Transcript of Chosen by War: The Rise of Iran’s New Supreme Leader

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Got some breaking news out of Iran. We are hearing for the first time from the new Supreme Leader of Iran.

Today's statement dismissed any hope of Iran backing down. He says, quote, avenging the blood of your martyrs is a top priority and that attacks on Gulf Arab neighbors will continue.

At the heart of the Iranian regime's behind the alliance's stance toward the United States and Israel in this war is its new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the regime's longtime ruler.

He said that all US bases should immediately be closed in the region, and he says that those bases will be attacked.

He went on to say that the Strait of Hormuz should remain closed.

Today, my colleague Farnaz Fassihi on the extraordinary behind-the-scenes jockeying that led to his selection and the growing consensus that the US and Israeli strategy motivated Iran to replace one hardline leader with another. It's Tuesday, March 17th.

Farnaz, welcome back to the show. I just wanna say at the outset that there are moments when our colleagues, because of their area of expertise, just become indispensable to The Daily, and you're one of those people now because you know Iran and its government inside and out. So thank you for making time for us.

Thank you for having me, Michael.

Your latest line of reporting has been focused on Iran's new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the assassinated Supreme Leader. And Mojtaba Khamenei is filling a job that is both essential for the regime's survival and arguably now the most dangerous job in the world. And we want to talk to you about what his selection means for Iran and the war and the behind-the-scenes process by which he was chosen. So where do you think we should start?

I think we should start by acknowledging that Mojtaba Khamenei's rise as the third Supreme Leader came as a surprise to even Iran watchers and insiders in Iran. Although he was his father's son and had been working closely with him in his office, the fact that he would become a Supreme Leader and succeed his father was not straightforward. Wasn't necessarily predestined. And it's an irony because the Islamic Revolution came about so there would be an end to monarchy rule and power being passed from father to son.

Just explain that.

Well, the Islamic Revolution in 1979 came about as a result of this movement to topple the Shah and thousands of years of monarchy where power was handed from father to son with this idea that power would go back to the people. Even when the first Supreme Leader, the founding the father of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, died, power didn't go to his son or to his relatives. It went to then the president, the former Ayatollah Khamenei. So that's why it's an irony to now have his son appointed as his successor.

Fascinating. So the choice of Khamenei's son, Mojtaba Khamenei, you're saying, is in many ways a violation of the revolution's core spirit. So talk to us about how that ever would have occurred over the past many days.

When I talked to sources in Iran about the appointment and selection of Mojtaba Khamenei, they described it as a succession war, as various political factions, generals from the Revolutionary Guards, powerful people like the former spy chief of the Guards and clerics, all vying for power to have the candidate that they preferred in the role. It was explained to me as sort of the Islamic Republic's version of Game of Thrones, vying for power, different factions competing to have their favorite candidate in, and really a war of succession.

Wow.

Well, describe these main factions in this selection process, who they are and what they want.

So constitutionally in Iran, the Assembly of Experts, which is a body of 88 elected senior clerics, has the task task of appointing, supervising, and removing a Supreme Leader. So this is the body that had to get together, debate, and vote for who would basically succeed Ayatollah Khamenei. But it's much more complicated than that, right? There's all this like backdoor and backchanneling powers and different factions trying to influence the vote of the clerics. We had on one side the moderates and the pragmatics, led by the head of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani, and President Pesechkian in this camp. And they were sort of arguing that this is really an extraordinary moment in Iran. We're at war with the United States and Israel. We've had months and months of upheaval with protests and whatnot. And maybe it's time to put a new face on the regime and pick a candidate that would at least signal to the world and to Iranian public that we're thinking of moderating our policies or we're thinking of reform.

So basically recognize that the war is a fundamental breaking point. It's a moment from which the country cannot really go back, that a change is required here.

Exactly. The war, don't forget, was preceded with massive street uprisings and protests by Iranians saying, we want an end of this regime. So while they can't really satisfy that desire. I think the moderates were arguing, well, at least maybe this power vacuum we have from the assassination of the Ayatollah allows us a space to try to steer the country in a different direction.

And Farnaz, who do these moderates, and I want to be careful with that word because moderates within a theocracy may not resemble moderates outside of a theocracy, but who do they look to specifically as they try to make this choice?

