TASS After 1971, TASS was elevated to the status of State Committee at the Government of the Soviet Union. The agency was frequently used as a front organization by the Soviet intelligence agencies, such as the NKVD (later KGB) and Main Intelligence Directorate, with TASS employees serving as informants. In 1959, Alexander Alexeyev was dispatched to Cuba on a fact-finding mission, ostensibly working for TASS. In January 1992, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a Presidential Decree signed by Boris Yeltsin re-defined status of TASS and renamed it the "Information Telegraph Agency of Russia". In May 1994 The Russian Government
Tasnim News Agency Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). On 10 April 2013 the IRGC chief Mohammad Ali Jafari visited the Tasnim headquarters and was quoted by the news agency saying "The faithful and Revolutionary media have today a very heavy duty in confronting anti-islamic and anti-human plots of the oppressors". Tasnim News Agency maintains a department staffed with dual language speakers of both English and Persian which translates some of the agency's articles into English. Tasnim News Agency Tasnim News Agency is a private news agency in Iran launched in 2012. Its purpose is to cover a variety of political, social, economic and international