An Iranian Network Is Ready to Act
· The Atlantic
The question of whether to bomb the Islamic Republic of Iran into oblivion has been much on the minds of decision makers in Washington. The most obvious alternative is to let Tehran slouch toward oblivion all by itself. Iran’s currency is sliding toward zero; its “Axis of Resistance,” the military strategy that appeared invincible just two years ago, has been wrecked by an Israeli-led campaign of assassinations, bombings, and exploding beepers; its people want to kill the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and are worried that biology (he is an 86-year-old cancer survivor) will get to him first.
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“There is no time pressure: The regime is already a goner,” Danny Citrinowicz, who led Iran analysis for Israel Defense Intelligence, told me. The problem is the absence of a coalition that can take over the government. Protesters in Tehran have chanted the name Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah who is based in Washington, D.C., but Pahlavi has “zero influence on the ground” in Iran, Citrinowicz said. Without a replacement government, the result of an attack could be civil war. “There are bad options and worse options right now, and an attack, when you don’t have a viable opposition, is definitely worse.”
Last month, an Iranian exile named Jaber Rajabi reached out to me by WhatsApp to make a case for something between bombing to oblivion and waiting. I had met him in person twice, and early this month, we met for a third time, in Dubai. Iran was recovering its composure after January’s protests, and had hinted that it might strike Dubai if provoked. Rajabi was for the better part of two decades a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic, in Iran and abroad, and spent years working with militias that were trying to kill Americans in Iraq. Like a Shiite Forrest Gump, he fought for the Iranian regime and mixed socially with its leadership. In Qom, Iran’s center of clerical learning, he was a study partner of the supreme leader’s son and potential successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, and knew the supreme leader himself through that connection. He is now a regime opponent, vocal in exile, and (like Gump) in a lucrative business career after his military service.
[Read: Anything could happen in Iran]
Along with Citrinowicz, Rajabi doubted that Pahlavi could do much, other than get Iranians massacred. “You want to remove a dictator and replace him with another?” he asked me. “He is a gift to the regime: They will fight to the death if they think he is the alternative.” But he said that Ali Khamenei must die—and that time is not as favorable to the regime’s enemies as they think. “The danger that nothing will happen is greater than the danger that something will happen,” he said. “If the regime does not fall this year, it will last for another 50.”
The solution, Rajabi said, is a light culling of the top of the regime. “There are about 10 people who need to be eliminated,” he said, and another 2,700 who need to be sidelined and offered amnesty. He claimed that networks of regime enemies have infiltrated the government, and that Iran’s enemies will need them if they wish to end the regime without chaos. “If someone from inside the system opens the window, it will open,” he said. His network is ready to act. “If the United States does not kill the ones who need to be killed,” he promised, “we will do it ourselves.”
There is a long tradition of disaffected patriots talking a big game in exile, and boasting of having agents already embedded and prepared to effect a seamless coup, if only a more powerful country would help them. Being skeptical of Rajabi’s network’s ability to do what it promises is reasonable. But sometimes, improbable ideas are useful for training one’s intuition and imagination. Although Rajabi’s plan might not describe what will happen, it provides a rough outline of what might need to happen to avoid the opposing dangers of doing nothing and attacking without a plan for what comes next.
The Iranian-exile community is diverse and strange. The two most prominent figures are Pahlavi and Masih Alinejad, the indomitable anti-headscarf activist who survived an assassination attempt in Brooklyn in 2022. Rajabi is nowhere near as famous as these two, but he is unquestionably stranger, and more deeply connected to Iran and its organs of power. He has bled for the Islamic Republic, worked in its politics, and (he claims) survived its multiple attempts to kill him—most recently with a dose of poison that has left his body ravaged. He went into exile in 2021 and now lives in the United Arab Emirates, under protection. When I first met him, in 2024, he imposed unusually thorough security measures. I was told to turn off my phone and get into a Maybach with blacked-out windows. The car drove around the city for nearly an hour before pulling up to a villa with a pool and an entryway whose ceilings echoed when he greeted me. He was not sorry for the protocol, and said that Iranians periodically send him threats, usually through his old militia friends in Iraq, and he expected that eventually they would kill him. (He showed me photographs and videos from many of the stages in his career and answered detailed questions about them. The answers were consistent across interviews, but it is difficult to confirm all of the facts.)
