The Empire of Terror Podcast

Empire of Terror - Chapter Two Podcast Two

Young Turks and Angry Iranians
Several Western-educated Iranian economists, known as the Young Turks, advanced successful development policies in the 1960s, a period later termed the “Golden Decade.” During this period, Iran enjoyed high economic growth and low inflation. From 1960 to 1976, Iran’s national income grew at a rate unmatched worldwide. By the end of this period, however, some of these same economists warned the Shah that the economy could not absorb the volume of investment he demanded. They predicted social unrest, and their forecasts proved correct. The problem was that the Shah’s modernization program involved massive spending, which fueled inflation and, in turn, eroded the living standards of average Iranians. Rising unemployment in the 1970s widened an already deep economic chasm between rural and urban residents. Years later, observers of Iran speculated about why so many Iranians wanted the Shah removed when he was determined to better their lives. Much of the answer lies in the socioeconomic divide. Despite a rising middle class, mass destitution persisted. By the end of the 1970s, Tehran's slum dwellers were desperate and had little to lose from any regime change.
A similar picture would reemerge decades later, when Iranians protested against desperate economic conditions under the mullahs’ rule. Compounding the problem, approximately 100,000 Iranian university students were abroad in the late 1970s. More than one-third of these students were studying in the United States, making Iranians the largest group of students from any single country. For many, the contrast between domestic living standards and those abroad led them to be swayed by the charismatic Khomeini, who they came to regard as feckless and unresponsive to the needs of their countrymen.
The shah’s position weakened as merchants, shopkeepers, and business owners—known as bazaaris—joined their religious countrymen in nationwide protests. Workers and university students followed, and strikes began crippling oil production. Strike leaders organized through neighborhood committees (komitehs), and neighborhood mosques became centers of revolutionary activity. Iran’s diverse ethnic groups, social strata, and educational cohorts found a common language in Khomeini's words.
 
His sermons stirred a renewed sense of Islamic identity and unity. The students were estranged and angry; the clergy were disappointed; and the bazaaris were fatalistic. The shah no longer controlled the megaphone of popular opinion, which was increasingly concentrated in Ayatollah Khomeini’s hands. Competing philosophies and organizations challenged Khomeini’s leadership as the Tudeh Party resurfaced and gained renewed popularity.
As the army began to disintegrate, communist activists promoted mutiny. Revolutionary elements attacked police stations and seized armories and weapons depots. The once-proud military began to collapse from within. Mass defections across all ranks sapped the military’s capabilities. Some army leaders changed sides, including the top commanders of the Imperial Guards. Police deserted the streets, and their stations were ransacked by street demonstrators and the Komiteh, which were likened to the committees led by Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917–21.
Perhaps because of this communist aspect, left-wing Western intellectuals were initially sympathetic to the revolutionaries. They were more drawn to the Islamic elements in Khomeini’s religious philosophy than to his anti-Americanism. With the shah’s overthrow, which they saw as the fall of a Washington satrap, Western progressives celebrated the street demonstrations as marches against imperialism, repression, and capitalism. French philosopher Michel Foucault went so far as to write that revolution was a “magnificent political creation.”
This Western apologia for the Iranian Revolution persisted even after its Islamist direction became irrevocably entrenched; indeed, over the years, American hard-leftists and some Muslims continued to laud the events of 1979. In 2016, leading a Nation of Islam delegation to Iran to mark the Revolution’s anniversary, Louis Farrakhan expressed the view that “the black people of America are in the mud of civilization,” while Iranian mullahs were at the head of a force of liberation.
Today, Guardian-run media celebrate Western intellectuals who lambaste their countries and praise or exonerate Iran, creating a seemingly absurd situation in which the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, praised Iran’s Press TV as the only station that gives him regular airtime. At the same time, many Western observers viewed the revolution as a disaster and regarded the shah as a misunderstood and tragic leader. Sir Anthony Parsons, London’s last envoy to the royal court, wept at his final meeting with the shah. The shah’s future biographer, Abbas Milani, opined that Mohammad Reza Pahlevi was neither a hero nor a villain. Rather, he was an Iranian tragedy, in Milani’s paraphrase of Shakespeare, “one that loved not wisely but too well.” The social edifice he and his father had built crumbled quickly, revealing many cracks in its foundation.
 
In the wake of the revolution, diplomats, intelligence professionals, politicians, journalists, and many others in Washington tried to make sense of what had happened. Ironically, it was the shah’s final appeal to liberalism that gave Khomeini the opportunity to organize and gather newly released political prisoners. The “King of Kings” and his family fled. Bulldozers leveled the first Pahlevi Shah’s mausoleum. In place of Machine Gun Reza Shah’s tomb, the revolutionary regime built public toilets. The U.S. embassy, from which fifty-two American hostages were abducted, faced a different fate. Known as the “den of spies,” it was later converted into a museum. At the entrance stands a painted-bronze plastic statue of a United States Marine surrendering to Iranian students.
The Shah and the Ayatollah
The Iranian Revolution shared similarities with its Russian predecessor, which pitted the Russian tsar against an obscure, angry revolutionary. The vacillating tsar lost his throne and his life, changing the world. After Ayatollah Khomeini drove Shah Mohammad Pahlevi from Iran, the world would change once again. Mohammed lived in his father’s shadow, lacking the charisma, shrewdness, or luck of his progenitor. The younger Pahlevi made choices that would haunt him, including an alliance with the United States. He made enemies in the Islamic world by inviting Israeli scientists and educators to help modernize his country. He was part of an international jet set and felt at home in Europe, which provided fodder for his opponents, chief among them Khomeini. Much like Nicholas II, Pahlevi was often aloof and indecisive.
 
