The Empire of Terror Podcast

Empire of Terror - Chapter Three Podcast Eight

            Luring Opponents to Return: “Clever, Multidimensional and Innovative Tricks”
Early Soviet and Nazi leaders sometimes pressured leading dissidents to return from abroad. One of the most successful early Soviet operations was the Trust, designed to disrupt the anti-Bolshevik White émigré community. By creating a false active opposition on Soviet territory, the Trust lured several prominent dissidents to the Soviet Union, where they were killed. One was Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum, who took the name Reilly, worked for British Intelligence, and became an international arms dealer. He was productive and clever but was outwitted by the Soviets and lured to his execution. For their part, Nazi authorities had an image problem in 1936. They feared a boycott of their Olympics and pressured one of their finest women athletes to return from the safety of Britain to compete for Germany. Gretel Bergmann, a Jewish high jump record holder, was told that her parents would be harmed if she did not return and showcase her ability. Fearing for her family’s safety, she returned but was not allowed to compete in the Berlin Olympics.
Similarly, in Iran, the Guards lured a regime critic back to Iran and boasted of abducting him. Major General Salami claimed the Guards captured Rouhollah Zam, a Paris-based Iranian dissident. Zam said he regretted his media activities in exile in recent years. Mr. Zam, the middle-aged son of a reformist cleric, ran the Amadnews website, an antigovernment forum that blamed Iran for provoking nationwide unrest. In its statement, the Guards said it lured Zam into Iran using “clever, multidimensional and innovative tricks,” which even deceived foreign intelligence agencies. In July 2020, a court sentenced Zam to death for corruption on earth.
 
“Wet Operations”
Early Killings Abroad. Since the regime’s inception, Iran has continued to send teams of assassins abroad to kill its enemies. The Iranian revolution was fragile in its early years, and its leaders feared subversion at home and attacks and intrigue from enemies abroad. The Soviets, years earlier, faced a similar challenge. After a failed assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918, the Soviet leadership launched a Red Terror. The Soviets sent “Illegals,” multilingual killers, to target enemies. A legendary assassination was the bludgeoning of the well-protected Trotsky in Mexico. His death sent a message that no critic of Stalin was safe. The Soviets frequently murdered defectors in the West. The Nazis, too, killed high-profile enemies beyond their borders.
Iranian leaders, like those of the Soviets and the Nazis, have ordered the tracking down and killing of enemies of the state abroad. Some attacks have been carried out by the Guards, while others by MOIS operatives. Like Stalin, Khomeini sometimes personally signed the death warrants, as many as five hundred, of enemy exiles. Some killings were well planned and professionally executed, whereas others were carried out ineptly.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Iranian operatives worldwide carried out assassinations of opposition figures in the United States, France, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany. In Argentina, Iran-backed groups were accused of the deadly bombings of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and a Jewish community center in 1994, an attack that left 115 people dead.
Most of the high-profile foreign assassinations occurred in the 1990s. Germany was home to nearly 100,000 Iranians who had fled the revolution. Iran used diplomatic facilities to gather intelligence on exile opposition forces in Europe within this community.
 Particularly notorious were the 1992 assassinations of three Kurdish dissidents and their translator at Berlin’s Mykonos restaurant. A German court ruling named Iran’s then-president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as ordering the killings. Yet such actions were not limited to Germany, as Khomeini targeted his enemies worldwide. In 1989, a gunman using a sound-suppressing pistol killed an Iranian dissident on Cyprus. A former intelligence colonel was shot in his hotel room in Dubai in June 1989. In March 1990, a survivor of an attack was on his way to an airport in Turkey when a would-be assassin opened fire, injuring him. Other victims were mutilated to send a message. In Istanbul in 1992, a victim was discovered in a shallow grave with her fingernails pulled out and her genitals slashed. Some attacks were brazen, such as the 1993 killing of a leading dissident associated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran. He was shot in the face and killed while sitting in his car in downtown Rome.
The two assassins escaped on a motorcycle. The most notorious assassination to capture world headlines was the August 1991 killing of Shahpour Bakhtiar, the shah’s last prime minister, who was stabbed to death at his home outside Paris. Iranian exiles immediately asserted that the slaying was the work of a hit squad from Tehran. An anticlerical political scientist and proponent of democracy, Bakhtiar had served six years in prison for political activism during the Shah's rule. He had proven liberal credentials and, as a young man, took great risks, fighting in Spain with the loyalists against Franco and later helping the French resistance against the Nazis. As prime minister, he permitted Ayatollah Khomeini to reenter the country, but Khomeini refused to work with him. Bakhtiar escaped to Paris and used his home as a base to organize against Khomeini’s fundamentalist rule. In response, Khomeini likely ordered Bakhtiar murdered. Much like Trotsky in Mexico, Bakhtiar had a well-guarded villa and was shielded around the clock by four policemen.
But Bakhtiar’s stronghold was insufficient to keep out assassins. As with Trotsky, Bakhtiar was killed by a family friend who had accomplices. The murderer was captured and imprisoned in France, but released in 2010 in a prisoner exchange. Most Iranian embassies serve as centers for diplomacy, espionage, and clandestine operations. This is not unique. While the Guards and MOIS operatives mask their identities by assuming the roles of cultural attaches or military officers, this is standard tradecraft used by intelligence services worldwide. What distinguishes the Iranian service personnel assigned to embassies from other intelligence personnel is the frequency with which they use embassies to plan and carry out assassinations, particularly in Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Syria. The Guards continue to target enemies abroad.
In 2018, two alleged Iranian operatives were arrested in the United States on suspicion of conducting preoperational surveillance of Jewish facilities and sympathizers of the controversial and militant MEK. Also in 2018, Albanian authorities arrested two Iranians for planning to kill dissidents, and French authorities claimed to have foiled a large-scale bombing in Paris. An Iranian diplomat in Vienna, arrested in Germany, was believed to be behind the planned attack, along with two people from Belgium who were arrested while in possession of homemade explosives and a detection device. In 2013, Iranian operatives were arrested in Nigeria for planning attacks against U.S. and Israeli tourist sites and organizations. The previous year, two Qods Force operatives were arrested in Kenya for plotting attacks against Western interests. In November 2018, the Danish foreign minister accused Iranian authorities of plotting to kill Iranian dissidents in Europe. The minister said it was “completely clear that the arrow is pointing at the Iranian intelligence service.” In 2019, the European Union confirmed that it suspected Iran of planning and committing assassinations and of hiring European criminal gangs to assassinate Iranian dissidents on the continent. In 2019, the Netherlands accused Iran of two earlier murders—in 2015 in Almere and in 2017 in The Hague.
Summary
Like the Soviets and Nazis before them, the leaders of the new Islamic Republic sought to shape a totalitarian nation-state through coercion and repression. They established the Guards to enforce their new laws and prioritized piety over expertise when selecting candidates and granting promotions. The Guards wield many tools, including imprisoning dissidents and confining them in special wards with medieval conditions. They also have external roles, which they periodically carry out with unchained brutality. In May 2018, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Evin Prison pursuant to Executive Order 13553. That year, Iran arrested protesters, teachers, factory workers, students, intellectuals, and union activists for protesting against the regime. As of late 2020, political prisoners continued to languish in Evin prison.
This concludes the reading from the introduction of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky. If you enjoyed this reading, please consider subscribing. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter Three Podcast Seven

