'IRGC has become a monster, not what we intended,' founder tells 'Post'

Mohsen Sazegara has been many things in his life: student, revolutionary, founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), journalist, politician, dissident criminal, and exile. But first and foremost, he is a proud Iranian.

There is a fire that burns behind Sazegara’s eyes when he talks about a homeland he has not seen for over 20 years; a place he cannot return to while the current regime holds power, for fear of death.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post, the former revolutionary-turned-politician discussed his role in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, his relationship then with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding of the IRGC, and how his political views evolved against the state-religion axis that rules in the Islamic Republic, leading to his being barred from the 2001 Iranian presidential elections.

Speaking from the US, where he is now based, Sazegara also touched upon internal conflicts within the Islamic Republic and the problems facing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Born in Tehran in 1955, Sazegara entered the prestigious Aryamehr University of Technology in 1973 before continuing his studies in 1975 at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he was an active member of the Muslim Student Association and, perhaps more ominously, joined the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI – also known as the Freedom Movement of Iran.)

The LMI was banned at the time in his homeland, Sazegara told the Post - “If [the authorities] knew that you were a member of that organization, you would be arrested. During the three years that I was studying in the US, I traveled to Iran four times, and I was very active in underground activities.”

DESPITE THE revolutionary zeal common to students, there was no sign of what was to come in 1979, when Sazegara was plucked from Illinoisan obscurity and thrust onto the world stage. 

He was called to join Khomeini, a fellow Iranian exile and Muslim cleric, who had become the de-facto leader of protesters against the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Khomeini was exiled to Iraq in 1964 before taking up residency in the commune of Neauphle-le-Château, 18 miles outside of Paris, in 1978.

Khomeini is described by Sazegara as having been “very clever, very smart. When you talk to somebody about something that he has no background knowledge on, from his questions and his reactions, you can find out how fast he got it and absorbed the idea. He was a very good listener, too. When you were talking to him, he looked down, put his hands together, and listened very carefully, and then he had very good questions.”

The ayatollah persistently called for the Shah’s removal and the introduction of Sharia law as the legal code for a future Iran.

“When Khomenei went to Neauphle-le-Château, Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi was his top adviser, and Yazdi was one of the leaders of the LMI,” Sazegara recalled. “He called me and said, ‘Mohsen, we have brought the ayatollah to France, and we need you.’ He called me at four o’clock in the afternoon, and I was on the plane at eight o’clock that night.

“I was at the commune for about 100 days, and I was responsible for different jobs before we returned to Iran. I returned to Iran on what they called the ‘Victory Flight.’”

The Victory Flight on February 1, 1979, gave the world one of the most defining images of the Iranian Revolution. The Shah had fled Iran due to the civil unrest two weeks earlier, never to return, and the sight of an elderly Muslim cleric being helped down airplane steps by an Air France captain (the plane was specially chartered), greeted by an adoring crowd, signified the moment of transition when Iran abandoned its 2,500-year-old monarchy and embraced Islamic republicanism.

There were fears that forces loyal to the Shah would shoot the plane down, such was the hatred for Khomeini in some quarters. But when asked about such worries, Sazegara chuckled.

“I didn’t think they would shoot down the plane,” he stated. We had about 150 [international] reporters on board!”

SPEAKING TO the BBC in 2019, Sazegara described how his entire family, except for his father, went out to the streets to welcome Khomeini back to Iran, and this was a common feeling across the city as millions greeted the cleric.

Some would hold Sazegara accountable for being complicit in the establishment of a regime and an organization responsible for bringing so much misery and terror into the world. However, the West has often misunderstood the Iranian Revolution.

While all revolutions are complex, Iran’s in 1979 is often portrayed as some form of working-class revolution – the poor rising up against the Shah, or the religious Islamists rising up against modernization and Westernization. 

However, the intricate relationships in Iranian society – between the urban and the rural populations, the middle and lower classes, the religious and irreligious, the ulema (clergy) who headed the Islamic schools of thought and the powerful bazaari merchant class, Marxists and democratists, men and women – meant that there was no guarantee of a successful successor state to the monarchy. 

Still, a referendum overwhelmingly supported the creation of an Islamic Republic and the appointment of Khomeini as supreme leader. Islamic law would now guide the new state, and Khomeini would be its guardian.

 It was in this volatile atmosphere of post-revolutionary Iran, where power struggles and ideological clashes were rampant, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was created.

IRGC

The IRGC is best known today for its ruthless enforcement of the republic’s will, military and intelligence sectors, terror designation, and regional influence through its relationship with Iranian proxy groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

 It was founded shortly after the revolution to protect the Islamic Republic’s religious control over the country and to act as a counterbalance to the regular Iranian Army, many of whose officers were still loyal to the Shah of Iran, and therefore could not be trusted by the revolutionary regime.

