Editor’s Note: Award winning journalist Kourosh Ziabari has written for Stimson about Iranian societal trends, including record brain drain, and about government ineptitude in safeguarding Iran’s cultural heritage.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives
In the early hours of July 31, shortly after Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian was inaugurated in a ceremony sparsely attended by foreign dignitaries, one of the government’s special guests was assassinated at his residence in Tehran.
Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of the Gaza-based militant group Hamas, considered a key ally of the Islamic Republic and a bitter adversary of Israel, was killed in an operation that the Iranian authorities immediately blamed on their regional bête noire. Nearly one month after the assassination, while guesswork is rife, authorities are still hard-pressed to explain away the colossal national security bungle.
Regardless of the specifics of the scheme, what happened laid bare the deep-seated vulnerabilities of Iran’s intelligence apparatus. The establishment had long staked its reputation on its intelligence sophistication, bragging about foiling successive foreign espionage plots. A blend of fury and resentment has now plunged the country into reignited chaos, with fears that a threatened Iranian retaliation will ignite an even wider war.
Conservative Islamic Republic loyalists are indignant that one of the leaders of the “Axis of Resistance” was eliminated in an act of extrajudicial killing on Iranian soil. Occurring against a backdrop of serial assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists from 2010-2020 and more recently, targeting Iranian military officers at an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, the perception of Israel’s brazenness in encroaching on Iran’s sovereignty animates their vendetta and calls for a “harsh revenge.”
Other Iranians, including the disgruntled electorate that boycotted the recent presidential election or cast a tactical vote for Pezeshkian to block his reactionary rival, are unhappy for other reasons. They did not approve of inviting Haniyeh to Tehran to begin with, joining other inauguration invitees who were government officials, not envoys of paramilitary groups.
To many Iranians, it is not acceptable anymore to continuously live on the precipice of crisis because the Islamic Republic is waging an ideological battle on behalf of another nation without a popular mandate. Cynical Iranians say that even the Palestinian people are opposed to Tehran’s interventionism. Data backs up this view.
The surgical attack that killed the Hamas politburo chief and his bodyguard was so flawless operationally that no one else was harmed when they were targeted in the dead of night in a government guest house in an upscale Tehran neighborhood. The glaring security breach further dented the ruling elite’s swagger as these mishaps have evolved into a pattern.
On January 3, 2024, nearly 100 mourners were killed in a bomb explosion in Kerman, the site of a commemoration for hero-worshipped Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, killed four years earlier by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other custodians of Tehran’s hard power watched the carnage after failing to preclude it despite warnings including from the U.S. The attack was later claimed by an offshoot of ISIS.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the mastermind of Iran’s nuclear enterprise, was killed on a road outside Tehran in 2020 using an AI-controlled remote machine gun. He was the latest of a half dozen cherished government-affiliated scientists to be eliminated by Israeli operatives, according to the U.S. and some Israeli officials who anonymously confirmed the account.
These security imbroglios unfold at a time when Iranians are increasingly pauperized, but the formidable military-security behemoth has never been more well-heeled.
The kaleidoscope of intelligence and disciplinary brigades hasn’t sought to address these threats. Instead, it continues to unleash its wrath on journalists, activists, professors, and students if they cross arbitrary red lines drawn around national security.
It doesn’t take long before a journalist posting critical remarks on social media or a professor publicly contesting the government’s brinkmanship on its nuclear program are summoned for interrogation or indictment. These non-violent civil society activists are, of course, much easier to pinpoint than those carrying out assassinations on Iranian soil. The government is still struggling to safeguard confidential documentation of Iran’s industrial and military activities as well as VIP guests.
The same applies to the doctrinaire law enforcement deploying its full force to harass women on the streets accused of being insufficiently veiled, mostly targeting vulnerable, underage individuals while failing to contain a spiral of violent crime, robbery, and kidnapping.
On social media, a meme currently going around includes variations of a hypothetical scenario in which an Iranian woman goes to a cozy café without a headscarf, takes a selfie while having a hot beverage, and shares it on her Instagram anonymously.
Iranians are sarcastically visualizing a squad of brawny IRGC combatants and intelligence agents identifying her coordinates and storming her house in a few hours.
Forced confessions of political prisoners have been aired on state TV so frequently that netizens are conjuring the woman admitting in an interview with the notorious “20:30” news program to have been paid by hostile states to topple the Islamic Republic.
Mazyar Ebrahimi, a businessman, was arrested in 2012 on charges of assassinating nuclear scientists. He confessed on state TV that he had received training in Israel for the covert mission. His crime, if he was convicted, was punishable by the death penalty. But he was acquitted of all charges and released two years later after it became clear that he had made the confessions under extreme torture to avoid further duress.
The porous, flawed nature of Iran’s intelligence setup isn’t lost on anyone, including those who support the status quo.
A national reckoning has been occasioned on the efficiency of this apparatus and whether it is prosecuting the right targets. There’s also a debate surrounding the outsourcing of counter-espionage responsibilities to the IRGC and if that has decapitated the Ministry of Intelligence to the extent that it’s only providing the window dressing of officialdom while the irregular army calls all the shots.
Not only is there no oversight of an unwieldy structure that functions as a bottomless pit, drawing resources without living up to the task, but it is rewarded in the face of its ineptitude. The parliament, despite an array of supervisory powers, appears unable to muster the moral fortitude to investigate the IRGC and intelligence ministry. In a new national shock on top of the Haniyeh assassination, Pezeshkian, a purported moderate, renominated Esmail Khatib, the unpopular minister of intelligence in the Raisi administration, to serve in the cabinet again. He was confirmed along with the rest of the cabinet nominees on Aug. 21.
A 2021 video that has recently resurfaced shows Ali Younesi, a former intelligence minister, saying in an interview, “in the past 10 years, Mossad’s infiltration in different sectors of the country has grown to the extent that it behooves all the Islamic Republic officials to fear for their lives.”
Kourosh Ziabari is a journalist and media studies researcher. A contributor to New Lines Magazine, he has a master’s degree in political journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2022, he received the Professional Excellence Award from the Foreign Press Correspondents Association.