By Reza Shafa
“Political Guides” are members of the political bureau of the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader’s representative office at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Their task is to control and ensure adherence among IRGC ranks to the political and ideological guidelines of the regime’s Supreme Leader. As such, they are tasked with everything from selecting and training suicide bombers, to implementing widespread electoral fraud during the regime’s sham elections, in accordance with the wishes and policies of the mullahs’ Supreme Leader, currently Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei uses two kinds of leverage to impose his control over the IRGC. First, as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he appoints the IRGC’s commander-in-chief and chief officers. Second, as the regime’s Supreme Leader, he runs an extensive web of representative offices operating at the IRGC.
The vast network of Khamenei’s representative offices at the IRGC operate in parallel to the IRGC’s command structure. Contrary to what may initially be assumed, Khamenei’s representatives are more than a bunch of mullahs at the IRGC preaching Islam. The representative offices form an extensive organization with tens of thousands of members, who control the IRGC and align it to Khamenei’s guidelines. These offices report directly to Khamenei himself. He uses them to control all of the IRGC’s rank-and-file as well as more senior officers and commanders.
Khamenei’s chief representative at the IRGC is mullah Saeedi, who during the current restructuring phase has appointed mullah Mojtaba Zolnouri as his deputy. He has also created a commanding unit for the Supreme Leader division. In tandem with the changes at the IRGC, which has restructured by decentralizing its forces into 31 provincial brigades, a provincial Supreme Leader representative has been appointed together with a provincial IRGC commander. These provincial representatives report to the Supreme Leader's office in Tehran. Each of the representatives stationed at a provincial brigade has a distinct headquarters, which includes the departments of “supervision,” “political and ideological guidance,” “public relations,” “administrative and finance,” along with a “political bureau.” The political bureau is responsible for fundamentalist ideological training, and reviewing the files of IRGC personnel to evaluate their credentials for promotion.
The “Political Guides” are comprised of mullahs and IRGC personnel at the political bureau. As mentioned, they are responsible for selecting and training suicide bombers, and also overseeing IRGC personnel in order to ensure that they comply with the Khamenei’s guidelines and policies.
Mullah Saeedi, Khamenei’s representative at the IRGC, has announced that the number of “Political Guides” has increased from 8 thousand in the winter of 2007 to 12 thousand in the summer of 2008. According to an IRGC-affiliated website, Basirat, on August 11th and 12th of this year, the fourth national gathering of officials, and tenth national gathering of Political Guides, from the IRGC, entitled, “the special operation of improving the insight of the IRGC and Bassij Force personnel,” took place in Iran.
In this gathering, brigadier general Yadollah Javani, head of the IRGC’s political bureau, announced an increase in the number of Political Guides, saying, “Today, we have 12 thousand Political Guides in the country, which encompasses 8 thousand personnel from the Bassij Force and four thousand from the IRGC.” He added, “Going forward, the political bureau will be in direct contact with the provincial brigades, and the plans and policies in each province must be set in a way that we can quickly and easily train more personnel in various fields.”
Javani also announced his intentions to have one Political Guide for every 50 IRGC members, and added, “This move can transform the Political Guides to an effective organization in defending the Islamic government.”
Mullah Saeedi stressed to his audience at the national gathering of Political Guides that, “The most important mission of the IRGC and Bassij Force is to ensure that the Osoolgarayan [Fundamentalists] remain in power.”
As such, the IRGC, through the creation of a 600-thousand-strong organization, intends to pull out the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from the ballot box during the regime’s presidential elections in June 2009.
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Reza Shafa is an expert on the Iranian regime's Intelligence networks, both in Iran and abroad.
He has done extensive research on Iranian Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) also known as VEVAK, Intelligence Office of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and Qods Force among others. Currently he is a contributor to NCRI website
