Ministry of Communications (Iran)

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The Ministry of Communications ( MOIS or VAJA , Persian وزارت اطلاعات جمهوری اسلامی ایران Wezārat-e Eṭṭelāʿāt-e Ǧomhūrī-ye Eslāmī-ye Īrān , 'Ministry of Communications of the Islamic Republic of Iran '; formerly Persian وزارت اطلاعات و امنیت کشور Wezārat-e Eṭṭelāʿāt wa Amniat-e Kešwar , Ministry of Intelligence and State Security; formerly known as VEVAK from English) is a secret service of the Islamic Republic of Iran .

Tasks and way of working

The secret service covers the entire spectrum of intelligence activities, from espionage to state security tasks , psychological warfare to covert operations at home and abroad. Information about the secret service mostly comes from Iranian opposition groups, Western intelligence services or Iranian defectors. State terrorism has been proven to the ministry in the past ; Arrest warrants have been issued against former Minister for Intelligence and Security Affairs Ali Fallahian for alleged murder in Germany, Switzerland and Argentina.

In addition to peaceful and non-violent opposition groups, the secret service also pursues members of the militant opposition groups and tries to recruit or smuggle informants into the groups. These include:

Unofficial employees are recruited among the employees of Iran Air or are e.g. B. Students, traders or bank employees. The secret service usually positions its employees in the foreign branches of the Iranian banks as agents or to control financial operations. In Germany, the best-known bank is the Melli Bank , which has a branch in Hamburg.

history

After the overthrow of the Shah in the course of the Islamic revolution , the forerunner organization SAVAMA was founded as the successor to the Shah's secret service SAVAK . The first director of the service was Major General Hussein Fardust . He was arrested in 1985 on suspicion of espionage for the USSR .

From 1983 to 1984 the service was reorganized by Mohammadi Reyschahri and Said Hajjarian and officially founded as VEVAK with the rank of ministry on August 18, 1984. Reyschahri was also head of the Revolutionary Tribunal . The major religious leaders of Iran, including a. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani , soon realized that they needed professional agents and decided to reactivate former SAVAK agents in order to fight the internal Iranian opposition. Other SAVAK agents were valuable because they had penetrated deeply into the structures of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party .

ladder

Previous heads of the secret service:

activities

Assassinations and murders

The secret service was linked to the following attacks in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in conjunction with the Lebanese Hezbollah and mostly during Ali Fallahian's tenure :

In addition, a whole series of other murders of exiles has been blamed on the Iranian regime by opposition groups.

Mykonos assassination

The alleged ex-secret service employee and defector Abolghasem Mesbahi was the important witness C in the Mykonos trial and charged Iranian government agencies with the murders of Ahmed Moradi-Talebi, Abd el-Rahman Ghassemlou and Mohammed Hussein Naghdi as well as the Lockerbie attack. In 1996, the Iranian government accused Mesbahi of being a swindler and a check fraudster, who was smuggled into the Paris embassy as a Western agent in the early 1980s, saying that he had never been an Iranian intelligence officer and that he had fled Iran from his creditors. He has been wanted by Interpol since 1997 with an international arrest warrant for fraud. In 1997, the Berlin Court of Appeal decided in its judgment on the Mykonos attack that VEVAK and other members of the Iranian government were the commissioners and masterminds behind the assassination attempt. In the course of the taking of evidence, the Federal Court of Justice issued an arrest warrant for the then VEVAK boss Fallahian in 1996 . In 2006, two more arrest warrants followed for him, one issued by a Swiss investigating magistrate for the murder of Kazem Rajawi in 1990 and the second by the public prosecutor in Buenos Aires , which holds high-ranking representatives of Iran responsible for the 1994 bomb attack on the Jewish cultural center AMIA , whereby Hezbollah was responsible for the execution. Further international arrest warrants have been applied for against former President Rafsanjani and issued against seven other allegedly involved parties. The credibility of the underlying testimony was again called into question by former Argentine MPs.

Activities in Germany

According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the secret service procures information from the fields of politics, business and science. The focus, however, is on spying on and combating Iranian opposition groups abroad, including in the 100,000 Iranian diaspora in Germany.

There is evidence of training and equipment assistance from the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) for VEVAK in 1991.

The Villa Parkstrasse 5 in Cologne (Iran House) was used intensively by the Iranian secret service after the Islamic Revolution until the 1990s. In July 2000, German intelligence services leaked information to SPIEGEL that the VEVAK was behind the riots of April 2000, which led to the interruption of the Heinrich Böll Foundation's Iran conference in Berlin. It is also intended to disrupt the then President Mohammad Chātami's visit to Berlin in order to discredit him in Iran.

In 2016, the Berlin Higher Regional Court imposed a prison sentence of two years and four months on a 32-year-old Iranian who had gathered information about members of the People's Mujahedin in Berlin and Cologne and passed it on to the Iranian government.

In 2017, the Berlin Court of Appeal sentenced a student from Pakistan to a prison term of four years and three months for acting as an agent for the secret service . He had spied on the French-Israeli economics professor David Rouach and the former defense commissioner of the Bundestag and President of the German-Israeli Society Reinhold Robbe . The student is said to have operated on behalf of the al-Quds unit and scouted out targets that could easily be hit in the event of war.

