Former Iranian Security Chiefs Turn on Each Other

For decades, Iran’s security establishment operated behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, and its internal conflicts and corruption were hidden from public view.

That wall is crumbling as two of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful former officials wage an increasingly public war, exposing scandals that reach the highest levels of government.

Hassan Rouhani and Ali Shamkhani are not low-level officials driven by a personal feud.

Between them, they controlled Iran’s national security apparatus for 26 years, sat in rooms where the country’s most sensitive decisions were made, and held secrets that successive governments desperately wanted to keep buried.

Now those secrets are spilling out.

Their feud’s latest escalation is a dispute over who knew what about the 2020 downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane.

But the accusations flying between the two septuagenarians reveal far more consequential truths about how Iran actually works.

It shows the gap between its revolutionary rhetoric and leaders’ private interests, the Supreme Leader’s willingness to protect corrupt loyalists, and the security state’s dysfunction during multiple crises.

Shamkhani recently said Rouhani knew from the first day that Revolutionary Guard missiles had destroyed Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

It directly contradicts former President Rouhani’s public statements about learning of the military’s responsibility only after days of denials.

The revelation suggests either that Rouhani lied to Iranians and the world or that his own security council secretary deliberately withheld critical information during an international crisis that killed 176 people.

The response from Rouhani’s camp came swiftly and ominously. Hesameddin Ashena, who advised the former president, issued a public warning: don’t open our former boss’s mouth.

The threat was clear: Rouhani knows the secrets and is ready to expose them.

Within days, a video surfaced online showing Shamkhani’s daughter’s lavish wedding - a sharp contrast to the modest values he had preached for decades.

The video that sparked the controversy showed scenes from a wedding ceremony held in March 2024 at Tehran’s upscale Espinas Palace Hotel.

Under the laws of the Islamic Republic, given the type of wedding he hosted, Shamkhani had committed a crime punishable by up to 99 lashes.

Women danced without headscarves in mixed company at the wedding, where luxury dominated every frame.

The estimated cost ran into billions of tomans, all for the daughter of a man who had spent decades enforcing the same Islamic codes that guests flouted at his family celebration.

The video’s release came amid reports that Iran plans to introduce 80,000 new morality police officers to Tehran’s streets to enforce women’s compliance with Islamic dress codes.

But the wedding video hinted at something potentially more damaging than hypocrisy for the Islamic Republic.

U.S. sanctions documents tell a story of how Shamkhani’s children built a sprawling oil smuggling empire during his decade as security council secretary, circumventing the very sanctions his government publicly vowed to resist.

Their network grew so extensive that it later diversified into smuggling Russian oil after Moscow faced international restrictions.

The arc of Shamkhani and Rouhani’s careers traces the Islamic Republic’s own journey from revolutionary idealism to entrenched corruption.

Both men, now 73 and 76 respectively, emerged from Iran’s formative trauma- the eight-year war with Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands and defined a generation of leaders.

Rouhani commanded the country’s air defense during the conflict. Shamkhani rose through military ranks in Khuzestan province before becoming minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the war’s final months.

They risked their lives for the Islamic revolution and earned credentials that would sustain long careers.

After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death in 1989, both transitioned from military to security bureaucracy.

Rouhani became the first secretary of the newly formed Supreme National Security Council, a position he would hold for 16 years under four administrations - a record that remains unbroken.

Shamkhani achieved his own distinction: simultaneously commanding both the IRGC Navy and regular Army Navy in an unprecedented arrangement, before serving eight years as defense minister.

For years, they epitomized the security establishment - serious, competent administrators who kept Iran’s most sensitive operations running.

The first cracks in that image appeared during the 1999 student protests at Tehran University.

Rouhani, then security council secretary under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami, took a hard line against demonstrators.

At a government-organized counter-rally, he called student protesters “thugs” and announced on state television that security forces had orders to suppress “opportunistic and seditious elements with severity and decisiveness.”

The speech made Rouhani a villain to Iranian students and reformists.

For someone who would later win the presidency on a platform of moderation, it became a permanent stain on his record.

Shamkhani tried to rehabilitate his own image through the 2005 presidential election, presenting himself as a strong military leader who could address Iran’s problems.

His campaign videos featured close-ups of his military boots and footage of meetings with world leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin - an attempt at strongman image-building borrowed from Reza Shah’s playbook.