            Deception and Prisons
For the Soviets and the Germans, concentration camps were instruments of terror and venues for slave labor. The camp's very existence fostered a paralyzing fear among citizens who might deviate from the state's agenda. Yet some macabre elements were concealed from the outside world. This is also true of Iran. The Germans sought to disguise extermination centers, particularly after their defeat at Stalingrad. One infamous deception was to mask the brutality at the Terezin concentration camp, which served as a way station for prominent European Jews, most of whom were sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Under international pressure to allow inspection, the Nazis beautified the camp before the Danish Red Cross visited it; as a result, the Red Cross reported that it found no indication of systemic mistreatment.
The Soviet Union concealed the poisonous conditions in its prisons from the West. U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies penned a fawning account of Stalin and his regime. Henry A. Wallace, vice president of the United States, visited the Soviet concentration camp at Kolyma, sometimes called the “Arctic Death Camp.” He spoke of the beauty of the flowers, the sturdily built young miners, and the warm reception he received from the guards. In fact, the prisoners he saw were guards dressed as prisoners. The real prisoners were dying of starvation and freezing in forty-degree-below-zero temperatures.
Iran’s Evin prison also reveals the conditions under which political prisoners are held. For example, in early 2017, prison authorities choreographed activities for foreign dignitaries visiting the facility to observe conditions there. Much like the charade staged years earlier by the Nazis at Terezin, officials at Evin shepherded Western observers to certain areas of the prison. In this case, the investigators were not misled and protested loudly against the charade.
Mental Hospitals
Iranian leaders, like those in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, misuse the diagnosis of mental illness to incarcerate and execute political dissidents. Soviet physicians swore to serve communism. Soviet psychiatrists systematically suppressed dissent by interning and sedating free spirits, misdiagnosing them as mentally ill. Those who found faults in the Communist Party’s philosophy and in the party’s rule were declared either enemies of the state or mentally disturbed. Some illnesses were diagnosed as “sluggish schizophrenia” or “delusion of reformism.”
In Germany, National Socialism billed itself as “applied biology,” and psychiatrists directly collaborated in the mass murder of the mentally ill. Most of the killing took place in six psychiatric institutions. Psychiatrists oversaw the killing of over two hundred thousand patients by gassing, starvation, and injection of poisons. In Iran, high-profile critics of Khomeinism can be arrested and imprisoned in mental hospitals. A retired teacher and member of the teachers’ union was incarcerated at the Ibn Sina Psychiatric Hospital in Mashhad, with his parents prevented from visiting him at the facility. The teacher was a civil rights activist who had earlier served two years in prison after the 2009 postelection protests in Iran. He had no history of mental illness.
Incarceration and constant beatings can produce an emotional collapse from which inmates never fully recover. Ali, a young prisoner, said his worst experience in prison was witnessing his friend, another Basij member, being sexually assaulted: “My friend . . . was confused. He lost control. He screamed and shouted, threw himself against the walls. The guards warned him that if he continued with this behavior, they would make things worse for him.”
A Young Basij Guard and His Brides
In German and Soviet prisons, inmates were abused with little mercy. German concentration camps held “brothel women.” The Nazis nicknamed these forced brothels Joy Divisions. Imprisoned women and girls included the unemployed, beggars, the homeless, prostitutes, Roma, and anyone the Nazis deemed nonconformist and physically attractive. Free thinkers were incarcerated as well. In Soviet gulag camps, women were regularly subjected to rape and humiliating, degrading conditions. Some became sexual fodder for incarcerated criminal gangs.
In Iran, religious authorities have pronounced that it is unethical to execute virgins. But Shia Islam allows for temporary marriage. By marrying girls and women temporarily, guards perform sex under the covenant of marriage, which accords with Islamic law. Sometimes lotteries are held to give guards equal opportunities to marry and rape condemned virgins. Some guards enjoy it and see nothing wrong with either the sex or the killing. Others are less enthusiastic.
The case of a young Basiji illustrates the sexual brutality endemic in Iran’s prisons. When he was sixteen years old, his mother delivered him to a Basij station and pleaded that they take him, feed him, train him, and employ him. They did so, and years later he became haunted by memories of raping virgins the night before they were executed. He confessed, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning, the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.” Some images of the defeated looks on the faces of his sexual prey still haunt him: “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her fingernails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.” Other Basij live with memories of the torture and the shame of the pain they inflicted on their countrymen. One Basiji apologized for what he judged to be cowardice in refusing to intervene against the torture and beating he witnessed: “I am thoroughly ashamed. I’m shamed before God, ashamed of my youth, ashamed in front of my friend, ashamed in front of the people.”
Coping in the Camps: Evin Cabaret. As in the German and Soviet penal systems, a pool of creative talent flourishes among Iranian political prisoners. German and Soviet concentration camps hosted underground theaters. At Buchenwald, humorous performances began with an opening song, followed by satirical sketches, folk songs, and political songs. In Iran, political prisoners make sotto voce jokes about the sadistic guards, foul food, and swill to help them grapple with the cruelty they cannot control. There is collective resistance in prison. Evin prison has been nicknamed Evin University because of the many student activists, journalists, and intellectuals who have passed through its gates. Iranian political prisoners continue to stage hunger strikes to protest conditions and the deaths of fellow political prisoners there.164 Sometimes hunger strikes turn from “wet” to “dry,” meaning strikers refuse to drink water or eat food. Many political prisoners devise their own coping plans. Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was, in his words, jailed for “118 days, 12 hours, 54 minutes,” on charges of espionage. Worn out but not defeated in captivity, Bahari imagined a book about his ordeal. Upon its release, he wrote it, and the humorist Jon Stewart adapted it into a film.
Other prisoners develop a personal regime. In May 2007, Iranian-American Haleh Esfandiari was thrown into Evin prison on charges of conspiracy. The director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C., Esfandiari spent 105 days in solitary confinement. She survived by maintaining a regular 10-hour exercise regimen. Like Bahari, she crafted and memorized a book: a biography of her grandmother. Another intellectual drew on his mastery of Persian poetry to survive. A world-renowned epidemiologist drew on poems he had memorized as a boy. Alone in his cell, the physician would recite his most-loved poems and write new ones. Others shout their defiance from the prison to all those within earshot. They yell “Allah-o-Akbar” (God is great) and “death to the dictator” from the darkness of their cells. But not all prisoners are emotionally well-integrated or strong, and some cannot cope. They are malnourished, abandoned, and dejected, and they begin to die physically and spiritually. When they are released, some stumble into despondency and despair and are haunted by memories of Evin prison that they cannot escape.
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter Three Podcast Six