Rajabi told me many wild stories, but the one that I found most remarkable was among the first he shared: that he had recently turned 40. He looked several years younger, perhaps owing to the waxy, taut skin turgor of someone who recently survived a poisoning. I remarked on his healthy appearance, and without taking the compliment, he opened his mouth for me to see the artificial chompers that replaced the ones his poisoning had rotted out. He had other hidden debilities. He took my hand and guided it through his black hair and over the dome of his skull. It felt bumpy and compromised, like the shell of a boiled egg after being tapped with a spoon. “I was in Samarra,” he said, fighting against the Islamic State in Iraq in 2017. “I looked behind me and saw a cloud of dust. Then blood started pouring into my eyes.” A sniper’s bullet had ripped across his head, plowing up bone and skin and sowing bullet fragments. These remain embedded in his head.
[From the October 2025 issue: The neighbor from hell]
Rajabi grew up in a home broken by war—a fitting beginning, perhaps, to a life that would be punctuated by combat. His father died while fighting in the Iran-Iraq War, and his mother worked for a period in the office of Ali Khamenei. Rajabi said that he had problems at home and fled to Iraq before the U.S.-led 2003 invasion, to study at a Shiite seminary in Najaf. Within a year of his arrival, he and nearly all of his fellow seminarians had joined a militia. Their goal, he said, was to defend Shiite holy sites. But by 2004, under the leadership of the Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, they were fighting the Americans and dying in large numbers. Rajabi, as a rare Iranian among the shrine guards, became a liaison to the Iranian military when it decided to support Sadr’s army. Rajabi claims that in Najaf, in early 2004, he met Abd al-Reza Shahlai—later a top planner of Iran’s operations in Iraq and Yemen—and Imad Mughniyeh, the legendary military chief of Hezbollah and the most elusive Shiite terrorist in the world. (Four years later, CIA and Mossad killed him in Damascus, using a Mitsubishi rigged with a bomb.)
In 2004, in the Battle of Najaf, Rajabi was shot in the right shoulder. “I was unconscious,” he told me. “I lost a great deal of blood.” Medevaced with the other Sadrists, nearly all Iraqi, to Tehran, he woke up in Baghiyyatollah al-Azam Military Hospital, which is run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He said the hospital staff were unaware that he was Iranian until he woke up speaking Persian. The IRGC detained him. “They were not rude, but they made it clear that I could not go,” Rajabi said. “Then they said I was free but asked if I might join them for lunch first.” They drove him to a simple villa in north Tehran, where he was surprised to find Qassem Suleimani, the architect of Iran’s Axis of Resistance strategy, welcoming him at the door.
Suleimani was friendly. “He knew my father and grandfather were both martyrs,” Rajabi told me, “and he said he was impressed that a kid from Tehran could have made it in Najaf alone.” Then he left Rajabi to be interrogated. For a week, Suleimani’s people took notes on the Iraqi factions and their respective willingness to work on Tehran’s behalf. Suleimani then returned, Rajabi said, and told him that Iran wanted him to go back to the militias, be friendly with them, and make sure Moqtada al-Sadr was shown all hospitality when he visited Iran. He gave Rajabi $25,000 and a Nissan Maxima for this purpose.
Rajabi spent most of the next decade in Iraq, working with militias to strengthen the Shiite hand there. He was a founder or early member of two militias that continue to be Iranian proxies today: Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and Harakat al-Nujaba. He told me that the Americans caught and imprisoned him but never found out his real identity.
