The creeping rise of secret power circles in Iran has historical precedence that is characterized by common features: These power hubs act on their own, trample the law, and commit crimes. They are innately crime-oriented, irrespective of the type of government that is at the helm. This explains why the power circles’ crimes recurred in the Islamic Republic only two decades after the tyrannous Pahlavi dynasty was toppled. Ironically, the same crimes that prompted the revolutionaries to rise up against the Pahlavi regime were perpetrated in the revolutionary Islamic Republic!

As such, the 1998 serial crimes by Saeed Imami’s ring are not unprecedented in Iranian history. They run parallel to horrendous murders of journalists Karimpour Shirazi and Mohammad Masoud and the ruthless murder of General Afshar Toos, Tehran’s police chief during Mohammad Mosaddeq’s tenure as premier. When compared with those preceding it, however, crimes by Saeed Imami’s clique are in a sense unique because of the contemporary government’s reaction to them.

This is the first time in Iran’s contemporary history that the government has bravely and publicly reacted to the serial crimes. President Khatami’s administration has vowed to investigate and root out such political crimes by revamping the Information Ministry. As a first step, the administration has to trace the roots of this political evil by investigating all suspicious murders of political activists over the past two decades.

The first crime committed by Iran’s power circles was perhaps the brutal assassination of Dr. Kazem Sami in 1988. Sami, health minister in Mahdi Bazargan’s transitional government, was murdered with knife stabs, similar to the way Forouhar and Eskandari were assassinated a decade later. Based on information released after Sami’s murder, the Information Ministry launched a nationwide manhunt for the assassin and finally found that he had committed suicide in a public bath in Ahvaz, the same fate that later befell Saeed Imami!

Speaking at her husband’s funeral in Tehran’s Hojjat ibn al-Hasan Mosque, late Sami’s wife told Bazargan and others present that she knew who had killed her husband. If an official had taken her up on her words right there and then, perhaps other crimes would not have followed.

Sami’s assassination was timed to concur with the then German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher’s visit to Iran. This visit was of paramount importance for Iran which had pinned hope on improving relations with Europe for political and economic reasons, topped by the urge to offset the upshots of the Iran-Iraq war.

The assassination of Sami prompted Genscher to announce, upon his return, that Iran was not still safe for foreign investment. This announcement dashed Iran’s hope to benefit from the German official’s visit.

Another suspicious murder took place three years after Sami’s assassination, this time outside Iran. On Friday August 9, 1991, the Iranian TV’s 2 p.m. news reported Shahpour Bakhtiyar’s assassination in Paris by unidentified assailants.

This assassination seemed strange, as Bakhtiyar, last premier of the Pahlavi regime, who fled Iran and obtained political asylum from France after the Islamic Revolution’s victory, did not pose a serious political threat to the Iranian establishment.

The morning after Bakhtiyar’s assassination, the present author printed a story in the Tehran-based Persian-language Abrar morning daily on the assassination. In the article, "Global Symphony", I reasoned that as Bakhtiyar’s assassination caused the cancellation of the then French president Francois Mitterand’s scheduled visit to Iran, the unidentified assailants must have opposed improved Iran-Europe relations. I concluded that as the US did not favor improvement of Iran-Europe ties, it might have had a hand in the assassination.

The same day the article was published, the Ministry of Information’s Public Relations Department sent a letter to Abrar daily, approving the contents of the article and calling on other papers to follow suit and use the same analysis for Bakhtiyar's assassination.

If the Ministry of Information had not sent this letter, I would have probably never doubted the correctness of my analysis.

In late 1992 when Western cultural invasion of Iran was a political hot potato, the Information Ministry spent exorbitant sums to set up a center to review the press. Three years before that date (in August 1989), Saeedi Sirjani, dissident Iranian writer, penned an article "Nokte" (The Point) which was published in the Tehran-based Ettelaat daily and which slowly prompted Iran’s information agents to keep an eye on him.

In his article, Sirjani sharply addressed five issues:

1. He criticized the Iranian officials who commanded the 8-year war with Iraq.
2. He called Iranian officialdom’s combat with the US a mere slogan.
3. He questioned the 1980 US Embassy takeover.
4. He said the Iranian officials lacked wisdom and prudence.
5. He urged the officials to settle domestic issues rather than focus on external issues.