Well, they were looking at several candidates. One of them was former President Hassan Rouhani. He's mostly a centrist politician who served 8 years as president and before that had very senior leadership roles in, in security apparatus. He led the 2015 negotiations, nuclear negotiations with the United States and world powers, and he's increasingly become vocal in giving speeches about how the status quo was not tenable. So the second candidate was was Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founding father of the revolution, who is squarely identified his politics as reformist, and he's part of the reformist faction. And then there was a third candidate who is not very well known in the public, Ali Reza Arafat. He has religious credentials. He ran a very successful charity, religious charity, and he was sort of considered as someone who would be easy to manage because he didn't really have experience in security or policy or defense and sort of would fall somewhere in the middle.

So all three of these say to the world, to varying degrees, turn the page on the revolutionary hardline Iranian ethos that has dominated since 1979.

That was basically the idea. Now, with the caveat, as you mentioned, that these are all still part of the Islamic Republic's establishment and they are loyal to the ideology of the Islamic Republic. But they have varying shades of how to pragmatically and practically practice that and enforce it. And I think if they had gone this way, they would have at least signaled that maybe we're open to change, maybe we're even open to scaling down hostilities with the United States. But that's not how it went.

Clearly. Okay. Well, what about the hardline faction?

So the hardline faction, particularly the Revolutionary Guards Corps, They were interested in making sure that, first of all, at wartime there would be no concessions made, no surrendering to U.S. demands, that sort of the policies and strategies that the Ayatollah and the guards had defined would hold as the war continued. The Revolutionary Guards are very powerful in Iran. They're represented in politics. They control the economy. They are more powerful than the military, the army itself, and they're now in charge of basically commanding this war because they're in charge of defending Iran's borders. So for the Guards, the election or the appointment of the Supreme Leader was, was also an existential choice because they wanted to make sure that their power and their grip on power remains.

And who is in this hardline faction's pool of candidates for Supreme Leader?

This pool wanted Mossadegh Khamenei. Unanimously, he was the candidate of choice. They viewed him as a very close ally, as a reincarnation, if you may, of Ayatollah Khamenei, who would continue his policies and give the Guards a free hand, particularly in running this war. And to this end, they were willing to toss out this whole idea of power should not be hereditary in the Islamic Republic.

Interesting. They just sort of said that's a formality we don't care about in the middle of this conflict. Who cares?

Right. I mean, they basically said this is wartime. The circumstances are extreme. And our former Supreme Leader, they consider him a martyr. And a lot of the anger and resentment against President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu was being fueled into this sense of defiance. Right. A lot of experts I talked to in Iran and outside of Iran said that, look, if Khamenei had died a natural death, Mousavi would have a lot of resistance. But now the guards and the hardliners could argue that, look, you know, they martyred our Supreme Leader and who is the closest thing we can get to him? His son, who not only physically looks like him, but also worked in his office and as far as we know, has the same ideological beliefs and policies.

Okay. So with all this in mind, How does the formal process of choosing Mujtaba Khamenei ultimately unfold? You describe it as filled with intrigue and drama, Game of Thrones. What does it look like?

The process of selecting the Supreme Leader began almost immediately after Ayatollah Khamenei was killed in airstrikes on the first day of the war. And there was some backchanneling and influencing and whatnot. So, you know, when they were debating, they were like fueled with this idea that we have to be defiant. Electing somebody who's a new face is not our priority. What's our priority is to tell the world that we continue our revolutionary ideology. So Mojtaba emerged as the front runner. They took a vote and they told the government, now we have a Supreme Leader, it's Mojtaba. And they were supposed to announce it the next morning at dawn at state television, but that plan kind of fell apart.

Why?

Well, first of all, as soon as it was leaked and we reported it, it was a New York Times scoop that he's emerged as a leading candidate. Both President Trump and Israel's defense minister threatened to eliminate the next successor to the Supreme Leader. So Iranians paused.

Hmm.

They thought that maybe this is not the right time to announce Mojtaba as the Supreme Leader because it could threaten his life.

Wow.

And this provides space for the moderates to launch an offensive to try to get the assembly to rescind the vote and redo the vote, right? They're like, okay, now it hasn't been announced publicly. Maybe we have some time to try to now lobby and jockey for power and try to get them to change their minds.

