Documents Show IRGC Had Foreknowledge Of Terror Attack In Iran

With an array of celebrities at a red-carpeted state dinner Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told France 2 TV he would support the French team if the United States were knocked out of the World Cup. The joint presidential statement called France the US’s oldest ally.

The two countries were at one in supporting global human rights and in Middle East policy, the presidents’ statement said. This included a “just solution to the Syrian conflict,” where US troops remain in the north east, backing the Abrahamic Accords, by which some Arab states have recognized Israel ahead of Palestinian statehood, and a determination that “Iran can never develop or acquire a nuclear weapon.”

While the statement expressed commitment to “democratic values,” respect for international law, and international cooperation to address Iran’s “nuclear escalation,” the Washington political mood is increasingly polarizing the US and western Europe on one side, against Iran, China, and Russia on the other.

Republicans and Democrats are vying to push harder. Senator Mario Rubio, an advocate of more US weapons for Israel, Wednesday demanded that President Joe Biden look into whether the Chinese tech company Tiandy’s involvement in Iran “raises serious questions about whether its products are being used against peaceful Iranian protesters.”

‘Barbaric treatment’

In a 20-minute interview for CNN, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton envisaged US foreign policy as a struggle for women’s rights. Highlighting violations by Russia, Iran and the Afghan Taliban, Clinton called for an “absolute rejection of using sexual attack as a weapon of war,” for holding leaders accountable for “barbaric treatment,” and for stepping up sophisticated arms supplies to Ukraine, including from Israel, whose new government needed to understand “Iran and Russia have made an alliance.”

Clinton explained her approach as secretary of state to protests in Iran after the disputed 2009 presidential election as due to intelligence assessments that “overt American support would actually hurt” and that “behind the scenes” activity was better. “Now it’s very different, what’s happening now deserves our full-throated support,” she said.

“I would not be negotiating with Iran on anything right now, including the nuclear agreement,” Clinton continued. With the US withdrawal in 2018 from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, “that horse is out of the barn,” she said, while the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had lost its “eyes” on Iran’s nuclear program as Tehran reduced the agency’s access in response to US sanctions and attacks on its atomic sites.

Clinton suggested that maintaining US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions was to force “regime change” but rather to spark “internal discussions” in Iran, “not just [within] the government … but [within] the clerics.” This tied in with Rob Malley, the White House special envoy for Iran, telling Foreign Policy magazine in an interview this week that “the Iranian system is divided.”

‘Active diplomatic track’

The Biden administration’s approach is not without critics. Much of the ‘global south’ is increasingly wary of US ‘exceptionalism,’ accusing the US of hypocrisy and double standards. The US-France presidents’ statement expressed support for the International Criminal Court, which Washington has refused to join. Both India and Pakistan abstained on the recent US-sponsored resolution condemning Iran at the IAEA governing board. South Africa and Brazil are among those refusing to take sides over Nato and Ukraine.

Nor is opposition to talks with Iran unanimous, in the US or Europe. In the Washington Post Thursday, Ellie Geranmayeh, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argued for “an active diplomacy track to reverse Iran’s nuclear conduct before it is too late.” Rejecting the case for more and more sanctions, she argued there was “little evidence” they had worked, since Iran had “escalated its behavior” in response.

“It is irresponsible to risk everything on the hope that a peaceful transition of power will place Iran’s nuclear program under democratic and safe control anytime soon,” Geranmayeh wrote.

But the issue now is not just nuclear escalation. It is also the deadly violence the Islamic Republic is using against antigovernment protesters, which leaves little room for sanctions relief. More than 450 protesters have been killed since mid-September while several have been sentenced to death.

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action against two individuals and two companies based in Lebanon for providing financial services to Hezbollah, along with an additional individual involved in facilitating weapons procurement for the group, it said in a statement.

Founded in 1982 by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and classified by the United States and other Western countries as a "terrorist organization," Hezbollah is a powerful group in Lebanon and acts as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. It has been fighting in Syria with other Iran-backed forces.

OFAC regulations generally prohibit all dealings by US persons or within the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated entities.

Among the individuals sanctioned on Thursday were Adel Mohamad Mansour, who led a Hezbollah-run quasi-financial institution; Hassan Khalil, who worked to procure weapons on behalf of Hezbollah; and Naser Hassan Neser, who worked with an entity that provided financial services to the group, the Treasury Department said.

The two companies sanctioned on Thursday over providing financial services to Hezbollah were named Al-Khobara and Auditors.

Last month, the United States issued sanctions against an international oil smuggling network it said supports Hezbollah and Iran's Quds Force, targeting dozens of people, companies and tankers.

Reporting by Reuters

The Washington Post said in an article on Thursday, that the expansion of the Islamic Republic's “terror and kidnapping plots” has worried officials in Western countries.

The article is based on government documents and interviews with 15 officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

It adds that the tempo of the plots has significantly increased in the past two years, and they are among the most ambitious and far-reaching in recent memory, according to the officials and documents.

The paper goes on to quote officials that the Islamic Republic’s intelligence and security services depend largely on proxies to carry out their plans, “offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to jewel thieves, drug dealers and other criminals in murder-for-hire schemes.”

The Revolutionary Guard Intelligence Organization and the IRGC Quds Force have been mentioned as two main actors in designing these plots.

The Iranians’ recruitment of agents appears as varied as the geographic distribution of their targets.

That hands-off approach probably caused some operations to fail, the officials said, as plots have been disrupted — and, in some cases, the hired hit men appear to have gotten cold feet and never carried out their orders.

During an interview with Foreign Policy’s podcast Playlist released on Wednesday, Malley said that the US and Iran came very close to reaching an agreement to revive the 2015 nuclear deal – or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- many times in the past two years, the latest of which was in August, but each time Iran stepped back and came up with new demands that often had nothing to do with the nuclear talks. 