Nine months later (in May 1990), Ataollah Mohajerani, then vice president, published an article, "Direct Talks", in Ettelaat daily in which he explicitly demanded direct Iran-US negotiations.

Iran’s right-wing circles opposed both articles, and the Information Ministry subsequently placed Mohajerani and Sirjani under surveillance. As Mohajerani put it, his phone was tapped from then on.

Sirjani wrote two open letters in 1992 and 1993 in which he scathingly attacked Iran’s cultural climate. Contrary to Mohajerani, who was part of the establishment and not so vulnerable on this ground, Sirjani was very vulnerable and, therefore, faced a different fate.

Sirjani’s letters were made public simultaneous with the launch of the Information Ministry’s newly established Press Research Bureau which was housed in a four-story building in Gandhi Street (in north Tehran). The Bureau was vested with the task of reviewing all Iranian papers every day, indexing the contents, and writing a politically leaning bulletin to feed Iranian officials distorted information.

In the spring of 1993, the Bureau was relocated to a luxurious building in Pasdaran Avenue close to Saeed Imami’s home and office. Directly supervised by the Information Ministry’s Social Department, the Bureau worked three shifts a day to prepare its classified bulletins.

Following Sirjani’s correspondence, the Bureau prepared a special classified bulletin on Sirjani, and this marked the start of the scenario of the dissident writer’s detention, confession, transformation, and suspicious death.

In a letter to the then president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (in 1993), 134 Iranian writers, dissidents, and activists objected to Sirjani’s detention. Failing to be of any help to Sirjani, the letter was rather played in the hands of the Information Ministry to pressure the signatories. One of the signatories Abbas Zaryab Khoee passed away after the Information Ministry exerted heavy pressure on him.

Another signatory, Ahmad Mir Alaee, died of heart arrest in 1995 after a suspicious intravenous injection.

Then came the arrest of Faraj Sarkoohi, followed by the spread of false news that he had fled the country.

In October 1996 Ghaffar Hosseini died a suspicious death. Ahmad Taffazoli’s body was found with his head smashed with a crow bar in January 1997.

Ibrahim Zalzadeh was reported missing in March 1996 and his body was recovered in April 1997 in Tehran’s suburbs.

Then came Saeed Imami ring’s thwarted plot to drive the bus carrying dissident writers to Armenia into a valley!

The crime machine was ticked off in Iran. And relying on huge state power, the Information Ministry’s power circle stood accountable to no official or body whatsoever.

Upon his re-election as President in the summer of 1993, Hashemi Rafsanjani introduced his new cabinet members to the Parliament for a vote of confidence. When he got to his proposed minister of information Ali Fallahian, who had already held the post for 4 years, Hashemi Rafsanjani sufficed by uttering only one sentence: "Then there is Mr. Fallahian, and no one dares to deny him the vote of confidence!"

Fallahian, who was present in the session, was apparently happy with this introduction and reacted by forcefully smiling at Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The fear which Hashemi Rafsanjani alluded to was very real: The MPs were well aware that if they wanted to run again for Parliament, they had to get the Ministry of Information’s approval which would be handed over to the Guardians Council that is in charge of vetting the candidates. And Fallahian headed the Information Ministry.

The MPs present in the session well remembered how the Information Ministry had directly intervened to disqualify most left-wing candidates for the fourth Parliament elections. And these MPs did not want to have the same fate.

In 1985 Iran’s information body was transformed into a ministry that was to be supervised by the Parliament. Ironically, however, this supervision ran the other way around, as the Information Ministry actually supervised the Parliament by monitoring the MPs’ public and private lives.

Since then the Information Ministry gave not a fig for Parliament supervision over its performance. In fact, the Ministry’s power was even redoubled in 1992 when it obtained license for economic activities. Such power increase and enhanced self-confidence made corruption even more rampant among the Information Ministry’s power circle that acted on its own.

An informed diplomat disclosed in the 1990s that after the assassination of Iran’s Kurdish Democratic Party leaders, Abdul Rahman Qasemlou and Sharafkandi, in Germany’s Mykonos Café, some of Iran’s Information Ministry agents, acting on their own, transferred medium and long range missiles to Germany on the ground that the US would react to the assassination by launching a direct military attack on Iran. The agents transferred the missiles to Germany, without informing Iran’s high-ranking officials, to enable Iran to counter a possible US attack!