Like the Russian tsar, the Iranian shah was haunted by his choice of wives, particularly his third. Empress Farah skied in St. Moritz and mingled with Western royalty. Yet many Iranians believed she promoted cultural corruption and hoped to rid the country of her. The shah, however, supported her efforts as part of his broader plan to modernize Iran’s society and economy. In his final years, the shah was stricken with cancer and bewildered by events he could no longer control. His last recorded words were “I wait upon Fate, never ceasing to pray for Iran and for my people. I think only of their suffering.”
If the shah shared many personality traits with Russia’s last tsar, his chief nemesis, Khomeini, who was wholly dedicated to the revolution, might have found a kindred soul in Lenin. Like the Soviet leader, Khomeini was relentlessly driven to destroy his enemies and forge an unforgiving radical system. Both men scowled often, and it is difficult to find pictures of either smiling. Both men generated emotional lava among their followers. Like Lenin, Khomeini spoke of smashing his enemies. In one sermon in 1964, he threatened to “smash parliament up” and “punch” its deputies “in the mouth.” Like Lenin, whose speeches evinced a profound hatred for Nicholas II, Khomeini called the shah a “wretched, miserable man.” And if memories of the Russian Revolution conjure up images of Lenin giving fiery speeches, inciting his followers with an angrily raised fist, the popularity of Khomeini’s political philosophy of Velayat-e faqih owed much, if not everything, to his exceptional oratory skills.
In vindictiveness, too, Khomeini mirrored Lenin, settling scores after he took power by targeting a long list of enemies, including secularists, Jews, the Baha’i community, Israel, and the United States. Like Lenin, he created an intelligence and security service to identify and eliminate enemies at home and abroad. During his ten-year rule, Khomeini executed far more prisoners than the Shah did in his thirty-seven-year reign, much as Lenin was responsible for the deaths of many thousands more people than the allegedly Bloody Nicholas. Nonetheless, when Khomeini died, he was, like Lenin, hailed as a national hero and is still mourned by millions.
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter Two Podcast One

The Guards as a New Tool of Power
“A Revolution is like Saturn; it devours its own children.” —Prussian dramatist Georg Büchner, commenting on the carnage of the French Revolution
Iran remained largely independent and ignored by the West in the aftermath of World War II, as European empires unraveled. By 1945, as the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s dominant powers, Britain began to divest itself of its colonies and distant obligations, announcing plans to dismantle its military presence in the Persian Gulf and the Far East by 1971.
 
As the British withdrew, the United States, mired in Vietnam, was constrained by military resources and could not fill the security vacuum they left. The West Wobbles and the Shah Falls. By the early 1970s, the shah’s hold on power was tenuous. Earlier, he had tried to foster reform and promote sustained economic development; indeed, in the 1960s, his White Revolution brought basic social services—hygiene, sanitation, and health care—to many thousands of villages. Literacy rose from 5 percent to over 60 percent. But this rise in literacy also enabled Iranians to read writings hostile to the shah and supportive of his enemies.
Making matters worse, it increasingly appeared that the shah had lost touch with ordinary men and women, many of whom found his tastes effete and exotic. For example, in 1971 he held an extravaganza at the ancient ruins of Persepolis, in which he portrayed himself as the heir of Cyrus. Soldiers were dressed as ancient Medes and Persians. Laborers built a tented city with marble toilets to house foreign dignitaries, who dined on the Shah’s spectacular Persepolis food flown in from Europe. Criticism was not long in coming. He was satirized by Muslim traditionalists and dismissed as kitsch by the Western audience he was trying to impress. His promotion of Western culture further divided the country.
Empress Farah Pahlavi became an icon for modern Iranian women. Her avant-garde tastes attracted progressives but alienated traditional Muslims. When she opened an exhibit at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art featuring a painting of naked couples on a bed, a scandal erupted. She built a collection of works by American artists Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, and after the revolution, those works languished in the museum’s basement.
In her effort to promote modern values, the empress created a bureau of national culture. In response, traditionalist vigilantes attacked international bookstores and art-house movie theaters. Some attacks were lethal; for example, in August 1978, arsonists torched the Rex Theatre in Abadan, killing more than three hundred people. Khomeini blamed government agents.
In 1979, of the more than five hundred movie theaters in Iran, approximately two hundred were burned down. Clerics disparaged cinema, prompting some acts of arson. According to Khomeini, Westernization included modern theater, dancing, and mixed-sex swimming. He denounced what he termed the “culture of idolatry,” based on his belief that Western capitalism worships materialism rather than God. When he seized power, he directed the Guards to root out and destroy all elements of this Westernization.
Following his father’s model, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi sought to replicate the American model of higher education and funded thousands of young people to study abroad. He also promoted gender equality: “If a woman wants to become a physicist, she should have the opportunity to do so, regardless of sex.” Iranian universities produced scientists, engineers, historians, and philosophers. They also served as cauldrons of revolutionary thought. Many of those students, animated by revolutionary fervor, would later serve as Guards in the 1980s.
 
