In a well-publicized national scandal in 2008, the Tehran police commander responsible for enforcing Iran's strict anti-vice laws, Reza Zarei, was caught nude in a brothel with six women (one of the women claimed he had asked them to pray naked in front of him). While American politicians might bounce back from such transgressions with their
own television show (see: Spitzer, Eliot), the revelation of the incident reportedly led
Zarei to attempt suicide while in prison.
The shame of sexual malfeasance has been routinely used by the regime as a form of political coercion and intimidation. When the famously jocular reformist cleric Mohammad Ali Abtahi, former vice president to Mohammad Khatami, was imprisoned after Iran's contested 2009 presidential election, he surprised his supporters by confessing with great gusto to being part of a Western-backed conspiracy to foment a velvet revolution. Although his confession was undoubtedly forced, his close associates claim that what compelled him to confess was not physical or psychological torture but hidden photos of him -- in flagrante delicto -- at a secret Tehran love nest that was long being
monitored.
The Islamic Republic isn't always so prudish, however. In fact, it's been willing to use sexual incentives as a form of statecraft. Ina WikiLeaked U.S. State Department cable, for example, senior Iraqi tribal chief Abu Cheffat confided in a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad that Tehran effectively wielded influence over Iraqi politicians -- ostensibly visiting Iran for "medical treatment" -- by offering inducements including "temporary marriages" with Iranian women. Not that Cheffat was complaining, mind you: The perks were surely better than when he visited President George W. Bush at the White House in 2008. It was not without reason, he explained, that Iranian soft power was trumping
American hard power in Iraq.
More recently, three Iranian intelligence agents who unsuccessfully tried to kill Israeli government officials in Bangkok this past February photographed themselves at a bar in the beach resort of Pattaya with local "escorts." When I asked the scion of a powerful cleric in Tehran how ostensible devotees of Khomeini's religious ideology are able to reconcile frequenting non-Muslim prostitutes and drinking alcohol, he quickly dismissed
any religious obstacles. "There are government clerics who can easily grant them religious
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