27-Jan-13: Tehran insider reveals what the Iranians really mean to do with their nuclear program

Heydari on Norwegian television

With all the speculation and accusations flying, what can we really expect the Iranians to do?

Since that is always going to be a forward-looking statement, no one can answer it with complete certainty. But for what it's worth, Israelis - who are preoccupied with what is happening behind the closed doors of the Islamist regime in Tehran - have now heard an authentic and unmasked Iranian answer that sounds substantive.

This stems from a television interview that went to air on Israel's Channel 2 last night (Friday) and is reported in an article ["Ex-Iranian diplomat warns Israel: If Iran gets the bomb, it will fire on you"] on the Times of Israel website today. The man doing the spilling is Tehran’s former consul in Oslo, Norway. His name is Mohammad Reza Heydari [Wikipedia]. He served Iran as its consul in Oslo until he resigned in 2010. Before that he served as an Iranian diplomatic official for two decades including stints in Georgia and Germany. These days, he lives in Oslo, where he and his family are protected by the Norwegian authorities.

Now that he has defected, Heydari says in the Friday night interview on Israeli TV that (a) the Islamic regime is ‘willing to destroy many countries’; (b) five other Iranian diplomats in Brussels, London, Geneva, Milan and Paris have defected recently and that he gradually began to realize that he was “not alone”; many other Foreign Ministry employees are only pretending to be religious and ideologically loyal to the regime; (c) his relatives still in Iran have asked him not to speak out publicly, but he feels the imperative to speak, and has no problem with the interview being screened in Israel; (d) if the Iranians get the bomb, they will use it against the Jewish state; (e) Iran uses diplomatic mail to import material relating to its nuclear program; (f) they are aiming to develop two or three bombs and see nuclear weapons as “insurance” to guarantee Iran's survival. 

To quote him on the nuclear weapons issue directly:

”If Iran is given more time, it will acquire the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb within a year... If Iran gets to the point where it has an atomic bomb, it will certainly use it, against Israel or any other [enemy] country... When they acquire a nuclear bomb, [others] will start to behave toward them as they do toward North Korea... As a matter of fact, the leading way of thinking in Iran is [devoted to] protecting their own security, and nobody else’s... They are busying themselves with ideological preparations for the arrival of the hidden Imam and are preparing the ground for that in a practical way. For this purpose, they are willing to spill much blood and destroy many countries.”

Ahmedinijad welcomes Venezuela's Chavez to Tehran [Image Source]

He had some first-hand observations about Iran's dealings with its terrorist clients, Hizbullah:

Heydari, who was previously stationed at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport as the representative of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said that while he worked there he noticed that Hezbollah groups would come to Iran, acquire knowledge and send it back to Lebanon, under the auspices of the Revolutionary Guards. He said that Hezbollah had contacts with terrorist outfits in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with which it had close ties. 

Heydari spoke of 

civilian airplanes from South America arriving with no passengers but with weaponry and material for the nuclear program [and] uranium purchased for and transported to Iran by Venezuela.

So what does he think needs to be done?

“If the US and Western countries believe Iran belongs to the Axis of Evil, as George Bush said, and that it aids international terrorists, they have to oust this regime,” said Heydari. He said that with strong enough sanctions, such as closing all Iranian embassies abroad and preventing Iranian ministers from leaving the country with the threat of their arrests, it would be possible “to help the Iranians.” In order to achieve results, he said, Iran must be treated “like the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

Lest you think these up-close comments by an Iranian insider are being ignored by the mainstream media, we have good news. Associated Press included a mention of them today in paragraph 8 of a report entitled "Iran Official: Attack On Syria Is Attack On Iran". 

Cynicism aside, it appears at this stage that the Heydari revelations are being treated as serious news in only one place on earth at the moment.