Right. And if you needed evidence that moderation was perhaps the right course, the fact that Israel and the US were saying we're going to kill this hardline successor to Velazquez Ayatollah might fuel your case. So how close do the moderates get to unraveling this choice?

Well, first of all, they needed a really good excuse, right? It wasn't going to be easy to get them to change their mind. So they called for the Assembly's leadership council or leadership committee to meet them in person. And at that meeting, Representatives of the moderates put a card on the table that really stunned the clerics. They brought two of his father's closest aides, his chief of staff and one of his top senior military advisors, to testify to the Assembly of Clerics that his father, the late Ayatollah Khamenei, had told them he had said he does not want his his son to succeed him. Oh, wow.

There are people willing to say essentially under oath that the last Supreme Leader does not want his son to be the next Supreme Leader.

That's exactly what happened. And it wasn't—

And that's kind of the word of God. Right.

And it wasn't just anybody. It was like literally his two closest allies. And then they throw another hurdle. They bring a letter in writing from Mr. Khamenei that they say this is his will and it was sealed. And now we're unsealing it. And here it says that I don't want any of my family members to become the Supreme Leader.

This really is Game of Thrones.

It's totally Game of Thrones. So there are all of these things being thrown at them saying you need to reconsider. Like, we have evidence that suggests this is not what Ayatollah Khamenei wants, right? So the hardliners and the generals generals in the Revolutionary Guards hear about this and they mobilize also and launch a counteroffensive to convince the clerics to vote for Moshebah Khamenei. So the generals and a former spy chief of the Guards, Hossein Taieb, personally called members of the assembly and asked them to meet virtually and have an emergency vote and announce Moshebah as the leader. And that is what happened. On Sunday, March 8th, the Assembly held a final vote and Mojtaba Khamenei received the two-thirds majority of votes he needed.

Essentially elected for a second time, but this time it's stuck.

Yes, it's stuck. They announced it and sealed the deal.

You know, given the sequence of events you've just described and all of this extraordinary politicking and everyone trying to undermine the other side, that it feels like we only get this person as Supreme Leader because of the unique circumstances we're in, the US and Israel being at war with Iran.

Right. I mean, I think that if Iran was not at war right now and under attack by US and Israel, and if Ayatollah Khamenei had not been killed by airstrikes, Mojtaba would probably not be the Supreme Leader.

And so now, of course, the question is, who is this new Supreme Leader? And is he as hardline as those who supported him and the moderates who feared him say that he is?

Mojtaba Khamenei is a mysterious figure, Michael. He hasn't really been in the public realm. He's always operated in the shadows of power. And since he was named the Supreme Leader, No one has heard his voice. No one has seen him. He's only issued two statements. But I've spent the past two weeks talking to sources in Iran who know him or who have met him to try to figure out who he is and how he will vote Iran.

We'll be right back.

So Farnaz, tell us as much as you have come to understand about this new Supreme Leader who, besides enjoying the support of hardliners, remains such a mystery still.

Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969. He was 9 years old when the Islamic Revolution came about and the theocracy was established. And as his father sort of rose in the ranks of the revolution, all the way to becoming the president, and then as the second Supreme Leader, Mojtaba also grew up in that very ideological, very religious early years of the revolution.

He's kind of witnessing the, as you've described it in previous episodes, the institutionalization of the revolution from idea to day-to-day governance.

Exactly. But he's not just an observer. As he grows up and becomes a teenager, he participates. In revolutionary Iran. About a year after the revolution, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, and it started an 8-year bloody war between Iran and Iraq. And many young men in Iran who were supporters of the revolution volunteered as teenagers, some as young as 13 and 14, to go to the battlefields. And Mushabba was one of them. He volunteered as a soldier when he was 17 years old and went to the front lines of the war. And he is in a brigade where many of the current generals and senior leadership of Iran's military were also in that battalion. So he bonds with these people and gets veteran credentials as someone who was willing to sort of leave the comfort of his home and go fight. And that's where many of his his powerful alliances with the current generals start in the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War.

Right, he has real street cred. He fought a war that, in theory, the son of someone as powerful as his dad doesn't necessarily need to fight.