Welcome to an excerpt from Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by Mark Silinsky, published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and discusses prisons.
Imprisonment and Prisons
Iconic prisons are engines of gruesome lore about sadism, injustice, and audacious escape attempts. The Tower of London in Britain, the Bastille in France, and Alcatraz in the United States have left legacies captured in popular culture. In Russia, the Peter and Paul Fortress, founded by Peter the Great, was filled with political radicals and social irritants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the more famous were Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, and Leon Trotsky. When the communists set up a government in Moscow, they used the Lubyanka prison to incarcerate and kill their enemies.
 If the fortress is associated with the tsar’s repression and the Lubyanka with Stalin’s Soviet justice, Auschwitz became synonymous with mechanized mass murder and sadism. Planet Auschwitz, a term coined by a survivor of that death camp, was a world of inverted values. Cruelty was hailed as virtuous, and compassion was shunned as weakness. Here, too, Iran followed in the footsteps of these gruesome predecessors: After the Islamic Revolution, the new regime’s prison system swelled across the country, with the Guards playing a leading role in its perpetuation.
Mohsen Rezai founded the Guards’ intelligence unit in 1981. Much of the early work involved counterintelligence operations directed against Kurdish separatists. Today, the unit oversees certain facilities within Evin Prison for political prisoners. Evin, built in 1971, originally held enemies of the Shah; today, it confines supposed enemies of the revolution. Toward the end of the shah’s regime in the late 1970s, conditions in Evin Prison were relatively humane. An eclectic corps of regime opponents—liberals, leftists, and Islamists—bunked next to each other and sometimes played chess or volleyball together. That camaraderie ended with the revolutionary regime, when the prison earned the moniker Iran’s Torture Chamber.
 After 1979, Iran’s prison population swelled well beyond existing capacity. Facilities were inundated with political prisoners, and the confusion and despair of the teeming, newly incarcerated inmates became palpable. Many political prisoners were executed near the prisons, in local forests or clearings. Often, prisoners were killed without trial. They were rounded up, shot, piled onto trucks, and tossed into mass, unmarked graves near towns. While Iranian prisons would not reach the death counts of the German concentration camps or the Soviet gulag, Iranian prisoners face similarly grim prospects when they enter the gates. The regime claims that those it executes are murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers. Human rights activists counter that many of those killed are regime opponents. Iran has the second-highest annual rate of executions in the world, after China. The Pasdaran casts its net wide to imprison nonconformist political activists, out-of-favor journalists, students, religious dissidents, common criminals, political rivals, and those considered enemies of the state or of the revolutionary spirit. Thousands accused of trying to overthrow the regime have been jailed. Often, the charges are vague. Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog organization for journalists, ranked Iran 169th out of 180 countries in its 2018 World Press Freedom Index. In Iran, death row inmates are often executed at short notice without notifying the families of the condemned. The three preferred methods of execution for women and girls are stoning, public hanging, and shooting.
The camps of the Soviets and Nazis were strewn with corpses and mass graves. Killings were carried out both randomly and methodically. In Iran, there have been mass murders of political prisoners. Khomeini established special commissions to select prisoners for stockyard-like killings; they became known as the “death commissions.” In events known as the Massacre of ’88, up to seven thousand were murdered in the Evin assembly hall in summer 1988. Prisoners were herded in groups of six and hanged. The bodies were transferred to mass graves in meat trucks at night. On some nights, up to four hundred were executed, and their bodies were tossed into a large, makeshift grave. Relatives of those killed called the point of execution the “Flower Garden,” but others know it as the “place of the damned.”
“Planet Evin”: Wards 209 and 350
Evin is located near a busy highway, with a side road providing direct access to the prison. Life inside its gates is generally more humane than life in the Soviet and German concentration camps. There is no evidence of industrial-scale mass murder or large-scale forced death through privation. Germans killed tens of thousands in a matter of days during their rule. In the Soviet Union, historian Richard Pipes has calculated that more than one thousand people were executed each day over the course of 1937 and 1938. But there is ample evidence of lurid torture. The Guards and the mois control their own wards within Evin. They are administered separately from the main Evin prison management. In Evin prison, Ward 209 is run by the mois, and Ward 350 is run by the Guards. The mois-operated Ward 209 is a secret detention center for political prisoners, with solitary confinement cells. In Evin, as in other prisons, the mois and the Guards carry out extra-judicial executions. Detention centers, built to hold people for several days during in-processing, have only a few toilets for hundreds of detainees. Access to medical care is often denied. Life is wretched in the overcrowded cells, and many inmates are forced to sleep on the floors of hallways or in filthy cells. The Guards have a reputation for brutality. Said one prisoner of Evin’s guards, “They use any tool—even toilets, showers, water, and tea.”
Political prisoners endure physical abuse, often in 209’s torture room, located in the prison basement.139 Mental and psychological torture, intended to break the spirit of the incarcerated, includes techniques such as false news and information, threats of flogging, threats to family members, and other forms of deception. Prisoners endure beatings, sleep deprivation, being dunked in cold water, and being paraded naked in cold weather. A particularly feared torture is called “the chicken,” in which a prisoner’s arms are bent back and tied to his ankles while he is suspended in midair. Some prisoners have their heads covered with an iron helmet so they are deafened by their own cries of pain. Emad Bahavar, a supporter of the opposition Green movement serving a ten-year sentence, explained, “They lined us up in the Ward 350 corridor, our faces to the wall. I could hear some crying in pain. . . . They started beating our backs very severely with batons. The screaming and crying got louder.”
 
For many prisoners in the Guards-operated Ward 350, prison life is tedious, punctuated by surges of fear and periods of brutality. There is a sanitized library, but books and newspapers are not permitted in solitary cells. Life in solitary cells is disorienting. Prisoners lose track of time. Each The prison cell in Ward 350 measures approximately ninety-eight square feet and houses sixteen to twenty prisoners.4 Sometimes, collective beatings occur spontaneously, such as the April 2014 thrashing, when dozens of security guards and senior prison officials attacked and severely beat political prisoners held in Ward 350. Notable prisoners include Esfandyar Rahim Mashaei, former first vice president and chief of staff to former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Evin’s Women’s Ward, political prisoners have difficulty communicating with their families. Many prisoners have no telephones, and family visits, including those with children, are limited to twenty minutes.
These short visits are often traumatic; indeed, some psychologists believe that cabin visits through a glass wall can be harmful to the psychological health of the prisoners’ children. Therefore, many families avoid bringing their children to visit.
The conditions in Evin and other prisons have become a rallying point for civil rights advocates. Sometimes, family and friends will stand outside of Evin to protest incarceration. On occasion, the demonstrations are loud, on others they are silent.8 Some women may have taken inspiration from German wives of incarcerated Jewish men who, in the winter of 1943, stood in front of a Berlin ad hoc incarceration center and shouted to the guards, “Give me back my husband!” Soviet Refuseniks organized publicly to garner attention to their cause. In 1974, a handful of protesters stood openly and defiantly in front of embassies in Moscow, clamoring for exit visas. Years later, in Tehran, a mother organized a sit-in protest against the jailing of her daughter in Evin.
 

