Posted by Laura Secor
Yesterday morning, I had a rare opportunity to sit down with a man many see as the right hand and most trusted advisor of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He is a longtime friend of Ahmadinejad, a relative by marriage, and a member of his innermost circle, a coterie so tight as to form a faction within a faction in Iran’s ruling establishment. His name is Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, and he is the Iranian president’s chief of staff.
Mashaei is a controversial figure among the Iranian hardliners, a lightning rod for the few known tensions between Ahmadinejad’s circle and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Curiously, this is because Mashaei has a reputation for being comparatively moderate and unpredictable. In 2008, when he was a vice-president (Iran has twelve) in charge of tourism, Mashaei made headlines for suggesting that Iran’s quarrel with Israel was with its government and not its people. Iran, he claimed, was a friend of all the world’s people, including Americans and Israelis. Mashaei walked that comment back, but it clearly sat badly with the traditional conservatives around Khamenei. Mashaei had already come to their attention when he attended a ceremony in Turkey at which women performed a traditional dance. In Iran, women are strictly forbidden to dance in front of men.
After last summer’s contested presidential election, Ahmadinejad appointed Mashaei First Vice-President. In an unusually public rebuke to Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei demanded that Mashaei be removed from that position. Ahmadinejad complied—he had no choice—but he shocked analysts with a show of defiance, making Mashaei his chief of staff. Iranian journalists speculate that Mashaei is close to the president spiritually as well as politically, and that the two men hold similar views of their personal relationships with the hidden imam—the Shiite messiah.