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May 4th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif speaks to his Cuban counterpart Bruno Rodriguez (not pictured) during an official visit in Havana, Cuba, November 6, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini/File Photo
A recently leaked audio recording featuring Iran’s foreign minister lamenting the dominance of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in setting Iranian policies, has given us the latest evidence of how Iranian hardliners exclude all others in setting the Islamic Republic’s agenda.
In the excerpts, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tells an Iranian economist named Saeed Laylaz, a supporter of the reformist camp, that the IRGC, and the late Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, dictate Iran’s regional and foreign policies. Soleimani was killed in a January 2020 US drone strike in Baghdad.
The tape confirms that Zarif is “filled with bitterness against the IRGC, and particularly with Soleimani,” said Brig. Gen. (ret.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of the research division in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate.
“The reality is that the IRGC is the dominant force in the power struggle taking place around the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Khamenei] in Iran,” said Kuperwasser, a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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Khamenei is ideologically close to the IRGC, and has allowed the elite parallel military body to also take over Iran’s economy. “The IRGC therefore has very significant power in Iran, in addition to its military force,” Kuperwasser said.
“Almost every time I went to negotiate, it was Soleimani who said, ‘I want you to make this concession or point,’” Zarif said in the recording. “I was negotiating for the success of the [military] field.”
“The general structure of our Foreign Ministry is security-based,” he added. “There is a group in our country that has an interest in making everything security-based, to highlight their own role.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said last week that the leak was an attempt to sow discord in Iran during a decisive phase of nuclear talks with world powers in Vienna. Rouhani ordered an investigation into the leak.
Despite the overarching power of the radical camp in Iran and the IRGC, “the supreme leader doesn’t always adopt their position,” Kuperwasser noted. Khamenei’s backing of the 2015 decision to enter a nuclear agreement is an example of his taking the reformist position.
The late head nuclear scientist in Iran, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, assassinated in November, played a key role in instructing Iranian negotiators on what to insist upon during the 2015 talks, said Kuperwasser, and the scientist was cited for his achievement after the deal was signed.
“There is no difference in objective between the reformists and the radicals. Both want Iran to be nuclear,” said Kuperwasser. “The reformists believe the right way to do this is to exploit the weakness of the West, and to progress towards a nuclear bomb without disruption, while the radicals say, ‘who cares about the West, let’s proceed to the bomb faster, because the West is too frightened to confront us.’ This is the main difference between them.”
While the reformist camp saw the 2015 deal — as well as a revived version of it now — as an opportunity to improve Iran’s poor economic situation and help Iranian citizens, economic relief was less important to the radicals.
At the same time, Kuperwasser assessed, the hardline camp may now be more open to the idea of a new agreement, due to the ravaging of the Iranian economy by the US sanctions imposed in 2018 by the Trump administration.
The same dispute between the two camps took place around the IRGC’s ambitious entrenchment program in Syria.
The reformists were critical about the scope of resources that the IRGC was pouring into its Syria takeover program (though not necessarily about the effort itself), at the expense of the economic interests of Iranian citizens, and criticisms also arose over the scope of its “adventures” in the Middle East
This could help explain why Zarif temporarily resigned in February 2019 after being left in the dark about a visit by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Tehran.
Zarif also said he was surprised when US Secretary of State (and current US Climate Envoy) John Kerry, told Zarif about 200 Israeli airstrikes on Iranian assets in Syria.
Kerry called Zarif’s claim “unequivocally false. This never happened – either when I was Secretary of State or since.”
And even if this did happen, the news was hardly secret.
In 2018, Israeli officials confirmed to media outlets that 200 strikes were carried out on Iranian targets in Syria since 2016.
This constant power struggle is, in actuality, comfortable for Khamenei, Kuperwasser argued. “He does not rush to one side or the other,” he said. “Khamenei is closer to the IRGC, but he allows this argument to run on. He usually backs the IRGC, but not always.”
Ultimately, Khamenei is able to use the ‘good cop bad cop’ routine to extort concessions from the West, just as he did from US negotiators in 2015, said Kuperwasser.
“Iranian negotiators said in 2015 that they were under restrictions placed on them by the supreme leader, as if the US has to take this into account. And negotiators fell into this game. That was the real problem with Kerry and the nuclear deal,” he argued. “Kerry’s claim that the West must strengthen Zarif and Rouhani against the IRGC came at the expense of US … interests” — in the form of a poor nuclear deal that empowered the Islamic Republic and its radical agenda.
Yaakov Lappin is a military and strategic affairs correspondent. He also conducts research and analysis for defense think tanks, and is the military correspondent for JNS. His book, The Virtual Caliphate, explores the online jihadist presence.
A version of this article was originally published by The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
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