When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was buried this month, a handful of Americans flew to Tehran to mourn him. The commentator Jackson Hinkle led “Down with the USA” chants from a rally stage. Calla Walsh, a former campaign volunteer for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), went on Iranian state television to call the man who had spent six years ordering an American president’s assassination “the greatest anti-imperialist leader” of her lifetime.
Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone — an outlet whose managing editor was paid by Iran’s state broadcaster, as the Washington Post reported — drummed for the cameras and filed admiring dispatches.
It is tempting to file this under Iran. That would be a mistake. What played out in Tehran was not an Iranian invention. It was a method — old, patient, and imperial — that Iran inherited rather than authored. To understand it, you have to go back to Moscow.
WHY IS IRAN SUDDENLY DESPERATE TO KILL TRUMP?
In 1984, a Soviet defector named Yuri Bezmenov explained on American television how his old service actually worked. The romantic image of espionage — stolen secrets, midnight handoffs — was, he said, a fraction of the business. The real work was slower: “active measures,” a long campaign to demoralize a target society, corrode its confidence in its own institutions, and turn its citizens into advocates of the very power working to undo them. You did not need to defeat a free country in the field. You needed only to persuade enough of its people to stop believing in it.
The method does not require converts by the million. It requires amplifiers, a modest number of loud, credible voices who will carry a hostile power’s narrative in the local accent, for reasons they experience as entirely their own. The gun removes an obstacle. The narrative removes the will to resist. The Soviet innovation was not assassination, which is as old as politics. It was the synchronizing of violence and narrative into a single instrument of state power and the discovery that a free society could be recruited to turn the second half against itself.
According to Soviet-bloc defector Ion Pacepa, the KGB ran a program he called Operation SIG to spread anti-Western and anti-Zionist propaganda across the Middle East. His account remains debated, but the broader pattern needs no defector to confirm: Soviet anti-Zionist active measures are documented independently, from the Mitrokhin archive to the Moscow-driven 1975 United Nations resolution branding Zionism a form of racism.
How cold the calculation runs is clearest in Josef Stalin’s dealings with Israel. In 1947 and 1948, Moscow was Israel’s indispensable patron, voting for partition, extending the first de jure recognition, and, through Czechoslovakia, supplying the arms that helped the new state survive its war of independence. This was not sentiment. Stalin expected a socialist Israel that would speed the collapse of British influence in the Middle East. Support for Zionism was an instrument, picked up because it was useful. When Israel chose the West instead, the instrument was discarded violently. Moscow reversed course, liquidated the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee it had itself created, broke relations in 1953, and spent the next four decades arming Israel’s enemies and flooding the world with anti-Zionist propaganda.
One figure captures the arc. David Dragunsky was a Soviet tank commander, twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, whose entire extended family was murdered by the Nazis. In 1948, he wanted to raise a Jewish division to fight for Israel. Decades later, the same state made him the public face of its Anti-Zionist Committee, the official instrument for demonstrating that “Soviet Jews condemn Israel.” The war hero became a prop. That is what active measures do to people: They take what is real and bend it toward the opposite of its meaning.
Watch the technique migrate. Iran today runs both halves at once. The kinetic half is a matter of public record: Federal prosecutors have charged an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operative, Farhad Shakeri, in a plot to assassinate President Donald Trump. A Brooklyn jury convicted a second Revolutionary Guard operative, Asif Merchant, in a murder-for-hire scheme aimed at the same target. And in 2022, the Justice Department charged the Guard’s Shahram Poursafi with attempting to buy the murder of former national security adviser John Bolton on American soil. These are indictments and verdicts, not intelligence rumors.
The narrative half is what the world saw at the funeral. The regime that runs the guns also runs the story, and it has learned, as Moscow did, that the most valuable messenger is a citizen of the target country. There is no public evidence that the American amplifiers in Tehran were paid agents. They were something more useful: true believers, translating Tehran’s grievances into fluent American English, for reasons they would describe as conscience. The Islamic Republic did not invent that arrangement. It borrowed it from a manual written in Russian.
A distinction matters here, and dropping it is how serious arguments become bigoted ones. The problem is not a faith of nearly 2 billion people. It is political Islamism as a governing project, and its usefulness to a hostile state, exactly as ultra-left and ultra-right movements have been useful to the Kremlin in Europe. The method is indifferent to the ideology it rides. It takes whichever current runs against the open society.
Nowhere is the updated method clearer than in my own country. The lesson is no longer historical. It is operational, and America is facing the same technique now. Russia did not take Georgia with a tank. It took it with a bank. Bidzina Ivanishvili built a multibillion-dollar fortune in Russia, came home, and bought his way to power, not by invading, but through money, elite capture, and political influence. Around that capture runs a narrative that teaches one of the most pro-American populations on Earth to resent Washington. This resembles what Bezmenov described as demoralization, carried out with a checkbook instead of a division.
I spent more than two decades inside Georgia’s security services, first in counterintelligence, then in intelligence and counterintelligence assignments under official cover, watching this method operate against my own country. The pattern is portable. I have seen it before. America is seeing it now.
The same method eventually produced a visible geopolitical consequence. The proof arrived in Tehran. On July 3, Georgia’s own president, Mikheil Kavelashvili, flew to Iran to attend Khamenei’s funeral and met President Masoud Pezeshkian, taking his place at the same ceremony where crowds chanted “death to America.” The trip drew sharp criticism at home and in Washington. A government that insists it faces West does not, as a rule, send its head of state to mourn the man who spent his life cursing it. Unless the compass has already turned.
HOW ONE LEAK IS TEARING IRAN APART FROM THE INSIDE
The empire that perfected this technique is gone. The technique is not. It survived the collapse of the state that built it because it was never really about communism, or Iran, or one oligarch in Tbilisi. It is about a permanent temptation available to every authoritarian power: to let a free country’s own citizens do the work of undoing it.
Moscow wrote the manual. Tehran translated it. Georgia became one of its clearest modern demonstrations. The only question is whether free societies will recognize the method before they mistake its voice for their own.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.