The Supreme Leader

At Friday prayers at Tehran University, one extraordinary week after Iranians went to the polls, Khamenei asked Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, along with the two other candidates—former Revolutionary Guards chief Mohsen Rezai and former Parliament speaker Mehdi Karrubi—to attend the service and acquiesce to his judgment. Reporters who had been ordered not to step outside their offices earlier in the week were now invited to attend. The purpose, without question, was to show that the regime was still solid. ("They know that if they don't hang together, they'll hang separately," says Sir Richard Dalton, who was Britain's ambassador to Iran earlier in the decade.) In every past crisis, such a moment had come, and the old boys' club of the revolution had pulled together. But this time, things were different.

Mousavi had not come. Neither had Karrubi. And looking at Ahmadinejad in the front row of worshipers, obedient there beneath him, Khamenei warned those who were not so loyal. He was not going to back down, he said. There had been no fraud in the election, and even if there had, it wouldn't explain the 11 million votes that separated Ahmadinejad and his opponent. To attack the results was to attack the revolution. With his denunciations of the protests, Khamenei opened the way for the crackdown by security forces that everyone has known, and feared, might come. But the marchers would be to blame. "If there is any bloodshed, leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible," Khamenei said.

The speech, in fact, was the performance of the Supreme Leader's lifetime, beginning with the suggestion that to disobey him would be like betraying the Prophet Muhammad and ending with Khamenei speaking into the air, as if directly addressing the 12th Imam, who vanished 11 centuries ago. The faithful dissolved in ritual tears.

Speaking for more than 90 minutes, the 69-year-old Supreme Leader not only laid down the law, as he saw it, he laid out a vision of the world in which Iran is unique and proud and powerful and beset by enemies, especially the United States, Britain and Israel. There would be no new "velvet" revolution here, whether homegrown or financed from abroad. No foreigner had anything to teach Iran. "It was a Khomeini moment," according to one devout supporter of the Supreme Leader who clearly was surprised by the show. "He was strong and fearless." Even Mousavi supporters seemed taken aback. "We're entering a new period," said one.

Yet for all the virtuoso drama and rhetoric of victimization during his performance, Khamenei has brought much of the crisis on himself, critics say. "This is a classic case of power blindness," says a former ally. "Mr. Khamenei is really a smart, intelligent and cultured man. Even a moderate. But all those positive adjectives are forgotten when it comes to his own power."

According to people who know him well, Khamenei dreams of creating an Islamic caliphate, where life would be more just, more equitable for all of Iran's people. But the man he has chosen to implement that dream, President Ahmadinejad, is less an idealist than a self-serving populist. And another former associate of Khamenei says the ailing cleric's fixation on his utopian goal has given him a kind of tunnel vision, so that at times he can be oblivious to the present-day realities of his country and the burgeoning aspirations of a population that is young, educated and increasingly urban. They are, in fact, the kind of people who look on Ahmadinejad as an embarrassment, or worse, a provocateur who could drag the country into needless, costly confrontations with the rest of the world.

Again and again over the past year, and against the advice of many of his own supporters, Khamenei has linked his own fate to Ahmadinejad's. Last August, according to Rooz Online journalist Hossein Bastani, who is now living in France, the Supreme Leader met with Ahmadinejad's cabinet and sang the praises of the president in no uncertain terms. Ahmadinejad, he said, did not apologize for Iran's actions or go on the defensive; he took the offensive, and that made him better than his two immediate predecessors. About a month before the election, in a trip through the Kurdish areas of the country, Khamenei said flatly that he favored the kind of candidate who fights superpowers, lives simply and is fearless. He didn't name Ahmadinejad, but he might as well have been reading talking points from his campaign. "From then on," says a reformist politician who was close to Khamenei in the past, "the election was not about Ahmadinejad and Mousavi anymore. It was a referendum about the legitimacy of Mr. Khamenei's rule. He brought on the situation we are in now."

The treacherous crosscurrents inside the regime are fed by the pressure from the street but date back long before many of today's protesters were born. An old photograph of Khamenei as a young seminarian shows a beardless youth in a turban who already wears thick glasses; behind them, the expression in his eyes is of a boy looking inward, lost in thought. A photograph of his fellow seminarian Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from that same period in the 1950s suggests, beneath the white turban, a Type A personality who might, in an American context, be running for class president. Both of those young men committed themselves to making revolution as followers of Ayatollah Khomeini in Qum before his exile, and as activists inside the country—and often inside its jails—after Khomeini had been forced to leave. The relationships that took shape among the young mullahs then have continued to shape Iranian politics ever since Khomeini's revolution triumphed in 1979. Through the bloody consolidation of power, and the eight-year war against Iraq, they shored up their positions, sometimes in competition, sometimes in support of each other. The aging Khomeini continued, truly, to be the Supreme Leader to whom all turned for approval. And he rewarded fealty. "The revolution will be alive as long as Mr. Hashemi [Rafsanjani] is alive," said the Imam. And, "I've raised Mr. Khamenei myself."

During the war years, Rafsanjani became speaker of the Majlis, or Parliament, and a young leftist intellectual named Mir Hossein Mousavi became prime minister. Khamenei was president, but he and Mousavi often disagreed, and to his consternation, Mousavi often won.

Then the war ended in 1988 and in 1989 Khomeini died without a clear successor as Supreme Leader. The post was supposed to be held by a great scholar of Islam such as Khomeini had been, a grand ayatollah recognized by all Shia clergy as a marja, or source of emulation. But the most qualified cleric, the one who had been thought of for years as Khomeini's heir apparent, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, had fallen out of favor. The year before, when thousands of political prisoners had been massacred at Evin prison, Montazeri had spoken out. (Rafsanjani, Mousavi and Khamenei all remained silent.) Khomeini punished the dissident, dismissing him as "simple" and "not a statesman capable of running the country."