Some have suggested Molavi Vardanjani was a former Iranian intelligence officer while others say that he was previously a member of the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

All of Masoud Molavi Vardanjani’s social media accounts and profiles have become inaccessible or unavailable after his death. Vardanjani had previously used these accounts to discuss details of his personal life and background. He had used his Instagram account to post pictures of himself with prominent political figures such as the former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mohammad Khatami, all of which have been deleted.

On March 9, 2020, Reuters reported that two diplomats from the Islamic Republic of Iran were involved in Vardanjani’s assassination in Turkey. He was killed a year after his arrival in Turkey.

According to the article by Reuters, two Turkish officials, who did not want to be named, stated that the individual who was walking next to Vardanjani at the moment he was killed “was called Ali Esfanjani, who was in charge of Mr. Molavi’s assassination team.” According to the report, three days after committing the killing, Ali Esfanjani escaped over the border from Turkey to Iran with the help of a smuggler and under a false identity.

A few months prior to this, Turkish police released a video of Vardanjani’s murder, which was recorded on a CCTV camera. In the video, he is seen walking with another individual when suddenly an armed assailant shoots him in the back.

The Reuters article also cited a Turkish police report on Vardanjani, published two weeks before the article was released, which stated that he had an “unusual employment history.” According to the police report, Vardanjani had previously worked in the cyber security department of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, but later became a critic of the Iranian authorities.

The Reuters article also discussed how Vardanjani had disclosed sensitive information about some prominent figures in the IRGC, which had been posted on his social media accounts three months before his death. In these posts, he had said that he was praying that he would not be killed before the mafia-like corruption of these IRGC commanders was revealed. 

However, Reuters wrote that they were unable to independently verify Vardanjani’s position in the Ministry of Defense.

Reuters reported that the alleged killer and a number of other Turkish and Iranian citizens were arrested in connection to the murder, who later confessed that two intelligence officers at the Iranian consulate had ordered the killing.  

The two security officials had also said that, before his assassination, Vardanjani had received warnings from the Revolutionary Guards demanding that he cut ties with drone manufacturers. The two officials also claimed that he had close ties to both the United States and countries in Europe, but Reuters could not confirm these claims. According to one of the officials, the Iranian government had also warned Vardanjani against contacting foreign diplomats.


International Reaction

A Turkish official openly compared Masoud Molavi Vardanjani’s assassination to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by Saudi Arabian officials in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, in 2018, which led to a crisis in Turkish-Saudi relations.

One week after the assassination, Mike Pompeo, the American secretary of state, called Vardanjani’s assassination another tragic example of the abuses perpetrated with the support of the Iranian government against those who oppose them.


Mysterious Background

According to what Vardanjani wrote about himself, he was born on April 17, 1986 in Shahin Shahr in Isfahan. He studied civil engineering at the Islamic Azad University, at the Najafabad branch in Isfahan. Shahin Shahr continued his studies with a Masters Degree in Computer Science at the University of Tehran in 2009. Finally, he received his doctorate in artificial intelligence from the American University of Arizona in 2014. However, some believe that Vardanjani's background was fabricated as he never provided any evidence or documents to support his claims.  

The confused background dates back to at least the winter of 2006. As a former student of a technical vocational college, Vardanjani was accepted to study Civil Engineering at the Islamic Azad University, Najafabad branch, where he began making claims which were published by print media and even by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting network. As a leading student at the Islamic Azad University, which was led by Abdullah Jasbi, he was taken to visit Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran, and the Hamshahri newspaper later reported that Vardanjani had been appointed as a robotics consultant for the Municipality of Tehran.

One of Vardanjani’s main claims was that the Islamic Azad University of Isfahan had built a robot which had technology that was not available to even the United States or Japan, and that it had designed an artificial intelligence system that American companies were willing to pay $200 million to purchase.

Vardanjani also posted a number of videos which showed him appearing several times on radio and on television shows as the “father of the modern science of artificial intelligence in the world.” He also made a number of his interviews with Iranian publications accessible to the public.


The Security Dilemma of Black Box Telegram Channel

Vardanjani became well known in the world of politics, intelligence and security through two of his social media channels. His first Telegram channel was called Black Box and he later went on to establish a Twitter account under the name of Brother Sadegh.

