Mohsen Fakhrizadeh creeps into the limelight
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of Iran's shadowy SPND organization, has traditionally shunned publicity. Until recently, the only glimpses that we've had of Fakhrizadeh have been from grainy photographs probably purloined by intelligence agencies. That's all changed. We recently wrote about how we spotted Fakhrizadeh in publicly-released footage from a meeting in January 2019 of Iran's Cognitive Science and Technologies Council (CSTC or ستاد توسعه علوم و فناوریهای شناختی ) - probably much to Fakhrizadeh's annoyance. Little did we realize then that Mohsen actually made at least two public appearances that month - and at the second one, he certainly wasn't hiding from the cameras. On 5 January 2019, as an obscure Iranian media outlet reported , Fakhrizadeh signed a trilateral memorandum of understanding on behalf of SPND with the IRGC's Basij mobilization organization ( مسلح سازمان بسیج سازندگی کشور ) and Iran's Supreme National Defense Univers