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For decades, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and ruling clerical elite have relied on a system critics say is as strategic as it is cynical: denounce the West in public, while quietly securing a future there for their own families.
“The Islamic regime in Iran is corrupt to its core,” Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC research at United Against Nuclear Iran, told Fox News Digital. “While regime clerics and IRGC commanders violently Islamize Iranian society and export anti-Americanism globally, their sons and daughters live lavish lifestyles on blood money in Western capitals.”
Iranian journalist Banafsheh Zand still remembers the girl from her school, the kind of memory that only becomes meaningful years later, when a familiar face reappears in a completely different context.
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Iranian women walk past a mural painting of Iranian flags in Tehran on Nov. 26, 2024. (Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)
They sat together in classrooms at Tehran’s elite Iranzamin School, an institution designed for the children of diplomats and Iran’s upper class, where students spoke multiple languages and moved easily between cultures. The girl was quiet and studious, already shaped in part by years spent in the United States, where she had lived as a child and picked up fluent English that would later define her public role.
Years later, Zand would see her again, not across a desk or in a school hallway, but on television screens around the world. Her former classmate had become the voice of the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage crisis.
The girl was Masoumeh Ebtekar, the English-speaking spokesperson for the extremists who held 52 Americans hostages for 444 days, and who would go on to defend the takeover of the U.S. embassy and later describe it as “the best move” for the revolution.
And yet, decades later, the story did not end in Tehran. It continued, quietly and almost predictably, in California.
Masoumeh Ebtekar, the English-speaking face of the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage crisis, later rose to senior roles in Iran’s government while her family built ties to life in the West. (Vahid Salemi/AP Photo)
A life far from the revolution
Ebtekar son, Eissa Hashemi, was living in the United States, pursuing graduate studies and eventually building a career in academia in Los Angeles, Zand exposed on her substack “Iran So Far Away” — a trajectory that stands in stark contrast to the ideology his mother helped articulate to the world.
For Zand, this is not an anecdote or an isolated irony, but a window into how the system itself functions.
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“They take the money from corruption inside the country and use it to live a better life elsewhere,” she said. “It’s not a few cases. It’s how they operate.”
What Zand is describing is widely referred to inside Iran as the “aghazadeh” phenomenon, a term used for the children of the Iranian regime’s elite who live lives of privilege abroad while their families enforce ideological restrictions at home, and who have come to symbolize for many Iranians the gap between the regime’s rhetoric and its reality.
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Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami (L) gives a certificate of appreciation to leading reformist politician Saeed Hajjarian during the annual congress of the Islamic Iran Participation Front in Tehran December 4, 2008. (Caren Firouz/Reuters)
A three-tier network inside the West
Exiled Iranian journalist Mehdi Ghadimi, now based in Canada, argues that this phenomenon is structured.
“When we talk about the presence of agents of the Islamic Republic, especially the IRGC, here in Canada, we should understand this is not random,” Ghadimi told Fox News Digital. “It operates in layers.”
The system functions as a three-tiered structure that allows regime-linked individuals to embed themselves across Western societies, according to Ghadimi, beginning with those who arrive as students and academics, often presenting themselves as ordinary immigrants while maintaining ties to the regime or its security apparatus.
“They come as students or professors,” he said, “but many have prior connections to the IRGC, and part of their role is to normalize the Islamic Republic in universities and gather information on activists.”
A billboard depicting Iran’s supreme leaders since 1979: (L to R) Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini (until 1989), Ali Khamenei (until 2026), and Mojtaba Khamenei (incumbent) is displayed above a highway in Tehran on March 10, 2026. Iran marked the appointment of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei to replace his father as its supreme leader on March 9, 2026. (AFP/Via Getty Images)
That category includes individuals identified in recent reporting across U.S. campuses, such as Leila Khatami, daughter of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami at Union College in New York, Zeinab Hajjarian, the daughter of Saeed Hajjarian, a founder of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, according to a March 18 New York Post report.
The second layer, Ghadimi explained, is financial, consisting of former insiders and trusted affiliates who enter Western countries as investors or business figures, often carrying significant capital that raises questions about its origin.
“In Iran, a monthly salary might be $100 or $200, while an apartment costs $100,000,” he said. “So when someone arrives with millions, they are not an ordinary individual.”
