Political rivalry among Iran’s various factions is nothing new. Ever since the 1979 revolution and particularly after former President Mohammad Khatami’s unexpected electoral victory in 1997, moderate officials—including reformists and centrists now associated with Hassan Rouhani’s administration—have been vying with hard-liners and traditional conservatives known as “principalists” for a greater share of clout and resources in Iran’s labyrinthine system of governance.
Yet factional jockeying is now happening more conspicuously than ever within Iran’s sprawling intelligence apparatus. Two Iranian intelligence services are increasingly, and openly, at odds with each other. The rivalry has significant implications for Iran’s domestic politics and foreign policy.
While the US “maximum pressure” campaign and growing threats of war are fueling nationalist sentiments across the political spectrum, they are also exposing the fault lines between the Rouhani administration and its Intelligence Ministry on one hand and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its intelligence organization on the other. The infighting is mainly over which body is better positioned to protect the country—and over which aspects of the country most need protecting.
The latest fuel for infighting came on Aug. 3, when BBC Persian aired a rare and exclusive interview with Mazyar Ebrahimi, a former prisoner in Iran who was jailed on suspicion of collaborating with Israel to assassinate four Iranian nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2012.
His story shed new light on the workings of the Intelligence Ministry and its relationship with the IRGC. Above all, the interview undermined the conventional belief that the Intelligence Ministry is the “good cop”—the more rational and responsible actor—to its “bad cop” hard-line rival, the IRGC intelligence unit.
Ebrahimi spent more than two years in Evin Prison in Tehran from June 2012 to August 2014. During his imprisonment, he was brutally tortured into making confessions about his alleged complicity in the killings.
Ebrahimi’s forced confessions, along with those of 11 other suspects, were aired on state TV in a documentary dubbed The Terror Club. One of the more notorious inmates featured in the documentary was Majid Jamali Fashi, who was reportedly executed in May of 2012.
In an interview with Foreign Policy from his new home in Germany, Ebrahimi said that, on the whole, “107 people including my brother, his pregnant wife and my brother-in-law” were arrested during the crackdown, only for most to be released after the IRGC’s intervention.
“Seven months into my imprisonment, and after I had ‘confessed’ to all they demanded about the assassinations, an [Intelligence Ministry] interrogator wanted me to take responsibility for the Bid Kaneh explosion as well,” he added, referring to a large blast in the missile warehouse of Modarres garrison outside of Tehran in November 2011, which killed many including IRGC Maj. Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the father of Iran’s missile industry, and was attributed to Israel.
“It was only then that the Revolutionary Guards intervened and the torture stopped as they realized all my confessions were false, but I was still kept in jail for a year and a few months.”
It seems that the IRGC, which is in charge of securing and developing Iran’s missile program, considered the issue at hand to be too critical to let it be tackled by a rival body. In fact, the interagency competition and the mutual mistrust at the heart of it paved the way for Ebrahimi’s release.
Ebrahimi’s interview has prompted some Iranian lawmakers to demand official explanations from the Intelligence Ministry about the high-profile assassinations and could affect the fate of other inmates in similar circumstances.
One such prisoner is Ahmad Reza Jalali, an Iranian Swedish medical doctor and lecturer at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who was arrested by the Intelligence Ministry in April 2016 and sentenced to death on dubious charges of engaging in nuclear espionage for Israel. Jalali is still in custody and awaiting execution.
The rivalry traces back to 2009, amid the Green Revolution protests against the electoral fraud that granted former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term in office. There were strong tendencies within the Intelligence Ministry against the official narrative—propagated by the Ahmadinejad administration and supported by the IRGC and the supreme leader’s office—that dismissed the possibility of vote-rigging and framed the protesters as foreign-backed “seditionists” hell-bent on regime change.
Fearing a coup or systematic defiance, the IRGC set up its own independent intelligence unit in 2009, on the orders of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who appointed Hossein Taeb as its director.
