The top layer of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leadership is gone, and the U.S and Israeli bombing campaign is steadily degrading the Revolutionary Guards’ senior officer corps. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei might be dead, but his son Mojtaba reportedly survived and is replacing him on the throne despite his lack of top religious credentials. He may not last, but unconditional surrender or not, the regime’s noxious ideology will live on. Iranians will pay the price for that as the Islamic Republic continues to threaten and even fire upon its own people. But, if reports of an intercepted communication to activate sleeper cells are to be believed, the regime might also unleash a wave of terror across the United States and the West unseen since the 1980s.
Real estate development shaped President Donald Trump’s idea of the art of the deal. While he now demands unconditional surrender, he makes a grave mistake if he views Iran through the lens of his business experience. That extends to any Venezuela-inspired effort to stand up a provisional authority led by regime officials like Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, a former commander of the national police and commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ aerospace force, or Hassan Rouhani, a cleric, former president, and former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Trump sees Venezuela as a success, and may see these figures as capable of delivering a new order short of regime change.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and Trump even more so. Former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the late shah, has failed his audition, largely because of the antics of his own advisers and their inability to work with broader-based groups like the Iran Freedom Congress. Pahlavi’s push for power convinced Trump and many insiders that the Iranian opposition is fragmented and unreliable.
Trump’s belief that he can rely on regime figures to sign a surrender and usher in a postwar provisional government discounts the role of ideology. He misunderstands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the ideological enmity it embraces.
It is possible to enter the IRGC bubble at age 8 as the organization and its paramilitary Basij run the equivalent of evil Boy Scout programs in which revolutionary ideologues run after-school and summer programs in which they can combine sports with indoctrination. Secondary schools and universities have Basiji clubs, and the IRGC runs its own universities.
Those Iranians who join the Revolutionary Guards for pay and privilege are already starting to fade away, especially the corpsmen assigned to drone and missile launchers. But the hardline ideologues remain. Not only will they wage insurgency inside Iran against any new order they do not dominate, much like the Khmer Rouge did after its ouster in Cambodia, but they also might direct a systematic revenge and sleeper campaign in the United States.
The United States should expect an IRGC insurgency inside Iran. Insight into the factional divisions within the Revolutionary Guards has long been a U.S. intelligence deficiency. While the U.S. military knows which clerics and politicians to target, it cannot differentiate between individual guardsmen with any granularity. Some IRGC true believers are certain to survive, and a fraction might target American businessmen and diplomats, much like the Mojahedin-e Khalq did in the years before the Islamic Revolution. The same cells that crafted and supplied improvised explosive devices to supply the Iraqi insurgency could now deploy the same to target Americans. They will be more lethal if only because businessmen and tourists eschew armored cars.
Trump’s suggestion that he could empower regime officials may make things worse. Here, he should take a lesson from the mistakes Gen. David Petraeus made in Iraq. Petraeus, seeking to show that coopting Baathists was wiser than purging them, installed former high-level Baathists in key positions in Mosul only to have them facilitate the November 2004 insurgency that briefly handed control over Iraq’s second largest city to insurgents.
The United States should not make the same mistake again. To install a former IRGCs general like Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani or Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf would be to ensure IRGC cells would rise to fight another day. Given the Islamic Republic’s propensity toward “export of Revolution” and its calls for revenge, this would also put Americans at risk.
Already, on Friday, an IRGC Telegram channel called on the regime’s supporters to hit Trump wherever and whenever he visits the region. The Islamic Republic has no shortage of sympathizers throughout the region willing to target American diplomats if not visiting politicians for ideology if not for profit. The Islamic Republic has previously been open about its desire to kill those who handled the Iran file during Trump’s first term including envoy Brian Hook and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The regime will not limit itself to the immediate Middle East. The IRGC and its proxy militias have targeted Israelis and Jews in Argentina, Bulgaria, Thailand, Georgia, and India. Its hit squads have targeted Iranian dissidents in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.