The missiles were confiscated in Hamburg Port upon the ship’s arrival in Germany. The Germans, however, showed self-restraint. They did not disclose the event but dispatched a high-ranking envoy to Tehran to demand explanations from the Iranian government.

The same diplomatic source noted that the Germans informed Hashemi Rafsanjani of this strange maneuver. Hashemi Rafsanjani followed the case up and incidentally got to know the details from one of his old merchant friends who had assisted the Information Ministry ring by procuring and transferring the missiles.

The power circle’s influence kept the then president from bringing it to book for this huge disgrace. Hashemi Rafsanjani sufficed with demoting Saeed Imami from deputy information minister for security to advisor.

After Seyyed Mohammad Khatami took over as president in 1997, Fallahian was dismissed from the Information Ministry, yet those loyal to him retained the ring inside and outside the Ministry. This circle was so powerful that even in the absence of Fallahian, it imposed Dorri Najafabadi, the weakest political personality, on Khatami for the post of information minister.

The power circle had so much self-confidence that on July 4, 1997 when Khatami was scheduled to introduce his proposed cabinet members to the Parliament for a vote of confidence, the Information Ministry invited the Iranian press to a briefing.

The present writer took part in the said briefing. I questioned the meeting’s timing and asked the hosts whether Fallahian would remain minister and what warranted the implementation of decisions taken in the session in case a new minister took over.

The hosts assured those present that all decisions taken in the meeting would stand, irrespective of whether the information minister remained or was replaced.

The meeting acquainted the press with a part of the Information Ministry’s unconventional activities. The hosts detailed how the Information Ministry located and arrested a person called Karim Sagbaz.

Karim Sagbaz apparently spotted young provincial boys who arrived in Tehran to work in the capital and sexually abused them after hiring them.

What remained hazy to the press was the incompatibility between the Information Ministry’s job description and its investigation of such cases that should apparently be handled by the law enforcement forces.

The briefing also shed light on the underlying corruption of a number of the executive, managerial, and operational personnel of the Information Ministry. A video film of the investigation of Karim Sagbaz and the boys he sexually abused was shown to the journalists.

The film’s questions and answers, however, lacked any trace of professional criminal investigation and only revealed how much the investigator took pleasure from hearing all the graphic details and probably visualizing them.

The hosts insisted with the same gratification that the journalists watch the entire video. The investigator’s irrelevant and abominable questions on the way the accused sexually abused the boys and his insistence that they relate each and every graphic detail revealed his shamelessness and the moral corruption of the officials in charge of the case.

Moral corruption is not confined to the Ministry of Information or a segment of it. With the unconventional post-revolution physical divide between Iranian men and women, many Iranians, from a pathological point of view, face sexual psychosis which is well evident in their behaviors.

Extensive prevalence of hysteric sexual jokes, the unconventional way some Iranian men ogle at the opposite sex (furtively glancing at women in public for visual gratification but hypocritically expressing anger that, say, they are not observing the Islamic dress code!), some women wearing provocative make-up and clothes in their workplaces and all through the city, extensive prevalence of unconventional forms of sexual gratification are some of the profound consequences of the unconventional public separation of Iranian men and women. And these problems affect both the public and private spheres in Iran.

Moral corruption is more disgraceful in Iran’s public sector which subjects the people to rigorous vetting to pick the most committed individuals, especially in places such as the Information Ministry where commitment and piety should hold sway.

The depth of the Information Ministry’s corruption can be fathomed by considering one example, namely the murder of a pretty Iranian stewardess Fatemeh Qaem Maqami who was said to have been killed in relation to the serial murders’ case. Rumor was also rife that she had affairs with the Saeed Imami clique.

Pirooz Davani’s mysterious disappearance is another event which reveals the Information Ministry’s performance. Davani, an independent communist, disappeared after he prepared and distributed a limited number of the "Booklet of Reality". Some consider him another victim of Saeed Imami clique’s serial murders.

There are solid reasons that attribute Davani’s disappearance to the Information Ministry. Firstly, Davani, in the "Booklet of Reality", shed light on the cooperation of Iran’s Tudeh Party with the Information Ministry.

Secondly, Davani criticized the Information Ministry agents’ harsh treatment of members of Masoud Rajavi’s terrorist MKO grouplet who were detained at Tehran’s Evin Prison. (MKO is based in Iraq).

