Mohsen Rafighdoost
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Mohsen Rafighdoost is an Iranian journalist and political figure whom John Kiriakou identifies as a co-founder, alongside Ayatollah Khomeini, of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Kiriakou describes him as the voice that recorded the intro to the pre-revolution propaganda tapes smuggled into Iran to turn the population against the Shah.

On the PBD Podcast, Kiriakou notes, Rafighdoost, brought on as "the propaganda guy", was asked point-blank whether the opposition's claim that SAVAK killed 100,000 people had been a lie. In Kiriakou's account of the exchange he heard on tape, Rafighdoost replied that "many documents have come out" since, and that "it was only 3,000, 3,500" political prisoners under the Shah, not 100,000. Rafighdoost went further and offered his personal verdict that "Shah was a better guy than Khomeini," and that the Shah's belief in modernisation of Iran was "definitely better than [the] Islamic Republic."

Kiriakou treats the admission as evidence that a founding figure of the Islamic Republic's security architecture had, four decades on and speaking against interest, effectively conceded that a foundational revolutionary talking point about the Shah's prison population had been an exaggeration by roughly a factor of thirty.

See also

- Reza Pahlavi
- Iran 12-Day War
- John Kiriakou