Empire of Terror Chapter Three Podcast Five

Show Trials
Just as in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, there is a culture of ambient fear of arrest within all Iranian social strata today. It is hard to predict who will be arrested or killed or what the charges will be. In Germany, a passing comment could be classified as Wehrkraftzersetzung, or “subversion” or “undermining the war effort,” which was punishable by death. A generic charge brought by Soviet prosecutors was "being an enemy of the people"; the equivalent in Germany was "being an enemy of the state". From their earliest days in power, Iran’s Guards have had the ability to imprison people in a vast penal system. The charges are often vague, such as war against God or spreading propaganda. For example, in 2018, the Guards arrested an Iranian journalist who spoke of Mohammed’s grandson Hussein as having “passed away” rather than as “dying as a martyr.”
 
Iran’s show trials harken to the public trials of Soviet and Nazi jurisprudence, during which hollow-eyed and emotionally drained men and women, often dressed in ill-fitting
apparel, sat in rows and denounced each other, their comrades, family, and former friends. The most spectacular confessions were Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. On stage, some hard-core Old Bolsheviks, who had survived tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, confessed to hair-raising and ludicrous tales of conspiracy. The author Arthur Koestler, a former communist, spoke of techniques to create mental breakdowns, as interrogators would use physical torture or drugs tailored to the victim’s personality.
Patently false confessions were ensured by the Soviet “conveyer” system, in which a prisoner was interrogated, beaten, and threatened nonstop for one week without sleep. Finally, the victim would sign any confession, sometimes without even understanding what he had signed.  The Nazis used the Soviet trials as exemplars for those held by the People's Court from 1934 to 45.
Before political prisoners were brought to trial, they often confessed after ghastly, prolonged torture. Admissions of guilt were usually followed by immediate execution. Iran’s leaders see their country filled with foreign agents and subversives.   British-American author Roger Housden was arrested as he was leaving Iran in February 2009. His captors warned that they could make him “disappear” if he did not surrender information on dissidents. He confessed on television to a host of crimes and implicated people he knew to be innocent. Another British captive said he was bullied, blindfolded, and beaten until he invented a wild story about his activities on behalf of a British service. Like those in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, Iranian intelligence and security personnel purged real, but usually imagined, enemies.
In utter debasement, suspects are compelled to confess on national television to crimes before their court proceedings begin. These forced confessions are then accepted as evidence in court. In Iran, videotaped confessions are staged to elicit optimal performance. According to one former prisoner, he spent hours each day memorizing fabricated information: “They even told me how I should move my hands and keep a happy face so that no one would suspect I was held in solitary confinement or ill-treated.” As in the Soviet Union, Iranian prisoners often invent self-incriminating conspiracy stories after days without sleep and unrelenting beatings. They are routinely denied access to a lawyer or their family for weeks. These confessions are treated as sufficient proof of guilt.
One inmate explained, “You see your own disintegration.” After refusing to sign a confession, the guards put a rope around this prisoner’s neck while he sat at a table: “When they pulled the table, the rope wasn’t attached to anything. I fell backward. I fainted. When I came to, I was wet. They had thrown water over me. I vomited. They took my confession then, and I signed.”
In the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, family members of the accused could be used as pawns or surrogates for enemies of the state. The German chief judge of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, shrieked at Elfrede Scholz, the sister of Erich Maria Remarque: “Your brother is beyond our reach, but you will not escape us.” She was beheaded. In Iran, authorities send messages to individuals who have not yet been taken to prison for interrogation.
 
According to one witness, “Two of my friends, who were recently released from the notorious Section 209 in Evin Prison, gave me a message from their interrogators: ‘We have concocted a nice case against you, and we will get to you soon.’”
 
The “Terror Club” Trial
 
Some show trials become iconic. In the Soviet Union, the 1936 Zinoviev-Kamenev “Trial of the Sixteen” was choreographed by Stalin. The trial of the conspirators in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler featured the flamboyant judge of the People's Court screaming invectives at the accused. Like these trials, the August 2012 Iranian “Terror Club” trial lent a veneer of legal legitimacy to the proceedings. Twelve individuals—seven men and five women—confessed on camera to a conspiracy to kill Iranian nuclear scientists. One defendant confessed to traveling to Israel to practice shooting at targets from speeding motorcycles: “There was a motorcycle racing complex in Tel Aviv. . . . We were given time bombs where we had to push the start button when we attached it,” he said. Another defendant declared that she received training in self-defense and intelligence gathering. On a tape shown on Iranian television, she said, “Global Zionism will commit any kind of crime to fulfill its foul aims.”
 
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Empire of Terror Chapter Three Podcast Four

