Khamenei's Governance Record Through Others' Eyes, Part 4

The conversation

An English translation of the interview, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

1:01 Oral History: The Governance Record of Ali Khamenei from the Perspective of Others. This episode, with Mohsen Sazegara: Khamenei's rise to power and his impact on Iran's position in the region and the international system. Part Four. In this part, we have a very important figure from both before and after the Revolution of '57 [1979]. Assuming

1:54 that future generations will watch this interview, and although he is a well-known figure whose life needs no retelling, I will give a brief account of his background. Mohsen Sazegara, born in 1334 [1955], is an Iranian political activist, journalist and researcher whose professional and political life has seen striking changes and ups and downs: from the original core of the founders of the Islamic Republic to his present opposition to that same system. As the events of the '57 Revolution reached their peak, Sazegara went to France and joined Ruhollah Khomeini's entourage at Neauphle-le-Château. He took on responsibility

2:42 for translating Khomeini's interviews and statements, and returned to Iran with Ruhollah Khomeini on the flight of 12 Bahman 1357 [February 1, 1979]. After the victory of the revolution he played a role in founding the IRGC and also held executive posts. Among his other managerial positions in the 1360s [1980s] were head of the radio, political deputy in the office of the then prime minister Mohammad-Ali Rajai, head of the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization, and deputy head of the Plan and Budget Organization. From the late '60s [late 1980s], after the end of the war and the death of Ruhollah Khomeini, he distanced himself from the power structure. After Mohammad Khatami's victory in the presidential election of 1376 [1997],

3:33 he became one of the main figures of the reformist press. He played a role in publishing reformist newspapers such as Jameeh, Tous and Golestan-e Iran. Gradually moving beyond reformism, he came to believe that reform within the framework of the Islamic Republic's constitution was impossible, and he proposed holding a referendum on a new constitution. In 1380 [2001] he registered as a candidate in the presidential election and was disqualified by the Guardian Council. In 1382 [2003], following the student protests, he was first arrested by the Ministry of Intelligence. After his release he was arrested again, this time by the IRGC Intelligence Organization, and during this period he went on a long hunger strike,

4:24 which drew a great deal of international attention. After being released on bail, he left Iran for medical treatment, and the Revolutionary Court sentenced him in absentia to 7 years in prison. After leaving Iran, Sazegara worked as a researcher and expert at a number of universities and institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Washington and the George W. Bush Institute. In later years, as a political analyst and expert in diaspora media, he critiqued and examined the political structure of the Islamic Republic, Iran's internal developments, and especially the influence of Ali Khamenei's leadership on conditions in Iran. With this introduction it becomes clear that today we are the guests of someone who knows the Islamic Republic from

5:16 the inside and also knows well the changes this system has gone through. Hence, an examination of Ali Khamenei's 37-year record in the words of Mohsen Sazegara will be a valuable resource for future generations. I will begin with this question: Mr. Sazegara, how do you assess Ali Khamenei's role in Iran's position today? Please bear in mind that this oral history, which I am recording and compiling from prominent figures, is in effect a way of setting Khamenei's 37 years of leadership alongside the 37 years of rule of

6:08 Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. History has more or less reached its judgment about Mohammad Reza Shah. There is a clear picture, and the "what ifs" have been set aside: those who support him support him, and those who oppose him oppose him. But about Khamenei this judgment has not yet been made. His followers call him "the martyred Imam"; his enemies call him the destroyer of Iran. Given your background, having come from the heart of the Islamic Revolution and now living abroad, driven out of Iran, how do you see Ali Khamenei's role in Iran's position today, in the region and in the world? [Sazegara:] My greetings and respects to you, Dr.

6:57 Alizadeh, and to all the viewers of this program, now or perhaps in times when we too are no longer in this world. First, let me say that a historical judgment about Mr. Khamenei's 37 years in power will naturally take years. As the historian Abbas Eghbal Ashtiani said, the historian turns to any event 50 years after it happens. The reason is clear: the documents, the archives of the foreign ministries of various countries, intelligence agencies, memoirs,

7:48 and the documents of the Iranian government itself, which will probably come to light after this regime falls, all have to be published so that the future historian can put them together and make a judgment. From this perspective, Khamenei has only just entered history, and an accurate historical judgment will be possible 50 years from now. What I want to say is my own personal judgment. Naturally it is colored by my opinions, and also by memories I personally have or events I witnessed. I will try to

8:38 keep these separate. First let me give my overall judgment of Mr. Khamenei, and then I'll go into the details. In my view, 37 years in power is enough time for someone who, under the country's constitution, holds boundless powers. The institution of the absolute guardianship of the jurist was added to the constitution in 1368 [1989], and under that constitution he had unlimited authority. That is enough time to raise a country to the highest heavens, make it prosperous and develop it, or to drive it into the ground.