 

Empire of Terror Chapter Two Podcast Eight

 This excerpt comes from chapter two and recounts Iran’s intelligence and domestic counterintelligence efforts.
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, was employed by 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 faced an image problem in 1936. They feared a boycott of their Olympics and pressured one of their top female 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 demonstrate 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 during his years in exile. Mr. Zam, the middle-aged son of a reformist cleric, ran the Amad news website, an anti-government 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 the Red Terror. The Soviets sent “Illegals,” multilingual Soviets who assumed foreign identities, abroad to surveil and sometimes kill targets. 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 have been carried out by MOIS operatives. Like Stalin, Khomeini sometimes personally signed the death writs, as many as five hundred, for enemy exiles. Some killings were well planned and professionally executed, whereas others were ineptly carried out.
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 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. Notably, in 1992, three Kurdish dissidents and their translator were assassinated at Berlin’s Mykonos restaurant. A German court ruling named Iran’s then-president, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as ordering those killings. Yet such actions were not limited to Germany, as Khomeini targeted his enemies worldwide. In 1989, a gunman using a sound-suppressing-equipped pistol killed one Iranian dissident on Cyprus. A former intelligence colonel was shot in his hotel room in Dubai in June 1989.
One survivor of a March 1990 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 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 perch 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 on U.S. and Israeli tourist sites and organizations. The previous year, two Qods Force operatives were arrested in Kenya for plotting attacks on Western interests. In November 2018, the Danish foreign minister accused Iranian authorities of plotting to kill Iranian dissidents in Europe. The minister stated that 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 aspired to shape a totalitarian nation-state through coercion and repression. They established the Guards to enforce their new laws and prioritized piety over expertise in selecting candidates and granting promotions. The Guards have many tools, including imprisoning dissidents and guarding them in special wards with medieval conditions. They also have external roles, which they periodically play with unchained brutality. In May 2018, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Evin Prison pursuant to Executive Order 13553. During that year, Iran had arrested protesters, teachers, factory workers, students, intellectuals, and union activists for protesting against the regime. As of late 2020, political prisoners continue to languish in Evin prison.
 

Empire of Terror Chapter Two Podcast Seven

 This excerpt comes from chapter two. It compares and contrasts Iranian prisons to those of the Germans and Soviets of the 20th century.  
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. But some macabre elements were concealed from the eyes of the outside world. This is true with Iran as well.
The Germans made efforts to disguise extermination centers, particularly after their defeat at Stalingrad. One infamous deception was masking 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 they 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, too, veils conditions in which political prisoners are held. For example, prison authorities choreographed activities for foreign dignitaries who visited the facility in early 2017 to observe conditions there. Much like the charade staged years earlier by the Nazis at the Terezin, officials of 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 fault with the Communist Party’s philosophy and rule were declared either enemies of the state or mentally disturbed. Some were diagnosed with “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 post-election protests in Iran. He had no history of mental illness. Incarceration and constant beatings can produce emotional collapse from which inmates never fully recover. Ali, a young prisoner, said his worst experience in prison was seeing his friend, another member of the Basij, 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 was going to continue 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 also incarcerated. 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 ruled that it is unethical to execute virgins. However, Shia Islam allows temporary marriage. By marrying girls and women temporarily, guards engage in sex under the covenant of marriage, which accords with Islamic law. Sometimes lotteries are held to give guards equal opportunities to marry and to 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, his mother delivered him to a Basij station and pleaded with them to 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 their execution. 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 torture and with shame for the pain they inflicted on their countrymen. One Basiji apologized for what he judged to be cowardice in refusing to intervene in 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.” This Basiji refused to rape female captives. After a term in jail, he fled to Britain.
Coping in the Camps: Evin Cabaret
 
As in the German and Soviet penal systems, there is a pool of creative talent 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 and foul food and swill to help them grapple with 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. Sometimes hunger strikes turn from “wet” to “dry,” when 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. Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson International Center in Washington, DC, spent 105 days in solitary confinement. She survived by practicing a regular ten-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 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.

Empire of Terror Chapter Two Podcast Nine

This excerpt comes from chapter two and discusses the opportunities for insiders and the new royalty of the Iranian Republic.
After the Revolution
One generation after the revolution, established stakeholders had emerged in the new political system. Some of those who helped build the government and its intelligence and security services remained a tightly knit cohort. As one observer noted, “If you are an insider, you can pick any job you want. If you are an outsider, you have to wait outside the doors of government offices.”
However, many insiders fell out of favor with the ruling elite, and some regretted their role in creating a system they saw as increasingly cruel. Similarly, some men and women who were part of the brutal state machinery of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union later regretted their participation. In 1946, standing as a prisoner in the dock at Nuremberg, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer expressed regret for his role in building and maintaining the Nazi empire. This act of contrition, whether sincere or feigned, may have spared him the gallows. Anticommunist literature is rich in themes of guilt. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon explores the mindset of men wracked by guilt for being part of the KGB, and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate introduces Commissar Krymov, beset by self-doubt as he withers in Lubyanka prison.
Similarly, some clerics who helped create the revolutionary state later regretted their role in a revolution that turned septic. One was Ayatollah Montazeri, who helped draft the nation’s new constitution based on velayat-e faqih, or rule by Islamic jurists, a concept that “enshrined a political role for Islamic clerics.” Later, Montazeri advocated for freedoms and human rights in Iran and accused Iran’s leaders of imposing a dictatorship in the name of Islam. Montazeri appealed to the morality espoused by anti-Pahlavi clerics before the revolution, but Khamenei and his cadre mocked him for his simplicity. Around the same time, Montazeri learned that, under Khomeini’s orders, almost four thousand prisoners serving time for earlier convictions had been put to death. “This is not what we fought for,” he lamented.
 