These individuals, he said, often serve as conduits for moving money out of Iran, operating under the cover of private enterprise while maintaining ties to the system that enabled their wealth. “They change their professional status and enter as private-sector investors,” he said. “But they are trusted by the system.”
The third layer involves individuals who receive explicit approval from the regime to move large sums abroad, a process that, according to Ghadimi, requires a “green light” from the security apparatus and often comes with expectations in return. “In order to move that level of money, you need permission,” he said, “and in return, they help finance networks connected to the regime.”
A woman holds an Iranian flag during the funeral and burial of Ali Shamkhani at Imamzadeh Saleh in northern Tehran, Iran, on March 14, 2026. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
One of the most prominent examples is Mahmoud Reza Khavari, the former chairman of Bank Melli Iran, who fled the country in 2011 after the bank was implicated in a roughly $2.6 billion embezzlement scandal, one of the largest corruption cases in Iran’s history.
Khavari later settled in Canada, where public reporting shows that he and his family acquired millions of dollars in real estate, including properties in Toronto, where he remains more than a decade later.
For Zand, the pattern is unmistakable.
“It’s a mafia structure,” she said.
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Ali Larijani, addresses a press conference in Tehran, Iran. Larijani, a top Iranian security official and a conservative force within Iran’s theocracy, was killed in an Israeli strike on March 17, 2026. (Henghameh Fahimi/AFP via Getty Images)
A global footprint: from Atlanta to London
As previously reported by Fox News Digital, Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of senior Iranian political figure Ali Larijani and a conservative force within Iran’s theocracy, who was killed in an Israeli strike this week, held a position at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta before leaving earlier this year following public pressure.
At the same time, a February 2026 report by The Guardian highlighted how relatives of Iranian elites have built lives not only in the United States, but also in Britain and Canada, including members of the Larijani family and relatives of other senior officials, even as the regime continues to position itself in opposition to the West.
Thousands of relatives of Iranian officials were believed to be living across Western countries, IranWire reported in 2022, though precise figures remain difficult to independently verify, underscoring both the scale of the phenomenon and the opacity of the system behind it.
“The problem is even more visible in Europe,” Aarabi said, “Governments, not least the U.K., have turned a blind eye.”
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In this picture obtained from Iran’s ISNA news agency, Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, looks on in Tehran on October 13, 2024. (Hamed JAFARNEJAD / ISNA / AFP via Getty Images)
Power, assets and the next generation
Mojtaba Khamenei, who is slated as the country’s new supreme leader, has been linked to a network of overseas assets, including high-value real estate in Europe.
A March 2026 investigation by The Times of London, identified two luxury apartments in London’s Kensington neighborhood, acquired in 2014 and 2016 through intermediaries, that sit directly adjacent to the Israeli Embassy compound.
The findings are part of a broader probe into Khamenei’s alleged overseas holdings, with a Bloomberg investigation estimating a portfolio spanning multiple countries and totaling roughly $138 million in assets across Europe and the Gulf, pending verification of full ownership structures.
“He has been operating behind the scenes, managing a large part of the Revolutionary Guard’s security and economic cartel,” Ghadimi said. “His hands are deeply stained with corruption and crimes, and the same Revolutionary Guard is now the main force backing his rise.”
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A person holds an image of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iranian demonstrators protest against the U.S.-Israeli strikes, in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 28, 2026. (Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters)
A system Iranians themselves cannot escape
Inside Iran, the contrast with everyday life is stark. Women are arrested for violating dress codes, protesters are jailed and economic hardship has deepened across much of the population. Outside Iran, the children of the elite live differently.
“They’re telling people how to live, what to wear, what to believe,” Zand said. “But their own families don’t live like that.”
For her, the issue is not only hypocrisy, but strategy. “It’s also about influence,” she said. “They integrate into societies, they build networks, they learn how the West works.”
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Pro-government demonstrators burn an American flag at Tehran University, on June 19, 2009 in Tehran, Iran. (Getty Images)
Aarabi believes Western governments have failed to respond accordingly. “The Islamic regime’s oligarchs should be treated no differently from Putin’s oligarchs,” he said. “The West should identify, sanction and deport these individuals.”
Efrat Lachter is a foreign correspondent for Fox News Digital covering international affairs and the United Nations. Follow her on X @efratlachter. Stories can be sent to [email protected].
