Iran's Top Security Official Removed Due To Links With Ex-President Khatami

In a May 25 article entitled “Revolutionary Government Breaks 81-Year Inflation Record in Iran”, Aftab News, a website close to former President Hassan Rouhani listed the annual inflation rate over the years for comparison, pointing out that in 1990, a year after the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, inflation was only 9 percent, in 1996 it had risen to around 23 percent, in 2006 it was less than 12 percent while in 2015 it was slightly over 11 percent.

Official figures released by the CBI indicate that prices in the food group rose by 79 percent between April 20, 2022, and April 20, 2023. 

The CBI and the Statistics Center of Iran have only published partial figures on inflation and other economic indicators over the past two years, with many doubting the veracity of the official numbers.

Economist Mohsen Ghobadlou told Aftab News that many people believe prices of items in the food basket have increased by over 100 percent. 

Ghobadlou also said to reduce inflation the government needs to take “real” measures including resolving the issue of sanctions and Iran's accession to the international watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), reducing its own expenditures, and reducing liquidity, rather than “making promises and hackneyed slogans”.

Iran has been on the FATF blacklist, along with North Korea, since February 2020 for failing to pass legislation introducing transparency measures designed to combat money-laundering, corruption, and financing of ‘terrorism.’ FATF members – who host most of the world’s financial centers – are required to undertake enhanced diligence and countermeasures against blacklisted states.

Economist Mehdi Pazouki told Aftab News, a website close to former President Hassan Rouhani, that the government and parliament have estimated astronomical revenues from oil exports, which could only be realized if oil prices reach $300pb. 

“Naturally failure to realize such revenues means a budget deficit,” he said, which in turn will force the central bank to print money. Printing money causes liquidity growth and higher inflation and eventually a drop in purchasing power of the people, he added. 

Rahim Mombeini, deputy head of Iran’s Planning and Budget Organization, said Saturday that Iran’s budget deficit for the previous Iranian year –which ended on March 20 – was about 8,000 trillion rials (about $16 billion in today’s exchange rates), or over 30 percent of the operating budget.

A report published by the Parliament’s research center on May 23 said that currently over one-third of Iranians live under the official poverty line and that anything such as a rise in rents or costs of treatment for an illness could quickly push many among the middle class down to below the poverty line. According to the same report, the rate of poverty rose from 19.4 percent in 2011 to over 34.4 percent in 2021 and 11 million Iranians dropped below the poverty line during this period. 

“The middle class, particularly the cultural middle class, is the driving force of cultural, social, and political change but in these circumstances, the middle class will shrink considerably while the lower classes will become more dependent on government aid to survive and may even be driven to rioting,” an Iranian political analyst who requested anonymity told Iran International. 

“People’s priorities in spending will also drastically change with the drop in their purchasing power and become limited to bare necessities such as food and housing which they will no longer afford to buy due to lack of savings,” he added.

Kyiv City Military Administration said that at around 5 am on May 30 several waves of Iranian Shahed drones were launched from different directions against the capital. No missiles were used this time.

"The attack was massive, came from different directions, in several waves," Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv's military administration, said on the Telegram.

"A massive attack!" Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app. "Do not leave shelters."

Air defenses intercepted over 20 Shahed drones, but falling debris caused casualties and fires. Damage to a high-rise building in Kyiv’s Holosiivkyi District killed one person and injured three others, Kyiv Independent reported.

Russia has used hundreds of the Iranian supplied Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) since last September to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure, civilian targets and try to overwhelm air defenses.

Russia has repeatedly attacked Kyiv in May using a combination of drones and missiles, mostly at night, in an apparent attempt to undermine Ukrainians' will to fight after more than 15 months of war.

Although the United States and its European allies have strongly condemned Iran for supplying drones and other weapons to Russia, major European countries have so far have only announced some sanctions but have not designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist entity.

The air attacks come as Ukraine prepares a counter-offensive backed with Western weapons to try to drive Russian occupiers out of territory seized since Moscow launched its unprovoked invasion in February 2022.

Iran is an OPEC member, although its oil exports are subject to US sanctions aimed at curbing Tehran's nuclear programme.

Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais, who is visiting Tehran for the first time, also told Iranian oil ministry's website SHANA that Iran has the capacity to bring on significant production volumes within a short period of time.

"We believe that Iran is a responsible player amongst its family members, the countries in the OPEC group. I’m sure there will be good work together, in synchronization, to ensure that the market will remain balanced as OPEC has continued to do over the past many years," SHANA's English-language website cited him as saying.

Although US sanctions can penalize any third party engaged in Iranian oil exports, Tehran ships daily close to one million barrels of crude to China, often disguised as cargos from third countries. Before the US imposed its sanctions in 2018 and 2019, Iran was exporting around 2.2 million barrels per day and in if sanctions are lifted Iran’s export capacity can hardly surpass that without major investments in the sector.

Saudi Arabia, the kingpin of OPEC, and Iran announced in March that they would restore diplomatic relations after years of hostility, in a deal brokered by China, the world's No. 2 oil consumer.

The hacktivist group ‘Uprising till Overthrow' claimed Monday that it breached 120 servers of the presidential office, getting access to internal communications, meetings minutes, President Ebrahims Raisi’s online conference platforms and about 1,300 computers inside the office.

