Iran Redline

  Like your dad’s favourite dead rockstars and the best actor in The Wire , it seems that the Iranian government just can’t quit its addiction to fentanyl. Indeed, we’ve just stumbled across a piece of information indicating that the weird relationship between Iran’s military‑industrial complex and the world of illicit drug production could be ramping up even further. Remember Iranian state-owned fentanyl manufacturer Tofigh Daru Research and Engineering Company , which we wrote about in a previous post? In that post, we aired our suspicions that Tofigh Daru is mass-producing fentanyl for the purposes of supplying the global black market for the drug. It turns out that in December 2023, Tofigh Daru was paid an official visit by an Iranian government official named Javad Mashayekh ( جواد مشایخ ). To those with a little bit of knowledge about the murky world of Iranian covert operations, Mashayekh’s presence at Tofigh Daru is what a poker player might call a Big Fucking Tell. Mas

  Ahmad Karimi Rahjerdi’s Hitler haircut is making me feel ill Redline does not generally purport to be an arbiter of style. But upon reviewing some recent photographs of SPND senior official Dr Ahmad Karimi Rahjerdi ( احمد کریمی راهجردی ), we couldn’t help but be reminded of a certain sweaty bunker-dweller from Austria. The clammy side-part is a tough look to pull off; we’re not sure that it really works for Dr Karimi (particularly when applied sans moustache). Dr Karimi has been the public face of SPND’s work on a dubious COVID vaccine . He’s also the head of SPND’s Biology Department, according to this radio interview . That role in SPND involves dabbling with small quantities of biological weapon material, ostensibly for the purposes of developing defensive mechanisms, but actually for developingpoisons and delivery systems . So what’s got Dr Karimi so sweaty? The photos above are from a recent demonstration of a mobile biological laboratory, developed by SPND not for the pu

It seems we struck a nerve with our last article on Dr Mehran Babri (مهران ببری, ID: 0050111078), the man leading SPND’s research into chemical weapons. That’s not surprising – Babri’s work on fourth generation chemical agents – including the notorious Novichok variants used by Russia in assassination attempts – is pretty outrageous, and we can barely believe that nobody had outed it already. One thing that we didn’t cover in that article is Babri’s deep connections across Iranian academia, and the inherent risks that those connections pose to otherwise innocent academics and research institutions. Let’s dive in! Publish or perish Like many of his SPND colleagues, Mehran Babri collaborates on scientific research with Iranian universities outside the SPND bubble. That’s not something that you might expect, given these guys work in an otherwise top-secret environment. But published research is the yardstick by which scientists judge their success; and it’s hard for SPND scienti

What do Prince and Tom Petty have in common, besides having a likely presence in your dad's CD collection? They both died of drug overdoses - and, specifically, overdoses of an opioid compound called fentanyl. Fentanyl is a hell of a drug. Originally developed as a super-potent form of pain relief, it's since become a widely misused illicit substance, and was responsible for more than 70,000 overdose deaths in the US alone in 2021. Anyway, there's a widespread and concerted global effort by law enforcement authorities, health policy officials, and medical workers to try and minimize the illegal production and abuse of fentanyl. That noble effort stretches pretty much everywhere across the world - everywhere, that is, except a couple of key places in Iran. As we'll see today, the IRGC and SPND aren't so much into stopping the abuse of fentanyl as they are enthusiastically exploiting its properties as a chemical warfare agent. We also have suspicions that both entitie