The Supreme Leader

"They are not going to answer your greeting," begins a poem that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, knows well, and loved once. "Nobody is going to raise his head to answer a question or to see a friend." The verse was written in the time of the shah, in the 1950s, when Khamenei was a young, idealistic Shia cleric who shared with its hard-drinking author a sense of claustrophobic alienation and deep frustration. "Winter," by Mehdi Akhavan Sales, is about as vivid a metaphor for oppression—externally imposed, but deeply internalized—as you can find:

The breath coming out of your chest

Turns into a dark cloud

And stands like a wall in front of your eyes.

Now, in this summer of 2009 in the overheated air of Tehran's stifling streets, it is Khamenei himself who has come to symbolize for millions of Iranians that cold, hard weight of authority. (Story continued below...)

What is unfolding in Iran is no simple confrontation between tyranny and freedom. The protests, wave upon wave of them, have not overturned the regime, nor have they sought to do so. But 30 years after the Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah, they have remade the country's political landscape. They have eroded if not destroyed the credibility—forget infallibility—of Iran's theocratic leadership. And they have done so, in large measure, because of who this Supreme Leader is.

Like all revolutions, this one is a complicated contest of wills and visions, ambitions and grudges, with marchers and martyrs on the streets and Machiavellian conspirators behind closed doors. You have seen the shaky cell-phone videos that still escape the censors: the hundreds of thousands of people walking solemnly, silently, relentlessly through Tehran; the militia motorcycle gangs swinging truncheons; the occasional outbreaks of violence against government forces and buildings. You have seen, probably more than you would like, the sunken eyes and disconcerting grin of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose reelection in a supposed landslide brought on the crisis. Amid the crowds you've also watched the relatively unfamiliar face of the challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, which in person and on posters has become an icon of hope.

In this kinetic, kaleidoscopic rush of images, however, Khamenei's appearances on state television have often seemed like static interludes. For Westerners who remember the first Supreme Leader, the fiery old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Khamenei can seem a rather wan successor. On TV he is almost entirely without charisma, and early on was considered by some almost an accidental ayatollah, keeping the chair warm until someone better came along. For two decades he has maintained his position not through force of personality or even religious authority but by balancing factions, playing sides and portraying himself as above the fray.

In fact, he never was. And over the past four years, critics say, like a rich old man who starts to let servants run his life, he has indulged and defended Ahmadinejad, the most divisive figure in the country. "Like anyone who is in power for such a long time, Khamenei loves to be revered," says a politician who has known him for more than 40 years. Like most Iranians, he asked for anonymity to discuss the subject, the most sensitive in Iran. "It's amazing how much people can be deceived by flattery. This man, Ahmadinejad, is destroying the whole system of the Islamic Republic, which includes Mr. Khamenei. But Mr. Khamenei supports him because he sits like a mouse in front of him and kisses his feet."

Over the years, to cement his power base, Khamenei has also developed close relations with the military and security apparatus. He has built a vast bureaucracy inside the government and around his own Beit Rahbari, or House of the Leader. But all that left him ill prepared for the initial stages of this crisis: his weakness is in the street, which came out massively against Ahmadinejad after the allegedly rigged election, and within the theocracy, where his power has been challenged by a divided clergy whose deep and complicated rivalries date back decades.