Getting shot increased his idealism. Moving into management destroyed it. He said that Iran’s plan for Iraq disabused him of the notion that Iran wanted to turn its neighbor into a Shiite theocracy along Iranian lines. Instead, Iraq was a tool, a way for IRGC leaders to make money through smuggling and black marketeering. Rather than make Iraq strong, they wanted the militias to bicker with one another and even fight—anything to keep an Iraqi state from challenging Iran’s status as Shiite supremo. “You simply cannot have a country that is made up of bickering militias,” he told me. Rajabi’s own militias were supposed to keep losing, forever. “When the truth came, it was like a punch to the face.”
Rajabi eventually retired from fighting, spent a brief period with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and then returned to Iran for religious study and a role as a foreign-policy adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad had come into office in 2005 as a hard-line antidote to his reformist predecessor, Muhammad Khatami. Ahmadinejad, for most of his term, played the part grandly, using harsh anti-U.S. and anti-Israel rhetoric, as well as dallying with Holocaust denial and other battiness. Rajabi offered a direct connection to the foreign networks that Ahmadinejad—who came up in politics through domestic channels, as a Tehran mayor—did not know well. And his disillusion with Iran’s foreign policy closely tracked Ahmadinejad’s own.
By the end of Ahmadinejad’s term, the president had been denounced by clerical hard-liners as a softy and a reformist. These hard-liners were astute. After the Green Revolt of 2009, Ahmadinejad inclined toward secular nationalism and briefly took over sensitive portfolios formerly reserved for Khamenei. This insubordination led to Ahmadinejad’s ouster, the purge of his sympathizers from government, and surveillance against him and his network that continues to this day. Rajabi’s fortunes fell with his boss’s, and the attempts on his life began, he said, after he accused IRGC leaders of corruption in Iraq. Once, someone tried to rig a door handle to electrocute him (this Looney Tunes–style assassination plot failed for technical reasons), and another time, he survived an attempted shooting. After the poisoning that rotted his teeth, he decided to leave and used government connections to circumvent a no-travel order to get out.
Ahmadinejad’s ability to travel and take part in public life has been severely curtailed, and his rare public appearances suggest a strange turn from Shiite theocracy toward … something else. In 2018, he tweeted about his fervent desire that the University of Michigan football team would “return to its glory days.”
When I returned to Dubai to see Rajabi this month, he told me that his affection for Ahmadinejad was undiminished. “I am personally indebted to that man,” Rajabi said, “and I view him as the one figure with enough domestic support to lead Iran.” Rajabi said that Ahmadinejad is not leading any group, but his former vice president, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, is a central figure in anti-regime networks. The Iranian opposition remains fragmented, and it’s difficult to tell how many from one faction would tolerate someone from another. (The Pahlavi people in particular seem reluctant to share power.) Ahmadinejad’s decade out of office has led many to suspect that his networks are useless and withered. The protesters in January were carrying pictures of the shah, not of Ahmadinejad or Rajabi, and as the intelligence analyst Citrinowicz told me, “You can’t expect much of a guy who has been stuck in his house for the last 15 years.”
“Khamenei stands in the middle of a sea of blood, and to reach him, you have to swim through blood yourself,” Rajabi said. He told me that the killings last month foreclosed the possibility of a peaceful transition. So many Iranians sympathetic to the regime are now implicated that they are convinced that the only way out is further violence. “Khamenei has made them believe there is no retreat.” The talk of a Pahlavi transition, Rajabi said, frightens them: They think that if the regime falls, everyone who took part in violence will be massacred in return.