Nor will Americans be immune on the home front. President Jimmy Carter was desperate to reset relations with Iran after the Islamic Revolution. He did not break relations after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s ouster of the shah, nor did he even after the November 1979 storming of the U.S. Embassy and the seizure of 52 American diplomats. Rather, only the April 1980 assassination of Ali Akbar Tabatabaei—an Iranian dissident who sought asylum in the United States and who was living in Bethesda, Maryland—forced Carter to break ties and shut down the Iranian Embassy that today still sits abandoned on Massachusetts Avenue.
Importantly, the gunman, Dawud Salahuddin (born David Belfield), was not Iranian; he was an African American convert to Islam whom Iranian agents recruited. Salahuddin later fled to the Islamic Republic. In March 2007, he was the last known figure to see former FBI agent Robert Levinson alive, after he lured Levinson to Kish Island for an interview.
A willingness to co-opt non-Iranians for terror is standard Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tradecraft. The 2011 plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States centered on an Iranian effort to hire Mexican cartel members to provide and set off the car bomb. In 2025, the U.S. District Court in Manhattan sentenced two Azerbaijani mafioso whom Iran hired to kidnap Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian diaspora journalist and women’s activist.
In both Germany and Argentina, local Lebanese diaspora worked alongside Iranian agents in deadly terrorist attacks.
The willingness of Iranians to co-opt non-Iranian ideologues and criminal networks complicates counterterrorism, especially given extensive and pre-existing ties with Mexican and Latin American cartels as well as Russian, Albanian, East Asian, and Caribbean gangs and organized criminal groups operating in the United States. President Barack Obama’s decision in 2016 to authorize pallets of cash—more than $1 billion in total—loaded onto an IRGC-controlled flight ostensibly as part of a hostage release has complicated counterterror significantly, as the U.S. Department of the Treasury has much more difficulty tracing cash than monitoring wires.
In 2003, an alert bartender in Little Rock, Arkansas, tipped off the FBI about an Iranian immigrant in the Arkansas National Guard who was asking numerous questions about logistics and deployments. A brief investigation showed that he had previous service in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So as not to expose sources and methods, the U.S. government prosecuted him for lying on his immigration forms about a previous marriage; I became aware of the case during efforts to find a proper expert witness. But, if one Revolutionary Guardsmen infiltrated a military unit, it is possible that others did so even more successfully, especially if they practiced better tradecraft.
Not all Iranians whom the Islamic Republic might press into service may be ideologically aligned with the regime. When Iranian Americans visit Iran, authorities interrogate them. Whether they know it, the regime sucks their electronics dry. If any of these computers or phones have anything the regime can use for blackmail, they will. This need not mean planting a bomb or shooting up a school: It could mean buying an innocuous component and transporting it to another location where an operative could assemble it, or plugging a USB with malware into critical infrastructure
While Sunni groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, both Muslim Brotherhood-aligned, deign to speak on behalf of all American Muslims, the Muslim community in the United States is much more diverse. Many are moderate. Some are secular. Perhaps 1-in-5 American Muslims were Shiites. Many oppose the Islamic Republic, but others may align ideologically, especially as word emerges of multiple sermons delivered at Shiite mosques across America lamenting Khamenei’s death and calling for revenge. The Shiite lionization of martyrdom simply adds fuel to the fire.
Unfortunately, there are no shortage of terror targets. After decades of terror, Israelis are accustomed to airport-like security when entering malls, bus stations, restaurants, and schools. Americans are not. Beyond targeting American officials used to leaving their jobs behind when they go out in the evening or attend Little League games with family, elite universities may be a high value targets, not only because the children of the elite attend and names like Harvard and Yale have cachet, but also because the student bodies there are so adverse to security or reporting suspicious for fear of being called racist. The celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of America will also be a tempting target.
The sleeper cell problem is not just the stuff of Hollywood imagination or Brad Thor novels; it is real, and Americans are likely soon to get an unwelcome wake-up call.
