Iconic prisons are engines of gruesome lore about sadism, injustice, and audacious escape attempts. The Tower of London in Britain, the Bastille in France, and Alcatraz in the United States have left enduring legacies in popular culture. In Russia, the Peter and Paul Fortress, founded by Peter the Great, was a hotbed of political radicals and social irritants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the more famous were Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, and Leon Trotsky. When the communists established a government in Moscow, they used the Lubyanka prison to incarcerate and kill their enemies.
If the fortress is associated with the tsar’s repression and the Lubyanka with Stalin’s Soviet justice, Auschwitz became synonymous with mechanized mass murder and sadism. Planet Auschwitz, a term coined by a survivor of that death camp, was a world of inverted values. Cruelty was hailed as virtuous, and compassion was shunned as weakness. Here, too, Iran followed in the footsteps of these gruesome predecessors: after the Islamic Revolution, the new regime’s prison system swelled nationwide, with the Guards playing a leading role in perpetuating it.
Mohsen Rezai founded the Guards’ intelligence unit in 1981. Much of its early work focused on counterintelligence operations against Kurdish separatists. Today, the unit oversees certain facilities within Evin Prison that house political prisoners. Evin, built in 1971, originally held enemies of the Shah; today, it confines supposed enemies of the revolution. Toward the end of the shah’s regime in the late 1970s, conditions in Evin Prison were relatively humane. An eclectic corps of regime opponents—liberals, leftists, and Islamists—bunked next to each other and sometimes played chess or volleyball together. That camaraderie ended with the revolutionary regime, when the prison earned the moniker Iran’s Torture Chamber.
After 1979, Iran’s prison populations swelled beyond existing capacity. Facilities were inundated with political prisoners, and the confusion and despair of the teeming, newly incarcerated inmates became palpable. Many political prisoners were executed near the prisons, in local forests or clearings. Often, prisoners were killed without trial. They were rounded up, shot, piled onto trucks, and tossed into mass, unmarked graves near towns. While Iranian prisons would not reach the death tolls of the German concentration camps or the Soviet gulag, Iranian prisoners face similarly grim prospects when they enter the gates. The regime claims that those it executes are murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers. Human rights activists counter that many of those killed are regime opponents.
Iran has the second-highest annual execution rate in the world, after China. The Pasdaran casts a wide net, imprisoning nonconformist political activists, out-of-favor journalists, students, religious dissidents, common criminals, political rivals, and those deemed enemies of the state or of the revolutionary spirit. Thousands accused of trying to overthrow the regime have been jailed. Often, the charges are vague. Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog organization for journalists, ranked Iran 169th out of 180 countries in its 2018 World Press Freedom Index. In Iran, death row inmates are often executed on short notice without notifying the families of the condemned. The three preferred methods of execution for women and girls are stoning, public hanging, and shooting.
The camps of the Soviets and Nazis were strewn with corpses and mass graves. Killings were carried out both randomly and methodically. In Iran, there have been mass murders of political prisoners. Khomeini established special commissions to select prisoners for stockyard-like killings, which became known as the “death commissions.” In events known as the Massacre of ’88, up to seven thousand were murdered in the Evin assembly hall in summer 1988. Prisoners were herded in groups of six and hanged. The bodies were transferred to mass graves in meat trucks at night. On some nights, up to four hundred were executed, and their bodies were tossed into a large, makeshift grave. Relatives of those killed called the point of execution the “Flower Garden,” but others know it as the “place of the damned.”
“Planet Evin”: Wards 209 and 350
Evin is near a busy highway, with a side road providing direct access to the prison. Life inside its gates is generally more humane than in the Soviet and German concentration camps. There is no evidence of industrial-scale mass murder or large-scale forced death by privation. Germans killed tens of thousands in a matter of days during their rule. In the Soviet Union, historian Richard Pipes has calculated that more than one thousand people were executed each day over the course of 1937 and 1938. But there is ample evidence of lurid torture.
The Guards and the MOIS control their own wards within Evin. They are administered separately from the main Evin prison management. In Evin Prison, Ward 209 is administered by the MOIS, and Ward 350 by the Guards. The MOIS-operated Ward 209 is a secret detention center for political prisoners, with solitary confinement cells. In Evin, as in other prisons, the MOIS and the Guards carry out extra-judicial executions. Detention centers, built to hold people for several days during in-processing, have only a few toilets for hundreds of detainees. Access to medical care is often denied. Life is wretched in the overcrowded cells, and many inmates are forced to sleep on the floors of hallways or in filthy cells. The Guards have a reputation for brutality. One prisoner of Evin’s Guards said, “They use any tool—even toilets, showers, water, and tea.”
Political prisoners endure physical abuse, often in 209’s torture room in the prison basement.139 Mental and psychological torture, intended to break the spirit of the incarcerated, includes techniques such as false news and information, threats of flogging, threats to family members, and other forms of psychological pressure. Prisoners endure beatings, sleep deprivation, being dunked in cold water, and being paraded naked in cold weather. A particularly feared torture is called “the chicken,” in which a prisoner’s arms are bent back and tied to his ankles while he is suspended in midair. Some prisoners have their heads covered with an iron helmet so they are deafened by their own cries of pain. Emad Bahavar, a supporter of the opposition Green movement serving a ten-year sentence, explained, “They lined us up in the Ward 350 corridor, our faces to the wall. I could hear some crying in pain. . . . They started beating our backs very severely with batons. The screaming and crying got louder.” For many prisoners in the Guards-operated Ward 350, prison life is tedious, punctuated by surges of fear and periods of brutality. There is a sanitized library, but no books or newspapers are permitted inside solitary cells. Life in the solitary cells is disorienting. Prisoners lose track of time. Each prison cell in Ward 350 measures approximately 98 square feet and houses 16 to 20 prisoners.
Sometimes, collective beatings occur spontaneously, such as the April 2014 thrashing, when dozens of security guards and senior prison officials attacked and severely beat political prisoners held in Ward 350. Notable prisoners include Esfandyar Rahim Mashaei, former first vice president and chief of staff to former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Evin’s Women’s Ward, political prisoners have difficulty communicating with their families. Many prisoners have no telephones, and they are allowed only twenty-minute visits with their families and children.
These short visits are often traumatic; some psychologists believe that cabin visits through a glass wall can harm the psychological health of the children of incarcerated prisoners. As a result, many families avoid bringing their children. The conditions in Evin and other prisons have become a rallying point for civil rights advocates. Sometimes, family and friends stand outside Evin to protest incarceration. On occasion, the demonstrations are loud; on others, they are silent. Some women may have been inspired by German wives of incarcerated Jewish men who, in the winter of 1943, stood in front of a Berlin ad hoc incarceration center and shouted to the guards, “Give me back my husband!” Soviet Refuseniks organized publicly to garner attention for their cause. In 1974, a handful of protesters stood openly and defiantly in front of embassies in Moscow, clamoring for exit visas. Years later, in Tehran, a mother organized a sit-in to protest the jailing of her daughter in Evin.
This concludes the reading from the introduction of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by Mark Silinsky. If you enjoyed this reading, please consider subscribing, and please hit the like button. This reading does not represent the official position of any agency or individual in the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
