Khamenei’s Spy Chief Confesses Live Jesus Freed Me From Iran
I spent 15 years feeding names to Iran’s secret police. Men disappeared because of me, but Jesus appeared to me in a prison cell and told me my time of destruction was over.
If you think a man like me is too far gone to be saved, stay until the end of this testimony.
What happened to me will change how you see everything. My name is Farhad Tehrani.
I was born in Tehran, Iran. I now live in the United States, and before I tell you what Jesus did for me, I need to tell you what I did for the men who run Iran.
Because without knowing what I did, you will never understand why what happened to me is a miracle.
I was a spy, not the kind you see in movies. I did not carry a gun or drive fast cars through European cities.
I was something far more dangerous than that. I was the kind of spy who sat in ordinary rooms and listened to ordinary conversations and then reported those conversations to people who had the power to destroy lives with a single phone call.
I worked for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence for 15 years, and the man whose household I ultimately served, the man whose inner circle I fed information to, was an advisor directly connected to Ali Khamenei himself, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I am telling you this today because I am no longer that man. Jesus Christ appeared to me inside an Iranian prison cell and broke every chain that had been wrapped around my soul since childhood.
And the wife of the very advisor I served, a woman named Nasrin, saw a vision of Jesus standing over the nation of Iran with his arms open.
She has been telling everyone who will listen that Jesus is coming to rescue Iran.
Her testimony went around the world, and when I heard it from inside a prison cell in solitary confinement, something inside me cracked wide open.
This is my testimony. I was born in the spring of 1977 in a middle-class neighborhood in eastern Iran.
The Islamic Revolution had just happened. Ayatollah Khomeini had just come to power. Iran was still trembling with the energy of a country that had turned itself completely upside down in less than a year.
I was born into a world where religion and government were the same thing, where the mosque and the state spoke with one voice, where to question the Supreme Leader was to question God himself.
My father, whose name was Mahmoud, was a school teacher. He was a quiet man who believed deeply in the revolution.
He had marched in the streets as a young man and chanted for Khomeini’s return from exile.
He believed that the Islamic Republic was the fulfillment of God’s promise to the faithful.
He hung a portrait of Khomeini on the wall of our living room next to a framed verse from the Quran.
Every morning he would point to that portrait and tell me and my brother that we lived in a blessed country.
He told us that Iran was the light of the Muslim world. My mother was a softer person than my father, but no less devoted to the ideology of the state.
She wore her hijab proudly and prayed five times a day without fail. She taught me to recite Quranic verses before I could read properly.
She told me that the greatest honor a man could have was to serve Islam and to serve the Islamic Republic with everything he had.
I grew up believing every word they said. I was a serious boy, not the kind who got into trouble or ran wild in the streets with other kids.
I sat in the front row at school. I memorized my lessons. I memorized Quran verses until I could recite entire chapters without looking at the page.
My teachers praised me constantly. They told my parents I was exceptional. They told them I had a mind that Iran needed.
When I was 16 years old, a man came to my school. He was dressed in plain clothes and he had no title that anyone mentioned out loud, but the principal of our school treated him like a visiting general.
Every teacher in the building is stood straighter when he walked past. He came to our class and he watched us work for about 20 minutes without saying anything.
Then he asked three students to stay behind after the session. I was one of them.
He asked us questions that had nothing to do with our school work. He asked how well we could keep a secret.
He asked whether we had friends who complained about the government. He asked whether we had ever heard our parents say anything critical about the Supreme Leader.
He watched our faces carefully as we answered. He was not just listening to what we said.
He was reading us. He was measuring how loyal we were and how willing we were to prove that loyalty.
I told him everything he wanted to hear and I meant every word of it.
I believed in the Islamic Republic with my whole heart at that age. I was not pretending.
I genuinely wanted to serve. I genuinely believed that protecting the revolution from its enemies was the highest calling a young Iranian man could answer.
Six months later, I was recruited into a youth intelligence program run by the Ministry of Intelligence.
They called it a patriotic service program. They gave it a name that sounded educational, but what it really was was the beginning of my training as an informant.
At first, the work seemed small and almost harmless. I was asked to keep notes on conversations I heard among classmates.
I was asked to report if anyone expressed sympathy for the reformist political movements that were beginning to grow in Iran at that time.
I was asked to note which families in my neighborhood seemed to practice religion less visibly than others.
I was asked to flag any young man who seemed to be spending time with people connected to opposition groups.
I did all of this without guilt. I was 17 years old and I was convinced I was protecting my country from people who wanted to destroy it.
