A secret memorandum made available to Iran Terror by a source in the Iranian government sheds light on the mysterious past of Iran’s newly-elected ultra-conservative president. Information provided by this source has proven reliable in the past.

Iran Terror was shown part of the memorandum, which described Ahmadinejad’s activities in the Islamic Revolutionary Committees in the wake of the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power in February 1979 and his work in the Internal Security Directorate of the Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad was one of the first volunteers to join the Islamic Revolutionary Committees after the Islamic Revolution and worked for some time in the Islamic Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office based in Evin Prison. He took part in the implementation of the first waves of execution of the officials of the corrupt Pahlavi regime,” the memorandum noted.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad worked in the internal security sector after June 1981 and was based in Evin Prison”, the internal document added. “He served with distinction in the crackdown on counter-revolutionary forces, particularly the Monafeqin”.

Monafeqin, or hypocrites, is the clerical authorities’ pejorative term for the opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK). Thousands of MeK members were executed in Iran in the early 1980s, according to Amnesty International and other human rights groups.

The memorandum was drafted for the MOIS as part of a routine background check on all presidential candidates. Iranian law requires the watchdog Guardian Council to vet all candidates and the MOIS, as the official secret service, is required to provide background information on them.

The minister, Ali Younessi, is known to have opposed the inclusion of the ultra-conservative mayor of Tehran in the shortlist of candidates approved by the Guardian Council, but the chairman of the Guardian Council, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, overruled Younessi’s objection. Ahmadinejad has for long been a protégé of the powerful ayatollah.

Younessi was similarly opposed to the appointment of Ahmadinejad as the mayor of Tehran in 2003.

The information in the memorandum is corroborated by a report on the Tehran-based website, Baztab, which quoted allies of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami as saying that Ahmadinejad “fired coup de grace shots at political prisoners after their execution,” for which his colleagues called him the “Terminator.” Baztab, which belongs to former Revolutionary Guards Chief Mohsen Rezai, denied the allegation.

Exiled opposition leaders have said that Ahmadinejad has been involved in the execution of political prisoners in Iran and assassination of dissidents abroad, including the murder of a former minister and a prominent Kurdish leader.

Ahmadinejad’s official biography is mum on the nature of his activities in the early 1980s. It is known that he went to fight in the Iran-Iraq war as a commander of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, but the war began in 1980 and there is no mention of what he did between 1980 and the mid-1980s, the period which, according to the internal document and other accounts, he was involved in executions and assassinations.

There has been no reaction by Ahmadinejad or his office to the widely reported allegations of his direct involvement in executions and terrorism.