In the early 1980s, many Western observers viewed the new government as a band of overzealous reformers who would moderate their rule once their fervor subsided. However, although the wholesale killings of the early years subsided, widespread repression continues, and the Guards remain the primary instrument of that subjugation. Today, Iranians under forty-five have little memory of Iran without the Guards.
The Islamic Revolution established a new social order grounded in fundamentalist Islamic family ethics and values. In present-day Iran, there is little room for political, religious, or social deviation. A woman’s life is valued at half that of a man’s, as stated in Article 209 of Iran’s Islamic criminal law. Article 1210 sets the age of majority for females at nine years. Girls can be married then. Life for gays and lesbians in Iran is often unbearable. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Baha’i are regarded with suspicion and contempt as outsiders. Morality police patrol the streets and social haunts, on the lookout for men with long hair and women wearing short skirts and revealing clothing. Women must cover their hair and wear baggy clothing to avoid sexually stimulating men. Those who do not comply are beaten and imprisoned.
The penalty for adultery is stoning or one hundred lashes. In September 2018, Brian Hook, senior policy advisor to the Secretary of State and Special Representative for Iran, said, “Iran is the last revolutionary regime on Earth. It does not respect the sovereignty of its neighbors or any nation. It doesn’t recognize the citizenship of other Shias who are members of other nations in the Middle East.” Iran is a land of contrasts. Prominent mullahs and senior Guards leaders have enriched themselves by plundering the fortunes of the previous ruling class and by creating a vast system of patronage, sinecures, kickbacks, and monopolies. This is IRGC Inc.
But many of today’s Iranians subsist in absolute poverty, while others exist on the margins of survival. Photographic images released to the world reveal the poverty of the “grave sleepers of Tehran,” the penniless and the drug addicts who sleep in cartons or under bridges or in the tombs of cemeteries. Among the more vulnerable are indigent immigrants. In 2019, Iran’s indigent and angry masses rose to challenge the regime, and the Guards responded with brutality. The anger is still palpable. But mullahs and Guards maintain their power by offering financial and social privileges. The IRGC also projects power abroad and underwrites terrorist organizations and attacks around the world. For this reason, in April 2019, the United States designated the entire IRGC as a terrorist organization.
As of the writing, it still holds that status. Who Are the Guards? The Guards’ origins, mission, orders of battle, leadership, strengths, faults, and defects are discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. It suffices here to introduce some basics. The Guards were created by the leaders of the Islamic Republic in 1979 to protect the new regime. Just as Lenin and Hitler created bodyguards for their new governments, the Ayatollah Khomeini forged a shield of guardians.
While the Guards began piecemeal, cobbled together from local militias, they evolved to become a great power. Many founding leaders were political outlaws during the Shah’s tenure. Others had been rusticated to Iraq or Paris or were imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin prison, which became a blast furnace of radical ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. Over time, the Guards grew from a military force that used both conventional and unconventional tactics to a multipurpose enterprise that controls an economic conglomerate.
Today, the Guards possess political and military power and control strategic industries, commercial services, and black-market enterprises. The total defense budget for 2016–17 was approximately $9 billion. In contrast, the Guards were reportedly allocated $4.9 billion, a 67 percent increase over the previous year, to which should be added the Basij budget of $357 million. The budget for fiscal year 2018–19 allocated the Guards' funds three times those allocated to the army.
Comparisons of Guards to the Soviet KGB and to the Nazi SS are a leitmotif of this book. All three were created to protect radical, expansionistic, and authoritarian states. As chapter 3 shows that the early leaders of all three services were true believers, drawn from the inner circles of Lenin, Hitler, and Khomeini. Their initial efforts focused on eliminating the remnants of the old regimes and rivals to power—the tsar’s Okhrana; the German Sturmabteilung (SA); and the shah’s Sazeman-e Ettelaat vaxx Keshvar (SAVAK). After domestic security was established, all three services built beachheads of influence abroad. All comprised military or paramilitary units. and economic domains.
This book argues that Iran’s regime is so intertwined with and dependent on the Guards that it is difficult to separate the two. Similarly, in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the government and the protective and intelligence services were woven from the same cloth. All three services offered (and Iran’s case continues to offer) unwavering obedience to their nation’s dictator. After 1934, German military, paramilitary, intelligence, and security officers took personal oaths of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Many, particularly SS men and women, followed Hitler until the war’s end, despite his reckless and ultimately self-defeating strategy and his contemptuous disregard for the lives of those who served him with blind loyalty. For their part, leaders of the Soviet services proved their loyalty to Stalin. But when their assistance was no longer useful, they, too, were killed on the dictator’s orders. Iran’s Guards, like those of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, swear allegiance to their leader. But they, too, are sometimes killed or psychologically ruined. As with the other services, the Guards pressure and sometimes harm the families of individuals they consider enemies.
Finally, like their historical counterparts, the Guards help deceive the world about life in Iran. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler deceived the world into believing he had peaceful global intentions. In the Soviet Union, Lenin and Stalin cultivated Western sympathizers, including leading intellectuals, professors, and liberal clergymen. The Guards’ information operations churn out material to polish Iran’s tarnished image, obscuring the conditions under which political prisoners, women, gays, and dissidents live. The Guards control press outlets and satellite channels that broadcast in many languages; their active measures include subsidizing allies, establishing front companies, and funding friendly mosques.