Montazeri began to feel painfully responsible for his role in enshrining velayat-e faqih. He carried guilt for helping create the Guards and publicly apologized for his actions. This public declaration of guilt separated him from most of his contemporaries, who profited from the revolution.
 A New Royalty
A generation after its founding, the Guards’ leadership became intertwined through marriages among political and financial leaders. There were echoes of the past. In ancient Rome, the Julians and Claudians intermarried and treated much of the empire as a family possession. Millennia later, there would be an Iranian dynastic saga of Khomeinis, Rafsanjanis, and Khatamis. Khomeini sired seven children, most of whom married the daughters or sons of government or clergy leaders. Khomeini’s surviving children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren married into prominent Shia families, including that of Imam Mousa al-Sadr, the founder of AMA:L, the precursor to Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Dr. Ali Larijani is the son-in-law of a senior leader of the revolution. His brother, Sadeq Larijani, married a woman whose brother is a prominent parliamentarian. Mohammad Ali Jafari married the sister of the deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces. Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Kharrazi, the secretary general of the Hezbollah-Iran organization and an elite member of the regime, is the brother-in-law of Ali Khamenei's son and the brother of the former Iranian ambassador to France and the current director of the Iran Diplomacy website. Other prominent families married into the Guards’ political, military, and economic leadership. The Larijanis are also very wealthy. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sadeq Larijani was worth at least $300 million as of this writing. Some of the Guards, young and rebellious men in the 1970s and 1980s, became senior and powerful citizens of Iran two generations later. As their beards turned gray, they passed the leadership torch to their sons.
Summary
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students seized the American embassy and held its personnel hostage for 444 days. This date is celebrated annually in Iran, but some Western commentators mark it as the beginning of an Islamic revolution that has metastasized into a global threat. Khomeini embodied the revolution he led, creating the Guards to enforce his values and legacy. Khomeini possessed a dark charisma that many Westerners found difficult to understand. Angry and shrill, he appealed to latent nationalism, economic redistributionism, and religious fervor. This allure waned quickly for all but the most devoted. When Khomeini died in 1989, Middle East observer Daniel Pipes wrote, “Good news for Iran: The Lenin of Islam is gone.” However, Khomeini’s ideology continued to influence the Guards as a legacy.
Like the dark, penal empires of the Soviet and Nazi regimes, Iranian prisons became black holes of misery into which intellectuals, enemies, and innocents were pulled, many never to return. The Guards, merciless and swift, targeted perceived enemies of the revolution or of Islam. In February 2019, Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei called on the Guards to intensify their search for enemy infiltrators, warning that all levels of the regime had been penetrated by foes and must be “fundamentally cleansed.” In summer 2019, he proposed a plan to upgrade the judiciary that would suppress political dissent “without delay.”
 

Empire of Terror Chapter Two Podcast Six

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 enduring legacies in popular culture. In Russia, the Peter and Paul Fortress, founded by Peter the Great, was a hotbed of 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 established 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 nationwide, with the Guards playing a leading role in perpetuating it.
Mohsen Rezai founded the Guards’ intelligence unit in 1981. Much of its early work focused on counterintelligence operations against Kurdish separatists. Today, the unit oversees certain facilities within Evin Prison that house 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 populations swelled 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 tolls 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 execution rate in the world, after China. The Pasdaran casts a wide net, imprisoning nonconformist political activists, out-of-favor journalists, students, religious dissidents, common criminals, political rivals, and those deemed 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 on 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, which 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 near a busy highway, with a side road providing direct access to the prison. Life inside its gates is generally more humane than in the Soviet and German concentration camps. There is no evidence of industrial-scale mass murder or large-scale forced death by 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 administered by the MOIS, and Ward 350 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. One prisoner of Evin’s Guards said, “They use any tool—even toilets, showers, water, and tea.”
Political prisoners endure physical abuse, often in 209’s torture room 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 psychological pressure. 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 no books or newspapers are permitted inside solitary cells. Life in the solitary cells is disorienting. Prisoners lose track of time. Each prison cell in Ward 350 measures approximately 98 square feet and houses 16 to 20 prisoners.
 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 they are allowed only twenty-minute visits with their families and children.
These short visits are often traumatic; some psychologists believe that cabin visits through a glass wall can harm the psychological health of the children of incarcerated prisoners. As a result, many families avoid bringing their children. The conditions in Evin and other prisons have become a rallying point for civil rights advocates. Sometimes, family and friends stand outside Evin to protest incarceration. On occasion, the demonstrations are loud; on others, they are silent. Some women may have been inspired by 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 for 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 to protest the jailing of her daughter in Evin.
This concludes the reading from the introduction of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by Mark Silinsky. If you enjoyed this reading, please consider subscribing, and please hit the like button. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual in the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 

Empire of Terror Chapter One Podcast Four

Ideological Divergence
While all four ideologies converge on seven points, they diverge on three issues, namely the role of religion, the distribution of wealth and property, and the nature of utopia. On the first point, communism is atheistic, and fascist ideologues tolerated Christianity out of political necessity. In Islamism and Shia revivalism, religion defines legal and social norms across all aspects of life. For example, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accorded the Twelfth Imam a special place during his weekly cabinet briefings.
Another point of divergence is the distribution of wealth and property. Communism advocates an equal distribution of wealth and the abolition of private property. Fascism and Islamism do not make that requirement. Shia revivalism appeals to aid the poor but does not require that the means of production be placed in the hands of capital producers. As Fredrick Kagan has remarked, “The Islamic Republic’s ideology has virtually no significant economic component. It is an amalgam of anti-colonialism. . .anti-Zionism, Persian nationalism, and adherence to an idiosyncratic form of political Shiism.”
 
