I looked into Ayatollah Khamenei's eyes. He's willing to die a martyr

Times

3 hours ago

The closest I ever came to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was in the summer of 2009, during the Green Movement that brought millions of Iranians on to the streets to protest against a presidential election that had been rigged in favour of the Ayatollah's preferred candidate.
One Friday in June that year I was one of two foreign journalists, and the only Brit, in the press section of a huge open air prayer space in the centre of Tehran while, a few yards away, the supreme leader delivered one of the most consequential sermons of his life.
Amid chants from the congregation of 'Death to America!' and 'Death to Israel!' Khamenei abandoned his long-maintained pose of neutrality between Iran's political factions, declaring the election results legitimate and ordering the protesters to end their agitation or face 'blood, violence and chaos'.
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Accusing western countries of being behind the protests, Khamenei suddenly fixed his eyes on mine, declaring: 'And the most evil of them all are the British.' The faithful bayed dutifully: 'Death to Britain!' In the weeks that followed, as the Green Movement was obliterated by truncheon charges and pepper gas, show trials and prison rapes, I never forgot that look.
Years later and now 86 years old, Khamenei is the least known of the three national leaders who will decide the future of Iran, and with it that of the Middle East. For Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, the war that Israel started on June 12 is about Iran's ability to acquire nuclear weapons and threaten the Jewish state, which Khamenei has described as a 'cancerous tumour' that needs removal.
Now, Trump has done what he previously seemed unwilling to do. Late on Saturday night, the US president ordered military strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
For Khamenei, this is a moment of truth in which his 46 years of service to the Islamic Revolution, 36 of them spent as the country's all powerful supreme leader — effectively its head of state, head of religion and commander-in-chief — will either be vindicated or reduced to ashes.
It was Khamenei's mentor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad RezaPahlavi after spending 15 years in exile. In the 1980s he waged an epic eight-year war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (If you find the surnames of the two successive supreme leaders confusingly similar, you're in good company; from Trump down, the US administration calls Khamenei 'the Ayatollah', even though there are actually many ayatollahs in Iran.)
Khomeini trusted his mentee and valued his commitment to revolutionary principles. When he died in 1989, Iran's Assembly of Experts, the body of more than 80 clerics who choose the supreme leader, elected Khamenei in his place.
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As supreme leader, Khamenei is the ultimate power in Iran. Presidential nominees are vetted by the Guardian Council, which is partially selected by Khamenei and also vets laws passed by parliament.
Critically, Khamenei also controls the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's elite military force that acts an ideological shield for the revolution, controls the ballistic missile programme and runs the country's foreign military operations.
In recent years, Khamenei has presided over what until last year looked like an unstoppable expansion of Iranian influence through the Middle East, backing militias in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, as well as Bashar al-Assad's Syria (a network that came to be known as its 'axis of resistance') — all the while enriching uranium to ever higher levels.
Hubris took hold. The death in 2017 of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran and Khamenei's only equal among his peers in the political elite, robbed the supreme leader of the restraining influence of a pragmatist, a man who was more interested in reaching an accommodation with the West than in fighting it.
Meanwhile, the rest of the religious establishment elevated this cleric of only middling expertise to the status of a major divine. The Revolutionary Guard commanders whom he coddled with lucrative sanctions-busting opportunities made his overseas mission their own.
All this came to an abrupt halt after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. This led to the mauling of Hezbollah at the hands of the same brutally effective Israeli intelligence services and air force that are now mauling Iran.
To make matters worse, last year Assad's Syrian regime was overthrown, denying Iran its most important foreign client. The Islamic Revolution has been boxed back to its heartland on the Persian plateau.
For the past week Israel's air force has been hammering nuclear, military and civilian targets in Iran, in the process killing more than 600 people, a third of them civilians. Unable to protect their own skies, Iran has retaliated by sending waves of missiles into Israel, including a device that got through Israel's defences and hit the Sorokah hospital, in Beersheeba, on Thursday.
Trump has announced that he will decide within two weeks whether to enter the war — giving him enough time to ready his stealth bombers and aircraft carriers, but also to have a last crack at diplomacy.
The world is waiting to see whether Trump uses his bunker-busting bombs to try to take out Iran's still intact Fordow uranium enrichment facility, near the seminary city of Qom, where Khamenei once studied 'at the feet', as the Persian saying goes, of his mentor Khomeini.