Right. So after the war, he moves to Qom, the seat of Shia seminaries and one of the centers of the Shia faith, to study and become a Shia jurist and a cleric and a scholar. And he gets married to the daughter of a political family. He sort of climbs the ranks of religious hierarchy, and he starts teaching advanced Islamic jurisprudence, which is a level of religious teaching that you can only teach if you yourself are an advanced cleric in the Shia hierarchy. So he's holding these classes in Qom in the seminaries, and the classes become very popular. Lots of young clerics are signing up.

Which I should say suggests a certain level of charisma, perhaps?

Well, it's hard to say. I guess, like, in the eyes of his students, maybe he was charismatic and popular, but we haven't really seen him in public to really be able to judge that. So he then stops the teachings because apparently they were oversubscribed and too popular and moves to Tehran and enters his father's close political circle and starts building alliances with very powerful generals and security people. And basically becomes in charge of managing the security and military administrative things of his father's office. He is very close to the former Revolutionary Guards intelligence chief, Hossein Taieb, and to General Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, commander of the Revolutionary Guards, who's now the Speaker of the Parliament. And the three of them, according to my sources, would hold meetings once a week, and there they would discuss and strategize the policies and sort of the plans that they wanted. And that went from who they wanted to see elected in office to the way that they would want crackdowns on dissidents and other security matters of the state.

So he's quite clearly becoming an extremely powerful behind-the-scenes figure in his own right. I'm curious if you have come across any specific examples of actions he took, decisions he made that help us understand how he viewed that power and used it.

One of the examples that we know of, and many people I've talked to point out, is the 2009 presidential election of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared victory, he's actually speaking.

Young people especially are angered by what they believe to be a rigged election that defeated the reform candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Where the election results were contested.

I just can't believe this election result. I'm so furious, said Ashbali.

And it started a movement called the Green Movement. An outpouring of anger like this hasn't been seen in more than a decade. We really saw the first real big nationwide protests of people coming out and saying the elections were rigged.

Iran's Supreme Leader is calling for restraint, saying protesters will be held responsible for any additional chaos.

And from the interviews that I've had with people who are in Iran and remember that, say that Mojtaba Khamenei played a role in what they allege was rigging of the elections in Mr. Ahmadinejad's favor. And also—

Police fought back by firing tear gas and water cannons.

Armour-clad police attacking protesters from the backs of speeding motorcycles. Encouraging and orchestrating the crackdowns, particularly his ties to the Basij paramilitary plainclothes militia of the Revolutionary Guards.

Human rights groups agree more than 300 remain in detention and at least 30 are dead.

Kind of authorizing them to go to the streets and really crush the protests as they were.

So this really underscores why the hardliners in the regime over the past few weeks would have looked to Mojtaba Khamenei and said, this guy is with us. He's our guy.

The story of Mojtaba's rise very much parallels the story of the Revolutionary Guard's rise and control of Iran politically, militarily, militarily and economically. Their stories are intertwined. But also, as much as he operated in the shadows of power and gained prominence in his father's world, he was not really reaching out to the public, right? If you're thinking that one day you're going to be the Supreme Leader of Iran and ruling over at least your own constituents, never mind the population that criticizes the regime, but sort of that 20% that's the core constituents, he never made any public outreach He never really came to attend a Friday prayer or deliver a public speech or attend any sort of social or religious event. He was sort of just someone, really a mysterious figure in the backgrounds and backrooms of power. So it makes it even more remarkable that suddenly he is now their religious leader where they don't really even know him.

Right.

And that has been reinforced, and you mentioned this earlier, by the fact that since his appointment as Supreme Leader, as Ayatollah, he has given the public pretty much nothing to work with. No speech, no video, nothing kind of tangible or emotional to say to the Iranian public, this is who I am and you should believe in me, which is a little bit baffling.

Well, there are two reasons for that, as far as we can tell from our reporting. One is that Mousavi is injured. He at least has injuries to his legs, so he may not be in top physical shape to record a video. The other reason is that we know that he's number one on Israel's target list, and the Iranians know that. And they say that we will not put him in front of a video because they could geolocate him and assassinate him.

