President Donald Trump said Tuesday at the White House that the United States is in contact with senior Iranian figures, even as Tehran publicly denies any negotiations are taking place. "Nobody knows who to talk to," Trump told reporters. "But we're actually talking to the right people, and they want to make a deal so badly."
The question of who holds real power inside Iran right now is not academic. It shapes whether any deal can stick, who can deliver compliance, and whether the regime's public denials are theater or genuine confusion about its own chain of command.
As Fox News Digital reported, the answer points squarely to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC sits at the core of what remains of Iran's governing apparatus, a regime battered by U.S.-Israeli strikes, stripped of senior leaders, and now scrambling to project strength while quietly exploring an off-ramp.
The Feb. 28 U.S.-Israeli strikes killed former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior military and political figures. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, inherited the position's authority, but has not appeared publicly since taking power. He has issued only written statements. Reports indicate he was injured in the same strikes that killed his father.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, offered a blunt assessment of the situation:
"For the time being, since Mojtaba has been injured, it seems he's a hologram and not holding power. However, if Mojtaba recovers, he will be involved in ruling Iran. He is not just a figurehead. But anyhow, for the time being, the control of Iran is in the hands of the revolutionary guards."
A hologram. That word captures something Washington should take seriously. The supreme leader's office, the single most powerful position in Iran since the 1979 revolution, may be occupied in name only. The funeral processions in Tehran on March 11 told the story: mourners held posters depicting both Mojtaba and Ali Khamenei, grieving a father and propping up a son nobody has seen.
On March 1, an interim leadership council met at an undisclosed location. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, deputy chairman of the Assembly of Experts, all attended. Other officials shaping Iran's direction include IRGC chief Ahmad Vahidi, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, and naval commander Alireza Tangsiri.
That's a lot of cooks. And every one of them answers, in practice, to the IRGC.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, described how the military campaign has reshaped Iranian politics. "No doubt both the 12-Day war and this current conflict have trimmed the commanding heights of the Islamic Republic's political and military leadership," he said. "But it has also expedited the trend lines inherent in Iranian politics, which is the dominance of the security forces and the ascendance of the IRGC."
Ben Taleblu's next point cuts deeper:
"Yes, there is more IRGC control over the state than ever before, but the state is weaker than ever before and more of a national security rump state than ever before."
That distinction matters. The IRGC runs the show, but the show is shrinking. The sustained American pressure campaign, from bunker busters deployed to secure the Strait of Hormuz to Defense Secretary Hegseth's warning that firepower over Tehran would "surge dramatically", has left the regime governing from a position of weakness it has never experienced.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Iran appointed Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former IRGC commander, as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. That council is Iran's top forum for coordinating military and foreign policy. Placing another IRGC veteran at its helm confirms the pattern Ben Taleblu described.
The State Department's Rewards for Justice program already has its eye on the regime's inner circle. A poster offers up to $10 million for information on key leaders tied to the IRGC, including Mojtaba Khamenei, Ali Asghar Hejazi, Yahya Rahim Safavi, Ali Larijani, Eskandar Momeni, and Esmail Khatib.
One name keeps surfacing: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Iran's Parliament Speaker is a former IRGC commander who has run for president four times since 2005. He was one of the key security figures involved in the crackdown on student protests in July 1999. He is no moderate, whatever Western media might wish.
But he may be a pragmatist. Axios reported that the White House is quietly exploring Ghalibaf as a potential interlocutor and possible future leader. Ghalibaf is expected to meet U.S. special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the capital of Pakistan as early as the end of this week. Yet publicly, Ghalibaf has denied engaging in talks with the United States.
That public denial tracks with Tehran's broader posture. Iran's U.N. mission did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital before publication. The regime wants to negotiate without admitting it is negotiating, because admitting it would mean admitting defeat.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi remains one of Iran's most visible figures internationally. He attended a joint press conference with Russia's foreign minister in Moscow on April 18, 2025, and would likely join any Iranian delegation alongside Ghalibaf. But Araghchi does not set policy independently. He is a channel, not a decision-maker.
Kuperwasser framed the internal divisions this way:
"There are the more pragmatic elites, like Araghchi, Rouhani, and Zarif. There are also the hardliners who have usually held the upper hand... But they are united in one issue, that the regime should survive and stay in power."
Western observers sometimes treat the rise of IRGC-connected figures as a new development. Ben Taleblu pushed back on that reading. He argued that Ghalibaf's expanded role is not the break from precedent it appears to be:
"Those who see the ascendants of someone like Ghalibaf, who is an IRGC veteran, having extended power outside his traditional civilian rule, have missed the decades of how personality, not profession, has been the driving force in Iranian politics for the past few decades. I would also say those who worry about the IRGC background of the Supreme National Security Council are all that in Iran today, may have missed the fact that the past few Supreme National Security Council Secretaries, Shamkhani, Larijani, Ahmadian, all also had IRGC backgrounds."
In other words, the IRGC has been running the table for years. The strikes and the current conflict just ripped away the civilian facade.
Ben Taleblu also offered pointed advice for Washington. "It shouldn't particularly preoccupy Washington, who is and isn't offering negotiations," he said. The real priority, he argued, is "working toward a military win at a political win, and that does not come by working with the IRGC, but actually beating them on the battlefield and supporting the forces most arrayed against them in Iran, which are the Iranian people."
Trump's posture suggests confidence. His administration has combined pauses in strikes to allow deal talks with relentless military escalation when those windows close. Reports of significant progress in U.S.-Iran talks have circulated for weeks, and the president's own language, "they want to make a deal so badly", signals that Washington believes the pressure is working.
The regime's survival instinct is the one thing every faction inside Iran agrees on. That instinct, not ideology, drives whoever sits across from Witkoff and Kushner in Pakistan. The question is whether the IRGC's grip on the state makes a deal easier to enforce or harder to trust.
A billboard displayed above a Tehran highway on March 10 depicted Iran's supreme leaders since 1979. The regime wants Iranians to see continuity. But what the world sees is an adversary that has caved, one that denies it is talking while its parliament speaker books a flight to meet American envoys.
Regimes that refuse to admit they're at the table usually end up accepting whatever's on it.