[Read: The ‘existential anxiety’ of the Islamic Republic]
But Rajabi says only the top leaders of the Islamic Republic need to be eliminated: “10 people—that’s it,” he told me repeatedly. The United States can help with this task, but Rajabi thinks it could be onshored to existing networks within the regime if necessary. The targets would include the supreme leader and his son Mojtaba: “If we get rid of these 10, the rest can be controlled.” According to Rajabi, the network of people in the government actively working for his faction is far greater than outsiders think. Rajabi referred to it variously as a “network” and an “organization,” and said that the government could not eliminate it even if it tried. “They don’t know who manages it,” he told me. “They don’t know the parts.” He said that 50 parliamentarians are in the network, as well as people in the security apparatus at all levels.
Rajabi said that the advantage of leveraging a network of infiltrators is that the network has already categorized everyone currently on the regime payroll into three groups: who can be trusted to work with a new regime, who needs to be retired, and who needs to die. In addition to the unfortunate 10 in the last category, Rajabi counts 2,700—their names already on a list—in the lucky middle. “We would need to move against these on the first night,” he told me. “Without the leaders, these ones would not be able to move their feet.” These immobilized stalwarts should then be bought off, he said: “Even the ones who were killers—we will say: ‘Go home.’” No trials; just early retirement. For the millions of Iranians who rely directly on the regime for their livelihood, little would change. Iran would thereby dodge the fate that Rajabi saw in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, when the military was disbanded, and a huge number of men had nothing to lose.
Rajabi told me that the goal of regime change should be “liberalism” and internationally monitored democracy. “I want to wake up and see no [religious] turbans, no mention of an Islamic Republic. I never want to hear of such things again,” he told me. (However unlikely the means of achieving this goal, the goal itself is widely shared by Iranian factions.) “We will go on television, and as statement No. 1, we will declare that we do not want war with the world, or hostility of any kind with America and Israel.” The next step would be immediate development of economic ties with neighbors, including the Gulf states that are his current hosts.
Rajabi gave me two reasons this plan cannot be delayed. The first was geopolitical: Russia and China are waiting to see if the regime is an ally worth salvaging. “The regime is using time to restructure itself,” he told me. “They know China in particular is watching them, because they saw a good chance the regime would fall.“ He said that Russia and China will, if the regime endures, not only support it but also call in favors—the establishment of military bases along the Persian Gulf, for example, and possibly even transformation of Iran into a vassal state, like former President Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.
The second reason was personal. During Rajabi’s studies in Qom with Mojtaba Khamenei, he came to view the supreme leader’s son as a brilliant zealot, much more extreme and uncompromising than his father, and a uniquely dangerous potential successor. He said that Mojtaba is already making decisions in the supreme leader’s office.
[John R. Bolton: A foreign policy worse than regime change]
As a student, Mojtaba was apocalypse-obsessed. (“I should know,” Rajabi told me, “because I was quite into these things myself at the time.”) “He thinks there are milestones on the path to the end of the world,” Rajabi told me, “and he himself will have a special part in hastening humanity down that path.” Rajabi said that Mojtaba kept a house near the Jamkaran mosque, and there he updated corkboards and diagrams, mapping out the places and events that according to prophecy stand between the end times and today.
“Mojtaba is more dangerous than 50 nuclear bombs,” Rajabi told me. He said that Ali Khamenei, for all of his blood-swimming, cares what Iranians think of him and has demonstrated a willingness to bend and reach out to allies to ensure his regime’s survival. Mojtaba, by contrast, is calculating and ideological, and willing to cause terrible destruction to the world just to prove a point. The killing of Iranian protesters last month was nothing. “He is willing to kill 13,000 Iranians. Why would he hesitate to kill 100,000 people in Tel Aviv?” The cost of waiting is the possibility that a regime that survives the current stresses will be less risk-averse, more ideological, and more assured of its divine mission.
“Iwill be back in Iran this year,” Rajabi promised me as I left his villa, nearly tripping over his fluffy cat, Jacob, on the way out. I told him that if he finds himself in Iran that soon, things will have either gone very well or very badly for him. He implied that one possible scenario was that he would, after years of retirement from the battlefield, be back fighting—probably in the mountains in northern Iran. “This is a year of suicide or victory.”