Assessing Ahmadinejad's Closed Circle

THE GULF

Date Posted online at jiaa.janes.com: 26-Jan-2010

Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst

Assessing Ahmadinejad's closed circle

Key Points

• Ahmadinejad's network is a closed circle composed of his university alumni, previous colleagues and former IRGC officers. • A small network has its advantages as it is cohesive and relatively easy for Ahmadinejad to control, but Ahmadinejad may find himself forced to use extreme measures to balance his political rivals. • It may be the IRGC which reaps the fruit of Ahmadinejad's efforts and future generations may look back at Ahmadinejad as a useful tool for the Guards.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has surrounded himself with trusted college alumni, former IRGC fighters and relatives. Ali Alfoneh looks at the advantages and disadvantages of having such a small advisory group, and predicts the long-term impact of Ahmadinejad's decision.

"Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are," the saying goes and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's second cabinet surely says a good deal about who he is. Ahmadinejad presented his 21-minister cabinet to parliament in two rounds: 20 August 2009, where 18 of his cabinet candidates gained a parliamentary vote of confidence thanks to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's intervention, and on 15 November 2009 where the cabinet was completed. In addition, since the 12 June election, Ahmadinejad has appointed 14 vice-presidents and advisers by presidential decree, bringing his immediate network up to 35, as reported by the Iranian presidency's website.

With the exception of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan's transitional government (1979), all cabinets in the history of the Islamic Republic have been broad coalition governments representing powerful elite groups such as various factions among revolutionary Shia clergy, the traditional bazaar class, technocratic elites recruited from the now defunct Islamic Republican Party, modern business elites of the 1990's, and members of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Broad coalition governments secured the highest degree of consensus in political decision making among elites of the Islamic Republic.

Ahmadinejad, however, has moved away from the political traditions and elites of the past. His first cabinet (2005-09), which was characterised by the highest number of shuffles in government since 1979, boasted 29 appointments. A record number of 17 cabinet appointees were former officers of the IRGC, 10 of the cabinet ministers were technocrats while the clerical representation in Ahmadinejad's first cabinet was limited to just two clerics - neither of whom lasted the entire tenure. Indeed, following Ahmadinejad's 26 July 2009 dismissal of Intelligence Minister Gholam-hossein Mohseni Ezhehi, there was no clerical representation in the cabinet during its last week in power.

Ahmadinejad's second cabinet is purged of most ministers who served the president during his first tenure in office. Otherwise, Ahmadinejad's second cabinet displays the same pattern as his first cabinet. Ahmadinejad's cabinet ministers, along with his vice-presidents and advisers, are recruited from a closed circuit composed of his fellow Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) alumni, local government and security executives serving in northwest Iran in the 1980s, IRGC officers who received civilian academic degrees from IUST in the 1990s, those who served Ahmadinejad during his brief tenure as Tehran mayor (2003-05) and a few family members. Such a small network has its advantages, but may also force Ahmadinejad to adopt extreme measures to balance powerful political rivals.

Science and technology core

In modern Iran, universities have always served as political engines of society. IUST is no exception and to find the roots of Ahmadinejad's circle of trust, one must look into the political dynamics at play at IUST more than 30 years ago. It was here where Ahmadinejad's road to radical politics began in the late 1970s, and here where Ahmadinejad shaped the most important friendship of his life: Mojtaba Hashemi Samareh was a fellow IUST student, his religious mentor and a political strategist.

Unlike Ahmadinejad, who comes from an unprivileged immigrant family, Samareh is the son of the sister of Islamist theoretician and former prime minister the late Mohammad-Javad Bahonar, and is also uncle of Mohammad-reza Bahonar, a parliamentarian. In the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, Samareh and Ahmadinejad headed a radical Islamist student faction at IUST, following the line of "the late [Ayatollah Ali] Ghoddousi, representative of the Leader's Deputy [Grand Ayatollah Hosseinali Montazeri] at the IUST," while the other faction followed "representative of the Leader at the university". It has not been possible to identify other members of this student faction, which has been kept secret.

Samareh and Ahmadinejad's group suffered a major setback at the November 1979 seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran. Inspired by the late Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, Islamic Republican Party co-founder, their faction had opposed this seizure. Beheshti himself had held secret negotiations with United States diplomats a week before the seizure and advocated taking over the Embassy of the Soviet Union, which was both imperialist and atheist.

However, seizing the embassy and taking the US diplomats hostage proved a tremendous domestic success for the hostage takers. Envious of the prestige of the leftist hostage takers, Samareh and Ahmadinejad readily aligned themselves with the rightist revolutionary faction, especially the Islamic Republican Party, in pursuit of revolutionary adventure. They established the Office of the Consolidation of Unity Student Organisation and, along with the late party firebrand speaker Hassan Ayat, set in motion what became known as the cultural revolution, which led to the closure of universities in Iran for more than a year, a purge of undesirable academics and students (including Marxists) and rewriting of academic materials according to the ideological and political doctrines of the Islamic Republic.

The northwestern ring

The cultural revolution did not become the success Ahmadinejad and Samareh had hoped for and its management was soon handed over to the Supreme Council for the Cultural Revolution. Both men abandoned the university in pursuit of further revolutionary adventures in the shadow of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, but they allegedly swore to their leftist opponents: "We will return to conquer the country."

The path to conquest was via executive and security positions in northwestern Iran which, at that time, was in a state of civil war. The periphery regions, either because of ethnic (Kordestan) or political reasons (Grand Ayatollah Mohammad-kazem Shariatmadari's rivalry with Grand Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, for example) challenged central government authority.