In one of the documents, the security chief of Fordow nuclear plant -- an Iranian underground uranium enrichment facility located 20 miles (32 km) northeast of the Iranian city of Qom – had asked for about 150 hectares of public land to be given to the nuclear facility to increase its security buffer zone as work continues on Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Earlier in May, the group, affiliated with the Albania-based opposition Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) group -- People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, hacked into the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry servers, disabling 210 sites and online services and leaking another large batch of documents.

In the new cyberattack, the group is said to have gained access to “tens of thousands confidential documents” but has so far released only a fraction of them. The number of the published documents is still so large that analyzing them will take days if not weeks.

The group also claimed that their access to the internal systems of the president’s office was so unbounded that they sent e-mails to the office’s recipients address list with photos of the leaders of MEK and photos of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Raisi with red crosses over them as well as slogans of “Death to Khamenei” and “Hail to Rajavi”, the current leader of the opposition group.

The president’s office immediately reacted, denying that “the official website of the president” was down due to any attack. However, the regime cannot win this on a technicality as the group had not claimed to hack the frontage of the site but the internal servers.

Among the released documents, there is correspondence between the president’s office and the office of the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) under besmirched chief Ali Shamkhani, confirming rumors that the regime's top security chief was forced out after the President said he had failed to do enough to quash riots, in spite of causing the death of 750 civilians and arresting 30,000 more.

In the letter addressed to Shamkhani, the chief of staff of the president, Gholam-Hossein Esmaili, criticized the security chief for a lack of insight into the wave of protests that engulfed Iran following the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. With a condescending tone, Esmaili rebuked Shamkhani’s office for “inconsistencies, deficiencies, and defects of the country's intelligence systems”. The letter tells the shamed security chief the regime “expected more.”

There are numerous other documents that showed how the president’s office is trying to keep the government afloat in the face of bouts of incessant rallies without any practical strategy and tactic. Several of such documents pertained to sessions held to find ways to quell the protests inside Iranian universities.

A large number of the leaked documents provide evidence of the administration’s financial exploitation in cooperation with different organizations. One such example is a letter that shows the country’s armed forces sold 400 million euros to the central bank, while another document shows that the armed forces also sell foreign currency gained from export of oil in the black market.

In the letter addressed to the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the head of the Central Bank of Iran, Mohammad-Reza Farzin, said the armed forces must supply the currency obtained from the sale of oil to the central bank, instead of selling the foreign currency to the cash-strapped bank. In March, Iran’s parliament approved legislation according to which the General Staff of the Armed Forces is allowed to export three billion euros worth of crude oil and oil products through small private refineries.

The ongoing brutal surveillance operations were exposed in another document, in which the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards asked Vice President Mohammad Mokhber to provide the financial means to revamp the surveillance cameras of the capital’s subway stations so that they can be used to quash the protests. In the letter, Hossein Salami said the CCTV cameras and the subway monitoring system in Tehran are old, leading to their limited functionality in the crackdown of the popular protests. The amount needed for new cameras is said to be over $32,000 for each station. Tehran has about 150 subway stations, which means spending nearly $5 million towards a security state.

Hossein Mortazavi Zanjani said in a virtual meeting on Clubhouse that Raisi, who was the deputy prosecutor of Tehran, told him: "We went and got an order from Ayatollah Khomeini to execute the prisoners."

This is the first revelation by a former judiciary official about the direct involvement of the Iranian president in the killing of political prisoners in the 1980s.

The executions during the 1980s were carried out based on a fatwa by Iran's then supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, against the MEK (The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran) which carried out a wave of bombings in Iran and struck an alliance with Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 war.

“Showing mercy to those who take up arms against the Islamic government is being naïve,” Khomeini said in his fatwa.

Most victims were linked to the MEK but there were also others with links to leftist and secular groups such as Fadaiyan Khalq Organization (FKO) and the Tudeh Party as well as some Kurdish groups such as Komala and the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran.

The exact number of prisoners executed during the purge of prisoners is not known but according to Amnesty International, the Iranian authorities "forcibly disappeared" and "extrajudicially executed" around 5,000 between July and September 1988.

The former director of Evin prison, which has held some of the country’s most high profile cases and is famed for its brutalities to inmates, added that he witnessed the bodies of the executed prisoners thrown into trucks and taken from the prison.

Mortazavi claimed he resigned to what was known as ‘the death board’, the group of decision-makers deciding whether prisoners lived or died. He claims his resignation was met with a death threat by the deputy intelligence minister.

“Although I did not have a direct role in the execution of prisoners, I feel guilty because of my silence about the executions, and even if I repent, I will not be cleansed,” he said.

After his victory in the presidential election in 2021, in response to an Al-Jazeera reporter’s question, Ebrahim Raisi said he has been a "human rights defender" since the beginning of his tenure in the judicial system and "should be commended " for his actions.

Mortazavi further stated that female prisoners still virgins were forcibly married to jailers before the execution. According to the narrative of political prisoners, the clerics of the Islamic Republic believed if the virgin girls were executed, they would go to heaven, and for this reason, they raped them in the form of forced marriage so that they would not die virgins.

”The father of one of the executed virgin girls told me that after the execution of his daughter, the agents gave him money saying the money is for his daughter's marriage endowment."