“We'll have the sanctions, pressure and diplomacy. If none of that works, the President has said, and, as a last resort, he will agree to a military option because if that’s what it takes to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, that’s what will happen. But we’re not there," he said. 

Defending the Biden administration’s efforts to keep diplomacy as an option and criticizing the Trump administration for its maximum-pressure campaign, he said, “We owe it to ourselves to have an honest examination of how sanctions work and how they don’t work.”

The Iranian system as a whole is divided, and not yet concluded whether they really want to come back to the deal, and so each time Tehran was presented with a deal, even about the deals that were considered fair by other parties such as Russia and China, Iran was the one that walked back. 

“Iran has rejected countless opportunities to come back to the deal... We are prepared for a world with the JCPOA and without the JCPOA. We’ve continued to put pressure on Iran... We made sure there are sanctions for their support for terrorism, their human rights violations, for their ballistic missile program and for their nuclear program,” he added. “The JCPOA is not on the agenda because of Iran’s position, and we’re continuing with our policy to respond to all of Iran’s destabilizing activities.”

Malley also said reviving the deal would be dead when the non-proliferation benefits of the deal do not justify or warrant the sanctions relief that the US is ready to offer, emphasizing that the US focus and energy are not on the deal. Currently, the focus is on what is happening in Iran and its support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

He also talked about many troubling issues emanating from Iran, saying the US supports aspirations of the Iranian people to achieve the fundamental rights and freedoms that all peoples across the globe should enjoy. “We are mobilizing international attention, putting the spotlight on what’s happening in Iran. It’s very important that the world know at a time when the Iranian regime is trying to hide what’s happening and to distort what’s happening,” he said. 

The administration has also put the spotlight on developments in Iran by sanctioning those up and down the chain who are violating the basic rights of the Iranian people, “whether it’s a top leadership or whether it’s an anonymous person in a prison,” Malley noted. “The world should know who is behind that repression.”

He also said Washington is pushing for measures against the Islamic Republic in international bodies, mentioning the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council and the move to kick out Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “It’s an aberration, a complete anomaly, that Iran would be on the commission that is supposed to defend the rights of women when they are repressing them,” he added.

The US will continue to voice its support for the Iranians who are protesting for their rights, he reiterated, saying that “it's an extraordinary page in Iran’s history that’s being written right now.”

Praising “the courage, the determination, the persistence and the creativity of Iranians, particularly women and girls,” Malley said “we’re not going to be the authors; we can be there to express support for the fundamental rights of Iranians. This page will be written by Iranians themselves. It won’t be written in Washington, in London or anywhere around the globe other than Iran.”

Also on Wednesday, The US secretary of state says that the Islamic Republic has a deeply incorrect understanding of its people and is trying to blame others for the current protests.

Prosecutor General of Tehran Ali Alghasi-Mehr said on Wednesday that the probe into the cyberattack against Fars news, a cultural propaganda machine with close links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, is because a significant database of personal information of journalists and employees has been leaked.

However, it seems that the investigation has been launched because the authorities are not sure what has been hacked and what database has been breached.

A new word has been coined to refer to the large amount of data leaked from the hack: Farsgate.

A 123-page document, a copy of which Iran International obtained, is among the material the hacktivist group Black Reward uncovered. The document which includes both hearsay and excerpts from domestic and foreign-based Persian media was made in one copy only for the eyes of the IRGC chief commander Hossein Salami. Earlier in the week, Black Reward also released some audio files from a meeting between Qasem Qoreyshi, the deputy commander of the paramilitary Basij and media representatives.

Black Reward announced on Friday, November 25, that it had attacked the database of Fars News Agency claiming that it deleted nearly 250 terabytes of data from all the servers and computers of the website and obtained confidential bulletins sent by the news agency to the office of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The report revealed a lot of recent orders by Khamenei about the ongoing protests that have engulfed the country since mid-September following the death of the 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini in the custody of morality police. Now, after several batches of information were leaked to the media, the authorities have started a damage control campaign to seize back the narrative, as most of the data prove that the Islamic Republic is frustrated and weary over its inability to end the protests.

The secret reports also revealed that most Iranians are getting ready for a revolution in the country as the popularity of the regime has dwindled, even among those considered supporters of the Islamic Republic. According to the documents, the level of dissatisfaction is so high that Khamenei has ordered some fundamental change in the structure of the regime in order to prevent a collapse.

The reports came as the protests in the country show no sign of ending and the movement has been spreading at universities and turning into strikes of employees in the industrial and services sectors, such as truckers.

While Iranian universities have turned into a battleground for antigovernment protests, students and professors in more than 150 universities around the world held events in support of the protests in Iran.

Meanwhile in Iran, Rasoul Jalili, the president of Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, said on Wednesday that the university has increased its security staff by recruiting forces from private security companies. The measure is probably aimed at silencing those who criticize the university for allowing government security forces – especially the IRGC’s Basij paramilitary forces – to enter the campus to crack down on student rallies and sit-ins. If the measure proves successful, it can serve as a model for other universities to clamp down on students.

While Iranians have planned to hold three days of nationwide protests next week – 5-7 December – strikes by employees of industrial factories and truckers have injected fresh blood to the uprising.

Truck drivers and owners in several cities such as Esfahan, Bandar Abbas, Qazvin, and Kermanshah as well as many other western cities refrained from moving goods in support of the protests and strikes by industrial workers. Many people on social media describe the strike by the truckers as a significant blow to the Islamic Republic since it has the potential to cripple the economy. Some people say, “the truckers are leading the revolutionary uprising.”