Fars News Agency (فارس نیوز) is an Iranian state news agency founded in 2003 and affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It maintains Persian and English wires and produces confidential briefing bulletins for senior IRGC officials and the office of the Supreme Leader.
Two streams of output. The public stream is a regime-aligned wire service. The internal stream is a set of confidential daily and weekly briefing bulletins produced for IRGC chief Hossein Salami and for the office of Ali Khamenei. The November 2022 Black Reward hack released large portions of the internal stream, demonstrating that Fars knew the Mahsa Movement protests were national in scope and unlikely to end soon while its public stream framed them as foreign-fomented and small.
The Black Reward leak is the closest the public will ever come to seeing the Islamic Republic's internal weather map of itself, and Fars News is the agency that drew it. The same outlet that called the 2022 protests an Israeli operation in its headlines told the Supreme Leader's office that the protests had a real social base. The deputy head of Fars was arrested for forging the bulletins, which is how the state confirmed they were real. Treat any Fars public story as the version the IRGC wanted the public to read while its private briefings said something different.
Because the 2022 leak is the most rigorous public documentation we have of an Iranian state media outlet briefing the regime privately and lying publicly on the same story.
What it is
فارس نیوز (Fars News Agency) is an Iranian state news agency founded in 2003 and openly affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. On 25 November 2022, during the height of the Mahsa Movement protests, a hacktivist group calling itself Black Reward published a large internal-document trove from Fars’s database. The leaked files included the confidential briefing bulletins Fars produced for IRGC chief Hossein Salami and for the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The documents revealed instructions to dishonour rather than arrest the Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid, expressed regime anxiety about the protests not ending soon, and exposed the gap between Fars’s public reporting and its internal briefings. The deputy head of Fars was subsequently arrested, confirming the leak’s authenticity.
Sources
- Iran International: IRGC arrest confirms authenticity of leaked Fars files (6 December 2022)
- Middle East Eye: leaked Fars bulletins to IRGC chief (3 December 2022)
- RFE/RL: leaked Fars document on Sunni cleric (1 December 2022)
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