On January 15, 2019, Abdul-Hamid S., who worked as a language mediator in the German armed forces, was arrested. He is said to have disclosed highly sensitive information to the Iranian secret service.

See also

literature

  • Yves Bonnet, Vevak, au service des ayatollahs: Histoire des services secrets iraniens , Timée-éditions, Boulogne-Billancourt, 2009. ISBN 978-2-35401-001-0 (French)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Report on the Protection of the Constitution 2017. (PDF) Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Home Affairs , p. 283 f. , accessed December 21, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Dominik Cziesche: Secret of Toni . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 2004, p. 38 ( online - 26 January 2004 ).
  3. ^ Ministry of Intelligence and Security VEVAK - Iran Intelligence Agencies, GlobalSecurity.org [1]
  4. ^ History - Ministry of Intelligence and Security VEVAK - Iran Intelligence Agencies, GlobalSecurity.org [2]
  5. ↑ a b Wahied Wahdat-Hagh : 20th anniversary of the Iranian secret service , MEMRI , October 29, 2004 http://www.memri.de/uebersetzungen_analysen/2004_04_OND/iran_mois_29_10_04.html ( Memento from June 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Mascolo: Best contacts . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1997 ( online - 21 April 1997 ).
  7. ↑ Didier Bigo: Les attentats de 1986 en France: un cas de violence transnationale et ses implications (Part 1) , Cultures & Conflits, 04, online since December 31, 2002. [3]
  8. ↑ a b c Death in the name of the sublime . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1996 ( online - 14 October 1996 ).
  9. ↑ a b The Mullah Trail . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 1997 ( online - July 7, 1997 ).
  10. ↑ a b Marcello Mega: Truth revealed on Lockerbie bomb timer , Scotsman.com News, June 1, 2008 [4]
  11. ↑ a b Iran: Persecution by the State of God ( Memento from April 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), Pro Asyl
  12. ↑ a b Arrest warrant against ex-Iranian minister, swissinfo.org, April 9, 2006 [5]
  13. ↑ Trial of Iranian official accused of dissident assassination begins in Rome, Associated Press , May 11, 2005 [6]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.nokta.co.za
  14. ^ The Buenos Aires bombing: Times coverage, Times Online , August 22, 2003 [7]
  15. ↑ a b Arrest warrant for Iran's ex-president applied for , tagesschau.de October 26, 2006 01:59 a.m. http://www.tagesschau.de:80/ausland/meldung92084.html ( Memento from June 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ↑ Pact with the regime . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1996 ( online - 1 July 1996 ).
  17. ↑ Operations - Ministry of Intelligence and Security VEVAK - Iran Intelligence Agencies, GlobalSecurity.org [8]
  18. ^ A Special Report from The Foundation for Democracy in Iran [9]
  19. ↑ 1979 unjust revolution in IRAN ( Memento of May 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Bahá'í International Community
  20. ↑ List of Assassinations, Iran Terror Database ( Memento of April 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), July 19, 2005
  21. ↑ Weakness makes them hard . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1996 ( online - Nov. 25, 1996 ).
  22. ↑ MESBAHI, Abolghasem , Interpol Wanted FALLAHIJAN, Ali ( Memento from June 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  23. ^ Judgment of the 1st Criminal Senate of the Court of Appeal in Berlin from April 10, 1997, AZ: (1) 2 StE 2/93 (19/93), PDF ( Memento from May 25, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  24. ↑ FALLAHIJAN, Ali, Interpol Wanted FALLAHIJAN, Ali ( memento of March 3, 2008)
  25. ↑ Julián Bruschtein: D'Elía dice que dos testigos de la AMIA son “disidentes terroristas” , Página / 12 , March 7, 2007 [10]
  26. ↑ Base of the spies . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1994, pp. 18-19 ( Online - Oct. 10, 1994 ).
  27. ↑ All nonsense . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 1993, pp. 26-27 ( Online - Oct. 25, 1993 ).
  28. ↑ Good relationships . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1993, pp. 30 ( Online - Nov. 1, 1993 ).
  29. ↑ Iran's agents are supposed to cause riots , Spiegel-Online July 10, 2000 [11]
  30. ↑ Wolfgang Bayer, u. a .: March against the mullahs . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 2000, pp. 118 ( online - 10 July 2000 ).
  31. ↑ Almost two and a half years imprisonment for spy on behalf of Iran In: Berliner Morgenpost, July 19, 2016. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  32. ↑ Georg Heil: Iranian secret service spied on SPD politicians. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 6, 2017. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  33. ^ Espionage trial in Berlin: Iranian spy imprisoned for several years In: Der Tagesspiegel, March 27, 2017. Retrieved on October 3, 2017.
  34. ↑ Daniel Friedrich Sturm: SPD politician accuses Iran of murder conspiracy In: Welt Online, April 6, 2017. Retrieved on October 3, 2017.
  35. ↑ Investigators unmask a suspected spy in the Bundeswehr. In: http://www.spiegel.de/ . January 15, 2019, accessed January 15, 2019 .

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