Finally, the ideologies diverge in their conception of utopia. While all four are utopian, their images of heaven differ markedly. Fascism viewed utopia through the lens of racial and national power and purity. Both Islamic ideologies have found utopia in the first generation of Muslims, as recounted in the sacred Islamic script.
 
Khomeinism and a New Golden Age of Islam
 
What finally emerged in 1979 was a revolutionary political and religious philosophy that fused Islamism with Shia revivalism and elements of fascism and socialism. Known as Khomeinism, it echoes Qutb’s view that today’s world is one of ideological darkness and Shariati’s rebuke of materialism. Khomeini was an aggressive rebel within a mostly quietist clergy who became an autocrat in 1979. When he came to power, his countrymen likened him to the prophet Abraham, who “smashed idols, was willing to sacrifice his son, and rose against tyrants.” Once in command of Iran, he crafted religious practices to create a “New Golden Age” of Islam. Like Islamism, Khomeinism is political Islam. Khomeini lectured that Islamic governance is the only valid system of rule, as outlined in the Koran and the canonized history of Mohammed. He wrote, “An Islamic government is based on the laws and regulations of Islam and can, therefore, be defined as the rule of divine will over humanity.”
 
At the heart of Khomeinism is the concept of velayat-e faqih, or Islamic rule under the guardianship of jurists. Although anticommunist, Khomeini promoted the redistribution of wealth under the slogans “Islam is for equality and social justice” and “Islam will eliminate class differences.” He also held that leaders are duty-bound to provide employment for workers, farmers, and laborers. However, workers' right to strike can be circumscribed by jurists.
When he came to power, Khomeini seized private funds and placed them in the hands of bonyads, vast charities under religious leadership, which will be discussed in chapter 8. Many of these organizations are controlled by the Guards. Many care for the indigent and the war-wounded. Constitutionally, the bonyads stand above the law and are answerable only to the supreme leader. In Khomeinism, the clergy rule by divine revelation. According to Shia Islam, Mohammad vested the duty and responsibility of guiding and leading the community in the clergy. The purpose of the state is to implement Islamic law. Khomeini, like other believing Muslims, held that all scriptures are free of error because they are the exact word of God. At the same time, Khomeini did not believe that Muslims could go directly to the text to understand scripture, as many Protestants think they can bypass a church hierarchy. Khomeinism is a theocratic autocracy.
While Khomeinism contains elements sympathetic to fascism, it differs from Italian or German fascism on issues of race and religion. Khomeinism demands conformity and obedience to authority. It views democracy as weak and arrogant. Like fascist societies, Khomeinism upholds an inflexible leadership principle. Finally, Khomeinism includes elements of Shia revivalism. Both despise all religions and ideologies that diverge from Shia fundamentalism. Khomeini declared that every non-Shia system was a form of idolatry.
The presence of these ideological strands within Khomeinism explains why U.S. policymakers initially struggled to assess Khomeini. Years later, observers of Iran recalled that “few U.S. policymakers knew much about him other than that he was.” Because Westerners could not understand Khomeini, they could not adequately grasp the collective mindset of the Guards.
 
From Khomeini to Khamenei
 
Khomeini’s legacy, revolutionary zeal, and philosophy were passed to his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Born in 1939 into a poor, religious family of eight siblings, three of whom became clerics, Khamenei recalls in his autobiography that he loathed the shah and the British and was inspired by the radical Islamist Navvab Safavi, who was later killed by the shah’s security forces after speaking at Khamenei’s school. He studied in Qom, sometimes spelled Qum, from 1958 to 1964 under Ruhollah Khomeini. Few were surprised when he assumed the mantle of national leadership after Khomeini's death. Fewer still were surprised when he bolstered the strength of the Guards. Khamenei’s view of leadership is sometimes referred to as principlism, an umbrella term used by Iranian leaders to encompass various forms of religious conservatism. In summer 2018, a Guards-affiliated journal encapsulated principlism as “an anti-hegemony, anti-aristocracy and pro-dispossessed revolution. Whoever embarks on this path will have the revolutionaries behind him.” For revolutionaries, the author could have substituted Guards.
 
Subsequent chapters will examine how the Guards seek to protect Khomeini’s revolution at home, or principlism, and to export it worldwide. Former IRGC commander Major General Jafari claimed that Khomeinism is solid in Iran and that “we are on the path that leads to the rule of Islam worldwide.” Jafari promised to use the Guards to “shape the picture of the Islamic world.” Jafari’s successor, Major General Salami, has openly shared this vision of transforming Iran into a global player.
 
Summary
 
Iran has a multi-religious and imperial past. Its fortunes faded after being conquered by Alexander and then the Arabs. But Iranians held fast to their language and built a literature of poems and songs that they still adore. The short-lived Pahlevi dynasty tried to modernize Iran but alienated religious leaders and civil society. The shah tried, too late, to appease both liberal and radical opponents and to lessen the incendiary atmosphere. In the early days of the revolution, some reformers were optimistic. Abbas Milani, a former political prisoner, recalls his release from Evin prison: “The gate opened, and with a strange sense of hesitation and exhilaration, I walked to freedom.”
Within a few years, the new regime vaporized civil freedoms. Gone was the salon set’s chirpy romanticism of ancient Persia and the love sonnets of its poets. Great works of the Western canon were pulped or burned to ashes by the Basij. By the mid-1980s, they were read only in secret, if at all. What remained was the mullahs' primitive religious architecture.
 