Ahmadinejad himself served as governor of Makou, Khoy, adviser to Kordestan governor general and Ardebil governor general. His colleagues from this era, also known as the 'Ardebil ring', are heavily represented in Ahmadinejad's second cabinet. The list includes Samareh who served as west Azerbaijan governor general and Kordestan political deputy, and who today serves as Ahmadinejad's senior assistant.

Ahmadinejad's first vice-president, Mohammadreza Rahimi, served as Kordestan governor general; Housing and Urban Development Minister Ali Nikzad was Ardebil governor general; Welfare Minister and former commander of the IRGC, Sadegh Mahsouli, served as west Azerbaijan deputy governor in the early 1980s; and Martyr Foundation Director, Masoud Zaribafan, who is also a relative of Ahmadinejad, served as Mahabad governor and also served Ahmadinejad while he was mayor at Tehran Islamic City Council.

Following the end of the Iran/Iraq war former officers of the IRGC pursued academic studies to prepare themselves for seizing public offices in the Islamic Republic. So did Ahmadinejad and Samareh, who both returned to university. Back at IUST, they kept the doors of the university wide open to friends they had made in the IRGC during the war with Iraq. In the 1990's IUST developed into a veritable Ph.D. factory for the IRGC, and friends of Samareh and Ahmadinejad - which explains the over-

representation of the IUST and IUST/IRGC alumni among Ahmadinejad's second cabinet. The list includes Ali-akbar Salehi, vice-president and Iran's Nuclear Energy Organisation director; Commerce Minister Mehdi Ghazanfari; Industry Minister Ali- akbar Mehrabian, who is also Ahmadinejad's nephew; Labour and Social Affairs Minister Abd al-Reza Sheikholeslami; and Roads and Transportation Minister Hamid Behbahani.

The Ahmadinejad clan

Ahmadinejad's tenure as mayor of Tehran (2003-05) proved as important to his network as his experiences at IUST and in the north west. It was probably also during his tenure as Tehran mayor where Ahmadinejad made another important friendship - Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei.

Mashaei, who has a degree in engineering, started his career at the Intelligence Ministry. He moved on to the Ministry of the interior, but joined Ahmadinejad's team in Tehran Municipality as director of Payam Radio. He also became Tehrans social and cultural affairs deputy and the municipality's culture and arts director. Ahmadinejad's elder son, Mehdi, also married Mashaei's daughter.

Under Ahmadinejad's patronage, Mashaei rose to high offices, and the president has used him to communicate controversial messages to the Iranian and international public - especially to Israel and the US - and has, at times, paid a very high price to keep Mashaei close, including a public row with Khamenei.

Another sign of Mashaei's influence is the appointment of other Tehran Municipality officials in Ahmadinejad's cabinet, including Hamid Baghayi, a minor former employee at Mashaei's office as Cultural Heritage Organisation director. Other Tehran Municipality personalities include National Youth Organisation director Mehrdad Bazrpash; science and technology deputy Nasrin Soltankhah; and Industry Minister Aliakbar Mehrabian, who is also a relative of Ahmadinejad.

Men of the IRGC

Apart from those guardsmen who are somehow related to Ahmadinejad, there are also a number of guardsmen who do not owe their appointments to the benevolence of the president and may well be the choice of the IRGC.

The list includes former IRGC Qods Force members Cabinet Secretary Majid Doustali, and Defence and Armed Forces Logistics Minister Ahmad Vahidi. Apart from Samareh, other former IRGC officers in Ahmadinejad's second cabinet include: Communications and Information Technology Minister Reza Taghipour Anvari; Co- operatives Minister Mohammad Abbasi; Culture and Islamic Guidance Minister Mohammad Hosseini; Education Minister Hamid-reza Hajibabayi; Energy Minister Majid Namjou; Minister of the Interior Mohammad Mostafa Najjar; Petroleum Minister Masoud Mirkazemi; and Science and Higher Education Minister Kamran Daneshjou.

The strong presence of former IRGC officers in the cabinet who have a shorter history of acquaintance with Ahmadinejad, who do not belong to the northwestern ring and who do not owe their civilian academic degrees to Ahmadinejad and Samareh at IUST, is important. The IRGC faction in the cabinet suggests that Ahmadinejad has had to reciprocate IRGC intervention to aid his re-election. Increased IRGC participation in the Islamic Republic's economy and IRGC seizure of public-owned economic enterprises such as Iran Telecommunications, in the largest trade in the history of Tehran Stock Exchange, is another price Ahmadinejad has been prepared to pay.

Bagher Alayi, an IUST alumn, remembering the student days of Ahmadinejad and Samareh, told Iranian news outlet the Shahrvand-e Emrouz: "They did not easily allow anyone to join their team. They had to be completely convinced that this person thinks the same way as themselves and is loyal towards them before they would allow him to join their ranks. They would also make investigations, and they would still be careful."

Little seems to have been changed. A small network has its advantages since it is cohesive and relatively easy for Ahmadinejad to control. But at the same time, such a network fails to represent members of powerful elites who have ruled Iran since 1979. Desiring a clear break with earlier elites, Ahmadinejad has constantly used extreme measures to isolate and marginalise elite groups he could or would not allow to join his ranks. These measures include allegations of his political rivals as economically corrupt. Ever since the controversial June 2009 presidential election, Ahmadinejad has, with the help of the IRGC, denounced and prosecuted leading members of half of the political elites of the Islamic Republic, depicting them as the enemies of the governing principle of the Islamic Republic, the Guardianship of the Jurist [Velayat-e Faqih] and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or as foreign agents.

Eventually however, it may not be Ahmadinejad, but the IRGC, which reaps the fruit of the president's efforts: a deeply factionalised civilian leadership provides opportunities for the Guards to seize control of the Islamic Republic. In this light, future generations may look back at Ahmadinejad as the useful tool of the Guards rather than someone who exerted control over the armed guardians of the revolution.