Iran supreme leader's son seen as power broker with big ambitions

The Guardian Council, which oversees the electoral process, has said the outcome will stand but also announced that it will continue to investigate the disputed vote count through Monday. The street protests and violence that erupted over the last week -- state news media have reported that 10 to 19 people have died -- were in part the result of a crackdown by forces close to Mojtaba Khamanei.

"This coup taking place is a political liquidation against the old guard by reckless people like Mojtaba and Ahmadinejad," said Mehdi Khalaji, an expert on Iran with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "But I don't think they will win. Power that relies only on the military and doesn't care about social or religious institutions cannot last long."

Mojtaba Khamenei is a secretive man who doesn't want to "be on people's tongues," said Mohsen Sazegara, an Iranian journalist and former government official whose reformist views led to his brief imprisonment in 2003. "Nobody knows much about him."

The younger Khamenei is the "most influential person in his father's court," said Ali Afshari, a dissident and reformist who spent three years in jail for running pro-democracy programs. "The question is, what happens when his father is gone? Mojtaba needs to hold on to the security apparatus."

Khalaji, who studied in Iran's holy city of Qom, said Mojtaba Khamenei "was raised in a house surrounded by intelligence services. He doesn't have [prominent] clerical credentials, despite the fact that he wears robes and a clerical uniform."

He added that the son's background is much different from his father's. The supreme leader, in his younger years, immersed himself in literature, novels and music, was friends with intellectuals and spent time in jail with Marxists. The younger Khamenei, said Khalaji, "grew up in a very different atmosphere, a post-revolutionary generation."

Much of that generation is not grounded in the personalities and passions that underpinned the 1979 revolt.

Analysts say Mojtaba Khamenei lacks the religious and political stature to overcome the opposition he would face in the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with selecting the supreme leader. His 69-year-old father is believed to have influence over about half of the assembly's 86 seats, but the board is headed by Rafsanjani and includes other reformists who probably would block a bid by the younger Khamenei to succeed his father.