Smoke rises over Tehran’s presidential compound. The airstrikes apparently killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Uncredited photo from AP)

UPDATED As U.S. and Israeli forces launched their joint offensive against Iran early Saturday, President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the country’s Islamic regime. “Take over your government,” he exhorted them. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny . . . This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

That moment may be now, especially since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is dead, killed in air strikes that devastated the presidential complex in Tehran, Trump declared on his Truth Social account. Iran has not confirmed the deaths of Khamenei and the other senior officials, and a spokesperson for the prime minister’s office issued a statement warning the public to be aware of “psychological warfare” waged by the United States and Israel.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the dead also included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohammed Pakpour; Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh; Ali Shamkhani, senior advisor to Khamenei; and Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces.

Sources tell SpyTalk that the Trump administration’s intent resembles what happened in Venezuela in January—to lop off Iran’s unpopular clerical leadership and invite the next level of officials to cooperate with Washington, however repressive it may remain. Regime change, in other words, would not include opposition figures who’ve led the huge protests that have roiled the country for months. Any IRGC officials who lay down their arms would be offered “immunity,” Trump said when announcing the start of “Operation Epic Fury,” hinting that U.S. intelligence already has made such overtures to that effect. “So lay down your arms, you will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death,” he said.

In any event, the regime’s opponents inside Iran appear cowed after government forces killed as many as 30,000 demonstrators in the past few months. And with the Iranian opposition abroad deeply divided, the prospect of any popular uprising toppling the remainder of Iran’s clerical leadership looks dim, according to veteran Iran- watchers both in and out of the government.

“In terms of really getting rid of this entire ruling class, lock, stock and barrel, without having any sort of really well-organized opposition with roots in the country is low,” Jon Alterman, the long-time director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the SpyTalk podcast on Thursday. Alterman was also a key State Department expert on the Middle East in the Clinton administration and says he has met with the Iranians many times over the past 30 years.

But some others, like Mark A. Fowler, a 22-year CIA veteran who rose to the number two position on Iran within the agency, say this is the moment for the Trump administration to do whatever it can to empower a popular opposition. In addition to its air campaign, he urges the administration to facilitate communication between Iran’s opposition groups.

“Iran’s youth are highly technically literate—when motivated to fight back, they are certain to find their own way to break through the regime’s constraints.,” Fowler said in a recent commentary that ran in The Washington Post. Once the recent demonstrations began in December, the Trump administration flooded Iran with Starlink satellite systems to facilitate communication among regime opponents.

But that’s a heavy lift, experts caution. Last month, Khamenei ordered his security forces, along with imported Shia militias from Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan, to fire on country-wide anti-government street demonstrations, which began in protest against Iran’s crumbling economy but soon morphed into calls for the government’s ouster. While the Iranian government placed the death toll at the end of January at 3,117, The Guardian, citing shared data from a network of more than 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iran’s 31 provinces, reported that the death toll could exceed 30,000.

Khamenei speaks at a mourning ceremony for the deaths of Iranian military commanders and scientists killed in Iran’s 12-day war with Israel, onJuly 29, 2025. (Office of Supreme Leader/Wana News Agency/Reuters)

Khamenei speaks during a mourning ceremony for the deaths of Iranian military commanders and scientists, who were killed in Iran’s 12-day war with Israel, in Tehran onJuly 29, 2025.Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/Wana News Agency/Reuters.

With Khamenei gone, will his erstwhile underlings do the same? When East German border guards stopped firing on people trying to escape in 1979, it spelled the end of the Soviet Union. Similar situations played out in Romania, Libya and other repressive regimes.

Split Decisions

Meanwhile, the Iranian opposition outside the country has been fragmented for years along ideological lines, preventing the formation of a unified front under a strong leader.

The most visible figure to emerge has been Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Iranian shah, who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ever since then, Pahlavi has lived in exile in California, leading a small group of exiled Iranian monarchists who support his return to the country at the head of a pro-Western government, He has virtually no following in Iran, observers say.

In a post on X on Saturday, Pahlavi urged his fellow countrymen to prepare to take to the streets in order and take control of their country amid the strikes by the United States and Israel on Iran. “Dear compatriots, fateful moments lie ahead of us. The help that the President of the United States promised to the brave people of Iran has now arrived,” Pahlavi said.

Presumably, Washington’s support would be critical for Pahlavi to assume power in Iran. But Trump himself has expressed skepticism over the longtime Californian’s ability to lead the country. “”He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump said. “I don’t know whether or not his country would accept his leadership.”

Pahlavi is also at odds with another opposition group, a newly formed coalition of Iranian Kurds, who recently proclaimed their intention to “struggle for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to achieve the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, and to establish a national and democratic entity based on the political will of the Kurdish nation in Iranian Kurdistan.” Pahlavi denounced the coalition, charging it threatens Iran’s territorial integrity.

A third exiled opposition group, the Paris-based Mujahedin-e Khalq, Iranian revolutionaries with a leftist history, is highly organized, enjoying influence with neo-conservatives in Washington. But it remains deeply unpopular inside Iran because it aligned with Iraq during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

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The Venezuela Option

Some informed intelligence officials say the Trump administration’s real goal in Iran isn’t the overthrow of the current regime but the elimination of Khamenei and the country’s top political and military leaders, leaving in place a commander from Iran’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who might bow to Trump’s demands for an end to the country’s nuclear program, its long-range ballistic missile program and its support for Shiite proxy militias across the Middle East. The CSIS’s Alterman compares it to the administration’s removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, but leaving in place his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez to do Trump’s bidding.

One former senior intelligence official, speaking on terms of anonymity, explained the theory behind the idea, cautioning he had no idea if it would succeed.

“Regime change doesn’t mean that suddenly Iran is now a democratic republic,” he told SpyTalk.“It means it could be the exact same government. It’s just—you’ve lopped off the top 500 people. In theory, the way it would work is after defeating the adversary and defending the partners, they reduce the leadership to the point where they reach some level where someone cries ‘Uncle and I’m ready to make a deal.’”

Other former intelligence officials dismissed the idea. “Iran is not Venezuela,” says Luis Rueda, who served as the chief of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group under President George W. Bush. “We might get lucky and take out some leadership, but so what? . . . That doesn’t translate to supporting outside regime change, nor does it guarantee there will be a change we like.

“Iran’s security apparatus is large and powerful,” he added. “Taking out one, two, ten leadership targets does not guarantee change, or that the people will successfully rise up. We would need to be ready to guide the change, and we aren’t.”

Alterman, too, is also highly skeptical . “It’s going to be very, very hard to accomplish our political goals from the air,” he says. “The Iranians know that, and they’re hunkering down. They’re thinking politically about how to undermine what we’re doing.”

“Everyone would love to see a magic bullet that eliminates the Iranian regime and that empowers an Iranian democracy that once again becomes friends with the United States,” added Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow and Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But there’s not a lot of great examples from history that such a clean operation exists.” ###

There’s lots else we’d like to be doing on this pleasant Saturday. But we roused ourselves to deliver what you’d expect: Something original on a big breaking national security story. You’re welcome—and please remember that SpyTalk is a wholly reader-supported publication—no ads, no foundation grants, no corporate sponsors. Yet we’re continuing to grow and punch above our weight, thanks to people like you. So how about upping to paid or taking out a free trial right here and now?

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