The overnight assassination of Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmaeil Khatib, in a targeted Israeli strike in Tehran was a strike at one of the Islamic Republic’s most opaque and important institutions in maintaining the regime of oppression in place. His death was confirmed on Wednesday morning by Defense Minister Israel Katz.
Khatib was not your average minister. Appointed by Ali Khamenei in 2021, he was a Shia cleric with deep roots in the security world and a history inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. He ran both the crushing of dissent at home and the expansion of Iran’s shadow operations abroad.
The Ministry of Intelligence, known by its acronym MOIS, was created in 1984, during the chaotic first years after the revolution and amid the Iran-Iraq War. It was intended to replace the shah’s SAVAK intelligence service.
The ministry’s original brief was to protect the revolution from its enemies, foreign and domestic, similar to the mission of the IRGC. That mandate has since expanded to cover almost everything. The ministry nowadays functions as a secret police, a foreign spy service, and an ideological watchdog rolled into one.
Inside Iran, its reach is deep. It runs informant networks through universities, newsrooms, minority communities, and activist circles. Its people identify protest organizers, monitor phones and messages, and conduct interrogations. During the 2009 Green Movement, the 2019 fuel protests, and the Mahsa Amini uprising in 2022, the ministry was central to the crackdown. It rounded up protest leaders and, according to consistent accounts, extracted the televised confessions that followed.
Repression in Iran is structured, intelligence-led, and deeply embedded within state institutions. MOIS provides much of that structure. Former detainees describe a system that is as methodical as it is brutal.
Prisoners held by the ministry have spoken of prolonged solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and psychological pressure designed to break them rather than simply extract information. Interrogations are often accompanied by threats against family members, with detainees forced to sign confessions that later appear on state television.
But MOIS does not work alone. The regime has always been careful never to hand any single body too much power, lest it pose a threat to the ayatollahs, and intelligence is no different. Running parallel to the ministry is the IRGC Intelligence Organization, a separate apparatus that answers directly to the supreme leader and tends to operate with less restraint.
MOIS and IRGC, however, are not straightforward allies. The ministry works through long-term surveillance and institutional channels, whereas the IRGC’s intelligence arm is more ideologically driven and quicker to move when unrest flares. The regime wants overlap and a degree of mutual suspicion between its security arms. Each keeps watch on the population, while, at the same time, keeping a quiet eye on the other.
Khatib struck balance between IRGC and intelligence ministry
Khatib straddled both worlds. His IRGC background, having served in its intelligence unit from 1985 to 1991, made him useful precisely because he could move between clerical authority and paramilitary power. He was a coordinator as much as a minister.
Abroad, the ministry’s tentacles spread globally. Iranian intelligence has been tied to the assassination of opposition figures across Europe since the early years of the republic. More recently, its operations have targeted Israeli and Jewish interests, Western institutions, and Iranian exiles whom the regime has considered threats.
That is why Khatib was in Israel’s sights. It says that, as well as directing internal crackdowns, he was involved in operations against Israeli and American targets.
The Islamic Republic possesses one of the most dangerous and repressive internal security systems in the region, which is capable of penetrating society at nearly every level. Nevertheless, it continues to face waves of protest, public dissent, and unrest.
Now, the minister has been eliminated. The unrest, however, carries on.