My handler, a man I will call Agent Kourosh, told me a regularly that the information I provided was keeping Iran safe.
He told me I was a young soldier fighting an invisible war. He told me that the enemies of the revolution did not wear uniforms.
They wore the faces of ordinary people and they hid among the population waiting for a chance to tear everything down.
My job was to find them before they could act. By the time I was 22 and had finished my compulsory military service, Agent Kourosh approached me with an offer to work for the Ministry of Intelligence on a full-time professional basis.
I accepted without hesitation. I felt chosen. I felt important. I felt like I was finally doing the work I had been put on Earth to do.
The training I received over the next two years was intense. I learned how to conduct surveillance without being detected.
I learned how to build relationships with targets and extract information from them without them realizing what was happening.
I learned how to write detailed intelligence reports that were clear and useful to the analysts who read them.
I learned how to identify people who were lying and how to appear completely trustworthy myself even when I was not telling the whole truth.
I was good at this work, very good. My supervisors recognized it quickly. Within three years of joining the Ministry professionally, I had been promoted twice.
I was moved from monitoring student groups to monitoring journalists and academics. Then, from journalists and academics to monitoring people with connections to foreign governments and international organizations.
Each promotion meant access to more sensitive operations and more powerful people within the system.
It was through this progression that I eventually came into the orbit of a man I will call Advisor Morteza.
He was one of the senior political advisors to Ali Khamenei on internal security matters.
He was not a man whose name appeared in newspapers or on television. He operated entirely in the shadow world where real power in Iran actually lived.
He had access to Khomeini’s inner circle on a regular basis. The decisions he influenced could determine whether a journalist lived or went to prison, whether a political reformer was allowed to run for office or was disqualified and arrested, whether a protest movement was monitored and allowed to exhaust itself or was crushed immediately with arrests and violence.
I was assigned to his intelligence support team when I was 31 years old. My job was to compile reports on individuals he was interested in, dissidents, reformers, journalists who were asking too many questions, lawyers who were defending political prisoners, religious minorities who were practicing their faith too visibly, young people on social media who were gaining followings with content the government did not approve of.
I compiled the reports. I wrote the names and I handed them to people who decided what happens next.
Some of those people were harassed. Some were arrested. Some disappeared into Evin prison and came out years later as broken versions of the people they had been before.
A small number did not come out at all. I told myself the same thing I had been telling myself since I was 17 years old.
These people were enemies of the revolution. They were threats to the stability of Iran.
They had been judged by men who understood the bigger picture in ways that ordinary citizens could not.
My job was not to question the judgments. My job was to provide the information that allowed the judgments to be made.
This is what happens when a man builds his entire identity around a system instead of around truth.
He stops asking whether what he is doing is right. He only asks whether he is doing it well.
I was 35 years old when I first began to feel something that I did not have a name for at the time.
I know now that what I was feeling was conscience, but in that world, in that life, I had been trained so thoroughly to suppress conscience and replace it with ideology that I did not recognize it when it all started to wake up.
It started with a woman named Shirin. She was a human rights lawyer in Tehran.
She had been filing cases on behalf of families whose relatives had been arrested during protest crackdowns.
She was not violent. She was not a foreign agent. She was not connected to any opposition movement with a radical agenda.
She was a lawyer doing the work that lawyers are supposed to do in a country that claims to have a justice system.
Her name came across my desk as part of a routine monitoring request from advisor Morteza’s office.
I compiled the report on her. I documented her movements, her clients, her communications, the people she met with.
The articles she had written for international human rights organizations. I handed over the report.
Three weeks later, she was arrested. She was charged with acting against the national security.
She was taken to Evin prison. I knew this because it was my report that had been used to build a case against her.
I knew this because my supervisor told me directly that my work had been instrumental in her arrest.
He expected me to feel proud. That was the culture we worked in. A successful arrest was a trophy.
It meant your intelligence work had been effective. It meant you had done your job well.
I sat at my desk after he told me, and I waited for the pride to come.
It did not come. Instead, something else came. Something quiet and cold that settled in my stomach and stayed there.
I pushed it down. I buried it under the same layers of ideology and self-justification that I had been building since childhood.
I told myself she had known the risks. I told myself that people who chose to challenge the system accepted the consequences.
I told myself that the security of 80 million Iranians was worth the inconvenience of one lawyer who had made choices that put her in the government’s crosshairs.
But the quiet cold thing in my stomach did not go away. Over the following 2 years, I began noticing things I had previously ignored.
What comes next?