- State affiliation · Iran
- Vigil category device · not official insignia
Identity provenance
State affiliation: Iran.
Vigil category device — drawn from this record’s own domain, echelon and role. Not an official insignia.
In brief
The Revolutionary Guard's own intelligence service, established as a separate organisation in 2009 beside the Ministry of Intelligence — the body whose counter-intelligence failures the leadership strikes of 2025 and 2026 exposed, and whose remit this module records only at the level of its existence.
- Scope
- Structure, role, lineage and links. No subordinate records published.
- Subordination
- Subordination confirmed
- Sources
- 4 on the record
- Record state
- Partial
- Broad area of activity
- Iran, with a publicly reported external role through the Guard's own channels. Nothing about its structure, stations or activity is authored.
- Notable history
- Raised to a full organisation of the Guard in 2009 after the post-election unrest, out of the Guard's earlier intelligence directorate, and built thereafter into a service that public accounts describe as rivalling the Ministry of Intelligence in domestic reach. The two wars of 2025 and 2026 put the record in this atlas for one reason: both opened with the killing of senior Iranian figures at known locations, the June 2025 campaign and then the 28 February 2026 strike that killed the Supreme Leader, and the Congressional Research Service's account of dozens of senior figures killed is, whatever else it is, an account of a counter-intelligence failure. Iranian statements since have announced arrests and executions on espionage charges; Vigil records that they were announced and adjudicates none of them.
- Strengths
- Institutional autonomy from the ministry and from the Artesh; a domestic reach that public accounts consistently describe as extensive; and the Guard's own backing under a Supreme Leader drawn from the Guard's orbit.
- Limitations
- The failures are the public record. Two leadership-targeting campaigns in nine months penetrated the structures this organisation exists to protect, and the module's information gap about who now holds senior posts extends to this service. A parallel service also means a parallel rivalry with the ministry, which analysts have long described as a source of friction rather than redundancy.
Lineage & institutional history
Quick actions
System access
Where this record connects into the rest of Vigil. Each row is here because this organisation actually reaches it.
Sensitivity: Public · structural Confidence: Low Sources: Congressional Research Service — Iran, the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz · IranWire — IRGC and Basij institutional series↗ · Iranian armed-forces institutional reference · Established international media reporting Methodology Corrections
Assessed as of — 2026-09 Last reviewed — 2026-09-14
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