I mean, everything you're describing here collectively. His entire journey up through the ranks of the regime's government, his role in the military, his crackdowns on demonstrators, and this latest attack which has killed his father, all of that suggests that he will be a hardliner, that this is not a hardliner who's gonna surprise us all in a few weeks or months necessarily and become a reformer. And that seems to have been manifest manifested by Iran's decision-making since his appointment. I mean, Iran has been nothing if not defiant and aggressive in its public statements, in its shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. So we seem to be looking at perhaps an even more hardline figure than his father.

This is a man whose father, wife, and son were killed by the United States and Israel. So we have to think about whether revenge is going to drive any of his policy decisions, right? In the two statements, written statements that we've seen from him, the first one said that Iran's military forces will continue to strike at regional countries that aid the American military. So he didn't stand down from that. And today he issued a very short statement saying that he was going to keep all the appointments his father made politically and militarily. So again, saying, you know, I want my father's policies and strategy of this war to remain. I want all his generals to remain and carry on his directives. I mean, some of his supporters that I've talked to, some of the people who know him well, are trying to portray him as a Mohammed bin Salman figure of Saudi Arabia, right? They're like, no, no, he may look like a hardliner and his father's son, but actually he's progressive. And if anyone can really bring down hostilities with the United States, the United States or forgive the United States, it would be him because anyone else doing this would meet the wrath of the—

Lack the credibility.

Lack the credibility or would face resistance. But if anyone can actually enter a ceasefire and convince the hardliners, it would be him. So there is a camp that's trying to promote him as an MBS figure, but we have no evidence of that, right? Other than what people are saying, all the evidence points otherwise.

In the opposite.

In the opposite. Right.

Well, in that case, Farnaz, is there a case to be made that the United States and Israel have given Iran exactly the leader of the regime that they said at the outset of this war that they were seeking to eliminate, overthrow, and avoid? And that would be a pretty ironic outcome here.

Many people in Iran point to that. They say that the United States and Israel said that they were going to come and liberate us from the rule of this regime. But so far, in third week of war, not only we're seeing vast destruction and ruin of our country, from residential homes to police precincts to critical infrastructure, airports, factories, cultural gems and heritage. Now we have the Ayatollah's son as our leader. So it's very disappointing to most Iranians. If this is indeed the final outcome of the war.

You had talked about the 80% of Iranians who wanted there to be a change. That was the math you described in our last episode. And it sounds like you're saying that the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader must be a real shock to the system for those who let themselves believe at the outset of this war that maybe there would be the kind of change that would open Iran up to something else?

I think, Michael, that moment of hope that we discussed the last time we spoke was real but brief. In the third week of the war, as Iran has reinstated Mojtaba Khamenei as its Supreme Leader, and there's no signs that it's going to change its policies or make any major concessions. Iranians are under a relentless bombing and airstrikes campaign by Israel and the United States, and they're afraid. They're afraid of the war. They're afraid of this war spreading. And pretty much every night I get text messages from people who live in Iran saying tonight the sounds of the explosion were much louder than before. They were closer than before. So it feels like fear and anxiety has replaced hope.

Well, Farnaz, thank you very much.

We appreciate it.

Thank you very much for having me, Michael.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

"I've been a big critic of all of the protecting of countries because I know that we'll protect them and if ever needed, if we ever needed help, they won't be there for us, I've just—" On Monday, President Trump disparaged U.S.

allies. Allies who have so far rejected his call to use their military to escort cargo ships in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has largely shut down during the war. In pointed remarks, Trump claimed that the refusal amounted to ingratitude from countries like Germany and Japan after the U.S. military protected them for decades.

You mean for 40 years we're protecting you and you don't want to get They don't want to get involved in something that is very minor. Very few shots going to be taken because they don't have many shots left.

But they said, "We'd rather not get involved." Trump's inability to end the standoff in the strait has roiled the global economy, raising oil prices sharply and becoming a major frustration for the president. In a sweeping decision, a federal judge has blocked many of the major decisions made by the Trump administration about vaccines over the past year. Those decisions include cutting down the number of diseases covered by routine immunizations, including hepatitis B for newborns, and restricting access to COVID vaccines. The judge said that those decisions bypass passed normal procedures and abandoned traditional scientific expertise. The White House said it would appeal the judge's ruling. Today's episode was produced by Astha Chaturvedi, Muj Zaidi, and Stella Tan. It was edited by Mark George, contains music by Marian Lozano, Chelsea Daniel, Will Read, Rowan Namisto, and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.