As the Khomeinists maneuvered to increasingly encroach upon all facets of state administration and consolidate power, Ali Khamenei’s fervent loyalty to Khomeini and close relationship with Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Khomeini’s closest acolyte, began paying dividends.

Relations continued to deteriorate over the next several months, reaching their apex when President Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah into the U.S. for cancer treatment in October 1979. Khomeini was convinced this was evidence of the U.S. plotting to restore its influence in Tehran, and his rhetoric against the “Great Satan” escalated. On November 1, Bazargan traveled to Algeria to represent Iran at a celebration of Algeria’s independence. While there, he met with U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and was photographed shaking his hand.

On January 6, 1979, Bakhtiar announced the formation of a new cabinet, and the Shah announced that as soon as the parliament approved Bakhtiar’s government, he planned to leave Iran indefinitely. Khomeini denounced Bakhtiar’s government as illegal and in an act of defiance that reflected his confidence that victory was imminent, formed a shadow government, the Islamic Revolutionary Council, whose membership was largely kept secret in the early phases of the revolution.

The final phase of the Shah’s reign began in October 1977, following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 49-year-old son and most trusted aide, Mostafa, in Najaf. Mostafa’s death occurred six months after the death of Ali Shariati under suspicious circumstances in the United Kingdom. Shariati was an intellectual from Mashhad, well-known to Khamenei, who fused Marxist and Islamic thought and was considered one of the leading ideologues of the Islamic Revolution. SAVAK was widely suspected of having played a role in both untimely deaths.

While Khamenei was in prison, the anti-Shah movement continued gathering steam, leading to a small-scale uprising that presaged the Islamic Revolution. In March 1975, the Shah reversed his earlier gestures towards political liberalization. Initially, he had allowed the formation of two political parties, one of which was nominally an opposition party.

The first signs of unrest between the Shah and Khomeini’s supporters emerged in March 1963 when the Shah’s agents violently attacked a protest against his rule at the Fayziyyah seminary in Qom, killing several students.

While his primary education focused mainly on traditional religious subjects, at the age of 13, Khamenei underwent a political awakening that led him to adopt Islamism, an ideology that merged politics and Islam, as his guiding principle. During that year, Khamenei attended a speech by the fundamentalist cleric Nawwab Safavi, who was later executed by the Shah’s regime for his militant activities.