After all these crimes, the knell of warning was finally tolled for Saeed Imami, and this criminal was to ultimately pay for his crimes. But six months after his imprisonment, Saeed Imami reportedly committed suicide while taking a shower at Evin Prison!

Saeed Imami’s suicide can be analogized with a chess game: Gambit is an opening move in chess in which a player sacrifices a pawn or other piece to secure certain ends. Apparently Saeed Imami, who as put by some Iranian political analysts was only a seventh-rank agent in the power circle at the Information Ministry, was a pawn that was sacrificed to grant maneuverability to other power Mafia agents.

Scorpions are the only creatures on earth that sting themselves as a last resort in the face of danger. Wolves are the only animals that tear each other apart if they fail to find food when they are hungry.

Now should Saeed Imami’s suicide be taken as a scorpion-like quality or as the wolf-like ferocity of his comrades?

Suicide carries different definitions and applications in the political and social realms. Suicide is actually deemed a means of combat in the political sphere, and as such Saeed Imami’s suicide cannot be digested as a political move.

Political activists refuse to disclose any information during the first 24 to 48 hours after their detention. This time period allows their comrades outside the prison to make necessary arrangements such as camouflaging other activists, destroying or relocating documents.

After the initial 48 hours, therefore, the imprisoned activist would no longer be as valuable as he initially was in terms of the information he could provide. Whether he talks or not would be of no consequence any more.

Political regimes, therefore, exert the highest pressure on detained opposition during the first 48 hours after their imprisonment so they would disclose information. And political activists will either be able to resist and maintain silence or give in and either confess or commit suicide.

There is every possibility that key information agents such as Saeed Imami would commit suicide in the first 48 hours after arrest.

But six months after his imprisonment, Saeed Imami apparently had no reason to commit suicide. Even though his friends outside the jail could have had many reasons why he SHOULD commit suicide!

Just as Saeed Imami’s confessions could have shed light on the hidden angles of the power ring’s crimes, the meaningful silence of Ali Fallahian, who was Imami’s direct superior for eight years, could serve as an important pointer.

Fallahian has attempted to maintain absolute silence on the serial murders ever since Saeed Imami’s involvement in the murders was disclosed. And silence during crisis is a kind of defense mechanism, a means to cover up the disgrace of stammering and staggering. Of course, silence can at times be more expressive than a thousand words.

The Tehran-based leftist Asr-e Ma Weekly reported that former information minister, Mohammadi Reyshahri, during whose tenure Imami entered the Ministry, had suspected that Imami could be a spy and, therefore, never gave him any top-echelon post, contrary to Fallahian’s insistence.

Saeed Imami, however, quickly climbed the ladder of success and progress when Fallahian replaced Reyshahri at the Information Ministry. Imami catapulted to the top of the Ministry by being appointed deputy information minister for security, becoming the Ministry’s second man at the helm.

According to Asr-e Ma weekly, even though Reyshahri had left the Information Ministry, he continued to oppose Imami’s appointment to high posts at the Ministry, so much so that he quarreled over this with Fallahian.

Fallahian, nevertheless, insisted on having Imami at the Ministry, despite the accusation that Imami was a spy. Why was Fallahian was so enchanted with Imami? Either Imami had something against Fallahian for which he could blackmail the minister or Imami brought special benefits and rendered special services to Fallahian.

If there are any other reasons for this enchantment, they will remain undiscovered so long as Fallahian persists in keeping mum on the subject.

The bitter reality which the Islamic Republic has to face is that after the disclosure of the power Mafia’s crimes, Iran’s information agents have lost their social credibility and prefer not to be recognized by the public as part of the Information Ministry.

Before this, too, Information Ministry agents had to work under cover but at present public aversion with the Ministry’s agents over the serial crimes serves as these agents’ motive to more strongly go for cover.

Information bodies are in charge of safeguarding national security and interests in the face of foreign enemies. For this reason the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is one of the most powerful such bodies around the world, enjoys high popularity inside the US, despite its track record of involvement in hundreds of crimes, murders, and coups around the world.

Interestingly even in US presidential campaigns, a candidate who has a track record of serving as CIA chief could have higher chances of being elected. This is because the CIA works hard outside US borders to insure a safe and secure domestic life for the Americans.

And this is the trend that should have existed in Iran’s Information Ministry but that was reversed after the criminal power Mafia took root there.