Intelligence Services, Part 2: Iran and Regime Preservation
[Teaser:] Centralizing control of the intelligence apparatus could disconnect the supreme leader from reality. Part 2 of an ongoing series on major state intelligence organizations.
Summary
In recent months, as nation-states and militant groups have vied for power and influence in the Middle East, several covert Iranian intelligence operations have come to light. Throughout March, U.S. officials claimed and media reported that Iran was providing arms to the Taliban. On March 30, Iran announced that Iranian intelligence agents had carried out a complicated cross-border rescue of a kidnapped Iranian diplomat in Pakistan. Then on May 1, a report began to circulate that intelligence agents thought to be working for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been arrested in Kuwait. The diplomat’s rescue may have been exaggerated (unnamed Pakistani officials said they were involved in the handover, which may have occurred in Kabul), but it does not diminish Iran’s reputation for having a capable intelligence apparatus particularly adept at managing militant proxies abroad -- all in the name of regime preservation.
Editor’s Note: This is part two in an ongoing series on major state intelligence organizations.
Analysis
Iran has two major and competing services that form the core of its intelligence community: the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and the intelligence office of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The bureaucratic battle between the two, as well as many examples of cooperation, may suggest the future makeup and character of Iranian intelligence and,by extension, the regime itself. Both services were purposefully designed so that no single organization in Iran could have a monopoly on intelligence. But over the past year, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has taken more direct control of both.
The operations of Iran’s intelligence and military services are directed first and foremost at maintaining internal stability. Minimizing the <link nid="119782">internal threat posed by minorities</link> and their potential to be co-opted by external powers is the first imperative for Iranian intelligence. While other countries such as North Korea must have strong internal security to preserve the regime, Iran has an even greater need because of the ethnic diversity of its population, which is spread throughout a mountainous country. Such an environment is ideal for the growth of separatist and other opposition groups, which must be contained by a strong intelligence and security apparatus.
The second focus of Iranian intelligence is maintaining awareness of foreign powers that could threaten Iran and distracting those powers. This involves traditional espionage (obtaining secret information on an adversary’s intentions or capabilities) and disinformation operations to obfuscate Iran’s capabilities and redirect attention to militant and political proxy groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Badr Brigades in Iraq and even elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan. These non-state entities give Iran a threatening power-projection capability with a significant degree of plausible deniability. The third focus is acquiring better capabilities for Iran’s defense. This includes everything from Iran’s nuclear program to missile and naval technology to spare parts for aging military equipment such as the F-14 fleet. The Iranians are also constantly recruiting and developing insurgent capabilities in case of war -- both in and outside Iran.For example, Iran’s paramilitary force has developed a guerrilla warfare strategy that requires acquiring or developing advanced speed boats and torpedoes to influence events in the Persian Gulf.
Iran is most successful at operating behind a veil of secrecy. The country’s <link nid="139860">leadership structure</link> is confusing enough to outside observers, but the parallel and overlapping structures of the intelligence and military services are even more effective in obscuring leadership at the top and links to proxies at the bottom. The prime example of this is the IRGC, which is a complex combination of institutions: military force, intelligence service, covert action/special operations force, police,paramilitary forceand business conglomerate, with proxies worldwide. The MOIS is more traditional, a civilian internal and external intelligence service.
Both of these organizations have overlapping responsibilities, but one key difference is that the president has much more authority over the MOIS, which is a ministry of his government, than he has over the IRGC, which has become a national institution unto itself (the supreme leader has ultimate authority over both). The Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the Supreme Leader’s Intelligence Unitare the semi-parallel organizations where overall intelligence authority lies. The SNSC is the official state body that makes broad political and military decisions that rely on intelligence collection and analysis as well as recommendations from advisers, but these decisions still must be approved by the supreme leader. His intelligence unit has the most power over Iranian intelligence activities and is designed to control the MOIS and the IRGC.
Iran’s secretive nature blends into operations as well. One of the first and most famous attacks instigated by an Iranian proxy was the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, a case in which the identity of the bomber is still unknown, a notable exception to the culture of martyrdom within Islamist terrorist organizations (Hezbollah never claimed responsibility for the attack, which was likely perpetrated by one of its front groups). Through its intelligence services, Iran has connections with militant Islamist groups worldwide, but its influence is especially strong with those in the Middle East. And Iranian intelligence is careful to pad these relationships with layers of plausible deniability that help protect the Iranian state from any blowback.
