Hacking Of IRGC Commander's Secret Briefings Stirs Controversy

In an open letter published in Farsi and English on her son’s twitter account, Badri Khamenei said the regime of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and Ali Khamenei his successor has brought nothing but “suffering and oppression” to Iranians.

She went on to say that the people of Iran deserve freedom and prosperity, and their uprising is legitimate.

“My brother does not listen to people’s voice and wrongly considers the voice of his mercenaries... He rightly deserves the disrespectful and impudent words he uses to describe the oppressed,” she added.

“As my human duty, many times I brought the voice of the people to the ears of my brother Ali Khamenei…But after I saw that he did not listen…I cut off my relationship with him,” Khamenei’s only sister told the public.

She further sympathized with the people, saying “I oppose my brother’s actions and I express my sympathy with all mothers mourning the crimes of the regime, from the time of Khomeini to the current era of the despotic caliphate of Ali Khamenei.”

She also called on the IRGC and Khamenei’s “mercenaries” to lay down their weapons as soon as possible and join the people before it is too late.

Badri Khamenei’s husband was a fierce critic of the regime, and her daughter was recently arrested for voicing her own criticism.

Iranians are well acquainted with the concept of political graffiti and used it extensively during the days that led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, but these days they are using the medium to overthrow the Islamic regime. 

According to documents released by hacktivist group Black Reward last week, the authorities are gravely concerned about the propagation of the phenomenon on the backdrop of nationwide protests and strikes that have rocked the foundations of the clerical regime during the past 80 days. 

The confidential briefing papers to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and ranking members of the Revolutionary Guard, acquired by hacking into the database of IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency, revealed that the authorities seem unable to deal with the enormous number of political slogans on walls and the persistence of protesters to renew them after they are painted over by the cities’ sanitation departments or volunteer members of Basij paramilitary force. In one of the documents, the city of Zanjan was mentioned as an example where almost all its walls are covered with slogans against the regime. Something especially worrying for the regime is the slogans directly targeting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, referring to him as a “bloodthirsty dictator” or a “despot” whose days are numbered. 

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Iranians know the significance of slogans against Khamenei, whose zealot supporters are prepared to kill anyone for even criticizing him, let alone wishing death for him. But now, according to the leaked documents, even schoolchildren are using slurs to talk about him. Profanities against the Supreme Leader which were only chanted in the worst protest-riot situations in the past have become mainstream, while protesters are continuously coming up with new and ingeniously rhyming slogans with even stronger profanities. This degree of profanity is unprecedented in Iran where four-letter words are normally avoided in most social and even private contexts, particularly in the presence of women and children. 

The regime’s agents are busy everywhere painting over the slogans or doodling over them to conceal the zeitgeist of society, but people are greater in numbers and bolder in action. For every graffiti that is painted over, more or bigger graffiti appear the following day. The most frequently used slogan is the motto of the uprising: Women, life, liberty – words that describe people’s aspiration that no amount of paint can hide them. 

Walls have become a new frame for people to make their voices heard. As American linguist George Lakoff explains in his book Don't Think of an Elephant!, that when you frame the debate, you have already won. Its rough translation on street walls of Iran is that however the regime paints over its walls, it cannot change the fact that most Iranians do not want the regime. 

According to an article in Etemad newspaper, the calls on Tehran’s municipality's service requesting to remove writings from walls have recently increased 60-fold. The paper cited sociologist Hossein Imani Jajarmi as saying that such an increase “is directly tied to the recent unrest.” Describing political graffiti as a common tool to express economic and political woes as well as racial and gender discrimination, he said the spread of graffiti during the past few months can be a sign of ineffectiveness of the regime’s coercive and military measures. 

Over 1,500 instances of political graffiti were found at Pompeii, offering a glimpse into the workings of Roman politics at the local level. Similar to how graffiti shed light on how politics was in the city of Pompeii until it was buried under volcanic ash and pumice in 79 AD, the walls of Iranian cities testify as to how the people fought their way to “Women, life, liberty.”

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Following the recent propaganda stunt by the government that the so-called ‘morality police’ has been disbanded, foreign and Iranian media are full of interpretations of how the regime plans to both enforce the dress code regulations and at the same time appease protesters.

On Tuesday, hardliner lawmaker and member of parliament’s cultural committee Hossein Jalali said that hijab enforcement will never be abolished, ensuring that “veils will be back on women’s heads within two weeks.” His remark shows that a growing number of Iranian women who are appearing in public without hijab since protests began in mid-September.