In 1944, George Orwell ventured, “Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’” Thirty-five years later, people would ask, “What is Khomeinism?” There was no quick answer. The question bedeviled successive generations of Iranians and Iran watchers because Khomeinism changed the world. Islamism, communism, fascism, and Shia revivalism overlapped in some respects, and elements of each found their way into Khomeinism. However it is defined, Khomeinism struck the world like lightning. The shock troops of the Revolution were the Guards, who suppressed dissent at home and advanced the mullahs' influence throughout the greater Middle East.
 
 
 
 

Empire of Terror Chapter One Podcast Three

 We now turn to two other philosophies – communism and fascism.
Communism
 The second set of ideas popular in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution was associated with communism. While some Iranians hoped to recast elements of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in a Shia mold, secular intellectuals looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration. The Communist Party of Iran (Tudeh) was founded in 1941, and a rival, the more left-wing Jangali Party, was established in 1920. Internal bickering split the Jangali movement and atomized it into small hard-left factions. It collapsed in 1921, but the Tudeh Party endured. Additionally, some left-leaning opinion-makers were independent of communist organizations.
 
Novelist and essayist Jalal Al-e Ahmad was not a communist, but his ideas and writings resonated with progressives and nationalists. His influential 1962 pamphlet, Westoxication, and his short stories argued that Iranians must control all elements of wealth, power, and culture. These ideas drew on Marx, Lenin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon and were debated on university campuses and in coffeehouses. Khomeini wrote favorably about Al-e Ahmad, who analyzed Iranian society through a Marxist lens. Khomeini saluted the mobilizing capacity and revolutionary zeal of Marxists, including Castroists and Maoists, though he did not share their view of religion. Similarly, in the twenty-first century, leaders of al-Qaida tried to lay the foundations for an alliance between radical Islamism and Western leftism.
Elements of socialism were compatible with Shia Islam. But communism never took deep and broad root in Iran, despite the efforts of Soviet-supported Iranian Marxists. Tudeh’s statement of principles, driven by atheism and its vague message of dialectical materialism, confused most Iranians. As with other Marxist groups, members of Tudeh snickered at religion but were willing to partner with clergy to forge a tactical front against a common enemy. Islamic radicals and Iranian communists shared a common enemy in the shah.
 
For this reason, the Tudeh supported Khomeini and the clerical regime in the aftermath of the revolution, though it regarded Khomeinism as little more than platitudes and abstractions. Khomeini, however, destroyed the party when he no longer had a use for it. The leftist Islamic group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) declared an armed struggle against the system in 1981. Nonetheless, the left was partially undone by internal bickering and its inability to solidify a base. Many Iranian communists were ethnic Armenians and deeply suspicious of any connections to Russia. By 1984, hard-left organizations were no longer capable of mobilizing forces for political change in Iran. Many of the leaders had been imprisoned, shot, exiled, or subdued.
Fascism
 Most Iranians were uncomfortable with communism, though some were attracted to National Socialism and Italian fascism, the third set of new ideas examined here. During World War II, some Western intellectuals argued that fascist and communist regimes shared similar goals. Journalists at the influential Times of London referred to the Soviet Union as a fascist country. However, once fascism was defined, some Iranian intellectuals liked it. Fascism emerged in Italy during World War I, drawing on the ideas of the political philosopher Giovanni Gentile. His slogan was, “All within the state, none outside the state, and none against the state.” At its most successful, totalitarian states could eliminate thought crimes, a term coined by George Orwell in 1984. The first fascist movement to gain power was Mussolini’s Blackshirts in Italy in 1922. For observers of fascism, such as Orwell, it was not easy to fit Germany, Japan, and Italy into the same political framework. Fascist elements that attracted some Iranian intellectuals included the glorification of violence, fetishized masculinity, and mass mobilization. They were also drawn to the theatricality and fixation on enemies. Iranians applauded German fascism because it was hostile to British colonialism.
 The elder Shah admired Hitler, National Socialism, and elements of the Aryan race concept, admiring and respecting Germany’s agenda in general. When Persia changed its name to Iran, Hitler reciprocated by making Iranians honorary Aryans. Hitler’s totalitarianism was predicated on an absolute identification with the community and the renunciation of individual rights or obligations to religion; indeed, in Hitler’s words, “We do not want to have any other God—only Germany.” Some Iranian intellectuals liked what they saw in Hitler’s collectivist and socialist philosophy. Some sympathy for Nazism continues today in Iran. Khomeini advocated for a dictator to lead an Islamic government and ensured that fascist principles would be enforced by the Guards, which has similarities to Hitler’s bodyguards, the SS. For all that, the philosophy that held the greatest and most enduring appeal for most influential Iranians was a resurgent and commanding Shia revivalism.
            Elements of Islamism, communism, fascism, and Shia revivalism—the four sets of twentieth-century totalitarian ideas present in Iran—overlap. Communism and fascism are both authoritarian and atheistic. Islamism and Shia revivalism both want to build global Islamic law. Furthermore, the four ideologies all converge on seven points.
First, all four share anti-democratic ideals, seeing democracy as either hostile, misguided, weak, or ignorant of the importance of healthy leadership. Islamism and Shia revivalism see all man-made law as invalid because the only valid code is sharia. In Iran, the Guards enforce sharia and punish those who transgress it. Of all political and bureaucratic cohorts in Iran, few have shown more contempt for democratic norms than the Guards.
The second point of convergence is a sense of victimization. The German and Italian fascists of the 1920s accused the treaties ending World War I of being unfair. They argued that their states' borders were irrational and needed to be revised to reflect ethnic and racial collective identities. Communists focused on class warfare and drew inspiration from images of Spartacus liberating slaves in imperial Rome. Islamists and Shia revivalists argue that Muslims have been victimized by Western, non-Muslim forces to explain the relative backwardness of Muslim states and societies. Shariati and Qutb spoke of master-and-slave relationships under imperialism.
Khomeini accused the West of imposing an unjust economic order, thereby dividing Muslims into the oppressors and the oppressed. The Guards have long emphasized the victimization of Muslims, Iranians, and non-Europeans. Their publications assail the historical colonial practices of European powers, particularly Britain’s, and attribute many of Iran’s current maladies to past injustices. They blame Iran’s widespread poverty and relative underdevelopment on policies of the shah’s regime and on the current practices of the CIA and President Trump’s reimposition of financial sanctions.
Third, all four philosophies center on implacable enemies. Adherents of each of the four idea sets see themselves in a pitched, unrelenting war with enemies. The Soviets declared capitalists, wreckers, and subversives their enemies. The Nazis identified lower races as enemies to be purged from the collective gene pool in German-controlled territory. The Iranian enemies are the United States, Israel, and world Jewry. According to Shariati, all of history was a struggle between two religions—God’s doctrine of justice and man’s worship of greed and injustice. The Soviets and Nazis were threatened by Western liberalism and social license, which they saw as subversive. Islamists, notably Qutb, and Shia fundamentalists see the West as immoral and hostile to Islamic values.
 