The most pressing issue for Iranian intelligence is management of the complex parallel structures with overlapping responsibilities among intelligence, military and civil institutions. This structure guarantees that no single entity has a monopoly on intelligence or the political power that stems from it, but the safeguard can also be a source of conflict. Over the last year, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has gone to great lengths to bring the MOIS and IRGCunder his direct control. This gives him even more direct power over the president and insulates him from political and security threats. And the parallel structures ensure duplication of activities and competitive intelligence analysis.
Eventually, however, centralization of power could insulate the supreme leader in an intelligence bubble, with officials telling him what he wants to hear rather than engaging in a rigorous reporting of the facts. This danger arises in all countries, but it could be a particularly serious problem for Iran as a kind of <link nid="31059">intelligence war</link>continues across the Middle East. The regime of MohammadReza Shah Pahlavi, the last monarch of Iran, fell in large part because of a politicized intelligence service that ignored the ground reality. Today, as the supreme leader gains more direct control over Iranian intelligence services, such control could promote a better, more competitive process, but it could also make the supreme leader as disconnected from reality as the shah.
A Brief History
The modern history of Iranian intelligence begins with the infamous security services under the shah. In 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown by a U.S.- and U.K.-sponsored coup, which began Pahlavi’s gradual rise to power in Iran. His power was based on the strength of the National Intelligence and Security Organization, better known as SAVAK (a Farsi acronym for Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar), which was formed in 1957, reportedly under the guidance of the U.S. CIA and the Israeli Mossad.
To enforce the rule of the shah, SAVAK created a police state through vast informant networks, surveillance operations and censorship. This was one of the first attempts in Iran’s history to impose centralized control of the country, rather than rely on relationships between the government and local leaders. While SAVAK was instrumental in controlling dissent, it also exacerbated corruption and brutality, resulting in a disaffected Iranian populace. A contemporary observer[who? kamran thinks we need to attribute this to someone/thing]claimed that one in every 450 Iranian males was a SAVAK informer. Still in usetoday by the IRGC,Evin prisonwas infamous for torturing and indefinitely detaining anyone deemed threatening to the shah’s regime.
The director of SAVAK was nominally under the authority of the prime minister, but he met with the shah every morning. The shah also created the Special Intelligence Bureau, which operated from his palace, and deployed his own Imperial Guard, a special security force that was the only Iranian military unit stationed in Tehran. Even with this extensive security apparatus -- or perhaps because of it -- the shah alienated the Iranian population and was forced to leaveIran to the growing Islamic revolution.
Even before the revolution, the security forces for a new regime were already taking shape and establishing links in the Middle East. Ayatollah RuhollahKhomeini, leader of the revolutionaries and founder of the new Islamic republic, sent some of his loyalists for military training in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where they received instruction at Amal militia and <link nid="115356">Fatah/link> training camps. By 1977, more than 700 Khomeini loyalists had graduated from these camps. They were founding members of what would become the IRGC (effectively the new Imperial Guard and Special Intelligence Bureau). During the revolution, the shah’s forces were purged by Islamic revolutionaries and what was left of them were merged with the regular Iranian armed forces, or <link nid="150955">Artesh</link>(Persian for “army”). The IRGC was formed on May 5, 1979, to protect the new Islamic regime in Iranagainst counterrevolutionary activity and monitor what was left of the shah’s military.
InFebruary 1979, the revolutionaries overran SAVAK headquarters, and its members were among the first targets of retribution. Internal security files were confiscated and high-ranking officers were arrested. By 1981, 61 senior intelligence officers had been executed. Even though SAVAK was dismantled, its legacy remained in the form of SAVAMA (Sazman-e Ettela'at va Amniat-e Melli-eIran, or the National Intelligence and Security Apparatusof Iran). In 1984, in a reorganization by the Army Military Revolutionary Tribunal, SAVAMA became the current Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and this was when Iran’s parallel intelligence structure truly took form.
From Terrorists to Agents of Influence
In February 1982, about a month after Israeli forces invaded Lebanon to quash the Palestinian resistance, an unnamed IRGC officer met in Lebanon with <link nid="104184">Imad Mughnyiah</link>, a young and disaffected Lebanese man of Shiite faith. Mughniyah also was an experienced guerrilla fighter, a member of Fatah’s Force 17 and an Arafat bodyguard. For years there was no record of this meeting, even among the world’s premier intelligence agencies, even though it would mark the inception of Iran’s first militant proxy group, an organization that would later become known as Hezbollah.