If Trump does decide to fight, Khamenei's response will be just as critical. This could range from the 'unconditional surrender' that Trump demanded on Tuesday to attacking US forces in the Middle East by conventional means and — as a possibly suicidal last resort — further enriching the 60 per cent enriched uranium that Iran already possesses and going flat out for a bomb, assuming that Iran retains the materiel and expertise to do so.
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At stake now for the supreme leader is not simply the country's territorial integrity but also the ideologically radical and socially repressive ethos he has imposed on it. Revolutionary Iran is a country where the hijab remains mandatory for women, even if a large minority abandoned it during the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' protests of 2022-23, and have resisted the authorities' best efforts to force them to adopt it again. Modesty codes are imposed by the police and criticising the supreme leader is punishable by prison. Married women need their husband's permission to obtain a passport. Religious minorities face discrimination and the state executed 901 people in 2024, according to the UN.
Conventional political careers are assessed on the basis of positions attained and policies enacted. But Khamenei, warrior, prophet and moral scourge, has made it his life's work to preserve the purity of the Islamic Revolution and deny Israel a moment's peace. It is by these measures that he asks to be judged.
The style of the man is the antithesis of his adversaries. While they love to be seen, Khamenei is sparing in his appearances, a stranger to vanity and reportedly frugal in his tastes. A globetrotter he is not: he last set foot out of Iran in 1989 (destination: North Korea) and rarely accepts visits from westerners (an exception is made for Vladimir Putin). Gone even are the modest fripperies of his early adulthood in the shrine city of Mashhad, where he indulged an interest in poetry and music and cultivated the image of a worldly intellectual by smoking a pipe.
From his earliest years, Khamenei was raised by his father, Javad, also a Shia cleric, to value austerity and devotion to Islam. Two of his brothers also became clerics. 'My father was a well‑known religious scholar who was very pious and a bit of a recluse,' Khamenei recalled. 'We had a difficult life. I remember that sometimes we didn't have anything in the house for dinner at night. Nevertheless, my mother would try to scrape something up, and that dinner would be nothing but bread and raisins.'
Today, when Khamenei engages in verbal jousts with his current — and perhaps final — adversaries in Israel and the West, it is in his mind the confrontation of the implacable man of God, soft of voice, hard of will, and the histrionics of the fragile western ego.
On Wednesday, in an address ostensibly to the Iranian people — but in reality directed at Trump — Khamenei made it clear that he won't capitulate. Occasionally raising his left hand to emphasise a point (he lost the use of his right hand in 1981 after an opposition group tried to kill him using a booby-trapped tape recorder), and frequently licking his lips, an old habit, the supreme leader said in his calm, even voice: 'The Iranians are not the kind of people who surrender … if America enters the fray it will suffer irreparable harm.'
As I learnt to my cost at Friday prayers that day in 2009, Khamenei is an amateur historian who remembers with rancour the sway that Britain enjoyed over Iran for many decades, without, however, ever formally colonising the country. He hates sell-outs, particularly the last Shah's father, Reza Shah. Reza was brought to power by the British and, having made the mistake of favouring the Germans in the Second World War, was bundled into exile by the Allies when they invaded in 1941.
An Iranian friend recently sent me a clip of Khamenei in a hall of people discussing the moment when the British told Reza to leave Iran. His style is conversational, intimate, grandfatherly — but above all virile. 'They told him to go,' Khamenei told his rapt audience, 'and he went! Can you imagine a greater humiliation for a country?' And, as if addressing Reza himself, he went on: 'If you're a man … if you possess a drop of spunk, you'd say, 'I won't go!' You'd let them kill you!'
So when Khamenei issues his warnings from his bunker, do not confuse them with the empty fulminations of a Colonel Muammar Gaddafi or a Saddam Hussein, made while their praetorian guards melt into the night. Do not expect this man who has lived his life for a noble cause — and in his pious eyes has everything to gain from dying a martyr to it — to do an Assad and willingly exchange the leadership of his country for a Russian dacha.
Right now, from exile in America, a second Reza Pahlavi — the grandson of Reza Shah, for whom Khamenei has such fierce contempt — has been calling for the Iranians to take advantage of the Israeli assault and topple their tyrannical ruler. It's true that millions of Iranians hate Khamenei for his callousness, his machinations, his driving of the country to the brink of disaster. But, if they are forced to choose between a foreign beast and a domestic monster, a great many will choose the latter.
From his base near Washington DC, Pahlavi taunts the supreme leader, calling him a rat in his lair. But he knows, and everyone knows, the basic history. His father cut and ran when things got tough in 1979 and his grandfather did the same in 1941. Not, I think, Ali Khamenei.
Christopher de Bellaigue is the former correspondent of The Economist in Iran and author of The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King