London, Jul. 14 – Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (VEVAK) has confirmed that Reza Golpour, the 28-year-old author of a controversial book on the secret past of some of the top officials of the clerical regime, has been under arrest since last week.

Golpour is the author of Shonud Ashbah, or Eavesdropping the Ghosts, a 1,000-page book, published in 2002, which alleged that some of the leading figures in the Islamic Revolutionary Mojahedin Organization, one of the factions within the clerical regime, had ties to foreign intelligence services. His arrest comes only days before the publication of a sequel to his first book.

The book’s author clearly had access to some secret documents, which fuelled suspicions that the young Golpour was only a front some of the factions within the clerical regime who wanted to discredit their rivals.

In an article in the ultra-conservative Kayhan newspaper on February 8, 2005, Golpour was accused of being a pawn in the hands of foreign powers.

Kayhan alleged that Golpour had received a huge some of money to write the book and that he had been instructed to carry out this assignment by Mehrdad Alikhani, a former Director-General of VEVAK who was one of the ring-leaders of VEVAK agents who killed dozens of Iranian intellectuals in the 1990s.

According to Kayhan, Mehrdad Alikhani is the nephew of Massoud Alikhani, described by the daily as “a key operator of the Israeli secret service, MOSSAD, in Iran during the Shah’s regime”.

Golpour responded to Kayhan’s allegations in a letter that was posted on Persian-language websites a month later, after the daily refused to publish it.

Golpour addressed his letter to Hossein Shariatmadari, the publisher of Kayhan and the Supreme Leader’s personal representative in Kayhan Publishing House. A general of the Revolutionary Guards, Shariatmadari rose through the ranks from an interrogator and torturer in Evin Prison to become one of the most powerful and feared figures in Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s dominant faction. Shariatmadari is widely credited as one of the masterminds behind the rise of fellow Revolutionary Guards commander Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Presidency.

In his letter, Golpour, who had himself spent some time working for VEVAK, exposed some of the notorious VEVAK officials who had worked closely with Shariatmadari in the interrogation and torture of political dissidents. These VEVAK officials included Ali-Akbar Bavand (a.k.a. Mojtaba Babai and Amiri), Javad Abbassi-Kangevari (a.k.a. Azadeh and Amoli), Ahmad Sheikhha (a.k.a. Ahmad Niakan and Taftazani), Mostafa Montazeri (a.k.a. Forghani and Sharbayani), and Mehdi Ghavami-Honar (a.k.a. Ghavam).

Golpour also noted that Shariatmadari was personally involved in the assassination of Iranian Kurdish dissidents in a Greek restaurant in Berlin in 1992. Golpour revealed close ties between Shariatmadari and Kazem Darabi, the VEVAK agent who was part of the team of assassins who murdered the four dissidents. Darabi was convicted by a German court and remains in prison in Germany.