            Martyrdom
 Like the Nazis and the Soviets before them, Iranian leaders have made martyrs of children and young leaders. The Germans hailed twenty-two-year-old Horst Wessel, who was killed by a communist, and immortalized him in ceremony and song as a major Nazi propaganda symbol. For the Soviets, the young hero was thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his father as an enemy of the state. After his father was executed, Pavlik was killed in a family conspiracy. In turn, Pavlik became a national hero and the subject of statuary, folk songs, and an opera. Iran, too, has its child hero. There, October 30 is celebrated as Student Basij Day, commemorating a 1980 battle of the Iran-Iraq War in which a thirteen-year-old Basij, Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh, threw himself under an approaching Iraqi tank, killing himself and disabling the enemy tank.
Khomeini hailed the boy as a hero and built a monument in his honor, which has since become a pilgrimage site for schoolchildren.78 Throughout Iran, children have been drawn into celebratory anniversary festivities, screaming their loyalty to the regime. Parents teach their children to hate America so that it “flows in their very being!” In successive decades, Iran would groom and field more martyrs. The ruling clergy would ordain a cult of self-sacrificial murder. Mothers of the Basij would raise sons to kill themselves and the sons of others. One mother of a boy celebrated as a martyr explained to her suicide-attack-bound son, “I am not sad at all. . . . You are going to a good place. Why should I cry?” Her son was killed in Syria.
The Education Ministry promotes martyrdom in school textbooks and has established ten thousand Koranic schools to pave the “motorway of martyrdom and humanity.” Guards-produced Fars Media circulates cartoons glorifying martyrdom. In one television cartoon, a young bearded Basiji is handed a Koran and sent to battle. While dreaming of his wife and child, he wakes to the sound of gunfire and artillery. As he rushes to the aid of a fallen soldier, he is killed, dying as a martyr. Basij-led moral instruction extends well beyond the classroom. Outside of school, children are indoctrinated to prepare for adulthood. The girls are guided toward domesticity, while the boys prepare for war.
Daily life toughens children. At an early, impressionable age, children are forced to witness beatings, humiliations, and killings. Moderate civil servants have criticized the system's coarsening of children, which forces them to attend public hangings. In Mashhad, the Guards operate an unconventional amusement park—the City of Games for Revolutionary Children. In the park, young, impressionable boys are dressed in military uniforms and escorted by a military commander who orders them to fire small-caliber weapons at a wide range of targets. Some targets bear pictures of Iraqi soldiers, while others are facsimiles of fighters for the Islamic State in Syria or images of the Saudi royal family. Children blast plastic bullets into targets bearing images of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. political leaders.
In 1982, the IRGC established its first high school in Tehran as a preparatory school for future service in the Guards. Soon after, it opened similar schools, which have since eased entry to university and, subsequently, to a career in government. The Guards monitor the progress of promising students from middle school through university. The Basij and the Qods Force, in particular, strategically place recruiters near holy sites, mosques, schools, and community centers to attract volunteers. The Imam Hussein University, established in 1986 and located in Tehran, is run by the Guards and houses the organization’s intelligence academy. The Guards use it as a training center and a recruiting ground, in addition to its many other functions, including nuclear research, also under the purview of the Guards.  Recruits and journeymen-level intelligence professionals are trained in the fundamentals of the profession at IHU. Senior-level cadres also attend courses; the university’s students are trained in many aspects of espionage, including its history, tools, and practices.
Courses examine the role of espionage in international relations and national security. Recruits train in open-source and covert intelligence collection. They are taught about the role espionage played in the early days of Islam. Guard cadets are taught that Islamic intelligence began with Mohammed, was developed by Ali, and was refined by successive generations of Muslims. The IHU teaches intelligence tradecraft and instills elan in the Guards. Instructors explain that, according to texts produced by the university, the United States promotes “global hegemony” and that Iran has been directed by divine providence to fight this enemy. In the academy, Iranian leaders highlight the importance of intelligence by citing the frequency with which the terms “enemy” and “hostility” appear in the Koran. They cite passages in the Koran that relate to the tactics, techniques, and procedures of early Islamic leaders.
Basic courses focus on tradecraft and field exercises. The faculty of Basic Jihadi Sciences trains all Guards officers and cadets. The first year of training is described as 50 percent ideological content, 30 percent military training, and 20 percent moral conditioning. The second year is more specialized. After completing all phases, individuals must take six-month introductory courses to prepare them to enter the Guards.
 
They are also trained in cyber capabilities. There are also IHU centers with a paramilitary focus, where recruits train in live-fire combat and asymmetric warfare. The IHU occasionally deploys its faculty and employees abroad, for example, sending trainers to Syria and Iraq to serve as advisors. Guards promote higher education in neighboring countries. The Qods Force serves as a liaison between Iranian university officials and foreign leaders.
One of the more colorful personalities associated with the IHU is Hassan Abbasi. Known by the baffling moniker “Kissinger of Islam,” Abbasi directs the Center for Doctrinal Strategic Studies, a think tank linked to the Guards. A self-styled renaissance man who lectures on economics, history, politics, and cinema, Abbasi rose through the Guards to become a leader. As such, he often serves as the voice of the Guards, with statements such as “America means enemy, and enemy means Satan.” Though the West sees suicide bombings as terrorism, Abbasi salutes them as noble expressions of Islam. Abbasi fears that the West’s soft war against Iran erodes the loyalty of younger generations. He has declared that this soft war is rooted in freemasonry, democracy, and Zionism and has theorized that the American cartoon figures Tom and Jerry are part of a Zionist conspiracy. Popular TV series like The Simpsons, Lost, and South Park, he said, have resulted in “Hollywoodism”: “They entertain us, but indoctrinate us at the same time. . . . The images you see pollute your sexual fantasies.”
 

Empire of Terror Chapter Three Podcast Three

New Generations of Guards
The early postrevolutionary period provided openings for ambitious youth, as discussed earlier. Some of those who joined the Guards in the early 1980s were opportunists, and some were committed zealots. Some were both. Membership in the Guards afforded privileged access to housing, goods, and services and provided a fast track to political and social mobility. As in other revolutions, many career government bureaucrats with prior service were ejected and replaced by party stalwarts. The talented and ambitious had an opportunity because the Guards needed men with skills, intelligence, and commitment. One such was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a high-achieving university student who served as a Guards logistics commander.
There is no evidence that he served in any combat role during his tenure. Nonetheless, his brief and safe service gave him bona fides and fostered relationships that would catapult him to power in the 1990s. Others followed a similar path. As its leadership changed over the years, three broad generations of the Guards developed. The first generation joined during the 1980s. As a shell-shocked cohort of frontline fighters, this generation shares a bond common to combat veterans of many wars. Many had religious backgrounds and stellar military resumes. Born in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, most of this cohort is retired.
The second generation of Guards was recruited after 1989 and tends to be less religious and ideological than the first generation, which joined the organization after Ayatollah Khomeini's death. Many saw service as a springboard to careers in government. Others were dead-enders and needed some employment. Most lacked the fervor of the earlier generation that fought in the trenches. Like the European youth of the 1920s, a lost generation of Iranians felt stymied and rebellious, to the point where Supreme Leader Khamenei became concerned about the waning zeal in the Guards. In 2000, he responded to this perceived problem by ordering what, by all accounts, was a largely successful enhanced indoctrination program for Guard members.
The third and successive generations of Guards are those recruited after 2000. Many come from families in which their fathers served in or were strongly connected to the Guards. This generation tends to be more religious than the second generation. Some of this dedication can be explained by enhanced ideological and political training after 2000 and screening during recruitment. Since 2008, recruiters have sought religiously conservative applicants.
 “Pasdar Forever”
After consolidating power, Iran’s leaders built educational machinery to indoctrinate the youth in its revolutionary ethos. Leaders reasoned that loyalty to the regime would remain fixed if it was forged at an early age. In Khamenei's words, the more ideological cadre “would remain Pasdar (a member of the Guards) forever” and would serve as a pipeline for future leadership. Iran prizes youth as human capital for tomorrow’s political leadership, a phenomenon common in authoritarian and collectivist states. Much of this ideological training was overseen by the Basij.
 
