The Directorates
As in the foundational periods of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Iranian security and intelligence services initially primarily protected the new regime. Khomeini did not call his new force Sepah, a Persian word for soldiers. Instead, he called them the Sepāh-e-pasdaran, or “army of the guardians.” They guarded the revolution. The Guards were garrisoned in a facility previously used by Savak on a street soon nicknamed “Pasdaran,” or Guards. Initially, the organization was modeled on British military intelligence services, protecting Khomeini and his entourage. Later, the Guards would deploy throughout the Middle East and other regions of the world, testing the military capabilities of major Western powers.
The Guards’ Intelligence Branch was initially a 2,000-person unit tasked with vetting government officials and applicants for government jobs to ensure they conformed to the principles of the revolution. Following large-scale riots in 2009, Ahmadinejad expanded the Intelligence Branch’s mission and personnel strength. By the early twenty-first century, the branch had acquired increasingly sophisticated cyber capabilities.
Since the early 1980s, Iran’s other main intelligence agency has been the MOIS. Some of the MOIS’s functions are similar to those of the Guards, while others differ. Both the Guards and the MOIS collect, analyze, produce, and categorize threat information and produce internal and external intelligence. Both have counterintelligence capabilities. Both protect classified documents and train and assist other security organizations. In the 1990s, the MOIS sometimes, in conjunction with the Guards, killed enemies abroad. Generally, the MOIS is charged with “protecting intelligence, news, documents, records, facilities, and personnel of the ministry; and training and assisting organizations and institutions to protect their significant records,” documents, and objects.” The military services also have intelligence-gathering and analytic capabilities. The Ministry of the Interior has intelligence personnel who partner with the Basij to prevent hooliganism and organized crime.
The Father of the Guards and Its First Leaders
The Iranian Guards, the Cheka of the Soviet Union (the precursor to the KGB), and the Schutzstaffel (SS) of early Nazi Germany served as bodyguards for newly installed, still-fragile regimes. All three services had broad latitude to harass, arrest, beat, and kill suspected opponents. In Germany, Hitler’s Night and Fog decree targeted political opponents for incarceration or summary execution. Opponents of the state would disappear at night and in fog, and sometimes would not be heard of again. Lenin began his war on intellectuals by ordering them shot indiscriminately. In June 1922, he signed a law granting the government the right to kill anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
In Iran, political leaders, satirists, liberal activists, and former associates of the shah’s regime lived in a state of great anxiety, waiting for knocks on the door from security personnel. They still do. As in Germany and the Soviet Union, many Iranian activists keep suitcases packed in case they are suddenly taken to prison. When Khomeini chartered the Guards, there was no existing core of vetted veteran intelligence operatives within their orbit. Iranian leaders had to innovate and experiment as they built the organization. From 1979 to 1981, five men commanded the Guards or served as its leader.
If one person were to be crowned the father of the Guards, it would likely be Mostafa Chamran. He had a short tenure—the spring, summer, and early fall of 1979—and many historians do not recognize him as a nominal commander. However, he left his personal imprint on the Guards. Like the intelligence services of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the Iranian Guards were built in the image of their leaders. The chiefs of all three services shared common personal traits. They were driven by ideology and ambition. Intelligent and brutal, they took risks as young men. All service chiefs were more than empire-building bureaucrats; they were committed ideologues.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, who created the Soviet intelligence and security service, abandoned Catholicism to become a confirmed Marxist. As a revolutionary, he was incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, where he was beaten and tortured. Later, Lenin appointed him head of intelligence, and he flourished. The former prisoner became, in effect, the warden of the Lubyanka prison complex. By 1920, he would stroll the prison corridors, beat male or female inmates, and then kill them. “Iron Felix” was credited with being responsible for the deaths of over five hundred thousand of his countrymen. His successors would swell the death count by the millions. Heinrich Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1923, and six years later, he was chief of the SS. By the mid-1930s, he was one of the most powerful men in Europe. Himmler molded the SS according to his views of a racial hierarchy and used his organization to destroy Jewish societies.
