Breaking: The Night Ali Khamenei Eliminated 5000 Muslims in Tehran
A man named Major Rostami approached me during my second year.
He was stationed at the university in a civilian capacity and he had been watching me for some months.
He had attended several of the more public student discussions I participated in and he had read papers I had submitted in classes whose professors he had relationships with.
He knew my academic record and my family background and the neighborhood I had grown up in.
He sat down across from me in a tea house one afternoon and told me directly and without preamble that the Islamic Republic needed young men with my capabilities and that he had been authorized to offer me a position that would give me both significant responsibility and the significant opportunity.
He told me I was exactly the kind of person that the revolution needed to survive and grow into the next generation.
I asked him what the position involved.
He told me it was intelligence work, domestic intelligence specifically, understanding the social and political currents moving through Iranian civil society and providing analysis that would help the leadership make better decisions.
He framed it as a form of patriotic service.
He told me that the best way to change things from within was to be inside the room where decisions were made.
I was 20 years old and I believed him.
This is the part of my story that I find hardest to tell because there is no way to explain it that makes me look anything other than naive.
But the truth is that I was not simply naive.
I was also genuinely motivated by something that felt at the time like love for my country.
I wanted Iran to be better.
I believed that being inside the system was the way to make that happen.
I believed that men with good intentions inside a flawed institution could gradually bend that institution towards something more just.
Major Rostami was a skilled recruiter because he understood exactly which version of this story to tell to a young man with my particular combination of intelligence and idealism.
He told me that the IRGC contained many people who shared my concerns about the direction of the country.
He told me that reform was possible but required careful and patient work from inside.
He told me that young men like me were the future of Iran and that the future needed to be built carefully rather than demolished recklessly.
I signed the papers he gave me and I joined an IRGC intelligence unit that operated under civilian cover.
My university studies continued as normal as far as everyone around me was aware.
But my real education was now happening in secured offices in a building whose address I was instructed never to share with anyone, including my family.
What I learned in those offices changed me in ways I did not fully understand until much later.
I learned how the Islamic Republic actually operated a distinct from how it presented itself publicly.
I learned the mechanics of surveillance and in control that kept 80 million people inside a system most of them had not freely chosen.
I learned that the gap between the public language of the revolution is talk of divine mandate and justice and Islamic governance and the actual motivations and methods of the people running the system was much wider and darker than I had imagined when I sat in that tea house across from Major Rostami.
that I told myself that knowing these things made me more effective at the reform mission I believed I was serving.
I told myself that understanding the machine from the inside was the necessary first step toward fixing it.
I filed away the things I saw and heard that troubled me.
In the same way that people throughout history have filed away troubling things when abandoning the system that was troubling them felt more dangerous than staying inside it.
I became good at my job, very good.
I rose through the IRGC intelligence structure over the following decade with a consistency that brought me into contact with increasingly sensitive operations and increasingly powerful people.
By my mid30s, I was operating at a level where I had direct access to information about decisions being made at the highest levels of the Iranian government.
I had also somewhere along the way stopped believing in the reform that had originally motivated me to join.
I no longer told myself that I was inside the machine to fix it.
I had accepted in the quiet way that people accept things they do not want to confront directly that the machine was not fixable from inside.
But leaving felt impossible.