Iranian youth indoctrination programs quickly became eerily comparable to those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Hitler affirmed, “He alone who owns the youth gains the future. Leaders of the Hitler Youth mobilized young Germans to serve Nazi ends. From 1939, 82 percent of German boys and girls between the ages of ten and eighteen belonged to the Hitler Youth or an affiliate. Boys were hammered by martial jingoism, paramilitary training, and full-contact athletics.
 The girls were groomed by campfire romanticism, folklore, and traditional themes of motherhood. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, children first became Little Octobrist and then Young Pioneers, whose motto was “We promise to . . . love and cherish the Motherland passionately, to live as the great Lenin bade us, as the Communist Party teaches us.” Orphans were raised in collective  homes where the state molded them into “New Soviet People.” The
young in Russia and Germany were trained to spy on their classmates, friends, enemies, and parents. Distant, though modified, echoes of these techniques would be heard in Iran by the 1980s.
Beginning in 1982, Iran’s primary and secondary education required that ideological and political values be standardized and taught nationally. Today, curricula focus on religious and political indoctrination. The content includes theology, with a strong focus on Shia practices and customs. Guards-produced publications, including books, booklets, and pamphlets, are distributed in schools. One book, Angels of Shrine, is aimed at children as young as five. Written in the form of bedtime poetry, the book’s text and illustrations eulogize fallen Iranian soldiers and celebrate the heroism of Shia. As part of education, Basij-run “resistance centers” prepare children to join Basij units upon transferring to middle school in early adolescence. Then they join Pouyandegan (or Seekers) in middle school and Pishgaman (or Standard Bearers) in high school. Throughout, children are taught that Western imperialism dates back to the British tobacco monopoly of 1890–92 and the oil concession in 1901.
 
T

Empire of Terror - Chapter Three Postcast Two

The Directorates
As in the foundational periods of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Iranian security and intelligence services initially primarily protected the new regime. Khomeini did not call his new force Sepah, a Persian word for soldiers. Instead, he called them the Sepāh-e-pasdaran, or “army of the guardians.” They guarded the revolution. The Guards were garrisoned in a facility previously used by Savak on a street soon nicknamed “Pasdaran,” or Guards. Initially, the organization was modeled on British military intelligence services, protecting Khomeini and his entourage. Later, the Guards would deploy throughout the Middle East and other regions of the world, testing the military capabilities of major Western powers.
The Guards’ Intelligence Branch was initially a 2,000-person unit tasked with vetting government officials and applicants for government jobs to ensure they conformed to the principles of the revolution. Following large-scale riots in 2009, Ahmadinejad expanded the Intelligence Branch’s mission and personnel strength. By the early twenty-first century, the branch had acquired increasingly sophisticated cyber capabilities.
Since the early 1980s, Iran’s other main intelligence agency has been the MOIS. Some of the MOIS’s functions are similar to those of the Guards, while others differ. Both the Guards and the MOIS collect, analyze, produce, and categorize threat information and produce internal and external intelligence. Both have counterintelligence capabilities. Both protect classified documents and train and assist other security organizations. In the 1990s, the MOIS sometimes, in conjunction with the Guards, killed enemies abroad. Generally, the MOIS is charged with “protecting intelligence, news, documents, records, facilities, and personnel of the ministry; and training and assisting organizations and institutions to protect their significant records,” documents, and objects.” The military services also have intelligence-gathering and analytic capabilities. The Ministry of the Interior has intelligence personnel who partner with the Basij to prevent hooliganism and organized crime.
The Father of the Guards and Its First Leaders
The Iranian Guards, the Cheka of the Soviet Union (the precursor to the KGB), and the Schutzstaffel (SS) of early Nazi Germany served as bodyguards for newly installed, still-fragile regimes. All three services had broad latitude to harass, arrest, beat, and kill suspected opponents. In Germany, Hitler’s Night and Fog decree targeted political opponents for incarceration or summary execution. Opponents of the state would disappear at night and in fog, and sometimes would not be heard of again. Lenin began his war on intellectuals by ordering them shot indiscriminately. In June 1922, he signed a law granting the government the right to kill anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
In Iran, political leaders, satirists, liberal activists, and former associates of the shah’s regime lived in a state of great anxiety, waiting for knocks on the door from security personnel. They still do. As in Germany and the Soviet Union, many Iranian activists keep suitcases packed in case they are suddenly taken to prison. When Khomeini chartered the Guards, there was no existing core of vetted veteran intelligence operatives within their orbit. Iranian leaders had to innovate and experiment as they built the organization. From 1979 to 1981, five men commanded the Guards or served as its leader.
If one person were to be crowned the father of the Guards, it would likely be Mostafa Chamran. He had a short tenure—the spring, summer, and early fall of 1979—and many historians do not recognize him as a nominal commander. However, he left his personal imprint on the Guards. Like the intelligence services of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the Iranian Guards were built in the image of their leaders. The chiefs of all three services shared common personal traits. They were driven by ideology and ambition. Intelligent and brutal, they took risks as young men. All service chiefs were more than empire-building bureaucrats; they were committed ideologues.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, who created the Soviet intelligence and security service, abandoned Catholicism to become a confirmed Marxist. As a revolutionary, he was incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, where he was beaten and tortured. Later, Lenin appointed him head of intelligence, and he flourished. The former prisoner became, in effect, the warden of the Lubyanka prison complex. By 1920, he would stroll the prison corridors, beat male or female inmates, and then kill them. “Iron Felix” was credited with being responsible for the deaths of over five hundred thousand of his countrymen. His successors would swell the death count by the millions. Heinrich Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1923, and six years later, he was chief of the SS. By the mid-1930s, he was one of the most powerful men in Europe. Himmler molded the SS according to his views of a racial hierarchy and used his organization to destroy Jewish societies.
As with the Soviet and Nazi services, the first leaders of the Iranian Guards left their mark. Chamran spent much of his adult life promoting Shia revivalism and schemes to remove the shah from power. His intelligence was evident early in the 1950s and 1960s, when he studied at American universities, earning a PhD in electronics and plasma physics from the University of California, Berkeley. His real calling, however, was revolution, and he traveled globally to advance Islamic guerrilla movements. In Lebanon, he helped establish Amal, the precursor to Hezbollah. In 1974, Chamran trained hundreds of Iranians opposed to the Shah’s regime and became a skilled military leader and tactician. Despite repeated efforts, Savak could not eliminate him, and he would eventually play a central role in Iran's revolutionary government.
In 1979, Chamran returned to Iran to join the Islamic Revolution and serve as Minister of Defense. He then spent several months as a Tehran-based representative in parliament, where he helped create the Guards and served as their commander, albeit for only one year, after purging Iran’s intelligence services of Shah loyalists. When war erupted with Iraq, Chamran volunteered to command soldiers in combat. While leading an attack in June 1981, he was killed in a mortar attack. Imam Khomeini praised Chamran as a “proud commander of Islam.”
Unlike the sullied reputations of Himmler and Dzerzhinsky, that of Chamran still glistens. Himmler was disparaged as a mass murderer after the war, and Dzerzhinsky’s statue near the Kremlin was yanked and carted to an obscure field on the outskirts of Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Mostafa Chamran was lionized and posthumously honored. A biographical film about him, titled Che, was one of Chamran’s many nicknames. Books celebrating his laurel-laden life fill bookstores and libraries. In Beirut, a street is named after him.
After Chamran’s death, Mohsen Rezai, sometimes spelled Resaee, assumed formal command of the Guards in September 1981, at age twenty-seven. Khomeini made the Guards an independent agency, and Rezai helped smooth the transition of national leadership from Khomeini to Khamenei. He commanded the Guards for sixteen years and founded the Guards-run Imam Hussein University (IHU) in 1986. Rezai was implicated by Interpol in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina. Ayatollah Khomeini prohibited the Guards’ commanders from engaging in politics outside the Guards. Accordingly, Rezai resigned his leadership position in the Guards upon entering politics and remains a vocal supporter of the revolution. As of early 2020, Rezai was head of the Expediency Council.
 
