Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, Iran’s Attorney General, revealed the details about a think tank responsible for the week-long protests in several cities across the country, saying “the mastermind of the project was an American named Michael D’Andrea, former Chief of the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center [current head of the Agency's Iran Mission Center], and an operations room composed of three sides, namely the United States, Zionist regime and Al Saud, was formed for leading the unrest. The project was funded by Saudi Arabia and mainly planned by D’Andrea and an intelligence officer affiliated with [Israel's intelligence agency] Mossad.”

He went on to add that the think tank conducted years of research and finally decided on launching campaigns inside Iran under the titles, ‘no to price hikes’, ‘no to paying bills’, and the campaign of the retired and those who lost their money in bankrupt financial institutes.

The think tank finally decided on executing the Libyan plan, i.e. moving from the margins toward the center, he added.

Montazeri said the project consisted of two phases, the first of which was the launching of the campaigns, and the second phase included violence and clashes with forces and officials in order to cause insecurity in the society, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the establishment.

“For executing the second phase, they had predicted two operations rooms in Iraq’s Erbil and Afghanistan’s Herat to use them as gateways for ISIL terrorists to cross into Iran amid the unrest,” he said.

Montazeri deemed the quick support of the US for the protests in line with the objectives of this operation, adding “the US president immediately began to post several tweets in support of the unrest in Iran, and was soon followed by UK, the Zionist regime, and come European countries. This trend was calculated and pre-planned.”

Elsewhere, Montazeri considered Telegram and Instagram, two popular social sharing platforms in Iran, as the most impactful factors in the recent protests in the country.

He went on to add that between Sep. 2016 to Sep. 2017, about 936,700 channels and pages on Telegram and Instagram were blocked due to “unethical content” or “criminal activities”. This number amounts to the restriction of about 15,000 to 20,000 channels per week, he added.

MS/IRN82785754