In Tehran, appointments to the Supreme National Security Council are rarely bureaucratic reshuffles. They are signals — about fear, factional power, and the threats the regime believes it is about to face. The return of Mohsen Rezaei, one of the oldest surviving figures of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is therefore more than another personnel change. It is a window into the security mentality of a regime increasingly preoccupied with Israel, its battered regional network, and ultimately its own survival.

The purpose of the Supreme National Security Council is to secure the national interests and safeguard the mullahs’ regime and Khomeini’s upheaval, which, in the wintry, springless season of 1979, brought the Islamic caliphate — or Shiite clerical dictatorship — to power under the name of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The council makes decisions on the regime’s foreign policy and its defense and security affairs. Its members are senior political, military, and intelligence officials of the regime.

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The council is chaired by Masoud Pezeshkian — the demagogic and rabble-rousing representative of the so-called reformist mafia — who still prides himself on serving the regime’s supreme leader. The Supreme National Security Council is one of the tools in the supreme leader’s hands.

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At this ominous center, political, intelligence, social, cultural, and economic activities are coordinated in connection with the regime’s general defense-security measures. It mobilizes all the country’s material and moral resources to confront the regime’s internal and external threats.

The Supreme National Security Council emerged from the Supreme Defense Council during the Iran-Iraq War.

After the death of Ruhollah Khomeini and the selection of Seyyed Ali Khamenei as supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hassan Rouhani was initially chosen to lead this council and, for 15 years, oversaw all the regime’s crimes and terrorist operations. For a long period, his associates included Seyyed Ahmad Khomeini and Akbar........

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