Yahya Rahim Safavi was the Guards’ third commander. He became a special military advisor to Khamenei and, in 1997, commander. Safavi’s tenure as commander benefited from President Ahmadinejad’s enthusiasm for the IRGC. Safavi and Ahmadinejad shared national priorities, piety, and a pathological hatred of Israel. The fourth commander was Mohammad Ali Aziz Jafari, and the fifth is Hossein Salami. On September 1, 2007, Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei, appointed Jafari as the top commander of the Guards. Jafari was born in 1957 in Yazd and was studying architecture when riots broke out in Tehran in the late 1970s.
He was arrested by the Shah’s forces for participating in the protests and spent a brief time in jail. After his release, he took part in the 1979 student takeover of the U.S. embassy. During the war with Iraq, Jafari served on the front lines with the Guards and steadily rose in rank. He was wounded several times and gained extensive military experience, eventually becoming one of the Guards’ most prominent commanders. He commanded the prestigious Ashura Battalion and returned to the university to earn his degree in architecture.
 
Salami Takes Command
 Salami was born in Golpayegan, Isfahan Province, Iran, in 1960. In 1978, he began studying in the mechanical engineering department at Iran University of Science and Technology but left to fight on the front lines against Iraq. Distinguishing himself in combat, he resumed his studies after the war and graduated with a master’s degree in defense management. Salami is comfortable in academia and has intermittently served on the faculty of Iran’s National Defense University. After the war with Iraq, he served with distinction in the Guards as commander of the Guards University of Command and Staff, operations deputy of the IRGC Joint Staff, and commander of the Guards Air Force.
Salami is credited with developing Iran’s robust and advanced missile capabilities and has boasted that this inventory could “annihilate” Israel. Salami also worked to implement policies that enabled Iran to conceal its contested nuclear weapons work from international inspectors. In 2016, he boasted, “Today, more than ever, there is fertile ground—with the grace of God—for the annihilation, the wiping out and the collapse of the Zionist regime.”
  
 

Empire Three Chapter Three Postcast One

Welcome to an excerpt of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and explores the creation of the Guards.
 
The real war is a cultural war. . . . There are so many television and internet networks that are busy diverting the hearts and minds of our youth away from religion, our sacred beliefs, morality, modesty, and the like. —Ali Khamenei, 2017
 
The shah was long gone, and the revolution was shaping a new government and society. The Guards were feverishly expanding into a protective force unlike anything that existed in Iran’s history. Its ranks would swell to a size many times the size of Savak’s, and the Guards would become far more murderous than were the Shah’s security services. In 1979, Khomeini needed to create an organizational structure and staff it with ideologically committed cadres. Soon, the Guards would be deployed at home and abroad to kill and imprison opponents. Show trials would jolt Iran, and fear would grip many political and religious circles.
 
The Creation of the Guards
 
In March 1979, the new regime abolished the hereditary monarchy and created a new position of national religious leader. This secured Ayatollah Khomeini's position for life and made him the supreme commander of the armed forces and the leader of the Guards. He had the power to declare war and dismiss the president.1 Khomeini’s prestige, burnished by victory, had never been higher. In effect, he became a dictator.2 Just as Emperor Augustus, at the height of Roman power, created a Praetorian force of talented loyalists, Khomeini founded the Guards on May 5, 1979, to protect his rule.3 At the time, Khomeini announced that the Guards would be built to “guard the revolution and its achievements.”
 
Ali Khamenei, the future supreme leader, helped establish the Guards.5 He was part of the inner circle of leaders, many of whom had bunked together in dank prisons or built camaraderie while residing in Najaf to dodge the reach of Savak.6 In the late 1970s, they became the power nucleus that shaped the revolution.7 Many principals remembered Operation Ajax, the CIA-led coup against Mossadegh, and were convinced that Western forces would attempt to crush the revolution and return the Shah to power. A robust guard force would prevent that.
Parliament issued the Statute of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in September 1982, to enshrine Khomeinist principles in law. This statute gave the Guards broad latitude to recruit, train, staff, and function. It also enabled them to partner with Iranian military services to pursue common goals.8 From its inception, there were bureaucratic brawls over lines of responsibility and authority between the Guards and the armed forces.
Periodically, the Guards aligned with the army. At other times, the two organizations competed for resources. Both had distinct responsibilities. Article 143 of the Iranian Constitution states that “the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for guarding the independence and territorial integrity of the country, as well as the order of the Islamic Republic.” Article 2 of the Constitution’s second chapter grants the Guards a primary counterintelligence function. Article 147 of the Constitution granted the Guards access to large sectors of the economy, and today the Guards dominate many vital sectors, including energy, construction, telecommunications, and finance. From the outset of the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian army was subject to far greater civilian control than the Guards. However, some early Iranian leaders feared a growing concentration of power in a single organization.
Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, who presided over the first postrevolutionary transitional government, warned of an “imminent danger” posed by the Guards’ political intervention. He failed to persuade Khomeini, and the Guards removed Bazargan from power. The student seizure of American hostages in 1979 galvanized Iran’s radicals and weakened the vestigial influence of moderates. Ali Khamenei assumed the presidency in 1981, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who became president in 1989, feared the Guards’ inherent volatility. For this reason, they sought to professionalize the corps. The Guards held a higher status than the armed forces because they protected the nation, the revolution, and its leaders. The Guards built their own theological seminaries, such as the Martyr Mahallati University, to indoctrinate officers.
This concludes the reading from the introduction of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky. If you enjoyed this reading, please consider subscribing. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter Three Podcast One

Welcome to an excerpt of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and explores the creation of the Guards.
 
The real war is a cultural war. . . . There are so many television and internet networks that are busy diverting the hearts and minds of our youth away from religion, our sacred beliefs, morality, modesty, and the like. —Ali Khamenei, 2017
 
The shah was long gone, and the revolution was shaping a new government and society. The Guards were feverishly expanding into a protective force unlike anything that existed in Iran’s history. Its ranks would swell to a size many times the size of Savak’s, and the Guards would become far more murderous than were the Shah’s security services. In 1979, Khomeini needed to create an organizational structure and staff it with ideologically committed cadres. Soon, the Guards would be deployed at home and abroad to kill and imprison opponents. Show trials would jolt Iran, and fear would grip many political and religious circles.
 
The Creation of the Guards
 
In March 1979, the new regime abolished the hereditary monarchy and created a new position of national religious leader. This secured Ayatollah Khomeini's position for life and made him the supreme commander of the armed forces and the leader of the Guards. He had the power to declare war and dismiss the president.1 Khomeini’s prestige, burnished by victory, had never been higher. In effect, he became a dictator.2 Just as Emperor Augustus, at the height of Roman power, created a Praetorian force of talented loyalists, Khomeini founded the Guards on May 5, 1979, to protect his rule.3 At the time, Khomeini announced that the Guards would be built to “guard the revolution and its achievements.”
 
