Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 10:27AM
A senior Iranian intelligence official, presumably from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ intelligence wing, was heard in an audio file outlining the IRGC’s involvement in dealing with the opposition before and after the June 12 election last year.
This audio file dates back to a private speech given by the general to a number of high-ranking clerics and state officials in the northeastern city of Mashhad, sometime after the June 12 election.
General Moshfegh, the intelligence official presumably heard on the audio file, accused high-ranking members of the opposition, including former President Mohammad Khatami, Assembly of Experts Chairman Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, and opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi of having direct ties to the United States and Great Britain. He said that these individuals and their families are connected to the West and “we [the IRGC] have made an effort in recent months to make this public.”
During this private speech, Moshfegh accused leading Iranian opposition figures of having held private meetings in the home of Mehdi Hashemi, Rafsanjani’s son currently on the run from the Islamic Republic, in order to find a way to “get back in the system” implying that these forces were looking for a way to infiltrate the government.
This high-ranking intelligence official accuses Iran’s reformists of seeking to weaken Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during President Khatami’s tenure. Moshfegh claims that key reformists figures, who held sensitive government positions at the time in places such as the Interior and the Intelligence Ministries, sought to create a crisis and therefore weaken the Supreme Leader.
In this speech, which has become an internet sensation in Iranian political circles, General Moshfegh brags about IRGC’s ability to influence matters of the most sensitive nature such as presidential and parliamentary elections. Moshfegh admitted that the IRGC shut down all SMS services in Iran on election day last year in order to prevent supporters of Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi from communicating with each other.
Moshfegh, who has interrogated a number of political prisoners incarcerated after the June 12 election, said that the opposition wants to instigate instability in the Islamic Republic and went as far as to accuse Ayatollah Mohammad Mosusavi-Khoiniha, a senior cleric close to the Green Movement, of being an American sleep cell.
What General Moshfegh considered to be the IRGC’s successes are at the core of the opposition movement’s complaints against the IRGC. According to Iranian law, it is illegal for Iran’s armed forces to take sides in political disputes. Following the release of General Moshfegh’s audio file, two leading opposition parties, the Participation Front and Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution, filed a lawsuit against high-ranking IRGC generals, most of whom are commanders of the Sarallah Base in Tehran.