Khamenei’s Personal Interpreter Breaks Silence Live Jesus Appeared and Saved Me
My name is Navid Hosseini and I am originally from Tehran, Iran.
I currently live in Toronto, Canada.
For more than a decade, I was the most trusted English language interpreter inside the inner circle of the Islamic Republic.
My voice carried the words of Khamenei himself to the ears of the Western world.
And for years, I believed I was doing holy work.
I grew up in a house full of language.
My father, Ibrahim Hosseini, was a professor of linguistics at the University of Tehran.
He was a serious and careful man who believed that words were the most precise tools a human being could possess.
He taught me that a man who controlled language controlled reality.
He spent his evenings reading to me in Farsi and then asking me to repeat what he had read back to him in English.
He had learned English himself during the years before the revolution when Iran had strong ties to the West and he passed that language down to me the way some fathers passed down a trade.
My mother, Ziba, was warm where my father was precise.
She was deeply religious and deeply loving in equal measure.
She cooked elaborate meals and welcomed neighbors into our home and filled every room she entered with a sense that everything was going to be all right.
She prayed constantly and she told me from the time I was very small that God had a specific purpose for every gift he placed in a person.
She believed my gift for language was not an accident.
She believed God had given it to me for a reason.
She was right about that.
She was just wrong about which God she was thinking of.
I was born in Tehran and I grew up in the Elahieh neighborhood in the northern part of the city.
It was an educated and relatively comfortable area.
Our apartment was modest but full of books.
I had access to good schools and serious teachers.
My father’s position at the university gave our family a degree of protection and the stability that many Iranian families did not have.
I was aware from an early age that I was fortunate though I did not always understand the full weight of what that meant.
I was a gifted student and language came to me the way music comes to certain people, effortlessly and completely.
By the time I was 16, I was reading English novels in their original form without a dictionary.
By 18, I was fluent enough to be mistaken for a native speaker on the telephone.
I studied translation at the University of Tehran and then completed a graduate degree in simultaneous interpretation.
My professors told me I had a rare talent, not just for the mechanics of language but for something harder to teach.
The ability to carry tone and intention across the gap between two completely different ways of seeing the world.
After graduating, I worked briefly for a private translation firm in Tehran that handled contracts for several government ministries.
My work was noticed by the right people.
In the mid-1990s, I was approached by a senior official from the foreign ministry who told me that my name had been passed along through channels that he declined to specify.
He said that there was a need for a young interpreter with exceptional English skills who could be trusted with sensitive material at the highest levels of government.
He asked whether I was interested.
I was 26 years old and I had grown up in the Islamic Republic believing that serving the state was the natural extension of serving God.
My mother had raised me to see faith and loyalty to the revolution as inseparable things.
When this official sat across from me and suggested that my skill might be useful at the highest levels, I felt the same thing a young man feels when he is told that he has been chosen for something important, pride, purpose, the belief that he is exactly where he is supposed to be.
I said yes without hesitation.
The preparation that followed lasted nearly two years.
I was given intensive training in diplomatic protocol and political sensitivity.
I was taught how to interpret not just words but entire political frameworks, how to carry the specific ideological weight of the Islamic Republic’s language into English without losing its intended meaning or its intended effect.
I was given access to classified briefings on foreign policy positions and international relationships so that I could interpret accurately in contexts that required precise and specific technical knowledge.
I was also vetted thoroughly and repeatedly.
My family background was examined.
My personal relationships were reviewed.
My religious observance was assessed.
My loyalty to the Islamic Republic and to the supreme leader was evaluated from multiple angles by multiple people whose job it was to find any reason to doubt me.
I passed every evaluation.
Of course I did.
I believed everything they believed.
I was not performing loyalty.
It was genuine.
By 1998, I had been cleared for the highest level of access and I was formally assigned to the office of the supreme leader as a senior interpreter.
My primary responsibility was simultaneous interpretation for meetings between Khamenei’s office and English-speaking foreign delegations.
I also worked on the preparation of official statements and documents that would be released to the international press.
On occasions when Khamenei addressed audiences that included English speakers, my voice was the voice those people heard.
Let me describe what it was actually like to be in those rooMs. The buildings where these meetings took place were immaculate and heavily guarded.
Every visitor was screened multiple times before entering.
The rooms themselves were decorated with the specific aesthetic of the Islamic Republic, calligraphy on the walls, Persian carpets of extraordinary quality.
No imagery of living things which was considered inappropriate under the interpretation of Islamic law that governed everything in those spaces.
The atmosphere was one of controlled seriousness.
Nobody laughed in those rooMs. Nobody spoke casually.
Everything was deliberate and weighted.
Khamenei himself was not what most people from outside Iran would expect.
He was not loud or theatrical.
He was quiet and deliberate.
He spoke in a measured and careful way that made it clear he considered every word before releasing it.
He had a long memory and a sharp understanding of how language worked as a political instrument.
When he spoke, the people around him listened with the kind of attention you give to someone who holds your future in his hands, which in a practical sense he did.
My job was to sit slightly behind and to the side of the delegation and render his words into English in real time.
