometimes I lose my mind.”

By the time the demonstrations subsided, ten months later, Mousavi was under arrest, and some four thousand demonstrators had been detained; at least seventy had been killed, and many others raped and tortured in prison. But the election and the protests marked a turning point for the Islamic Republic. Months later, a leaked video of a meeting of Revolutionary Guard commanders spread to the Internet. In the video, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, who was then the leader of the Guard, said that the problem was not that a reformist was prevented from capturing the Presidency—it was that the reformers had challenged the tenets of the revolution. “It was a blow that weakened the fundamental pillars of the regime,” he said. The protests had presented the ruling class with a “new paradigm,” in which it could no longer count on popular support, he said. “Anyone who refuses to understand these new conditions will not be successful.”

Amouee was released in 2014. Since then, he’s been bouncing from job to job, working as an editor and sometimes writing without a byline. (His memoir, “Life in Prison,” was published last month in the United States.) I asked if he felt safe talking to me, and whether he wanted his name published. He didn’t hesitate. “It is my right,” he said. After dinner, as Amouee and I drove to my hotel, we passed a darkened intersection, where armed officers were pulling over cars and searching them. “It’s all about maintaining fear,” he said.

Khamenei did not always project menace. When he was first chosen to be the Supreme Leader, he was seen as weak, lacking the respect of his fellow-clergymen. So he turned to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. To build support, he reached far down into the ranks and appointed new colonels and brigadiers. “Khamenei micromanages the whole system, so everyone is loyal to him,” Khalaji, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. “He is hyperactive. He knows every low-ranking commander and even the names of their children.” The I.R.G.C. became the principal basis of Khamenei’s power. In turn, he made it the country’s preëminent security institution.

During the Green Movement, the Guard and its plainclothes militia, known as the Basij, were instrumental in crushing dissent. According to Abbas Milani, the director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford and a former political prisoner in Iran, the uprising amounted to a political anointment. “Clearly, the regime believed it was going to lose control, and the I.R.G.C. and the Basij saved the day,” Milani said. “The result is that the I.R.G.C. now has the upper hand. Khamenei knows that without the I.R.G.C. he’d be out of a job in twenty-four hours.”

The most visible symbol of the I.R.G.C.’s strength is the Basij, whose members can be seen on street corners in every Iranian city. A less visible measure is its manipulation of the economy. When the clerics took hold, after the revolution, they secured control of large sectors of the economy, including oil production, factories, and ports. During the next two decades, an array of state-owned enterprises were privatized—but, rather than going to skilled businesspeople, many of them were acquired by the I.R.G.C. and its associates. Today, elements of the Guard are thought to own construction companies, oil refineries, and mines, along with a nineteen-story luxury mall in a posh neighborhood of Tehran. No one is entirely sure how much of the economy the group controls; credible estimates range from ten per cent to more than fifty. One indication of its wealth came in 2009, when its investment arm paid $7.8 billion for a majority stake in the Telecommunication Company of Iran; the I.R.G.C.’s total budget, on paper, was only five billion. In Iranian society, the Guard has grown into an untouchable élite. “They have their own schools, their own markets, their own neighborhoods, their own resorts,” a former senior Middle Eastern intelligence officer told me. “The neighborhoods look like a carbon copy of Beverly Hills.”

Since taking office, Trump has made a series of efforts to strangle the I.R.G.C. In 2017, the Treasury Department designated the Guard as a terrorist organization, and Secretary Steven Mnuchin pledged to “disrupt the I.R.G.C.’s destructive activities.” But sanctions imposed by the West had a perverse effect. Because few countries could trade with Iran, the businesses that the I.R.G.C. controlled came to exercise near-monopolies within the country. As the U.S. and its allies policed international shipping, the I.R.G.C. tightened its hold on the sea-lanes and the airports, where oil smuggling and drug trafficking were flourishing.

When Rouhani became President, in 2013, he started working to restrain the I.R.G.C.’s power. He moved to take away some of its business holdings, encouraging the idea that “all soldiers must return to the barracks.” He also led negotiations with the West over the country’s nuclear program, which the Guard oversees. But both initiatives ultimately foundered, and the I.R.G.C. pushed back with a campaign of its own. In 2017, prosecutors, many of them loyal to the Guard, began a series of criminal investigations of people close to Rouhani, imprisoning his brother on corruption charges.

Tensions became so acute that officials publicly discussed efforts to neutralize Rouhani. In a speech in August, 2018, Khamenei complained of usurpers who were “working on the enemy’s plan.” Two months later, Ezzatollah Zarghami, a former I.R.G.C. general and head of Iranian state broadcasting, said in an interview that the chiefs of several leading state enterprises had been preparing to “take over in many of those areas and manage them instead of the government.”

The effort was thwarted, but there may have been another. Masoud Bastani, an Iranian journalist whose reporting has landed him in prison three times, told me that, late last year, the I.R.G.C. was moving to strip Rouhani of much of his power. A source who is familiar with the inner workings of the Guard told me that officers were planning to arrest roughly a hundred people close to the President.