Confirming that the regime is making some decisions about hijab rules, the lawmaker explained that the methods for enforcing hijab may change, adding that “it is possible that women who do not observe hijab would be informed via SMS, asking them to respect the law. After notifying them, we enter the warning stage... and in the third stage, the bank account of the person who unveiled may be blocked."

Jalali did not elaborate on how the government intends to identify the people who unveil in public to send them text messages. However, there were earlier reports that the Islamic Republic was about to start using cameras in the metro to track and identify women. Such measures had been announced as part of efforts by President Ebrahim Raisi’s hardliner administration to intensify pressures on women in society throughout the year which culminated in the beating to death of Mahsa Amini by hijab enforcers.

On Monday, Ali Khan-Mohammadi, the spokesperson of Iran’s Headquarters For Enjoining Right And Forbidding Evil, tasked with promoting the Islamic Republic’s interpretation of Islamic laws, echoed some reports about the end of the hijab police, saying that "the mission of the morality and social safety patrols (the official name for the hijab police) is over."

He added that new measures will be implemented "in a more modern framework, using the technologies that already exist for this purpose and with an atmosphere that is not one-sided."

Iran's police have so far declined to confirm Prosecutor General Mohammad-Jafar Montazeri’s claim on December 3 that the notorious "morality police" has been disbanded, as international media trumpeted the report. Shargh daily reported Monday that it had contacted the head of public relations of the Greater Tehran Law Enforcement, Colonel Ali Sabahi, to verify the claim but the official refused to make any comments.

The news about disbandment of ‘morality police’ was widely covered by Persian and foreign media as a measure by the Islamic Republic to calm the unrest. However, state-run media immediately cast doubt on any substantial change in hijab enforcement.

Montazeri’s suggestion made headlines in many major international media and even made US Secretary of State Antony Blinken cautiously comment on it in an interview with the CBS.

Many activists, such as US-based Masih Alinejad, have debunked Montazeri’s claim as a sheer publicity stunt or even misinformation spread by a dictatorial regime that is about to fall. However, there are some journalists such as Negar Mortazavi and Farnaz Fassihi of the New York Times who called the measures a victory for Iranians, eliciting condemnations by Iranian activists.

Human rights group Amnesty International has issued a statement regarding the issue, urging the international community not to be “deceived by dubious claims of disbanding morality police.”

“The Prosecutor General’s statement was deliberately vague and failed to mention the legal and policy infrastructure that keeps the practice of compulsory veiling against women and girls firmly in place,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. “The international community and global media must not allow the Iranian authorities to pull the wool over their eyes. Compulsory veiling is entrenched in Iran’s Penal Code and other laws and regulations that enable security and administrative bodies to subject women to arbitrary arrest and detention and deny them access to public institutions including hospitals, schools, government offices and airports if they do not cover their hair.”

The state-run television (IRIB) confirmed the arrest of Abbas Darvish-Tavangar, a high-profile hardliner journalist and politician in its Monday evening 20:30 program, hours after rumors of his arrest were reported by a reformist newspaper.

Mentioning Darvish-Tavangar only by initials, the program said as a journalist who often participated in meetings with top officials and had access to some news but had “forged” reports and created false briefing papers “without authorization”.

“Unauthorized” reports and newsletters refers to a series of document that a hactivist group, Black Reward, said on November 25 it had acquired by hacking into the database of Fars News Agency claiming it had obtained confidential newsletters sent by the news agency to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials.

Black Reward made scandalous documents as well as recordings of some confidentially held meetings available to the public and media. Several of the documents and recordings contain material that are highly damaging to the image of the regime and its officials including Supreme Leader Khamenei.

Iran International published a report at the time on a sensitive document that showed pervasive concern among officials over ongoing anti-regime protests.

IRIB’s 20:30 is known for being largely produced by security organizations. The program often contains so-called “confessions” of those arrested on security charges and propaganda against opposition and dissident figures and spreads unsubstantiated accusations political groups and activists and even ordinary citizens.

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Some social media users have suggested that the regime has taken action against Tavangar, a quite controversial figure, to portray the documents as written by a rogue person and unused by officials.

