Self-Sacrifice

by Struan Stevenson

  Since Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office, the fascist clerical regime in Tehran, under the iron grasp of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been able to advance its goals by taking advantage of indecision and division among Western allies. Repression had been stepped up, with a rising number of executions, amputations, stoning to death of women and men, mass arrests and closure of media outlets. The increasing incidence of public hangings of political prisoners was designed to terrify and subjugate the restless Iranian people.

  On the nuclear issue, the regime had continued the relentless expansion of the project, with over 3,000 centrifuges operating in cascade to enrich weapons-grade uranium. The Mullahs argued that this enrichment process was purely for the generation of electricity, but there is only one nuclear power station in Iran, at Bushehr, and no additional ones were being built. The Bushehr plant had been constructed by the Russians and its fuel was supposed to be provided by them.

  In March 2004, the PMOI were able to pinpoint the precise location of the regime’s top-secret nuclear command and control centre at Lavizan, where work was well advanced on the manufacture of a neutron generator and a trigger for an atomic bomb. They also identified the extensive top-secret site at Khojir, southeast of Tehran, where nuclear warheads were being produced. In each case, the PMOI were not only able to provide the exact location and activity that was going on, but also even named the scientists and key personnel involved. All of this information was passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency for investigation.

  The West meanwhile pretended to back tough sanctions on Iran. Nevertheless, EU companies continued to supply sophisticated drilling equipment, and teams of experts to train the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in their operation. This equipment, ostensibly for use in innocent hydrology projects, was essential for the construction of the massive underground water and bunker infrastructure required for the Mullahs’ aggressive nuclear weapons programme. Other EU companies had lucrative contracts to supply the mobile construction-cranes routinely used to hang opponents of the regime in public squares across Iran.

  While we in the West filled our pockets with Iranian gold, the Mullahs’ regime was busily training and deploying hundreds of suicide bombers and insurgents in Iraq, in a bid to foment civil war and deliver that country into the clutches of Iran. The IRGC provided the sophisticated roadside bombs (EFPs) that were being used to kill and maim allied military personnel on a regular basis. They were also the puppet-masters of Hezbollah during the war with Israel in Lebanon and their support for the militant Palestinian group Hamas led to the rupture with Fatah and the partition of Palestine.

  The PMOI, due to its extensive network within Iran, began to expose the Mullahs’ meddling in Iraq. They tried to make the US understand that Iran was seeking to impose its hegemony in Iraq, but the Americans, in a continuation of their wrong-headed policy that led to the invasion of Iraq, kept the doors open for Iran. Between 2003 and 2011, the PMOI published over 4,500 information packs on this issue or gave them to relevant officials. One of these packs included a list of the names of 32,000 people who were on the payroll of the IRGC in Iraq, an amazing and top-secret document. This list was obtained from within the IRGC in Tehran, and at least one of the sources was executed for leaking the information. An interesting point was that many senior officials in Nouri al-Maliki’s government in Baghdad were on the list! Among other information, it included full names, bank account numbers, bank codes and amount of salary paid by the IRGC, for all of those listed.

  Iran, moreover, had repeatedly thumbed its nose at the West’s compromise offers, forcing Javier Solana, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, to concede in a speech in January 2005, ‘There has been no progress. Iran continues to ignore us.’ Even so, in the same debate, he and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the Austrian Commissioner for External Affairs, again and again emphasised the need for ongoing discussion, debate and negotiation. ‘People to people’ contact is what is needed, Mrs Ferrero-Waldner assured the European Parliament, outlining the EU’s strategy of opening our universities to Iranian students of nuclear physics and pouring Euros into a ‘poverty alleviation fund’! In a speech before a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg and in front of Commissioner Ferrero-Waldner, I said: ‘It almost beggars belief that EU taxpayers are helping to relieve poverty in one of the world’s richest oil-exporting nations, whose leaders have corruptly embezzled billions and who choose to squander their cash on building weapons of mass destruction. Worse still, it is astounding that the European Commission boasts that we are training Iranian students in nuclear technology!’

  In Washington, George W. Bush had placed the IRGC on the US list of terrorist organizations. This had, of course, infuriated Tehran and its apologists in the West, but it enabled the US to freeze the vast foreign financial assets of the IRGC and to target foreign companies doing business with them.

  The IRGC have always comprised the backbone of the Iranian regime’s system of oppression. In 2004 more than fifty former IRGC members sat in the 290-seat parliament, with others serving as mayors and provincial governors. Former IRGC commanders made up about two-thirds of the cabinet, including the president, Ahmadinejad, and the foreign minister, Monouchehr Mottaki, who was expelled as Ambassador to Turkey because of his involvement in assassination and torture. Former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and many other high-ranking officials were also ex-members of the IRGC.

  The IRGC also supplied Tehran’s key economic needs, enabling the fundamentalist regime to spread terrorism throughout the Middle East and even Europe. It controlled, and still controls, over 30 per cent of Iran’s non-oil exports and more than 57 per cent of its imports. Its commercial annual revenue in 2004 was around $4.8 billion.