In line with these ideas, the Guards have been charged with unmasking, imprisoning, and, at times, executing prisoners. Fourth, all four ideologies are anchored in contempt for nonconformity and the conviction that the individual must be subordinate to the collective. This collective may be the larger racial grouping in Nazi Germany, the economic class in the Soviet Union, or the religious body in Iran. The Basij, truncheon in hand, stroll the streets to discourage and penalize social nonconformity. The Guards use cyber operations to block Iranian protests against the regime.
Fifth, all four are utopian. Communists imagined elements of a pure and primitive prehistory that contrasted with the materialism and corruption of the European industrial revolution. The perfect future would have an equal distribution of wealth, no poverty, and access to health care and education for all. There would be no war because there would be no human conflict. For National Socialism, utopia was a racial order; the Nazis looked back to a time of imagined racial purity and hoped to recreate it by eliminating existing contaminants. Islamists and Shia revivalists pictured a utopia of first-generation Muslims conducting a perfect society. Khomeini held that Mohammad’s Mecca and Imam Ali’s caliphate in the first generation of Muslims were models to emulate. Khomeini also anticipated a planetary conflagration that would establish Allah’s kingdom with the return of the Mahdi. His advent could be hastened by creating the right set of circumstances and a sufficient set of nuclear weapons.
The Twelver Shia believe that the first twelve imams who succeeded Muhammad were sinless and chosen by God as models for future generations of Muslims. In their historical narrative, these imams were hounded and killed by the Sunnis, except for the twelfth, who disappeared and has been in hiding ever since. Each year, millions of Shia make a pilgrimage to a well in the village of Jamkaran, near the city of Qom, to pay homage to the Mahdi. The Twelfth Imam will return as the Mahdi, or savior, and reveal himself. Then Jesus will return to earth to battle the forces of evil. Good will triumph over the wicked; Jesus will die and be buried alongside Muhammad in Medina. Then comes judgment day, when the world’s inhabitants will ascend to heaven or descend to hell. Utopia is found in that Islamic heaven.
Sixth, all four ideologies are driven by a mandate for change, compelling them to crush existing societies and craft new ones. Those who obstruct this plan are enemies. Khomeini agreed with al-Banna and Qutb that reviving “true Islam” was imperative to establishing God’s sovereignty. The Guards lead Iranian efforts to change the old order in the Greater Middle East.                                                                                    
 

Empire of Terror - Chapter One Podcast Two

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.
            “I am Cyrus, who founded the Persian Empire and was King of Asia. Grudge
me not, therefore, this monument.” —Inscription on the tomb of Cyrus the Great
Iran sits at the strategic center of the greater Middle East. Once boasting the most powerful kingdom of its day, Iran’s influence waned over the centuries. By the nineteenth century, its military and industrial capabilities could not match those of Western empires. In the twentieth century, many powers courted Iran until Iranian leaders broke from the Western orbit in 1979 to create a unique political philosophy rooted in fundamentalist Shia Islam. A newly formed Praetorian Guard would seek to export this philosophy worldwide. Iran is perched between two large oil fields in and around the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf and is awash in fossil fuel resources. In land area, it is second only to Saudi Arabia in the greater Middle East. It is twice the size of Texas and has a population of more than 70 million. Iran has been linguistically and ethnically diverse for many centuries. Persian is the mother tongue of only half of Iran’s population; one quarter is ethnic Azeri; the remaining quarter comprises Arabs, Baloch, Kurds, Turks, and others. Iran is a mountainous country, and its rugged terrain has served as a strategic barrier to would-be invaders.
The earliest traces of human civilization in Iran date to about 8,000 BCE. Cyrus I established the Achaemenian dynasty and laid the foundation for the Persian Empire in 630 BCE. His grandson, Cyrus the Great, conquered much of Greece. In the fifth century BCE, Persia was a global superpower. Many Iranians are proud of their ancient heritage and travel to King Cyrus the Great’s tomb in southwestern Fars Province to pay their respects to this legendary figure. The Greeks referred to “the West” as all land west of Persia, and the Greeks and Persians clashed for decades. The ancient Greeks forged many of their democratic freedoms in response to the Persian challenge.
The Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote The Persians in 472 BCE, casting civilized Greece against authoritarian Persia. In 338 BCE, Alexander the Great’s army reached Persepolis and was astounded by its beauty. Nonetheless, he leveled much of the city in retaliation for the Parthenon’s torching years earlier.
 
