Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the last Shah of Iran. Asked on a January 2026 broadcast where the United States had gone wrong in its dealings with him, John Kiriakou began with the man rather than the policy: “Where do you even begin? The Shah was an absolute monarch, absolute dictator.”[1]
The indictment that follows has three parts. The first is the security apparatus: the Shah “had a bloodthirsty intelligence service called SAVAK that spent way more time investigating and murdering Iranian citizens than it ever did doing anything, you know, in any other country.” The second is alignment — he “had formal official diplomatic relations with Israel, which really pissed people off.” The third is the oil: he was “perfectly happy to send Iran’s oil to the United States and to the UK.”[2]
The democratic interruption
In Kiriakou’s telling the throne was not continuous. Iran “very briefly had a democratic government” under prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh; the Shah’s father had been in power, then the Shah briefly, then Mosaddegh won an election. The United States and the United Kingdom overthrew Mosaddegh in 1953, and he “spent literally the rest of his life under house arrest.”[3]
The word Kiriakou uses for what happened next is the one that carries the argument: the Shah “was forcibly reimposed on the Iranian people.”[3]
He has given the same sequence elsewhere in a single sentence, and attributed it to the father rather than the son: the Shah “overthrew the only democratically elected prime minister in the history of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, 1953 with the CIA and MI6.”[4]
The ski vacation
The end, as Kiriakou dates it, was undramatic in form and total in effect. “By 1979 it all fell apart. He went on a ski vacation in February of ‘79 and never went back.”[5]
The inheritance
Kiriakou treats the Shah’s record as the reason his son Reza Pahlavi has no constituency to return to. Asked why the exiled crown prince “wouldn’t survive the walk from the plane to the terminal”, his answer runs straight back to the father: “Because they hate him. Why do they hate him? Because his father created SAVAK.”[6]