MONITOR IRGC

“These generals are not as motivated and driven by the cleric ideology that defined Iran in the past forty seven years, sort of the death to America, the religious theocracy. What motivates these generals is power and money. And for both of those things to happen, the regime needs to survive, and it needs to thrive economically.”

“Iran's foreign minister went to Islamabad, and The US special envoy Steve Witkoff and president Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner were scheduled to also fly to Pakistan on Saturday, and everyone anticipated another round of talks. And then we started getting mixed messages. The Iranians said, oh, well, we're not meeting directly with the Americans, and the foreign minister left Pakistan. And president Trump abruptly announced on social media that he was canceling the talks and not sending his envoys to meet with the Iranians.”

“In fact, people who I spoke to in Iran were telling me that the decision making is now kind of like a board of directors, that the Ayatollah is sort of the director of the board, and the generals are the members of the board, and that, yeah, it's not a one man show anymore. And when those decisions are eventually brought to the supreme leader, through couriers, to his hideout, is he essentially being asked to rubber stamp them?”

“In my interviews over the past month, every time I would ask that question from sources, I would say, who is making the decisions? Who's running the country? And I would hear Sepah. Sepah. Sepah means the revolutionary guards. No one said the Ayatollah. No one said it's the supreme leader. And that was just such a difference to how things were done before the war, where the senior Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran for thirty seven years, always had the last word on all decisions that were critical to the state.”

“He's been moved to a very high secure secret place. Access to him is almost impossible for government officials or military commanders. There's no electronics around him. He can't speak on the phone or engage electronically in any way. And communicating with him is sort of, you know, the old ways of writing longhand letters, sealing it in an envelope, and having a human chain of couriers carry the letters to his secure place and then back.”

“For the first time in forty seven years, the generals have gone to the Americans and said, if there's a deal, your oil and shipping companies can come and invest in Iran. You can help us reconstruct and rebuild. And that's something that's never been done before. The senior Ayatollah Khamenei had specifically banned all American companies from coming to Iran after the 2015 nuclear deal, and now the generals are doing away with that order.”

“They've now discovered that they can control it, that they can even threaten ships by suggesting there are mines at the bottom of the seas. And, of course, insurance companies are not going to risk it, and that alone will upend the global shipping and energy and economy. So they now have a tool in their disposal, and they're trying to figure out how to monetize it because they've calculated that if they toll the ships that are passing through the Strait Of Hormoz, they can make a lot more money than they do from their oil revenues.”