This required not just language skill but a kind of mental discipline that I had spent years developing.
I had to stay ahead of the speaker by a fraction of a second processing the meaning of what was being said while simultaneously converting it into another language without losing anything in the transfer.
It was technically demanding work and I was very good at it.
What I was also doing, though I understood this only gradually over the years, was something more than translation.
I was a kind of bridge between two realities, the reality that Khamenei and the Islamic Republic wanted the world to see and believe thus and the reality that actually existed inside Iran for the people who had to live under the system I was representing.
Every time I opened my mouth in those rooms and converted his words into smooth and authoritative English, I was participating in the construction of a version of Iran that bore very little resemblance to the country that ordinary Iranians experienced every day.
I did not see it that way at the time.
I saw myself as a skilled professional performing an essential function.
I saw myself as a faithful servant of the revolution and of the Islamic Republic.
I told myself that the foreign policy positions I was helping to communicate were principled and correct.
I told myself that the international community simply did not understand the Islamic Republic because they were looking at it through a biased Western lens.
My job was to help them understand more clearly.
That was how I explained my work to myself for a very long time.
The salary was excellent.
The access was extraordinary.
The status that came with the position was something that opened every door in Tehran.
I moved in circles that most Iranians never came near.
I attended private functions and high-level gatherings and occasionally traveled with official delegations to meetings outside Iran.
I lived in a comfortable apartment in a good neighborhood.
I drove a good car.
My parents were proud of me and told everyone they knew about their son who worked for the supreme leader.
I had everything a young man from Tehran could reasonably hope for.
And underneath all of it, so quiet that I could barely hear it, a voice was beginning to ask whether any of it was true.
The first time I understood clearly that my work involved something beyond translation, I was 31 years old.
It was the year 2001, and I had been in the position for 3 years.
I was assigned to interpret during a series of private meetings with a European diplomatic delegation that was attempting to open a channel of dialogue on human rights issues inside Iran.
The delegation had been given carefully managed access, and was meeting with officials who had been specifically selected and prepared for the encounter.
During one of those meetings, a senior European diplomat asked a direct question about a group of journalists and intellectuals who had disappeared in Iran the previous year.
These were the chain murders, a series of killings and disappearances of writers and intellectuals that had been carried out by elements within the Iranian intelligence services.
The diplomat described the cases by name and asked for an official accounting of what had happened to these individuals.
The Iranian official across the table from her paused for a moment and then delivered a response that I proceeded to translate faithfully into English.
The response denied any state involvement.
The cases as matters under ongoing judicial review.
It expressed concern for the well-being of all Iranian citizens and commitment to the rule of law.
It was eloquent and authoritative and completely false.
I knew it was false because I had been in briefings where the actual nature of these cases had been discussed in terms that left no ambiguity.
I sat in my position and I translated those lies into perfect English, and I watched the diplomat receive them with the cautious skepticism of someone who suspected she was not being told the truth but had no way to prove it in the room.
And I felt something move through me that I recognized as discomfort and then immediately suppressed.
I suppressed it because I had been trained to suppress it.
Interpreters are trained to be neutral conduits.
Your personal response to the content is irrelevant.
Your job is accuracy and fidelity, not judgment.
I told myself this and it worked for a while, but it worked less well each time I had to use it.
Over the following years, I translated dozens of official communications and participated in hundreds of meetings where the gap between what was being said and what was actually true was enormous.
I translated statements about Iran’s nuclear program that were strategically misleading.
I translated responses to questions about political prisoners that denied realities I was personally aware of.
I translated official positions on Iran’s support for militant groups across the region that carefully obscured the full extent of that support.
Every time I did this, I was participating in the deception, not as a minor player, as an essential one.
Because the English-speaking world could not hear Khamenei’s words without my voice.
I was not just a passive instrument, I was the mechanism by which these lies reached the people they were intended to mislead.
I got married in 2003 to a woman named Shirin.
She was an architect from a good family in Tehran.
She was intelligent and warm, and she had a quality of directness that I found both attractive and occasionally uncomfortable.
She saw things clearly and said what she saw.
In the early years of our marriage, she accepted my work at face value, the way most people in our social circle did.
Working for the supreme leader’s office was prestigious, and she was proud of me.
But Shirin was also perceptive, and as the years went by, she began to notice things that worried her.
She noticed that I came home from certain assignments quieter than usual.
She noticed that there were evenings when I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the wall for an hour without speaking.
She noticed that I drank more than I used to and I slept less.
She asked me questions that I deflected with answers that were technically true but not honeSt. The most I told her the work was stressful.
I told her that high-level government work always came with pressures that couldn’t be discussed at home.
She accepted this for a long time because she trusted me.
What I could not tell her, what I could not tell anyone, was that the voice inside me that had first spoken in 2001 was getting louder every year, and I had run out of ways to make it stoP. In 2007, something happened that pushed the volume of that voice past the point where I could reasonably pretend not to hear it.
I was assigned to a joint project preparing official communications around the case of a dual Iranian-American journalist named Roxana Saberi who had been arrested and was being held in Evin prison on espionage charges.
The charges were fabricated.