Defector: Iran prez picked by Ayatollah, not vote

WND EXCLUSIVE

Ex-Revolutionary Guard intelligence analyst says West has been duped

Published: 16 hours ago

 

Reza Kahlili, author of the award-winning book "A Time to Betray," served in CIA Directorate of Operations, as a spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, counterterrorism expert; currently serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory board to Congress and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI). He regularly appears in national and international media as an expert on Iran and counterterrorism in the Middle East.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally selected Hassan Rouhani to win Friday’s presidential election even before he received the majority of the votes cast, according to a former Revolutionary Guard intelligence analyst who has defected from Iran.

Rouhani replaces Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose fraudulent election in 2009 touched off rioting by millions of Iranians. Thousands of the protesters were arrested, with many tortured, raped or executed. Rouhani, who is well-versed in deceiving the West over Iran’s nuclear program, also has blood on his hands from previous regime crackdowns.

The defected intelligence officer, who had called the selection of Rouhani as the next president one week before the election, said the regime constantly creates a phony image of division within its political system between so-called conservatives and moderates. The aim of tapping the perceived moderate Rouhani as the winner is to deceive the West yet again by creating new hope that there could be meaningful negotiations over Iran’s illicit nuclear program, he said, while buying even more time to develop nuclear weapons and thereby becoming untouchable by the West.

That scenario includes the easing of international sanctions, which have caused great economic hardship in the country.

The source claims in reality there is no division within the clerical establishment that rules Iran when it comes to the regime’s survival.
The president-elect, in fact, is a cleric who has spoken out against popular uprisings that threatened the regime’s grip on the country.

Rouhani had called the 2009 protesters “thugs” and said, “If the regime had not acted, the revolutionary forces (plainclothes police) would have put the protesters in their place.”

He made a similar statement about the 1999 student uprising: “These students are so despised and inferior that they could not be labeled as a movement to change the regime. If the officials had not prohibited (the students from rioting), our people would have cut them in pieces.”

Hassan Rouhani, a Shiite mujtahid, an Islamic scholar, attended religious seminaries in the city of Qom, the hotbed of radical clerics. He has served the Islamic Republic at the highest levels since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, among them as the deputy speaker of Parliament, the head of the Executive Committee of the High Council for War Support during the Iran-Iraq War, the deputy to the second-in-command of Iran’s joint chiefs of staff, a member of the Expediency Council, a member of the Assembly of Experts (the body that chooses the supreme leader), a former nuclear negotiator and, most importantly, the representative of the supreme leader to the Supreme National Security Council (1989 to present).

Rouhani, as the head of the High Council for War Support, was deeply involved with the regime’s effort to eliminate the opposition and the 1988 mass execution of thousands of political prisoners as ordered by the then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The president-elect also participated in the regime’s deceitful policies. He was put in charge of Iran’s nuclear team in 2003 by order of the so-called moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, and the supreme leader, Khamenei. He succeeded in preventing further U.N. resolutions by agreeing to suspend parts of Iran’s nuclear activity, but, as the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated, Iran’s nuclear program never truly stopped.

Hassan Rouhani (in white turban) during prayers, behind the founder of the Islamic Revolution, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

In 2008, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, the former parliamentary speaker and secretary of the Iranian government during Khatami’s term, revealed that while Khatami was president and through Rouhani’s efforts, “We had an agreement for the suspension of enrichment, but we were importing all the necessary parts for our nuclear activity. We were conducting our policies on two fronts: one to continue negotiations openly and keep the Americans away from such negotiations, and the other to continue our nuclear activities in secret.”

The good cop/bad cop show has been masterfully played by the regime for the past 33 years, and every time the West has bought it, said the former intelligence officer, who has defected to a Scandinavian country.

Interestingly, in 2009 the regime announced the result of the election only hours after 39 million votes were cast, but it took the regime one day to announce the 2013 winner of the presidential election with a little over 35 million valid votes.

The former officer told WND that the actual votes cast this year were much lower than what the regime had announced, despite the fact that Rouhani presented himself to the voters as a moderate in order to get the crowds out. The regime days before the election even spread a rumor that Rouhani’s qualification could be reviewed and he might be barred from the election, thus further painting him as a figure opposed to the regime and getting more people to vote.

An indication that Rouhani is not regarded as a moderate came in the form of a congratulatory note that the leader of the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, sent to the president-elect.

“Hezbollah, along with all the mujahideen in this country of resistance, congratulate you … for aptly earning the big trust of the great people,” Nasrallah said in the cable, Naharnet reported.

The regime enforced strict censorship on both domestic and international media on their coverage of the election, with many major media barred from traveling to Iran.
America must be warned, the former intelligence officer said, that “the regime will have its ballistic missiles armed with nuclear bombs before the next Iranian calendar year (March 21, 2014), at which point it will be too late to stop the madmen in Tehran.”