Ali Khamenei, the future supreme leader, helped establish the Guards.5 He was part of the inner circle of leaders, many of whom had bunked together in dank prisons or built camaraderie while residing in Najaf to dodge the reach of Savak.6 In the late 1970s, they became the power nucleus that shaped the revolution.7 Many principals remembered Operation Ajax, the CIA-led coup against Mossadegh, and were convinced that Western forces would attempt to crush the revolution and return the Shah to power. A robust guard force would prevent that.
Parliament issued the Statute of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in September 1982, to enshrine Khomeinist principles in law. This statute gave the Guards broad latitude to recruit, train, staff, and function. It also enabled them to partner with Iranian military services to pursue common goals.8 From its inception, there were bureaucratic brawls over lines of responsibility and authority between the Guards and the armed forces.
Periodically, the Guards aligned with the army. At other times, the two organizations competed for resources. Both had distinct responsibilities. Article 143 of the Iranian Constitution states that “the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for guarding the independence and territorial integrity of the country, as well as the order of the Islamic Republic.” Article 2 of the Constitution’s second chapter grants the Guards a primary counterintelligence function. Article 147 of the Constitution granted the Guards access to large sectors of the economy, and today the Guards dominate many vital sectors, including energy, construction, telecommunications, and finance. From the outset of the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian army was subject to far greater civilian control than the Guards. However, some early Iranian leaders feared a growing concentration of power in a single organization.
Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, who presided over the first postrevolutionary transitional government, warned of an “imminent danger” posed by the Guards’ political intervention. He failed to persuade Khomeini, and the Guards removed Bazargan from power. The student seizure of American hostages in 1979 galvanized Iran’s radicals and weakened the vestigial influence of moderates. Ali Khamenei assumed the presidency in 1981, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who became president in 1989, feared the Guards’ inherent volatility. For this reason, they sought to professionalize the corps. The Guards held a higher status than the armed forces because they protected the nation, the revolution, and its leaders. The Guards built their own theological seminaries, such as the Martyr Mahallati University, to indoctrinate officers.
This concludes the reading from the introduction of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky. If you enjoyed this reading, please consider subscribing. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual within the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter Two Podcast Three

Khomeini’s Three-Phased Plan of Action
As Iran’s revolutionary leaders stepped up to fill the power vacuum left by the shah’s flight, Khomeini promised support for democracy, but it was a ruse. As in the Russian Revolution and the Nazi seizure of power, the man who would rule as Iran’s dictator for the next ten years moved quickly to consolidate control. Lenin eliminated all those he deemed threats to Bolshevism, including noncommunist reformers.
After Hitler seized total power in 1933, he immediately targeted internal enemies and built concentration camps. Khomeini, too, issued a flurry of arrest warrants, rounding up his enemies and killing or imprisoning them. Just as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union infiltrated neighboring states to ferret out rivals and exert power, Khomeini did as well. Both Lenin and Hitler pursued ambitions of international conquest; here, too, Khomeini trod in their footsteps.
Khomeini’s agenda upon seizing power can be distilled into three phases: eliminating domestic enemies and purging Iranian society of non-Islamic elements; expanding Iranian regional influence; and establishing world supremacy. The Guards would play prominent roles in all three phases. In the first, the Basij would subdue and destroy domestic enemies. In the second, the Guards, particularly the Qods Force, would infiltrate Shia communities in neighboring states. In the third, the Guards would project power worldwide.
 Phase One: The Guards at Home
 During the domestic stage, in which all remnants of the shah’s rule were expunged, Khomeini ordered the purge of all non-Islamic elements from Iranian society. “Death to America” was proclaimed as a unifying national slogan. The Guards targeted known associates of the shah and those suspected of harboring an antirevolutionary agenda. Values that did not align with the mullahs’ vision of Islam were to be eliminated, as this first phase of Khomeini’s plan focused on persons deemed enemies of the revolution. The Guards, particularly the Basij, would extirpate the country of its alleged Westoxification. They were the soldiers in the supreme leader’s war on Western culture.
Iran’s Cultural Revolution, which began in 1980, was the first step toward the Islamization of Iran’s educational system. The first targets were universities, which Khomeini sought to cleanse of students and professors who criticized the new regime. Authorities locked down the universities in 1980 for two years while the new revolutionary regime purged disloyal faculty and rewrote the curriculum to conform to its philosophy. Once reopened, the universities were ordered to fill their ranks with zealous revolutionaries. This initial restructuring was followed by a second wave of Islamization in 1994 and a third following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory in the 2005 presidential election. The last wave reflected that, a quarter century after the revolution, Iran’s new president expressed full solidarity with the Guards and opposition to liberalism: “Some people keep saying that our revolution is aimed at establishing democracy. No. Neither in the Imam’s statements nor in the message of the martyr . . . has any such idea been considered.”
The Islamization came from both below and above. Guard leaders indoctrinated children, young adults, and middle-aged adults. This was loosely parallel to the Nazi seizure of all rudiments of culture during the mid-1930s, via “Nazification,” or Gleichschaltung, a process that involved removing anyone or anything deemed undesirable by the state. Among the first targets were the free spirits and satirists. Nazis feared the Berlin cabaret as a vehicle for weaponized humor against the state, and the police and Gestapo pursued out-of-favor jesters. Similarly, the early Soviets labeled political satire “a disease” that undermined the state’s effort to create an obedient citizenry. A joke to the wrong audience could send a funnyman to prison under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code. In Iran, anti-regime jokes came to target the Guards and Basij, with punchlines centering on the Basij’s prudery, ignorance, and hypocrisy. They also targeted the regime’s prissiness and Ayatollah Khomeini’s commandment: “There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.” Such sentiments were, and remain, suspect. From the early days of the Islamic Republic, the Guards, the MOIS, and the Basij established networks to infiltrate dissident groups.
During the first phase of Khomeini’s rule, Iranian intelligence and security services shut down newspapers and arrested intellectuals. As technology evolved, particularly in information technology, the Basij confiscated satellite dishes and disrupted Internet traffic as that means of communication developed. Seeking to harness culture and art, the regime established the Committee for Cultural Revolution, charged with policing all forms of art and cultural activities.  This was a central mission of the Basij.
 
The services are intended to purify poetry, Iran's most beloved literary genre, of un-Islamic contaminants. As a young man, Khomeini composed both gloomy and light-hearted poems, but his love of romantic verse waned. The new leaders of Iran forbade poems that did not promote their view of Islam. They were particularly hostile to the New Poetry of the 1950s and to contemporary verse. Later, resistance poetry that portrayed the Islamic Revolution in dark tones and that the mullahs declared subversive could result in death sentences for its authors.