  The Qods (Jerusalem) Force, the main terrorist apparatus of the IRGC, has to this day more than 21,000 Iranian members and tens of thousands of non-Iranian mercenaries, including in Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and many European countries. The Qods Force has dozens of garrisons across Iran in which it trains its non-Iranian operatives. In 2004 it boasted that at least 7,000 suicide bombers had enlisted for volunteer operations with the Qods Force; an IRGC general said they would be unleashed in waves across Israel and the Middle East if anyone attempted to attack Iran’s nuclear installations.

  When President George W. Bush unveiled his new strategy for dealing with the spiralling insurgency in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, he should have cast his eyes across the border to Iran. Repeated intelligence reports from the zone provided evidence of increasing Iranian subversion of Iraq. In fact, in 2004, the capture by the US military of Qods Force members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who had infiltrated Iraq, further exposed the widespread, covert activities of the Qods Force in that beleaguered country. US and UK intelligence now had extensive details, provided by the Iranian opposition, of infiltration routes, Iranian proxy contacts and networks of operatives who moved arms, personnel and money from Iran to Iraq. The Qods Force secretly trained, financed and armed an extensive network in Iraq. It had embarked on creating a new terrorist infrastructure, calling it ‘Hezbollah’ to mimic Lebanon’s Hezbollah. This Iraq network operated in Basra and Baghdad, and was in direct contact with the Qods Force and Hezbollah of Lebanon.

  According to these intelligence reports provided by the Iranian opposition, agents of the Iranian regime were routinely transferring money from Iran to Iraq for terrorist operations. After a Qods Force envoy collected the money in Ahwaz in Iran, he was escorted by the Iranian regime’s official security force to the Shalamche border crossing between Iran and Iraq, where he was handed over to Qods Force agents in Iraq. These agents would escort him to Najaf. In addition, the Qods Force used its affiliate currency exchange centres to send money to its front institutions and the new terror network directly from Qom in Iran to Najaf in Iraq. The Qods Force also set up a front organization called ‘HQ for Recons
truction of Iraq’s Holy Sites’, which had been smuggling arms and ammunition to Iraq disguised as containers intended to rebuild holy Shiite shrines.

  Often these shipments would include sophisticated bombs used for attacking allied patrols. These so-called Improvised Explosive Devices or IEDs were not being manufactured in basements in Iraq, as was widely believed at the time, but in industrial complexes in the Lavizan neighbourhood of northern Tehran. Military sources confirmed that Iranian ordnance factories were producing an advanced form of IED, called Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFPs), which could penetrate thicker armour, were more difficult to detect, and as a result were far more lethal. There is little doubt that Iran had become the primary killer of US and UK forces in Iraq at that time, as the Iraqi insurgency spiralled. Just as President Bush prepared his plan to stabilize Iraq, Tehran continued to foment instability.

  It was Leon Trotsky who said: ‘It is not the people who vote that count, but the people who count the votes.’ That was certainly true in the Iranian presidential elections of June 2009. No one could believe the election results or the figures the regime was claiming for voter turnout. The PMOI had undercover observers at 25,000 of the 40,000 polling stations throughout the country. They reported that turnout was extremely low. Their final estimate put overall turnout at around 15%. In other words, fewer than 8 million Iranians voted. The Mullahs, on the direct instructions of supreme leader Ali Khamenei, in a press release that was inadvertently leaked the day before the elections took place, announced that over 40 million people had cast their votes, with the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad winning by a landslide! Indeed such was the farcical nature of the Mullahs’ efforts to rig the election, that Ahmadinejad won a huge majority even in the villages and districts of his main opponents.

  This massive electoral fraud ignited a volcanic reaction across Iran. Hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets demanding an end to the Mullahs’ theocratic dictatorship. Their courageous resistance against their fundamentalist rulers showed the free world that the regime did not speak for the Iranian population. The Mullahs ordered a brutal crackdown, with the expulsion of foreign journalists, the suspension of mobile phone and Internet networks, dawn raids on homes and universities and mass arrests.

  The protestors, like the vast majority of Iranians, were opposed to the clerical regime in its entirety and their courageous demonstrations showed the will of Iranian society to uproot the religious dictatorship and establish freedom and democracy. Their slogans denounced the Khamenei dictatorship and supported democracy and freedom. The chants in the street were: ‘Death to the dictator’ and ‘Iranians do not accept this disgrace’. The bulk of the protestors were young men and women, but they were not only students; they came from all walks of life.

  The protests quickly grew, from objections to Ahmadinejad’s rigged re-election, to wider protests about the oppression and corruption of the clerical regime. But as always the protestors paid a heavy price for their courage. Dozens were killed by the regime’s storm-troopers, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their handsomely rewarded Basij paramilitary thugs.