As with the Soviet and Nazi services, the first leaders of the Iranian Guards left their mark. Chamran spent much of his adult life promoting Shia revivalism and schemes to remove the shah from power. His intelligence was evident early in the 1950s and 1960s, when he studied at American universities, earning a PhD in electronics and plasma physics from the University of California, Berkeley. His real calling, however, was revolution, and he traveled globally to advance Islamic guerrilla movements. In Lebanon, he helped establish Amal, the precursor to Hezbollah. In 1974, Chamran trained hundreds of Iranians opposed to the Shah’s regime and became a skilled military leader and tactician. Despite repeated efforts, Savak could not eliminate him, and he would eventually play a central role in Iran's revolutionary government.
In 1979, Chamran returned to Iran to join the Islamic Revolution and serve as Minister of Defense. He then spent several months as a Tehran-based representative in parliament, where he helped create the Guards and served as their commander, albeit for only one year, after purging Iran’s intelligence services of Shah loyalists. When war erupted with Iraq, Chamran volunteered to command soldiers in combat. While leading an attack in June 1981, he was killed in a mortar attack. Imam Khomeini praised Chamran as a “proud commander of Islam.”
Unlike the sullied reputations of Himmler and Dzerzhinsky, that of Chamran still glistens. Himmler was disparaged as a mass murderer after the war, and Dzerzhinsky’s statue near the Kremlin was yanked and carted to an obscure field on the outskirts of Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Mostafa Chamran was lionized and posthumously honored. A biographical film about him, titled Che, was one of Chamran’s many nicknames. Books celebrating his laurel-laden life fill bookstores and libraries. In Beirut, a street is named after him.
After Chamran’s death, Mohsen Rezai, sometimes spelled Resaee, assumed formal command of the Guards in September 1981, at age twenty-seven. Khomeini made the Guards an independent agency, and Rezai helped smooth the transition of national leadership from Khomeini to Khamenei. He commanded the Guards for sixteen years and founded the Guards-run Imam Hussein University (IHU) in 1986. Rezai was implicated by Interpol in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina. Ayatollah Khomeini prohibited the Guards’ commanders from engaging in politics outside the Guards. Accordingly, Rezai resigned his leadership position in the Guards upon entering politics and remains a vocal supporter of the revolution. As of early 2020, Rezai was head of the Expediency Council.
Yahya Rahim Safavi was the Guards’ third commander. He became a special military advisor to Khamenei and, in 1997, commander. Safavi’s tenure as commander benefited from President Ahmadinejad’s enthusiasm for the IRGC. Safavi and Ahmadinejad shared national priorities, piety, and a pathological hatred of Israel. The fourth commander was Mohammad Ali Aziz Jafari, and the fifth is Hossein Salami. On September 1, 2007, Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei, appointed Jafari as the top commander of the Guards. Jafari was born in 1957 in Yazd and was studying architecture when riots broke out in Tehran in the late 1970s.
He was arrested by the Shah’s forces for participating in the protests and spent a brief time in jail. After his release, he took part in the 1979 student takeover of the U.S. embassy. During the war with Iraq, Jafari served on the front lines with the Guards and steadily rose in rank. He was wounded several times and gained extensive military experience, eventually becoming one of the Guards’ most prominent commanders. He commanded the prestigious Ashura Battalion and returned to the university to earn his degree in architecture.
Salami Takes Command
Salami was born in Golpayegan, Isfahan Province, Iran, in 1960. In 1978, he began studying in the mechanical engineering department at Iran University of Science and Technology but left to fight on the front lines against Iraq. Distinguishing himself in combat, he resumed his studies after the war and graduated with a master’s degree in defense management. Salami is comfortable in academia and has intermittently served on the faculty of Iran’s National Defense University. After the war with Iraq, he served with distinction in the Guards as commander of the Guards University of Command and Staff, operations deputy of the IRGC Joint Staff, and commander of the Guards Air Force.
Salami is credited with developing Iran’s robust and advanced missile capabilities and has boasted that this inventory could “annihilate” Israel. Salami also worked to implement policies that enabled Iran to conceal its contested nuclear weapons work from international inspectors. In 2016, he boasted, “Today, more than ever, there is fertile ground—with the grace of God—for the annihilation, the wiping out and the collapse of the Zionist regime.”
