Iran Redline

OH MY!!! Who would have thought the world would be so forceful against Iran? Watching from our little perch, we saw the destruction of key Iranian facilities and institutions. In a lightning-like (rapid) turn, shocking events occurred that absolutely everyone saw coming, popular institutions, like Shahid Beheshti University and Imam Hossein University, were targeted as well 1 2 . Turns out, as Redline has exposed in the past 3 , they are also supporting the Iranian military programs, including research and development for chemical and biological weapons 4 , and other favorite programs of the regime. Aren’t these places supposed to be conducting research that helps the Iranian people? We thought so, too, but it seems their true functions were exposed by the recent military campaigns. As we have discussed in the past, the regime does love to use the people’s hard-earned money to pretend to build useful infrastructure that they claim will ultimately benefit the public good...

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...

Iran's president Ebrahim Raisi spent much of his first few months in office since August last year sweeping out the remnants of any former government ministers who might have a whiff of reformism or internationalism about them. One victim of this clean-out has been the urbane Ali Akbar Salehi (علی اکبر صالحی), who headed the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI or سازمان انرژی اتمی ایران) from 2009 to 2010 and then again from 2013, and was for all intents and purposes the public face of Iran's nuclear program. Salehi made a famous double-act with US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, teaming up in the JCPOA talks to wrestle together a highly complex and technical negotiated agreement. With Raisi at the helm, negotiations with the enemy are no longer in vogue, and Salehi is out. And Salehi's replacement is someone who has what we in the Iran nuclear fanboy/fangirl community would call "form" - that distinctive characteristic of having been so deeply involved in ...

  Dear Redline fans,   Do you ever find that life gets in the way and stops you getting on with even the most important things? Well we here at Redline have been away for a little while, but we never wavered in our commitment to uncovering the latest antics of SPND ( سپند or sepand) , the secretive Iranian defense research organization. That’s right, we’re back in town, and we’ve got some very exciting discoveries to share with you which we think will more than make up for lost time.   Stay tuned over the coming weeks to find out what we’ve got in store for you!   First up…    Another SPND front company unveiled: Milad Darou Noor   We thought we’d start with another dive into one of the multitude of front companies owned or used by SPND , the shadowy Iranian defense research organization responsible for Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons program.   The company's name is Milad Darou Noor, ( شرکت داروسازی میلاد دارو نور ), also known...

No villainous organization, factual or fictional, is truly complete without a part-time penchant for the truly weird. The Nazis had an obsession for finding the Spear of Destiny and Holy Grail. Spectre had a volcano lair and chinchilla cats. SPND ( سپند), the Iranian defense research organization that holds the ageing expertise from Iran's nuclear weapons program, is no exception. When SPND wants to get its freak on, it calls on one of its subsidiaries: the Sadra Cognitive Defense Science Center ( مرکز علوم شناختی دفاعی صدرا or مرکز علوم شناختی و دفاعی صدرا or مرکز پژوهشی صدرا or مرکـز مطالعات علوم شناختی دفاعی صدرا ). The Sadra Center has been around for a few years, but its status as a component of SPND was only revealed publicly in March 2019 in a US government sanctions list. Since then, a short article from a corporate intelligence company, Kharon, has provided some extra details on Sadra . Today, we want to provide even more evidence on the connections between SPND and Sadr...