The Empire of Terror Podcast

New Generations of Guards The early postrevolutionary period provided openings for ambitious youth, as discussed earlier. Some of those who joined the Guards in the early 1980s were opportunists, and some were committed zealots. Some were both. Membership in the Guards afforded privileged access to housing, goods, and services and provided a fast track to political and social mobility. As in other...

The Directorates As in the foundational periods of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Iranian security and intelligence services initially primarily protected the new regime. Khomeini did not call his new force Sepah, a Persian word for soldiers. Instead, he called them the Sepāh-e-pasdaran, or “army of the guardians.” They guarded the revolution. The Guards were garrisoned in a facility previousl...

Welcome to an excerpt of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and explores the creation of the Guards.   The real war is a cultural war....

Welcome to an excerpt of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and explores the creation of the Guards.   The real war is a cultural war....

Khomeini’s Three-Phased Plan of Action As Iran’s revolutionary leaders stepped up to fill the power vacuum left by the shah’s flight, Khomeini promised support for democracy, but it was a ruse. As in the Russian Revolution and the Nazi seizure of power, the man who would rule as Iran’s dictator for the next ten years moved quickly to consolidate control. Lenin eliminated all those he deemed threat...

Young Turks and Angry Iranians Several Western-educated Iranian economists, known as the Young Turks, advanced successful development policies in the 1960s, a period later termed the “Golden Decade.” During this period, Iran enjoyed high economic growth and low inflation. From 1960 to 1976, Iran’s national income grew at a rate unmatched worldwide. By the end of this period, however, some of these...

The Guards as a New Tool of Power “A Revolution is like Saturn; it devours its own children.” —Prussian dramatist Georg Büchner, commenting on the carnage of the French Revolution Iran remained largely independent and ignored by the West in the aftermath of World War II, as European empires unraveled. By 1945, as the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s dominant powers, Britai...

 This excerpt comes from chapter two and recounts Iran’s intelligence and domestic counterintelligence efforts. Luring Opponents to Return: “Clever, Multidimensional and Innovative Tricks” Early Soviet and Nazi leaders sometimes pressured leading dissidents to return from abroad. One of the most successful early Soviet operations was the Trust, designed to disrupt the anti-Bolshevik White émigré c...

 This excerpt comes from chapter two. It compares and contrasts Iranian prisons to those of the Germans and Soviets of the 20th century.   Deception and Prisons   For the Soviets and the Germans, concentration camps were instruments of terror and venues for slave labor. The camp's very existence fostered a paralyzing fear among citizens who might deviate from the state's agenda. But some macabre e...

This excerpt comes from chapter two and discusses the opportunities for insiders and the new royalty of the Iranian Republic. After the Revolution One generation after the revolution, established stakeholders had emerged in the new political system. Some of those who helped build the government and its intelligence and security services remained a tightly knit cohort. As one observer noted, “If yo...

Iconic prisons are engines of gruesome lore about sadism, injustice, and audacious escape attempts. The Tower of London in Britain, the Bastille in France, and Alcatraz in the United States have left enduring legacies in popular culture. In Russia, the Peter and Paul Fortress, founded by Peter the Great, was a hotbed of political radicals and social irritants in the nineteenth and early twentieth...

Ideological Divergence While all four ideologies converge on seven points, they diverge on three issues, namely the role of religion, the distribution of wealth and property, and the nature of utopia. On the first point, communism is atheistic, and fascist ideologues tolerated Christianity out of political necessity. In Islamism and Shia revivalism, religion defines legal and social norms across a...

 We now turn to two other philosophies – communism and fascism. Communism  The second set of ideas popular in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution was associated with communism. While some Iranians hoped to recast elements of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in a Shia mold, secular intellectuals looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration. The Communist Party of Iran (Tudeh) was founded in 1941, an...

Welcome to an excerpt of Empire of Terror, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. This is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security.             “I am Cyrus, who founded the Persian Empire and was King of Asia. Grudge me not, therefore, this mon...

Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher, founded the Muslim Brotherhood to fill material and spiritual voids in civil society. Along with other pious Muslims, he was crestfallen at the Ottoman Caliphate's collapse in 1924. Much like Shia clerics in Persia, he saw Islam threatened by atheism, imperialism, and the widening scientific gap between the West and the Islamic East. Al-Banna was a Sunni...

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 t...

The Rise of the Guards The early years of the Guards were filled with the jingoism and martial pageantry marshalled to rally support for the war against Iraq. The piety, sacrifice, and courage of the Guards and, in particular, the Basij were celebrated throughout Iran during this conflict. The Basij were initially an independent force that drew poor, often religious, and resolute young men to figh...

  The Father of All Bombs   Iran has become a primary threat to American interests in the greater Middle East. If armed with a nuclear arsenal, it could threaten America itself. For nearly forty years, the Guards and the MOIS have sponsored and commanded anti-Western terrorist organizations. Indeed, the Guards’ reach has expanded into the heart of the Middle East and into South America. Iran’s ene...