A Glorious Past
 
The ravages of the Greek army did not extinguish Persia’s artistic and literary beauty. The stories of Omar Khayyam and iconic Persian poetry, such as Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” recall the glories of pre-Islamic Persia. In the arts, the Parthians excelled in miniature painting and carpet weaving. The Mongols ravaged all lands under their control, including Persia. Yet artistic creativity survived and thrived, and the works of Rumi and Hafez are still praised for their magnificence. Today in Iran, the works of the golden age are censored and redacted by the Guards to protect moral piety.
 
The Persian Empire declined and was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, and its inhabitants converted to Islam. But Persians retained their language and much of their culture. By the nineteenth century, the West had become militarily, economically, scientifically, and technologically dominant worldwide. Britain and Russia expanded their imperial and commercial reach to the borders of Persia.
 
Persia’s oil reserves made the country a central focus of international relations from the early twentieth century. Western oil firms tapped the country’s petroleum wealth, and Western cultural influence grew more prominent there. During World War I, rival Western powers competed for Muslim support. As part of the “Kaiser’s Jihad,” Germans spread the rumor that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam. For their part, the British circulated a story that an ancient Muslim holy figure would reemerge to lead Muslims in battle against German armies.
 
Some Iranians took sides in Western power jockeying, but many more avoided foreign meddling. The more pious Persians sought to resist the advance of European and American values by retreating into Islam and mysticism. To escape harassment by Iranian authorities, leading ayatollahs quietly moved to Najaf in newly created Iraq. They, like nationalists, embraced a romantic nostalgia for a long-lost empire and its prestige. Some intellectuals turned to Western dictatorial philosophies, such as those of Nazi Germany. Then called “the German Lawrence of Arabia” for promising a Pan-Arab state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran. He built ties between Persian elites and the Nazi foreign office. One of those smitten by the Third Reich’s pomp and power was Reza Pahlevi.

Empire of Terror Chapter One Podcast One

Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher, founded the Muslim Brotherhood to fill material and spiritual voids in civil society. Along with other pious Muslims, he was crestfallen at the Ottoman Caliphate's collapse in 1924. Much like Shia clerics in Persia, he saw Islam threatened by atheism, imperialism, and the widening scientific gap between the West and the Islamic East. Al-Banna was a Sunni Muslim, but he had no quarrel with the Shia, whom he regarded as fellow Muslims. Instead, he advocated a solid Shia-Sunni Islamic front against non-Muslims and particularly detested the British. Iranian Islamic revolutionaries praised the Brotherhood and mourned al-Banna when he was killed in 1949.
 
After al-Banna’s death, the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, sometimes spelled Sayeed Qutb, became the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading theorist until Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered his execution in 1966. In the late 1940s, Qutb attended a teachers’ college in the United States and wrote a phantasmagorical account of his experience titled The America I Saw. He loathed America, describing its women as vixens, its men as vulgar, its society as devoid of religion, and its cultural tastes as unrefined and salacious. Iranian mullahs echoed his descriptions of America. Qutb was not a cleric, and his commentary on Islamic scripture does not carry authority among the more pious. However, he shone as a general strategist and opinion-maker for the Muslim masses. Future supreme leader of Iran Ali Khamenei translated Qutb’s works into Persian.
 
The Persian activist-intellectual Said Jamaleddin Asadabadi, sometimes called Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani, was a principal architect of the first wave of religious revivalism. Revolutionary Iran’s founders, including Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Khamenei, were profoundly influenced by the militant Navvab Safavi, who promoted the work of Egyptian Brotherhood leaders, notably Qutb. The Iranian Ali Shariati is often regarded as the ideologue of the Iranian Revolution. He promoted Islam as a complete lifestyle and advocated purging Iran of all nonreligious elements. This appealed to Iran’s religious, weak, and alienated. Shariati took avant-garde leftist designs for social justice and wedded them to Shia Islam. Shariati was influenced by the radical, trendy ideas popular in Paris, where he lived in the 1950s and earned a doctorate in religious studies from the Sorbonne. His prose was fluid and energetic. Said a friend, “He was a Gramsci, Guevara, Fanon, Malcolm X, and Iqbal rolled into one.”
 
Stirred by the revolutionary zeal he found among Europe’s progressive salon set, Shariati sought to revitalize Shia Islam. He described two versions of Shia Islam—a “red” or authentic Shia and a “black” Shia, which was stagnant and worn. Shariati was part nationalist, Islamist, and revivalist, and his message inspired scores of activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, he was an advocate for Shia Islam. He believed Shia Muslims should stop passively waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam. Instead, they should create conditions that would hasten his return, writing, “Every day is Ashura; every place is Karbala.” He argued that the clergy’s role was to guide society through a synthesis of Islamic values and left-oriented activism. His work remains foundational in Iran today.