Speaker 1: Welcome back everyone. Today we're going to be taking a
look at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the code's forces.
So let's think about something. You're a dissident, you fled
Ran years ago. You're living in Berlin or London, you
have a job, maybe a family, You write, you speak,
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 in an opinion. And
there's a man Tehran who has your name on a list,
not a metaphorical list, a real tangible list, a list.
It 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 US, 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 Kutz 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, in 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
nineteen seventy nine in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution.
It was built explicitly to protect the revolution, not just
the state, and that distinction matters. A conventional military protects
borders and national interests. The IRGC was assigned from the
beginning to protect in ideology. That ideological mandate gave it
a different kind of operational permission and that most military
organizations carry inside the RIGC. Because force is the External
Operations Directorate, Kutz is the Arabic, 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 Kutz
Forces operated with an estimated strength of somewhere between ten
thy twenty thousand, thought the actual numbers impossible to verify.
It ran operations through a network of embassies, front companies,
cultural organizations, and proxy militias spanning Lebanon, in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza,
Latin America, and for roughly two decades from approximately nineteen
ninety eight until twenty twenty, all of it ran through
one man, Solomone. If you have not read everything available
in Solomoni, 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. Solomani joined the
IRGC in the late seventies, fought in the Iran Iraq War,
and by the late nineteen nineties had taken command of
the Kuds Force, where he built over the following two decades.
Was not just a military organization, it was a relationship network.
Solomonia understood a fundamental level the power projection at the
scale he was attempting require personal trust between him self
and the leaders of every proxy organization he supported. He
met with Hassan Nozraala of Hezbola personally and repeatedly. He
was embedded with Shia militia commanders, and he rocked during
the fight against License. He traveled constantly in and out
of conflict zones, off in a way that should have
gotten him killed. Because his physical presence was how he
maintained the web. American intelligence tracked him for years. There
were reportedly multiple instances where the decision was made not
to act against them because of concerns about escalation on
the downstream consequences for regional stability. That calculus held into
January twenty twenty, when a Reaper drone strike Baghdad International
Airport killed Solomoni along with Abu Mahdi al Muhandas, the
deputy commander of the Iranian backed popular mobilization forces. The
question of whether that strike was strategically correct, is legitimately
contested is not contested, is what Solomoni had spent two
decades building. Let me walk you through some of the
documented operations, because the scope of what the Cuds Force
and his proxies have carried out is not fully understood
by most. The nineteen ninety four bombing of the Amia
Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires killed eighty five people
in wounded hundreds. Argentine investigators and prosecutors spent decades building
a case that pointed to kods Force involvement in planning
and support with his Bull's operational unit executing the attack.
Iranian officials, including a former president and former intelligence minister,
were ultimately names of suspects in Argentine indictments. That operation
was not a military strike against the military target. It
was a mass casualty attack against civilians. In South America.
In twenty eleven, the US law enforcement disrupted an alleged
Coots Force plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the
United States on American soil. The plan reportedly involved hiring
a member of a the Mexican drug cartel to carry
out the killing. The sophistication of the plan was debated
by analysts, but the intent was not because Force 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 the Iranian
intelligence officers and documented the Iranian surveillance operations against Jewish
community organizations and Israeli diplomatic facilities in German soil. Multiple
European countries have intercepted CUTS 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 CUTS Force assets were planning attacks against
Israeli in Jewish targets during passover. Albania, a Muslim majority
NATO member with historically warm relations with Israel, made a
significant diplomatic decision based on what it's intelligence service uncovered.
The pattern is consistent across geography and across time. The
CUTS Force operates wherever Tehran perceives threats or opportunities, does
not stop at borders. It does not recognize as a
civilian or diplomatic startists status of targets. I want you
to understand something about this organization because this is where
the intelligence trade craft gets fascinating and disturbing. The cuts
Force does not only US Iranian nationals. In fact, using
Iranian nationals for sensitive operations in Western countries is exactly
what because 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 converced 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 of 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 into 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 acknowledge and diplomatic towns is exactly the space that
shadow war operators exploit. Defector accounts have described the Cuts
Force operational culture that is highly compartmented, deep patient, and
willing to run operations on timelines that stretch years. Similar
to the Russians, an asset may be cultivated, placed in
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 organizations
playing a generational game. Solomonia is gone, what is Mael Khani,
who replaced them as Cuts Force commander, has continued the
operational posture. Iran has made explicit threats against former American officials,
including individuals who are involved in decision to authorize as
Solomoni strike. The Justice Department has publicly indicted Iranian nationals
for plots against Americans soil or disrupted up to twenty twenty.
What does all this mean? It means that Iran has
made a calculated decision sustained across multiple administrations multiple Supreme leaders,
at the cost of projecting power through covert and proxy
means is lower than the benefit. It means that the
international norms around assassination and extraterretorial territorial operations and have
not functioned as a sufficient deterrent, and it means that
for the dissonance on those lists, for the intelligence officers
who've been targeted, for the civilians who happened to be
near a target. The shadow war is not abstract. It
is very real. Understanding how this machine works. Who's not
optional if you want to understand the Middle East American
foreign policy. The Cuz Force is not a French story.
It is one of the defining co writ programs of
our era.