But, before anything could happen, Rouhani’s administration threw the country into chaos. On November 15th, the government announced that it was raising the price of gasoline by fifty per cent. The news was released quietly—in the middle of the night, on a national holiday—but it was still met with outrage; Iranians drive everywhere, and rely on government-subsidized gasoline. Ordinary citizens began swarming into the streets to protest, touching off the largest and most disruptive riots since the revolution.

On the second day of the protests, Pouya Shirpisheh, a twenty-seven-year-old electrical engineer, was driving home from work, in the Tehran suburb of Karaj, when he passed a crowd gathering to demonstrate; social media had been pulsing all day with talk of the protests. At home, he shared a lunch of okra stew with his mother, Nahid. Afterward, he told her that he was heading into the streets, and asked if she wanted to come along. She agreed, on one condition: “Only if you hold my hand.” Pouya’s sister, Mona, decided to join him, too.

The Shirpishehs were sick of the revolution, even though Pouya’s father had fought in the Revolutionary Guard for five years during the Iran-Iraq War. Pouya, who was hoping to marry soon and build a life, loathed it most. “Pouya loved poetry and nature—he saw beauty in everything,” Nahid told me. “He also loved history, and he used to say these clerics have ruined our country. He used to say, ‘We’ve never had such a terrible time, ever, in our history.’ ” The protests quickly became an outlet for broader frustrations. “We can see that the government is spending our money on other countries, sending it to Hamas, to Syria and Hezbollah,” Nahid said. “The protests weren’t about gasoline. They were about protesting the same bunch of people in charge for forty years, deliberately seeking a fight with the U.S. It is these people who have turned Iran into a pariah state. We cannot have any fun—Iran is a joyless religious dictatorship. We are forced into fake identities.”

As the family joined the demonstration, Nahid experienced a rush of euphoria. The crowd was angry, but not violent. “America is not the enemy!” the marchers roared. “The enemy is here!” The police fired tear gas, but the marchers kept surging forward. Nahid felt suddenly free: “I turned to Mona and said, ‘This is the best night of my life.’ ”

Pouya told his mother that he’d torn his shoe and was heading back to the car, and then he disappeared into the crowd. Nahid heard the sound of gunfire, sporadic at first and then sustained. She pushed through the throng, seeing people fall around her, bleeding from gunshot wounds. “How horrible it will be for the mothers of these sons,” she told herself. Then she spotted Pouya in the arms of a group of protesters. He had been shot in the head. “That’s my son!” she screamed. Nahid and Mona pulled Pouya into the car and raced him to a hospital. He was dead before they arrived.

The following days brought no relief to the family. “I was crazy with grief,” Nahid said. At first, the security forces refused to turn over Pouya’s body. Then they dragged Nahid and her husband to the police station for questioning. Plainclothes officers lingered outside the family’s home. Men called on the phone and threatened them, she said: “When we asked who killed Pouya, the agent said it must be the M.E.K.,” the opposition group. When they finally received Pouya’s body, two thousand sympathizers turned out for a ceremony to mourn his death; policemen lurked at the periphery. In the months after her son’s death, Nahid began to visit the mothers of other slain Iranians. “The crackdown showed us that this regime will do whatever it takes to hold on to power,” she said.

The November demonstrations were remarkably distinct from those in 2009. The earlier protests were led by the middle class and by university students, and took place largely in major cities. The more recent demonstrations were begun by workers, the regime’s traditional base, and spread rapidly throughout the country. They also turned violent; in many cities, demonstrators burned stores and trashed police stations. “The 2009 protests showed that the regime had lost the middle class,” a shop owner who witnessed protests in his Tehran suburb told me. “The protests in November show that they’ve lost the working class, too.”

The regime struck back brutally. “It happened very fast,” a Western diplomat in Tehran told me. “The government switched off the phones and the Internet and responded massively—and the whole thing was over in three days. I think the regime was genuinely afraid.” Iranian authorities confirmed that some seven thousand people had been arrested, but they have not disclosed the number of civilians killed. Amnesty International estimated the death toll at three hundred; Reuters, citing unnamed officials close to Khamenei, put the number at fifteen hundred. One dissident politician I spoke to endorsed the higher number, saying that she had been told two hundred people were buried in one area in a single night. “Then there is the second phase by the police, which few people talk about,” she added. “They examine photographs of license plates to identify leaders and speak to informants to identify more. They arrest these people, too.”

In a nearly unprecedented sign of unrest, the demonstrators began to fight back. According to Iranian news accounts, at least six police officers and soldiers were killed, apparently by protesters. Four of them were shot to death, even though civilians are largely forbidden to have guns; others were stabbed. Security forces encountered resistance in such areas as Kurdistan and Khuzestan, which border neighboring countries. A YouTube video, purportedly taken in Khuzestan, shows security forces shooting civilians as they flee into a marsh. “That suggests there is some kind of organized resistance,” Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, in Washington, said. “Ordinary civilians don’t hide in a marsh.”

A few politicians tried to raise an outcry. Parvaneh Salahshouri, a member of parliament, made a speech from the floor of the legislature, in which she denounced the military’s influence on the government’s decisions. “How can I, as a representative of the people, watch the murder of my country’s young?” she said. She told me that she was accosted and harassed for days afterward.