Iranian voters were not impressed. He finished near the bottom.

Both men left government when hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency.

Rouhani resigned from the security council after refusing Ahmadinejad’s demand that he call the International Atomic Energy Agency director and say Iran would fund most of the agency’s budget.

Shamkhani was not offered a position in the new administration.

What revived both men’s careers was Iran’s 2009 crisis - disputed presidential elections that sparked the largest protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Green Movement’s suppression, which continued through 2010 with mass arrests and violence, created opportunities for figures tainted by earlier crackdowns to rebrand themselves.

Shamkhani, who had served in the cabinet of candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi years earlier when Mousavi was prime minister, appeared sympathetic to protesters.

In one television appearance that went viral among opposition supporters, he refused to condemn the Green Movement.

When a persistent interviewer pressed him to denounce the “sedition” - Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s label for the protests - Shamkhani pushed back.

He said, “Accepting or not accepting the word sedition doesn’t change anything. Who do you want to put me against?”

The moment was politically calculated but effective.

Shamkhani had positioned himself as a security figure with moderate sympathies, exactly the profile Rouhani would need when he ran for president four years later.

Rouhani’s 2013 campaign succeeded by assembling a coalition of Iranians exhausted by Ahmadinejad’s confrontational foreign policy and economic mismanagement.

With endorsements from Khatami and former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Rouhani promised to free opposition leaders Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi from house arrest and resolve the nuclear standoff that had isolated Iran internationally.

For his security council secretary, Rouhani wanted Shamkhani - partly for his moderate image, partly because they had worked together before.

Supreme Leader Khamenei initially opposed the appointment, according to former government spokesman Mahmoud Vaezi. Only after Rouhani’s repeated insistence did Khamenei relent.

Shamkhani never delivered on Rouhani’s central promise to opposition supporters.

Mousavi and Karroubi remained under house arrest for all eight years of Rouhani’s presidency.

More significantly, after President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement in 2018, Shamkhani became one of the loudest voices against reviving the deal.

His opposition puzzled observers. Why would Rouhani’s own security chief work against his main foreign policy success?

The answer emerged gradually through the U.S. Treasury sanctions documents and investigative reporting: Shamkhani’s family had built an empire on sanctions evasion.

His children operated a sophisticated network for selling Iran’s sanctioned oil, using front companies and ship-to-ship transfers to evade detection.

As international pressure on Iran intensified, their operation expanded. After Russia invaded Ukraine and faced sanctions, the Shamkhani network pivoted to smuggling Russian oil using the same techniques.

The U.S. Treasury eventually sanctioned the individuals, companies, and tankers involved, publicly documenting how a top Iranian security official’s family had turned sanctions into a lucrative business opportunity.

Every time nuclear negotiations approached success, Shamkhani had financial reasons to oppose a deal that might ease restrictions and remove his family’s profits.

Rouhani’s government had popularized the term “sanctions profiteer” to describe hardliners who benefited from Iran’s isolation and therefore opposed diplomatic solutions.

The phrase became ironic when it perfectly described Rouhani’s own handpicked security chief.

According to Vaezi, Rouhani tried repeatedly to remove Shamkhani - five or six attempts over eight years.

Each time, Khamenei blocked the dismissal. The Supreme Leader’s protection of Shamkhani, despite his obvious conflicts of interest, revealed whose interests really mattered in Iran’s power structure.

Shamkhani’s tenure also coincided with two of the bloodiest crackdowns in the Islamic Republic’s history.

In November 2019, protests over fuel price increases spread nationwide. Security forces killed an estimated 1,500 people in a few days - the deadliest suppression since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Three years later, the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody sparked months of protests across Iran.

Again, security forces responded with lethal force, killing hundreds.

The Supreme National Security Council’s precise role in ordering or coordinating these crackdowns remains unclear, hidden behind the Islamic Republic’s secrecy.

But analysts universally acknowledge that under Shamkhani’s leadership, the council played a central part in the government’s violent response to both uprisings.

Rouhani has not publicly addressed Shamkhani’s role in these crackdowns, perhaps because his own responsibility for the violence remains contested.

But the implied threat in Ashena’s warning - “don’t open our former boss’s mouth” - suggests Rouhani could reveal information about who ordered what during Iran’s darkest recent moments.