  This was the moment the West could have intervened. The EU and US could have poured in support for the popular uprising, helping the ordinary citizens of Iran to overthrow their tyrannical rulers and restore democracy. Typically, the West did nothing. Iran rounded up thousands of suspected protestors in raids across the country and shipped them off to be tortured and executed, while the West watched in horror, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

  12

  Interviews with Political Prisoners Tirana, Albania, May 2014

  Abdal Nasser

  ‘My name is Abdal Nasser. I was also in this prison in the cell right next to Hossein (Ebrahimi) [See chapter 10], although I didn’t know it at the time. I hadn’t seen daylight for months. I didn’t see my mother and sister for three years. When I was teaching Hossein how to communicate through Morse I got angry and I would kick the wall. He was so difficult to teach. Once I was singing and asking what is your name? The guard came in and said, what are you doing, and I said, I am talking to God! And the prison guard told me he heard me say the name Hossein. I said that was Imam Hossein I was praying to! He said you have gone mad . . . and left me!

  I was so alone and isolated that sometimes I preferred to be beaten up so I had some contact with another human being, even if it was only a sadistic guard. Finally one day Hossein managed to talk to me using Morse code and asked what is your name? I told him a nickname. We agreed to meet each other whenever it became possible. We fabricated a story in which I claimed I had stomach ache and he said he had a toothache, which got us out of our cells. We were forbidden from talking or making any physical contact with each other, of course, because they even thought we could communicate using Morse by tapping on each other’s bodies.

  One day it was very cold and I was hungry. I slept and dreamt that I had gone home and that my Mum was making my favourite kebabs. She shed tears of joy and I was eating all these kebabs and I was so happy that I had eaten my first full meal after three years. I woke up realising it was just a dream, so I tried to go back to sleep and continue with this sweet dream.

  Soon I was separated from Hossein and we said goodbye to each other through Morse code. I was released from prison and escaped to Iraq where I joined the resistance. Many years later, by sheer accident we came across each other again. I was not sure if it was really him, but then we used Morse to say hello and we found each other again!

  I was in prison for a total of six years despite being sentenced to only 20 months initially. I was kept there for five extra years because they wanted to break me down.’

  13

  Amman

  Following my election to the European Parliament in June 2009, I had been appointed as President of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq. This was a new delegation, and when the leader of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group approached me initially, he offered me the choice of chairing either the Iraq Delegation or the Canada Delegation. I told him that Canada was a lovely country that I had enjoyed visiting previously, but chairing such a delegation would be less challenging and less rewarding than taking on the more onerous task of Iraq. I duly found myself presiding over the first meeting of the new delegation, to which the Iraqi Ambassador to the EU had also been invited. Pleasantries were exchanged all round, and I pledged to do my best to improve relations between the EU and Iraq.

  On Monday 26 October 2009 I set off to Jordan, where I had arranged a series of high-level meetings in Amman with the Foreign Minister, the Director for European Affairs in the Foreign Ministry, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Minister for Media and Communications. I had also arranged for key political leaders from Iraq to travel to Amman to brief me on the current escalating insurgency inside Iraq.

  My first meeting in Amman was with a group of Iraqis representing the National Dialogue Front, a secular parliamentary group. There had been a horrific bomb outrage just on the edge of the Green Zone in Baghdad the previous day, killing 150 people and wounding over 500. They told me that this outrage was certainly politically motivated and a reaction to the formation of the new coalitions in readiness for the forthcoming general election in January 2010. Although it was quickly blamed on Sunni insurgents, such sophisticated explosive devices as were used in the attack could only have been smuggled into this high security zone with the knowledge and connivance of the Iranian Qods Force that roamed throughout Baghdad with impunity, as they told me. The massacre was almost certainly motivated by Iran and aimed at sending a warning to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he should re-join the pro-Iranian Shiite coalition with Hakim, Badr and Muqtada al-Sadr, in order to secure power again following the election.

  They told me that current tactics used by the pro-Iranian factions were to threaten people not to vote in the elections and, through fear and intimidation, dramatically to reduce the number of peop
le who would participate. This would then leave hundreds of thousands of blank ballot papers that could be falsified. All civil servants and police and military personnel were being ordered to vote for the governing Shiite parties, they informed me.

  On the question of Iranian meddling in Iraq, they were adamant that Iranian infiltration to the very top of government had taken place to an unprecedented extent. Two of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s senior staff were Iranian. His private jet and the entire crew were supplied by Iran. They also pointed out that many government ministers in Iraq had dual nationality with other countries, in order that if any were accused of corruption they could quickly escape arrest and flee from Iraq.

  Later that morning I met with Dr Nabil al-Sharif, Minister of State for Media Affairs and Communications, and Ahmad S. al-Hassan, Director of European Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Dr Sharif said that Jordan had gone out of its way to support Iraq. King Abdullah was the only Arab leader so far to have visited Iraq since the war. As far as the forthcoming Iraqi elections were concerned, Dr Sharif said that it was essential that all of the political factions were included in the political process. No one must feel left out.

  I raised the question of Camp Ashraf with the ministers and referred to the July 2009 massacre (see Chapter 15). I said that there was a new threat from Maliki to displace the 3,400 refugees to the desert in southern Iraq, and that this would create the conditions for another massacre. Mr Hassan suggested that perhaps I could resolve the situation by offering all 3,400 PMOI refugees visas to come to live in Scotland! I answered that I would if I could.