Shahram Behbahanian: SPND’s man in Geneva

You might think that employees of Iran’s most secretive WMD-related research organization would be prevented from travelling abroad. It’s dangerous enough working for SPND inside Iran – let alone overseas, where there is presumably no shortage of adversaries on street corners and in hotel corridors.

But SPND officials do travel – especially to Europe. The main reason is to ensure that SPND’s interests are protected at the three key international fora relating to WMD detection and prevention – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), based in Vienna; the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), located in The Hague; and the UN’s office on the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), located in Geneva. SPND wants to ensure that it can conduct its secret WMD‑related research with as little scrutiny from these international organizations as possible, and SPND has top-level support in Iran’s government to monitor these organizations and fulfil this goal.

The unofficial reason that SPND officials travel abroad is that travelling outside Iran on official business yields personal benefits. There’s duty free shopping; fat expense accounts; and the chance to indulge in those sexual and pharmaceutical proclivities which are far better tolerated in liberal European capitals than they are in Tehran. And these things have great appeal for SPND’s upper management.

Of course, SPND officials don’t wear their SPND lanyards or wield SPND-stamped passports when they travel on work business. Instead, they use the official cover of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Ministry of Defence. That cover allows for a far more discreet experience while overseas – not to mention a far simpler exchange of business cards when meeting foreign counterparts. Imagine the alternative:

Iranian representative: “Good morning! I’m Seyed Ahmad Mirzaei from SPND! Pleased to meet you.”

Foreign diplomat: “SPND…SPND… wasn’t that the organization that ran Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons programme? Weren’t they in charge of security for the repository of Iran’s nuclear weapons research but fucked up and allowed the whole thing to get stolen by Mossad? Isn’t there a blog that does nothing but investigate their ham-fistedness using obscure references to 1990s popular culture?”

Iranian representative:

“Ummmmmmmmm”

It wouldn’t work. Operating under the cover of the Ministry of Defence or MFA allows the SPND representatives to pretend that they’re actually working for the goal of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, when actually SPND is just trying to make sure that SPND’s secret work in the field of WMD development stays secret.

That SPND is actively working to undermine international non-proliferation is one thing that annoys us. But there’s another injustice at play here that really gets our goat: at Redline, we frankly don’t think it’s fair that the SPND old guard gets the chance to seek out sex and drugs overseas while the rank‑and-file SPND employees are stuck back in Tehran with fewer chances for fun.

So, we’ve taken up a jihad to out as many undercover SPND members as possible who we know are working abroad.

Back in 2023, Redline uncovered SPND representative Mehran Babri (مهران ببری) who was regularly travelling to The Hague to spy on the activities of the OPCW. We suspect his life has been slightly less comfortable since we became his top Google search result.

Today, we’re proud to out an SPND official who’s doing much the same thing, but in Switzerland rather than the Netherlands, and in the realm of biological weapons rather than chemical weapons.

This person’s name is Shahram Behbahanian (شهرام بهبهانیان).

We’ve scoured the UN’s meeting database and found out that since 2018, Behbahanian has flown to Geneva on at least six occasions to participate in expert meetings or inter-governmental sessions of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC): in December 2023, August 2023, December 2022, November 2021, December 2019, and December 2018. Were it not for COVID, we suspect that Behbahanian might have had at least another five or six visits to Switzerland.

On each of these occasions, as UN records show, Behbahanian represented Iran under the relatively innocuous cover of “Ministry of Defence” – true, strictly speaking, given that SPND is an arm of Iran’s Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics. But our research shows that Behbahanian is actually a member of SPND.

Here’s how we know:

1. Guilt by association.

Behbahanian is deeply tied into the oddball network of wannabe psychologists and failed neuroscientists that is SPND’s Sadra Centre, which we’ve previously written about.

Sadra Centre gets money from Iran’s government on the promise of creating mind control weapons and super-soldiers. You may have noticed that in the various conflicts in which Iran is currently engaged in the Middle East, Iran is wielding neither mind control weapons nor super-soldiers. That’s a pretty good measure of how successful Sadra Centre has been so far.

To see Behbahanian’s connections with Sadra Centre in action, just check out this paper that Behbahanian co-authored with Sadra Centre’s Dr Mohsen Oftadehal (محسن افتاده حال/ محسن افتادهحال) and SPND’s Seyed Mohammad Mahdavi (سید محمد مهدوی). Working with one SPND official may be a misfortune; working with two looks like carelessness. We’ll take that as a demonstration that Behbahanian himself is at least affiliated with SPND, if not on their payroll.

2. Lack of competence.

Note that Behbahanian’s official role on his trips to Geneva is to spy on participate in the UN’s work against biological weapons – meaning bacterial, viral and toxic weapons like anthrax, botulinum and ricin. You would probably assume that the best-qualified representative to do this would be a toxicologist, or at least a medical doctor or biologist.

Behbahanian is none of those things. Indeed, take a look at Behbahanian’s online footprint and you’ll see that his scientific credentials are rubbish. He has a PhD from Iran’s Institute for Cognitive Science Studies (ICSS or موسسه آموزش عالی علوم شناختی), which amongst other things is a poorly‑disguised degree farm for untalented members of Iran’s military industries. And Behbahanian’s only peer‑reviewed academic publications are in the fields of pseudoscience and quackery: brain stimulation using electromagnetic fields (spoiler alert: it doesn’t do much) and the effect of Wi-Fi fields on human memory (spoiler alert: there isn’t any).

Picking an untalented and unqualified crony for a lucrative overseas role is a classic SPND move. And that gives us even more confidence that Behbahanian works for SPND.

Anyhow, for any diplomat who has just met a nice Iranian named Shahram Behbahanian at the watercooler in Geneva and happens to look up his name – welcome to our blog. We hope you enjoy our work!