Hack Of President's Office Shows Nuclear Expansion Continues
A hacktivist group has broken into servers of the Iranian president’s office and leaked troves of sensitive data, proving corruption, conflicts and an ongoing nuclear expansion.
A hacktivist group has broken into servers of the Iranian president’s office and leaked troves of sensitive data, proving corruption, conflicts and an ongoing nuclear expansion.
The hacktivist group ‘Uprising till Overthrow' claimed Monday that it breached 120 servers of the presidential office, getting access to internal communications, meetings minutes, President Ebrahims Raisi’s online conference platforms and about 1,300 computers inside the office.
In one of the documents, the security chief of Fordow nuclear plant -- an Iranian underground uranium enrichment facility located 20 miles (32 km) northeast of the Iranian city of Qom – had asked for about 150 hectares of public land to be given to the nuclear facility to increase its security buffer zone as work continues on Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Earlier in May, the group, affiliated with the Albania-based opposition Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) group -- People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, hacked into the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry servers, disabling 210 sites and online services and leaking another large batch of documents.
In the new cyberattack, the group is said to have gained access to “tens of thousands confidential documents” but has so far released only a fraction of them. The number of the published documents is still so large that analyzing them will take days if not weeks.
The group also claimed that their access to the internal systems of the president’s office was so unbounded that they sent e-mails to the office’s recipients address list with photos of the leaders of MEK and photos of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Raisi with red crosses over them as well as slogans of “Death to Khamenei” and “Hail to Rajavi”, the current leader of the opposition group.
The president’s office immediately reacted, denying that “the official website of the president” was down due to any attack. However, the regime cannot win this on a technicality as the group had not claimed to hack the frontage of the site but the internal servers.
Among the released documents, there is correspondence between the president’s office and the office of the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) under besmirched chief Ali Shamkhani, confirming rumors that the regime's top security chief was forced out after the President said he had failed to do enough to quash riots, in spite of causing the death of 750 civilians and arresting 30,000 more.
In the letter addressed to Shamkhani, the chief of staff of the president, Gholam-Hossein Esmaili, criticized the security chief for a lack of insight into the wave of protests that engulfed Iran following the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. With a condescending tone, Esmaili rebuked Shamkhani’s office for “inconsistencies, deficiencies, and defects of the country's intelligence systems”. The letter tells the shamed security chief the regime “expected more.”
There are numerous other documents that showed how the president’s office is trying to keep the government afloat in the face of bouts of incessant rallies without any practical strategy and tactic. Several of such documents pertained to sessions held to find ways to quell the protests inside Iranian universities.
A large number of the leaked documents provide evidence of the administration’s financial exploitation in cooperation with different organizations. One such example is a letter that shows the country’s armed forces sold 400 million euros to the central bank, while another document shows that the armed forces also sell foreign currency gained from export of oil in the black market.
In the letter addressed to the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the head of the Central Bank of Iran, Mohammad-Reza Farzin, said the armed forces must supply the currency obtained from the sale of oil to the central bank, instead of selling the foreign currency to the cash-strapped bank. In March, Iran’s parliament approved legislation according to which the General Staff of the Armed Forces is allowed to export three billion euros worth of crude oil and oil products through small private refineries.
The ongoing brutal surveillance operations were exposed in another document, in which the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards asked Vice President Mohammad Mokhber to provide the financial means to revamp the surveillance cameras of the capital’s subway stations so that they can be used to quash the protests. In the letter, Hossein Salami said the CCTV cameras and the subway monitoring system in Tehran are old, leading to their limited functionality in the crackdown of the popular protests. The amount needed for new cameras is said to be over $32,000 for each station. Tehran has about 150 subway stations, which means spending nearly $5 million towards a security state.
Hossein Mortazavi Zanjani said in a virtual meeting on Clubhouse that Raisi, who was the deputy prosecutor of Tehran, told him: "We went and got an order from Ayatollah Khomeini to execute the prisoners."
This is the first revelation by a former judiciary official about the direct involvement of the Iranian president in the killing of political prisoners in the 1980s.
The executions during the 1980s were carried out based on a fatwa by Iran's then supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, against the MEK (The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran) which carried out a wave of bombings in Iran and struck an alliance with Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 war.
