EXILES.(Reza Pahlavi, Shahriar Ahy)

On a snowy mid-December day, Reza Pahlavi, the forty-five-year-old son of the deposed Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was seated at a table by the fire at a popular country-French restaurant in Georgetown, enjoying a bowl of cassoulet and plotting the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was accompanied by Shahriar Ahy, who in the months before the 1979 Iranian revolution had been an informal liaison between the Shah and the White House; after the Shah died, in exile, in 1980, Ahy remained close to Reza, whom many refer to as "the young shah." By early 2004, Ahy, who had been running a multinational media company from Saudi Arabia, had left his job to work full time on unseating the Iranian regime. Although Ahy says that he has no factional affiliations, he has become, in essence, Pahlavi's political strategist, mentor, speechwriter, monitor. He is also attempting, on Pahlavi's behalf, to unite the atomized Iranian opposition. Ahy, an M.I.T. graduate-school alumnus, is often compared to his fellow-alumnus Ahmad Chalabi, who, before the American invasion of Iraq, was the head of the Iraqi National Congress. An Iranian-American political activist with ties to Ahy and Pahlavi commented recently, "If Reza is ever returned to power, it will be because of Shahriar."

At lunch, as long as Pahlavi stayed on well-marked if somewhat platitudinous terrain, Ahy concentrated on the plate of calf's brain before him. But when Pahlavi seemed to veer off course Ahy's head jerked slightly. At one point, Pahlavi became quite excited, saying, "Maybe what happened twenty-six years ago is a blessing in disguise." Ahy, frowning, waited for him to finish his thought, and Pahlavi continued, "I don't think we could have had the appreciation for democratic values we have come to today. It's by losing democracy that we have come to value it." Ahy said, "You know what Churchill said when told that his loss in the 1945 election was a blessing in disguise." He glanced at Pahlavi. "He said, 'It is quite effectively disguised.' "

A front-page story in the Washington Post that morning reported that Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had called the extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War a "myth." The week before, at a conference of Islamic nations in Saudi Arabia, he had said that, if the Europeans had supported the creation of Israel because of guilt over their actions against Jews, they should give the Jews a country in Europe instead. "We have been trying to tell the world, 'This is who this regime is,' " Pahlavi said, with grim satisfaction. "What you see here is the most extreme--not the smiling face of Khatami." Mohammad Khatami, the former President of Iran, who was elected as a reformist in 1997, had made overtures to the U.S., at one point calling for "a dialogue of civilizations," but his efforts at reform were stymied at home by a conservative backlash. Pahlavi went on, "Now the veil finally comes off!"

For years, the Iranian opposition has been so beset by factionalism that it has defied efforts at mobilization. Pahlavi insists that those days are past. Ahy is organizing a national congress, built around the Iran referendum movement, which calls for a nationwide vote on changing the constitution in order to make Iran a secular state. The two men stress that, with international pressure building over Iran's nuclear program, and with Bush's second term winding down, 2006 is the critical year. "Today, it is not 'You are a monarchist,' 'You are a republican,' 'You are a Marxist'--we are all in the same boat, fighting a common enemy," Pahlavi said. "We are getting very close, thank God. From what I hear from the activists, the walls of resistance are slowly dissipating, but it is still among the political elite and the intelligentsia. The message has yet to trickle down. So the opposition has to have broadcasting capability. If we had a wish list for Christmas, that would be on it."

Ahy spends nearly all his time travelling through Europe and the Middle East, recruiting Iranian dissidents. Pahlavi said that eighty per cent of his time is spent communicating with activists inside Iran: "I tell them this is not an open-ended debate. We have a time line of six months. Now, there can be no predicting--will there be preemptive strikes, either by Israel or by the U.S.? It's the absence of a homegrown alternative that causes the world to take drastic steps. But we have to tell the world that we have this alternative--shame on us if we don't!" According to Ahy, the national congress will be convened by summer, to be followed by a huge civil-disobedience campaign throughout Iran. "All have to cooperate to bring the regime down," he said. "We would have five, six, seven clusters inside, coordinated for unity of action. So, at the same time, the Kurds would be doing this! The oil workers striking over here! So the wolves are not running after different zebras."

In the past few months, Pahlavi and Ahy have met with leftists and with ethnic minorities. They have been excoriated for this by the monarchists, who are their core constituency, because many of these groups have separatist ambitions, which have been encouraged by the recent political victories of the Kurds in neighboring Iraq. For the nationalistic Persians--who have dominated Iran since Pahlavi's grandfather Reza Shah came to power, in 1925, and solidified their control over the minorities--Iran's territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Ahy defended Pahlavi: "He's talking to Kurds, to guerrilla forces, to the left--he's having a great time with them! What he's trying to do is say, 'We are one people, we are going to have to sit next to each other in a congress--the most important thing is to talk to each other.' " Last September, Pahlavi had dinner in Berlin with some of the leftists who had helped to overthrow his father, and it generated outrage on both the left and the right. Ahy said, "For two months, all these Web sites were filled with things like 'How could you possibly sit with him?' "

The issue of having designs on the throne dogs Pahlavi, no matter how much he tries to dispel it. He insists that his "sole mission" is to bring democracy to Iran, and that the Iranian people will then decide whether they want a democratic republic or a constitutional monarchy. His role model is King Juan Carlos of Spain, who is also a friend. "In his heart, he wants to be king," an Iranian-American dissident who has known Reza since he was a boy says. "And the Iranian people are not fools--they know it. It would be better if he said it outright."