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Spy Craft
The Long Arm of Tehran: Quds Force, Global Hit Networks, and Iran’s Shadow War
00:09:36
For decades, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force has operated a clandestine global network responsible for assassinations, proxy warfare, and targeted operations against dissidents, intelligence officers, and American interests across...
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- [00:00]
Host
What's up everybody?
- [00:01]
Bretzky
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- [00:21]
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- [00:31]
Host
Welcome back, everyone. Today we're going to be taking a look at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Forces. So let's think about something. You're a dissident. You fled Iran years ago. You're living in Berlin or London. You have a job, maybe a family. You write, you speak. You criticize the regime publicly because you believe that is what you're supposed to do when you have the freedom to do it. You're not a spy, you're not a combatant. You're a civilian with a keyboard and an opinion. And there's a man in Tehran who has your name on a list. Not a metaphorical list, a real tangible list. The list that moves to a bureaucratic apparatus, gets signed off by people with titles, gets handed down to a unit that has done this before and results in a team showing up somewhere near you, near where you live, with a plan and a timeline. This isn't hypothetical, folks. This is documented. It's happened in Germany, in France, in the U.S. in Albania, Lebanon, you name it. It's happened on every continent where Iran has decided it has enemies. And today we're going to be talking about the Quds Force, the external operation arm of the irgc. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The organization has been called Iran's tip of the spear, its most lethal instrument of foreign policy and the engine behind one of the most sophisticated and persistent shadow war campaigns in modern intelligence history. Let me give you the architecture first, because you cannot understand what this organization does until you understand what it is. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard was established in 1979 in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. It was built explicitly to protect the revolution, not just the state. That distinction matters. A conventional military protects borders and national interests. The IRGC was assigned from the beginning to protect an ideology. That ideological mandate gave it a different kind of operational permission than most military organizations carry. Inside the irgc. The Quds Force is the External Operations Directorate. Quds is the Arabic and Persian word for Jerusalem. That naming is intentional. The force was built around a revolutionary objective that extends far beyond Iran's borders. Its mandate includes supporting, training, equipping and directing proxy forces throughout Middle east and beyond, conducting intelligence operations in foreign countries, running assassination and kidnapping programs, targeting dissidents and perceived enemies of the Islamic Republic, and projecting Iranian influence in ways that give Tehran plausible deniability. At its peak, the Quds forces operated with an estimated strength of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000, though the actual number is impossible to verify. It ran operations through a network of embassies, front companies, cultural organizations and proxy militias spanning Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Latin America, and for roughly two decades from approximately 1998 until 2020, all of it ran through one man, Soleimani. If you have not read everything available on Soleimani, stop after this episode and do that because he's one of the most consequential intelligence and military figures of the post Cold War era and he operated almost entirely in the shadows. Until he didn't. Soleimani joined the IRGC in the late 70s, fought in the Iran Iraq War, and by the late 1990s had taken command of the Quds Force. What he built over the following two decades was not just a military organization, it was a relationship network. Soleimani understood at a fundamental level. The power projection of the scale he was attempting required personal trust between himself and the leaders of every proxy organization he supported. He met with Hasan Nasrallah of Hezbollah personally and repeatedly. He was embedded with Shia militia commanders in Iraq during the fight against isis. He traveled constantly in and out of conflict zones, often in ways that should have gotten him killed because his physical presence was how he maintained the Web. American intelligence tracked them for years. There were reportedly multiple instances where the decision was made not to act against them because of concerns about escalation and the downstream consequences for regional stability. That calculus held in January 2020, when a reaper drone strike near Baghdad International Airport killed Soleimani along with Abu Mahdi Almuhandas, the deputy commander of the Iranian backed Popular Mobilization Forces. The question of whether that strike was strategically correct is legitimately contested. What is not contested is what Soleimani had spent two decades building. Let me walk you through some of the documented operations because the scope of what the Quds Force and its proxies have carried out is not fully understood by most. The 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and wounded hundreds. Argentine investigators and prosecutors spent decades building a case that pointed to Quds forced involvement in planning and support with Hezbollah's operational unit executing the attack. Iranian officials, including A former president and former intelligence minister were ultimately named as suspects in Argentine indictments. That operation was not a military strike against a military target. It was a mass casualty attack against civilians in South America. In 2011, the US law enforcement disrupted an alleged Quds Force plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil. The plan reportedly involved hiring a member of a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the killing. The sophistication of the plan was debated by analysts, but the intent was not. The Kudz Forrest officer had made direct contact with an individual he was believed was a cartel operative and was willing to pay for a political assassination inside D.C. germany expelled Iranian intelligence officers and documented Iranian surveillance operations against Jewish community organizations and Israeli diplomatic facilities on German soil. Multiple European countries have intercepted Quds Force linked operatives and disrupted assassination plots against Iranian dissidents living in exile. In Albania, the Albanian government expelled the Iranian ambassador and another diplomat following intelligence that Quds Force assets were planning attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets. During Passover, Albania, a Muslim majority NATO member with historically warm relations with Israel made a significant diplomatic decision based on what its intelligence service uncovered. The pattern is consistent across geography and across time. The Quds Force operates on wherever Tehran perceives threats or opportunities. It does not stop at borders. It does not recognize the civilian or diplomatic status of targets. I want you to understand something about this organization because this is where the intelligence tradecraft gets fascinating and disturbing. The cuts forces not only use Iranian nationals. In fact, using Iranian nationals for sensitive operations in Western countries is exactly what gets people caught, and they know that. The more sophisticated approach involves recruiting from diaspora communities, from criminal networks with no ideological connection to Iran, who simply want money, from foreign nationals who can be coerced through family members still inside Iran and through front organizations that give operatives legitimate cover. The use of criminal proxies is particularly significant. When you outsource an assassination to someone with no Iranian passport, no known connection to the IRGC, and no ideological profile that would draw intelligence, you create a layer of deniability that can hold up under public scrutiny even when the intelligence community knows the truth. The gap between what intelligence services know and what can be proven in open court or acknowledged in diplomatic channels is exactly the space that shadow war operators exploit. Defector accounts have described the cuts Force operational culture that is highly compartmented, deeply patient and willing to run operations on timelines that stretch years. Similar to the Russians. An asset may be cultivated, placed and left dormant for a long time before being activated. The Western intelligence community, which often operates in budget cycles and shifting political priorities forces a structural disadvantage against an organization that's playing a generational game. Soleimania is gone, but Ismail Qaani, who replaced them as Quds Force commander, has continued the operational posture. Iran has made explicit threats against former American officials, including individuals who were involved in decision to authorize the Soleimani strike. The Justice Department has publicly indicted Iranian nationals for plots against American soil that were disrupted after 2020. What does all this mean? It means that Iran has made a calculated decision, sustained across multiple administrations, multiple supreme leaders, that the cost of projecting power through covert and proxy means is lower than the benefit. It means that the international norms around assassination and extra extraterrestrial territorial operations have not functioned as a sufficient deterrent. And it means that for the dissidents on those lists, for the intelligence officers who have been targeted, for the civilians who happen to be near a target, the shadow war is not abstract. It is very real. Understanding how this machine works is not optional. If you want to understand the Middle East, American foreign policy, the cuts force is not a fringe story. It is one of the defining co writ programs of our era.
- [10:07]
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- [10:30]
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