“Showing mercy to those who take up arms against the Islamic government is being naïve,” Khomeini said in his fatwa.
Most victims were linked to the MEK but there were also others with links to leftist and secular groups such as Fadaiyan Khalq Organization (FKO) and the Tudeh Party as well as some Kurdish groups such as Komala and the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran.
The exact number of prisoners executed during the purge of prisoners is not known but according to Amnesty International, the Iranian authorities "forcibly disappeared" and "extrajudicially executed" around 5,000 between July and September 1988.
The former director of Evin prison, which has held some of the country’s most high profile cases and is famed for its brutalities to inmates, added that he witnessed the bodies of the executed prisoners thrown into trucks and taken from the prison.
Mortazavi claimed he resigned to what was known as ‘the death board’, the group of decision-makers deciding whether prisoners lived or died. He claims his resignation was met with a death threat by the deputy intelligence minister.
“Although I did not have a direct role in the execution of prisoners, I feel guilty because of my silence about the executions, and even if I repent, I will not be cleansed,” he said.
After his victory in the presidential election in 2021, in response to an Al-Jazeera reporter’s question, Ebrahim Raisi said he has been a "human rights defender" since the beginning of his tenure in the judicial system and "should be commended " for his actions.
Mortazavi further stated that female prisoners still virgins were forcibly married to jailers before the execution. According to the narrative of political prisoners, the clerics of the Islamic Republic believed if the virgin girls were executed, they would go to heaven, and for this reason, they raped them in the form of forced marriage so that they would not die virgins.
”The father of one of the executed virgin girls told me that after the execution of his daughter, the agents gave him money saying the money is for his daughter's marriage endowment."
Ahmad Alirezabeigi, the member of parliament from Tabriz says he has not even been allowed to make brief comments on the proceedings at the Iranian Parliament (Majles). He added that the authorities have muted his desk microphone.
"I have asked twice to make brief comments on the legislations being discussed at the Majles but I have been denied the permission to speak," Alirezabeigi told Etemad Online. He added: "I expect the Majles presidium to intervene in the matter and defend my rights as a member of parliament."
His comment sounded odd as it is the presidium that allows MPs to speak or mutes their microphone to bar them from commenting. Alirezabeigi said that presidium members should resign if they cannot restore lawmakers' rights.
He reiterated that no one may prevent a member of the parliament from expressing his views during sessions. "Article 75 of the Majles internal regulations in particular says that lawmakers should be given a chance to respond to accusations made against them at the parliament," he said.
Following the disclosure involving nearly 140 SUVs given to lawmakers at extremely discounted prices to bribe them to stop an impeachment motion against a former industry minister, Alirezabeigi has been questioned by a prosecutor and an investigation committee at the parliament.
The lawmaker told Etemad Online that he thinks "a secret power is trying to prevent me from fulfilling my responsibility as a member of the parliament," however, he did not name anyone.
Alirezabeigi said elsewhere that even the ethics committee, which questioned him following the disclosure about the bribes is not legally authorized to bar him from speaking at the Majles.
Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former IRGC general, has been often criticized by some lawmakers and other politicians for running the parliament like a military garrison. Khabar Online Website has quoted lawmakers as having said that "by running the parliament like a military center, Ghalibaf has made the legislature useless."
According to Khabar Online, criticism of Ghalibaf's leadership at the Majles surfaced when he stopped impeachment motions for ministers in a bid allegedly to support President Ebrahim Raisi.
A video posted on Fararu website on Saturday showed Ghalibaf threatening lawmakers to name those who do not work hard enough or refuse to take part in voting.
At another level, politicians in Iran have often criticized Ghalibaf and other lawmakers for making the parliament so weak that key decisions on issues such as raising fuel prices or the final decisions on the annual budget are made at a meeting between the heads of the three government branches rather than by lawmakers.
Other key issues such as the decision to accept the terms of the international financial watchdog, the FATF have been referred by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to the Expediency Council, apparently as he has deemed the Majles not knowledgeable enough about the matter.
The Council is a collection of aging clerics and demoted politicians susceptible to pressures by Khamenei’s henchmen.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader makes many decisions such as sending troops to Syria or giving weapons to Russia to help Putin in the war against Ukraine without consulting the parliament.