“Ayatollah Hassan Lahouti, who was released from jail during the revolution, got an order from Khomeini to gather weapons from the hands of the people,” Sazegara recounted.

 “At the final stage of the revolution, everybody had guns, so for the country’s security, we decided to collect the guns from the people. I went to one of the garrisons in Tehran, and I wrote a statement for national radio inviting the people to bring back their weapons. That was the first step in establishing a people’s army, which became the IRGC.”

Sazegara had established connections while in Neauphle-le-Château with militant Iranians, some of whom he sent to camps across the Middle East for training, including Palestinian ones. He predicted at the time that the revolution would be a five-to-seven-year guerrilla war to gain power.

As with other revolutions, the number of different political groups holding weapons, plus the threat of the Iranian Army, was one the new authorities wanted to protect against.

“It took a week as a group of five; we worked on the charter of this People’s Army. We had three goals in establishing this new organization,” Sazegara explained. 

“First, the security of the country: to collect the guns,” he said. “Second, to defend the country if we came under foreign attack as the fear was that the US would attack Iran [to restore the Shah]. 

Sometimes, as a joke, I say that the Shah didn’t stay long enough for us to fight against him. Third, we had the bitter experience of a plot against the national government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1953 military coup, a plot designed by the British and US Secret Services, and we were afraid of a military coup.”

THERE WAS also a surprising influence in the decision to create a people’s army, Sazegara revealed.“We knew that we would rebuild the army of Iran, but we thought that if we have a people’s army defending the country, it would mobilize the people to help the Iranian Army, and in peacetime, people would have training like the Israeli army and volunteers in Israel. That was one of the models that we were thinking of then.

“I was one of the five members of the provisional board of commanders,” he recalled.”Three months after it was established and the charter was passed, I said to myself that I don’t like this job, and I left the Guards.”

Sazegara is quick to recognize, however, that the organization that exists today and has such a prominent role in global terror is far from the idealistic people’s army he helped to create in 1979.“Our idea of a revolutionary guard was not the idea of the current one,” he stated.

 “This is a monster right now. [The modern] IRGC is not a unified organization. It’s like a dragon with seven different heads that are independent from each other. There is a classic army, the terrorist group, the suppression machine with intelligence like the KGB, and at the same time [the Corps] is like a Western cartel involving hundreds of companies and like the mafia, involved in drug smuggling, brothel running and running gambling houses. This is completely different from the original idea.”

Sazegara describes the current leadership as behaving “like a theocracy or totalitarian regime or a dictatorship, but the main nature of this regime is a kleptocracy right now.” He estimates that up to half of the Iranian economy may be tied in some way to current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s personal fortune, whether through embezzlement or misappropriation.

The Wilderness Years

However, as the new regime solidified its power, Sazegara’s disillusionment began to grow. Serving as managing director of Iran’s National Radio until 1981, and in various political roles throughout the 1980s, he witnessed firsthand the regime’s divergence from the revolution’s original ideals.

He served as political deputy in the prime minister’s office, deputy minister of heavy industries, chairman of the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization of Iran, and vice minister of planning and budget.

Real disillusion with the regime began for him in 1988 as he described his realization that “the problem of this regime is not accidental: It’s essential. It’s in the theory of this regime. It’s in Islamism, and in running a country based on Islamic sharia and ideological leftist ideology regarding the economy.”

After nearly a decade spent battling the regime to keep open several publications that Sazegara ran, he was now firmly in the reformist political camp, determined to change the status quo of the Islamic Republic’s constitution.

As the 1997 presidential elections approached, the reformists were looking for a way to “break the shell, which is the constitution of the Islamic Republic, and establish a democratic regime. 

“That was the plan of the reform movement – and we chose [Muhammad] Khatami,” he said. 

Khatami was a reformist cleric who swept to the presidency in a shock result with around 70% of the public vote, and his presidency promised much change in its formative months.

However, the new president consistently found himself battling the authorities. Part of Iran’s political system is that the supreme leader and a Council of Guardians have the ultimate say on who can run for the Iranian parliament and in presidential elections, often leading to cherry-picking of favored candidates.

AHEAD OF the 2001 presidential elections, Sazegara intended to stand himself on a reformist ticket – with only one policy. If elected, he would have held a referendum on the Iranian constitution. After declaring his candidacy, despite knowing that Khamenei would ban him from running, he then had three months to speak to as many people as possible and get his message across.

Universities and students welcomed his message and soon he found himself in further trouble with the authorities.

“When they arrested me, they arrested about 800 students with me – including my son, who was a student in University of Tehran – and then I went on hunger strike,” he told the Post from Washington.

“The intelligence ministry arrested me first, but then released me because of my hunger strike and the pressure from many of my friends still in the parliament.”