Although the name of the IRGC officer is still unconfirmed, he was likely Hussein Moslehi, the IRGC’s liaison with Hezbollah in the years afterwards. The new Shiite militant group would conduct many terrorist attacks orchestrated by Mughniyah (and many different organizational names would be used, such as the Islamic Jihad Organization, or IJO, to create ambiguity and confusion). During that first meeting in Lebanon, and unbeknownst to many, Mughniyah received an officer’s commission in the IRGC and would later be named commander of a secret IRGC proxy group, Amin Al-Haras, or Security of the Guards, for which hewas told to recruit family members and friends from his time in Fatah to wage a new jihad under the IJO banner.
Mughniyah also became part of the security detailguarding Sheikh Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. In March 1983, he represented Fadlallah at a meeting in Damascus with the Iranian Ambassador to Syria, Ali Akhbar Mohtashemi. They decided to begin a terror campaign that would become the first to repel a “foreign occupier” in the modern era of Islamist militancy. Mughniyah orchestrated the truck-bomb attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on April 18 and against the U.S. Marine barracks and French paratrooper barracks on Oct. 23. By March 31, 1984, the multinational peacekeeping force had left Lebanon.
On behalf of Tehran, Mughniyah orchestrated many otherbombings, kidnappings and plane hijackings that hid the hand of Iran (and sometimes even his own). When foreign governments wanted to negotiate the return of hostages held in Lebanon, however, they always went to Iran. The Iranians used their proxies’ captives as playing cards for political concessions and arms deals (like the Iran-Contra affair in the late 1980s).
By the 1990s, however, Iran had realized it could achieve its geopolitical goals more effectively not by engaging in provocative international terrorist activities but by promoting insurgencies and infiltrating political movements.So Hezbollah turned into a political group with an armed guerrilla wing to fight an unconventional war against Israel and rival Lebanese forces while also gaining political power in Lebanon. Guerrilla warfare replaced terrorism as the primary tactic for Iran’s proxies, which also came to include the Badr Brigades (then in Iran); <link nid="131873">Hamas</link>, the Popular Front for the Liberationof Palestine-General Command and <link nid="2845">Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ)</link> in the PalestinianTerritories; andvarious Afghan militant groups.
Iran never wanted to lose the deterrent threat of Hezbollah’s terrorist capabilities, however, and Hezbollah continued to develop plans and<link nid="72443">surveil targets</link>, such as military installation and embassies, to threaten Iran’s adversaries. (In 1994, Mughniyah was involved in planning attacks in Buenos Aires.) Hezbollah victories against Israel in 2000 and 2006 proved the group’s effectiveness while Mugniyah became less active as a terrorist coordinator and more active as a military commander. By the time <link nid="110642">Mughniyah was assassinated</link>in Damascus in February 2008, Iran had shifted its proxy tactics, for the most part, from international terrorism to regional insurgencies.
The secular Iraqi Shiite politician Ahmed Chalabi may have personified the next Iranian proxy shift, from guerrilla fighters to more careful agents of influence. Chalabi was one of three executives, and the de facto leader, of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a supposedly broad-based Iraqi group opposed to Saddam Hussein’s regime. It will never be clear who Chalabi really worked for, other than himself, since he played all sides, but Iran clearly had substantial involvement in his activities. STRATFOR laid out the case for <link nid="82999">Chalabi’s relationship with Iran</link> in 2004, noting that the false intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction provided by Iran through Chalabi <link nid="79106">did not inspire the U.S. government to go to war</link> in Iraq, it only provided the means to convince the American public that it was the right thing to do.
Chalabi’s influence contributed to <link nid="79715">U.S. tactical failures in Iraq</link> that allowed Iran’s unseen hand to gain power through other Shiite proxies, most notably the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), known at the time as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The ISCI gained a substantial amount of power after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and its main militia group, the Badr Brigades, has since been integrated into the Iraqi security forces. In early 2004, Chalabi fell out of favor with the Bush administration, which continued to work with ISCI leader Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim. For all practical purposes, the Dawah party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the al-Sadrite movement and assorted other political factions in Iraq are also, to varying degrees, proxies of the MOIS and of the IRGC’s overseas operations arm, the Quds force.
In May 2004, U.S. officials revealed that Chalabi gave sensitive intelligence to an Iranian official indicating that the United States had broken the MOIS communications code. And the fact that Chalabi was able to pass the intelligence revealed certain clandestine capabilities on the part of Iran, particularly the ability to use proxies for direct action and intelligence gathering while keeping its involvement plausibly deniable. While there is much circumstantial evidence that Chalabi or Mughniyah were Iranian agents, the lack of direct evidence clouds the issue to this day.
Organizations and Operations
Ministry of Intelligence and Security