In Tehran, appointments to the Supreme National Security Council are rarely bureaucratic reshuffles. They are signals — about fear, factional power, and the threats the regime believes it is about to face. The return of Mohsen Rezaei, one of the oldest surviving figures of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is therefore more than another personnel change. It is a window into the security mentality of a regime increasingly preoccupied with Israel, its battered regional network, and ultimately its own survival.
The purpose of the Supreme National Security Council is to secure the national interests and safeguard the mullahs’ regime and Khomeini’s upheaval, which, in the wintry, springless season of 1979, brought the Islamic caliphate — or Shiite clerical dictatorship — to power under the name of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The council makes decisions on the regime’s foreign policy and its defense and security affairs. Its members are senior political, military, and intelligence officials of the regime.
The council is chaired by Masoud Pezeshkian — the demagogic and rabble-rousing representative of the so-called reformist mafia — who still prides himself on serving the regime’s supreme leader. The Supreme National Security Council is one of the tools in the supreme leader’s hands.
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At this ominous center, political, intelligence, social, cultural, and economic activities are coordinated in connection with the regime’s general defense-security measures. It mobilizes all the country’s material and moral resources to confront the regime’s internal and external threats.
The Supreme National Security Council emerged from the Supreme Defense Council during the Iran-Iraq War.
After the death of Ruhollah Khomeini and the selection of Seyyed Ali Khamenei as supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hassan Rouhani was initially chosen to lead this council and, for 15 years, oversaw all the regime’s crimes and terrorist operations. For a long period, his associates included Seyyed Ahmad Khomeini and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. After Rouhani, one of the most dangerous Revolutionary Guard officers, Ali Larijani, assumed the position. Two years later, however, he was replaced by another Guard officer, Saeed Jalili, who remained for five years.
Then Ali Shamkhani, the mysterious face of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, led the council for nearly a decade. For approximately two years, an obscure Guard officer named Ahmadian held the post. But after the 12-day war between Israel and the United States against the Islamic Republic, he was removed. Larijani returned to the job, but after being killed in the four-day war, another Guard officer, Zolghadr — engineered by the Revolutionary Guard — took the seat. He lasted no more than four months. This is a sign of internal divisions and the power struggle within Iran’s current junta government. Since Aug. 6, the seat has once again gone to another Guard officer.
What Rezaei shares with Zolghadr and Shamkhani is membership in the terrorist group Mansouroun, whose members carried out terrorist operations before 1979.
Notably, the members of the Supreme National Security Council include the president, the speaker of parliament, the head of the judiciary, the interior minister, the foreign minister, the intelligence minister, the chief of staff of the armed forces, the commander in chief of the regular army, the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guard, and the head of state broadcasting.
The Intelligence Coordination Council is also a body composed of the heads of the Islamic Republic’s intelligence community. It provides the necessary consultations to coordinate the country’s intelligence organizations and coordinates overlapping matters with the Supreme National Security Council. The National Security Council — known as SHAK — is a subordinate body of the Supreme National Security Council. Within the limits of the law and the SNSC’s resolutions, it is responsible for maintaining domestic security, coordinating provincial security councils, and coordinating law enforcement and security forces in ensuring domestic and provincial security.
Naturally, the regime’s supreme leader also has two representatives on the council, one of whom usually serves simultaneously as the council’s secretary.
Most of the Revolutionary Guard figures within this institution have designed and supervised all the regime’s terrorist group operations abroad. Yet, today’s face of the council is a mysterious and comical character.
Mohsen Rezaei
Rezaei is a figure associated with the fundamentalist camp.
In the early 1970s, he was arrested by SAVAK because of his terrorist activities and spent a period in prison in the city of Ahvaz. He was one of the founders of the Islamist terrorist group Mansouroun. Together with his colleague in that group, Mohammad Boroujerdi, he was a member of the protection team for Khomeini after Khomeini entered the country.
Following the 1979 upheaval, most Islamist and Marxist terrorist groups loyal to Khomeini and the regime gathered under the banner of the Organization of the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution, a coalition consisting of seven armed Islamist terrorist groups.
Rezaei was the first commander of the Revolutionary Guard Intelligence Unit and, later in 1980, was appointed by Khomeini to command the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He served in that position for 16 years. In 2019, the Treasury Department placed Rezaei on its sanctions list for advancing the regime’s destabilizing objectives in the region and around the world. An Interpol arrest warrant was issued for him in November 2007 on accusations of involvement in the AMIA bombing.
He played a key role in suppressing protests in Kurdistan and Sistan and Baluchestan, in neutralizing the Nojeh coup, and in massacring the nation’s heroes. His military command style in the Revolutionary Guard led to the slaughter of young soldiers in unsuccessful operations. He faced political challenges while commanding the war and has been described as a war criminal. He dealt harshly and violently with critics within the Guard, even executing and purging some individuals.
He holds the record for repeatedly running and losing elections: He entered four elections, and no one voted for him. Yet, he said, “I will leave only by a bullet or if the people no longer want me.” In pursuit of self-promotion, he sometimes attends meetings in military uniform, with his medals displayed. His economic and job-creation schemes, as well as his hostage-taking, have always been mocked by the Iranian people and have even become the subject of jokes.
In addition to the Interpol arrest warrant, Rezaei remains wanted by Interpol.
Back in the 1990s, Rezaei wanted to come to the U.S. and give a lecture at a Washington think tank on warfare, but the plan was blocked because of the AMIA bombing issue. He also wanted to meet with the CIA and former SAVAK officials in Pakistan, yet he refused to enter the U.S. Embassy there.
For a period, there was speculation that he might have the potential to become an intelligence asset, but nothing ever came of it. His son eventually came to the U.S., became involved with figures in the Constitutionalist Party around Prince Reza Pahlavi, was openly gay, met the prince, and was later killed in Dubai by his own employees.
In 1993, he and Iraj Masjedi transported Barzani from Sardasht to Erbil, and he consistently tried to portray himself as one of the architects of the Kurdistan Region.
He has always had a rather delusional — and at times almost comical — view of security and intelligence affairs. He has a profoundly disturbed mind and a brain empty of knowledge, yet he is highly deceptive and destructive.
Like other Guard officers who once served as secretaries of the Supreme National Security Council, he is intensely anti-Israel. He will therefore naturally pursue the Iranian regime’s terrorist plans against Israel and greater coordination with terrorist groups across the Shiite crescent. Although the illusion that Mojtaba Khamenei is still alive continues to be raised, Rezaei is among those who fight for the survival of power and preservation of the regime.
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Today, this aging Mansouroun terrorist wants to make decisions about Iran’s security. It is as grotesque as having Osama bin Laden run an educational center or a charity.
But Rezaei’s return reveals something larger than the resurrection of an aging revolutionary. When a regime facing Israel, regional isolation, internal fractures, and a crisis of survival reaches back to the men who built its security machinery decades ago, it is not displaying renewal. It is displaying exhaustion. Tehran may present Rezaei as a guardian of national security. In reality, his return is the portrait of a regime with fewer new ideas, fewer trusted men, and increasingly fewer places to hide.
Erfan Fard is a counterterrorism analyst and Middle East studies researcher based in Washington, with a particular focus on Iran, Islamic Terrorism, and ethnic conflicts in the region.