Abdollah Ganji, the former editor of the IRGC-linked Javan newspaper who is now chief editor of Tehran municipality’s Hamshahri newspaper, in a tweet on December 2 claimed that as a former member of Fars News Agency’s policymaking council he had never seen any such briefing reports. “This sort of work is done by someone who, incidentally, worked at Fars,” he wrote while trying to attribute the leaked papers only to Tavangar.

Tavangar, apparently, also secretly recorded some meetings, including a meeting between a Revolutionary Guard general and a group of media managers or representatives from outfits affiliated with the IRGC. The audio file obtained by the hactivist group revealed IRGC and its Basij militia’s concern about security forces’ capability to quell the unrest widely spread across the country.

One of the documents quoted Khamenei as saying that he did not expect anti-government protests that have engulfed the country in the past three months to end soon. The newsletter claimed Khamenei had ordered security and intelligence bodies to issue a joint statement about the protests.

The leaked material show Khamenei plays a major role in decisions that lead to the violation of human rights and the secret operations of intelligence agencies against dissidents including the order to “disgrace” a top dissident Sunni leader, Mowlavi Abdolhamid Esmail-Zehi, in the restive Sistan-Baluchestan Province instead of arresting him. This could be interpreted as a character assassination order.

The IRIB program that confirmed Tavangar’s arrest was produced by Ameneh-Sadat Zabihpour who critics often refer to as “interrogator-journalist” for her alleged direct role in forcing detainees to make false self-incriminating “confessions” under duress to be used in the program. She and her colleague Ali Rezvani were recently designated by the US treasury for violation of human rights and other collaboration with security forces.

Some hardliners, like Iran's Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi appear to be repeating what they hear from others or in the news.

Vahidi told reporters about a fact-finding committee to investigate the ongoing protests, but he said dissidents cannot be part of the investigation. He added that what the government is facing are "riots" rather than "protests".

The committee, comprised of security organizations and "independent" lawyers, will be tasked with "finding the players," among the “rioters” meaning that it is not really a fact-finding committee but a chase and crackdown group. Previously Vahidi had talked about an investigative group which was supposed to uphold the rights of those who have sustained losses during the protests.

The only thing he knew was that it is a ‘fact-finding committee’, a term he must have heard in the news from the UN about establishing an international fact-finding mission to probe into violations of human rights in Iran during the protests since mid-September.

Furthermore, he spoke about independent lawyers at a time when more than two dozen are in jail for trying to represent and help human rights activists including other lawyers.

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Lawmaker Shahryar Heidari of the Majles National Security Committee has told ILNA that the committee set up by Vahidi is going to be "useless".

Meanwhile, figures Vahidi presented on casualties among protesters contradicted what other officials have said. He mentioned 200 individuals who were killed "during the riots,” while IRGC's General Hajizadeh put the number of those killed at "more than 300". Human rights organizations say there are between 450-500 verified cases of deaths.

In another development, one of Vahidi’s deputies, Majid Mir Ahmadi, has made outlandish remarks about the protests in an interview. Mir Ahmadi said some "rioters" receive 500 million rials ($1400) for attacking each security officer. He added that some female protesters were assigned to offer indecent proposals to young men to spend a few nights with them if they promised to take part in the "riots".

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In yet another report, Hassan Hassanzadeh, the commander of the IRGC Headquarters in Tehran said the United States has spent 55 trillion dollars to establish media in Arab states and countries around Iran to steer the protests (It is not a typo. He really said $55 trillion).

Reformist activist Feyzollah Arabsorkhi reminded him in a tweet that the United States' annual Gross Domestic Product is only 25 trillion dollars.

This shows either the lack of basic education on the part of senior IRGC officers or their ability to utter fantastic lies.

On the more pragmatic side, Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf appears to have retreated from his idea of introducing a "new form of governance” for Iran as the reformist website Etemad Online reported. According to the website, after several highly controversial speeches that were welcomed by some optimistic Iranians, he has finally said that what he meant by new governance was a plan to abide by Iran's forgotten constitution.

While almost every official and politician praises the constitution as the ultimate guide, it appears to have been shelved after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei took office in 1989. Two of the precepts of the constitution that are much talked about recently are articles that allow peaceful protests and holding referendum about core political disputes in the country.

This comes while conservative politician Hossein Kanani Moghaddam said in an interview that "Talking about a new form of governance without amending the constitution is a joke, particularly in a situation in which people are so pessimistic that they refuse to buy the arguments of any politician or state official."