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3 Iran's clerical
spymasters By Mahan Abedin
lack of politicization. This
is often overlooked by specialists on Iranian
intelligence and Iran analysts in general. There
is a tendency to position different components of
the intelligence community into the dizzyingly
complex factional politics of the Islamic
Republic. Thus the Intelligence Ministry is often
projected as pro-reformist whereas the
intelligence organizations connected to the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are seen as natural
allies of the so-called
"hardliners".
The reality is very
different. Despite the diversity of its personnel,
the Islamic Republic's intelligence community - as
opposed to its political society - is remarkably
cohesive. The designers and watchdogs of the
post-revolutionary intelligence community have
expended tremendous efforts to ensure that the
intelligence community remains free from political
manipulation.
This is a reflection of the
revolutionaries' desire to avoid the mistakes and
abuses of the pre-revolutionary era when the SAVAK
was far too close to the political elites and
hence prone to manipulation and corruption. This
is one of the greatest enduring strengths of
Iranian intelligence and the single most important
factor that distinguishes it from other Middle
Eastern intelligence communities.
Nevertheless, since the early 1990s, the
Intelligence Ministry has committed numerous
abuses. The most notorious were the so-called
"chain murders" of the late 1990s when allegedly
"rogue" agents inside the ministry murdered
several dissident political activists, writers and
artists. Although the Intelligence Ministry owned
up to the crimes, its contention that "rogue"
agents controlled by Saeed Emami (a US-educated
head of internal security at the ministry) had
planned and perpetrated these murders has never
been seriously tested by competent investigative
bodies.
Conflicting conspiracy theories
notwithstanding, the tension between the
ministry's professional core and the absolute
determination of a group of tightly knit
"spy-clerics" to oversee and direct the most
sensitive intelligence issues is the likely cause
of these abuses. While it is no surprise that the
Islamic Republic of Iran has, from the very
outset, been a major target for US
intelligence-gathering and sabotage operations,
the sheer breadth and depth of US intelligence
activities in Islamic Iran are rarely
acknowledged.
The Americans have
purposefully cultivated the myth that the Islamic
Republic is a "denied area" to Western
intelligence, whereas in reality the country - on
account of its open borders, divided political
society, Westernized middle classes and large
diaspora community - can be regarded as the very
opposite.
US intelligence activities in
Iran in the 1980s were focused on recruiting
agents from inside the civil service, the military
and private sector. These networks revolved around
conventional "agency-agent" relationships and were
directly controlled by Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) stations in Turkey, Greece and the former
West Germany.
But despite their best
efforts, US intelligence operations came crashing
down in spectacular fashion in early 1989 when the
Intelligence Ministry began releasing detailed
information on the detection and destruction of US
spy networks inside the air force, army, civil
service and private sector. After each carefully
controlled leak to the national and international
press, the scale of the disaster became more
apparent. This author has spoken to several
Iranians and Americans who were closely involved
with the affair, and all are adamant that
virtually the entire US intelligence apparatus in
Iran had been detected and successfully disrupted
by the Iranians.
The then minister of
intelligence, Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri (who is
regarded as the vanguard of a special class of
clerical spymasters), broke cover in April 1989
with a series of interviews to the national and
international press alleging that his ministry had
dealt the most serious blow to CIA operations and
prestige in the agency's history.
This may
be exaggerated, but there was little denying the
scale of the CIA's humiliation. This was
exacerbated by details that some of the American
spies had been "turned" into double agents barely
a few months after their initial recruitment. Some
had been feeding their American controllers
misinformation as early as the beginning of 1985.
While Western intelligence was no doubt
impressed and surprised (in equal measure) by the
Iranians' capabilities, a careful review of this
affair suggests that US incompetence - as opposed
to Iranian prowess - was the chief factor in the
unraveling of these networks. Many of the agents
that had been recruited were simply fundamentally
unsuited to intelligence work.
Some had
even discussed their ties to the Americans with
close family members. Moreover, the Americans had
failed to give even basic training to their
agents. None of the agents displayed a
satisfactory knowledge of counter-surveillance,
counter-interrogation, basic communication
security, and deception techniques.
In one
instance, an Iranian RF-4 pilot and colonel in the
air force had been taken to a safe house in West
Germany and given a two-day crash course. Colonel
Bahram Ikani was identified as an American spy by
a joint operation involving military intelligence
(G2) and the Ministry of Intelligence, barely five
months into his assignment. But instead of
arresting and charging Ikani, the Intelligence
Ministry "turned" him into a double agent and
designed and implemented a carefully controlled
misinformation pipeline that had the Americans
fooled for two years.
After exhausting his
usefulness, armed agents of military intelligence
burst into Ikani's office in late 1988 and
arrested him on charges of treason and espionage.
Apparently the Intelligence Ministry had failed to
honor its pledge either to pardon Ikani or
substantially reduce his sentence in the event of
his full cooperation. Bahram Ikani was executed on
November 4, 1989, the 10th anniversary of the
seizure of the US Embassy (dubbed the "den of
spies") in Tehran.
Badly bruised by its
catastrophic failure, the CIA embarked on a
different track, focusing far less on recruiting
"agents" than developing as wide a base of
contacts and informants as possible. Aside from
reflecting the results of a "trial and error"
process, this change of approach was more
conversant with shifting political and strategic
priorities.
By 1990 the US government had
given up all hope that the Islamic Republic could
be significantly weakened (let alone overthrown)
through intelligence-led subversion. The priority
now was to
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