The Black Box account was set up on March 21,2018. It described itself as “the voice of the Iranian people” and “a medium for exposing the corruption, crimes and clandestine activities of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Over the approximately 20 months that the Black Box account was active, it published a massive amount of documents, information, videos and audio concerning the activities of the Iranian judiciary, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the Intelligence Organization of the IRGC. The account intended to continue its activities by making films and videos about the content of these documents. The Telegram channel published a large volume of documents and evidence which will require significant time and effort to verify.

One of the most controversial stories posted on Black Box, posted on its Telegram channel, concerned Zeinab Taheri, a lawyer who represented Mohammad Salas, a dervish (a believer in Sufism) who had been executed in Iran.

Another document published on Black Box is related to Judge Abolghasem Salavati, the lead judge of Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Courts. The document alleges that Judge Salavati had an “immoral” relationship with a woman, resulting in a case being opened against him, which is now being investigated in the judiciary’s Center for Information Protection, the body that conducts internal reviews of Iranian judges.

In another article, the channel also released the names of several other judges and accused them of “corruption.”

Several videos have also been released on the channel, one of which the administrators of the channel and Masoud Molavi Vardanjani claimed included information from "the meeting room of the Deputy of Counter Espionage for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence."

In another post, the channel claimed that “Abul Hassan Firoozabadi, the director of the Ministry of Intelligence's communication surveillance and signals intelligence gathering sites, attempted to blackmail Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, to appoint him as the Secretary of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, by threatening to release information about Rouhani’s (alleged) corruption, as well as that of his brother and his ministers. From there he will demand to be appointed the Director of the National Cyberspace Center! Then, he will become the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Electronic Industry Companies! He will keep all these positions and still be an employee of the Ministry of Intelligence.”

The channel also posted a separate news item about Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, head of the Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which alleged that Golpayegani was involved in the Larijani brothers’ “gang of corruption,” referring to five brothers who all occupy key positions within the Iranian political system.

Black Box also had a YouTube account, which released a short film about the organized “corruption” of a group of IRGC commanders who have significant influence within the Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran. This film implicitly mentions a group of influential people in organization, who are accused being complicit in the alleged murder of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian President died of a heart attack in 2017 (though family insist that he was murdered).

The Black Box channel also attacked the Revolutionary Guards in its revelations. In particular, it published documents and complete files from a variety of security and intelligence related projects from the IRGC and the Ministry of Intelligence which have been some of the most unprecedented revelations in the history of the Islamic Republic.


The Brother Sadegh Account

The Brother Sadegh Twitter account, which has been active since January 2018 and is said to have belonged to Masoud Molavi Vardanjani, claimed several months ago that the Ministry of Intelligence was planning to arrest Vardanjani in Istanbul.

Following an interview with the administrator of the Black Box account, the Brother Sadegh account wrote that it had concluded that “they (the Black Box administrator) have no financial resources, they have not been contacted by and they are not connected to any foreign intelligence services” and that “one of their informants has been arrested at the Ministry of Intelligence.”

The Brother Sadegh account wrote in a tweet that “the ‘Black Box’ account had a wide range of sources in the security organizations and institutions due to the presence of former colleagues, friends and acquaintances in the Ministry of Intelligence, the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces, the Iranian Law Enforcement Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Intelligence Organization of the IRGC and the Supreme National Security Council, the government and even the Islamic Consultative Assembly. These people have worked with these Organizations for years and have an emotional and fraternal bond.”

The account also wrote that: “In the Ministry of Intelligence, a joint working group made up of deputies and experts in a variety of fields including technical, counter-espionage, information security and investigation has been formed to work on the ‘Black Box’ case. The result of this is that by analyzing the individual's situations and mindsets, these people [the working group] can create structures, organizations and networks both inside and outside of Iran, and that is dangerous.”

However, according to a report that has been published on IranWire, a number of people have said that Masoud Molavi Vardanjani was always a “strange and odd” character, that he was a liar, that he was trying to stir up trouble for people in Iran and Turkey with “lies” and “fabrications” and that he had no shortage of enemies.

Mohammad Jarjandi, a cybercrime expert, is one of Vardanjani’s critics. He released a 30-minute video about Vardanjani, saying that the majority of his allegations were untrue and that he was nothing more than a “fraudster.”

Jarjandi also recently published the text from a private conversation that he had with Vardanjani in which Vardanjani promised new revelations against Iranian officials who he had been personally targeting.