Khamenei’s Spy Chief Confesses Live Jesus Freed Me From Iran
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.