Just two months later, however, Sazegara was arrested again, this time by IRGC intelligence officers.“I was arrested by IRGC intelligence and they didn’t release me. I went on two long hunger strikes, for 79 days in total; after that, I was released for poor health. I damaged my heart and my eye so when I was released, my eye doctor and heart doctor recommended that both of them needed surgery.”

After a $600,000 bail, Sazegara attempted to leave the country for surgery in the UK, and was only granted permission to leave after asking the IRGC. He believes the permission to leave Iran came from Khamenei himself, but figured the authorities would rather have him out of the country than inside causing trouble.

The dissident spent a year in London before continuing on to the US, where he still resides, completing fellowships at several American universities before settling in Washington. He was sentenced to six years in absentia in Iran for crimes against the state.

Modern Iran

As the political landscape in Iran has evolved, so too has Sazegara’s perspective. Now a vocal critic of the regime from his exile in the US, he offered a stark analysis of his homeland’s current predicament, particularly its precarious stance against Israel. The republic is in no position to fight a long-term war with Israel, he said, and even asked the US to intervene to prevent a possible large-scale Israeli retaliation to any Iranian attack.

“What Israel did – I mean the alleged assassination of [Hamas Chief] Ismail Haniyeh, in the heart of Tehran, in one of the most protected places – was a humiliation for the intelligence organizations of Iran,” Sazegara stated. “This has created a problem for Khamenei among his main power base: the intelligence services.

“[Khamenei’s] first reaction was that we retaliate and don’t stop. But when he referred to his military commanders and the experts in the IRGC, and that they should present the options of what to do, they told him that Iran is not in a position to fight Israel. They don’t have any strategic balance. They can send missiles toward Israel, especially hypersonic missiles that can reach Israel in six to eight minutes. ‘But when Israel retaliates, then we can’t defend the country, especially air defense,’ Khamenei’s commanders told him.

They told him that “Iran is not in a position to fight Israel,” Sazegara said. “They emphasized that ‘even if we launch an attack, we should immediately consider a ceasefire with international mediators.’”

SPEAKING ABOUT the US role in the growing conflict between Israel and Iran, Sazegara stated that, “As far as I know, Iran, behind the scenes, negotiated with the US and the Biden administration and asked them to talk to Israel, stating that Iran would attack somewhere in Israel – and promise that nobody will be killed – but Israel should not retaliate.

“Iran asked the US to put pressure on Israel not to retaliate enough to escalate,” he said, “but this time, the US did not agree, and told them that ‘we can’t prevent Israel’” from retaliating.

For Sazegara, Khamenei faces multiple challenges in considering any military action against Israel. First, a limited attack risks provoking a significant Israeli retaliation, which could lead to the defeat of Iran’s armed forces. Such a defeat could threaten Khamenei’s power, since historically, humiliated armed forces often bite the hand that feeds them.

Secondly, Iran’s economy is fragile, struggling with issues like energy production, inflation, unemployment, and daily strikes. This economic instability further complicates the prospect of engaging in war.

Lastly, Khamenei lacks the support of the Iranian people for a war with Israel. Intelligence gathered indicates that the majority of Iranians oppose any conflict with the Jewish state, leaving the supreme leader potentially isolated if he chooses to pursue military action. 

Although he knows the forcefulness with which the regime cracks down on dissent, that thought may be far from the ayatollah’s mind.

Three senior Iranian officials told Reuters last week that only a ceasefire deal in Gaza could prevent Iran from directly retaliating against Israel for Haniyeh’s assassination. Diplomatic envoys have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to de-escalate the situation. 

This is a face-saving measure to allow the regime to fall back and present the people with some form of a pyrrhic victory, according to the exiled dissident.

“I’m sure that in Iran, the propaganda will say that ‘Israel was actually afraid of us and accepted the ceasefire,’” should a deal be agreed to,” he told the Post. “They have to do something to say to their followers that this was a show of power: that [Israel] accepted a ceasefire.”

And if these [Israel-Hamas] negotiations go nowhere and there is no ceasefire, I don’t know what Khamenei will do – but I guess that he would consider using Iran’s proxy groups to retaliate against Israel.”

AND WHAT of the future for Sazegara and Iran? In the meantime, he says, he will continue fighting the regime just as he did during the Green Movement of 2009 when pro-democracy Iranians protested the re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and during protests following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a young girl arrested by the Guidance Patrol (morality police) in September 2022 for allegedly violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law.

Sazegara points to women and Generation Z as the two main cohorts who can bring the Islamic regime down, perhaps ironically since the youth and women were two of the groups who gained the most from the shah’s policies of modernization.

As the Shah himself stated, “Iran is the land of great contradictions and unforeseen events, especially this regime. Maybe tomorrow, something will happen that we cannot foresee right now.”

This is a story of a man and a nation caught in the throes of revolution, repression, and the enduring hope for freedom. 

The question remains: Will Sazegara, a man who fought and is still fighting hard for a better future for Iranians, ever see his homeland again?