Reza Pahlavi is the exiled Iranian crown prince, son of the last Shah, whom John Kiriakou dismisses as an Israeli-backed fantasy candidate to rule Iran. Pahlavi has not lived in Iran since he was 16 or 17, lives comfortably — by one Kiriakou account in Potomac, Maryland, by another in McLean, Virginia — and draws his support mainly from wealthy Iranian exiles in Beverly Hills.[1][2] The Israeli plan, Kiriakou says, is for the U.S. to install him and take 49% of Iran’s oil in return — “a fantasy” echoing the 1953 coup. Pahlavi, he says, “wouldn’t survive the walk from the plane to the terminal,” and “literally nobody in Iran” wants the Pahlavis back.[3][4]
Kiriakou says Pahlavi told podcaster Patrick Bet-David directly that he does not actually want to return to Iran, having lived in the US since 1979: “My kids are Americans. I have my life. It’s in McLean, Virginia.”[5] He adds a further, unflattering personal detail — that Pahlavi’s wife is cheating on him with her French personal trainer, which he says is documented in the French press.[5] Kiriakou says he has received threats after calling Pahlavi “a clown” on a podcast, and repeats the assessment that Pahlavi would not survive the walk from the plane to the terminal if he returned to Iran.[6] Mocking calls to reinstall Pahlavi as Iran’s leader, Kiriakou compares him to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile figure used to help justify the Iraq War — “except not as intelligent.”[7] He says he has faced criticism for his opposition to restoring the Iranian “so-called royal family.”[8]
Why he is hated in Iran
Kiriakou traces the hostility to Pahlavi’s father, the Shah: he created SAVAK, the Iranian intelligence service notorious for mutilating dissidents, and — with CIA and MI6 help — overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s only democratically elected prime minister, in 1953.[9] He says the U.S. worked with the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to crush all opposition — religious and communist alike — through escalating harassment, jailing, and exile, until the 1978 revolution culminated in the Shah’s February 1979 overthrow and the November 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy.[10] He notes the Shah and the royal family fled Iran for Switzerland in February 1979 as the revolution unfolded, taking with them gold bars, gems, jewels and Picassos.[11]
Responding to a Washington Post op-ed in which Reza Pahlavi called for Iran’s “return to democracy,” Kiriakou notes Iran was never a democracy under his father, whose SAVAK intelligence service tortured and executed tens of thousands, and calls Pahlavi financed by the Israelis.[12]