9:30 The best judgment of any ruler is his performance. After 37 years, there has been enough time for you to come and say: well, what has this man done? Let me remind you that you referred to Mohammad Reza Shah's 37-year reign. As it happens, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar also reigned for 37 years. Or kings like Shah Abbas or Shah Tahmasp of the Safavids, or, say, Anushirvan before Islam. We also had non-kings who ruled Iran for several decades, and they can all be put on the scales. But let's step outside Iran. In today's world, look at China.

10:21 Roughly at the same time as the Islamic Revolution in Iran, its victory and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, China entered a phase in which it took a path away from Mao Zedong's bizarre communism and moved forward, especially after a decade of unrest and so on. In China too, over exactly the same 37 years as Mr. Khamenei's rule, look how far China has come. Look how its rulers transformed a country. Or, without going far, look at our neighbors, the countries along the Persian Gulf, which have now become a dream for Iranians,

11:11 and at what they have accomplished, if we weigh their rulers, or those of other countries. So in my view, comparison is the first way to put Mr. Khamenei's record on the scales. If the country today has reached this state, this bankruptcy and misery, in the year 1404, excuse me, 1405, and 2026, it can be said decisively that it is the result of Mr. Khamenei's rule. If it is good, his supporters should come and prove it is good, and if it is bad,

12:02 it can be shown that it is bad. In any case, its good and bad rest, more than on anyone else, on Mr. Khamenei personally, who over 37 years in power brought the country to this state. If I want to categorize what he has done, which in my view has created a catastrophe: in my view, not only in our contemporary history, but even if we search our ancient history, we may never have had a king as bad as Khamenei. We had kings who were bloodthirsty and murderous. We had kings who were accursed and seized people's property. We had kings

12:55 who were warmongers. We had all kinds of people. But someone who had the whole collection of vices, that we really had very rarely. That is, someone who is extremely self-regarding, who has a crooked view of the world, who has political astigmatism, who is vengeful, who kills people, who represses thousands upon thousands, who wants to choke off people's air, who takes away freedoms, who lays hands on people's property, on people's lives, on their honor, on their reputation, on

13:43 their livelihoods. All of that in one person. As a student of history, I want to say this has few precedents among the rulers of our long history. To support this claim, I have thought a bit about what Mr. Khamenei has done. If we want to categorize it, six or seven main axes come to mind, although these six or seven are not the whole of Khamenei's record. He can be looked at from many, many other angles. These six or seven are what occurred to me. The first point is that

14:33 when he became Leader... I'm quoting Mr. Bahman Mahmoudpour. Before the revolution he was a member of the Islamic Association of Students in England. After the revolution he became a seminary student and then a cleric, and he also had relations with the Office of the Leader after Khamenei became Leader. He held some representative role because he knew English, for example, and he came and went there. I have no idea where Mr. Mahmoudpour is now or what he does, or even whether he's alive or dead, but I quote him: six months after Mr. Khamenei became Leader, he went to see him, and Khamenei told him, "I have read this constitution

15:22 carefully, and I know well what powers I have. I will not step back even one centimeter from these powers," or maybe he said "one span." So the first point is this. When they told him in the Assembly of Experts that he had become Leader, he recited that part of the Quranic verse, "Take the Book with strength," from Surah Maryam, addressed to the prophet Yahya, and so on. He was saying, "Now I will rule in my own way and take hold of it with strength." And that is what he did. He not only held on tightly to the absolute guardianship of the jurist,

16:13 gripping it with both hands, he also added ten more things on top of it. And since he was a micromanager, meaning he liked to interfere in every detail, there is a remark attributed to him that "Khomeini was in fact a seated Imam; I am a standing Imam," implying that he was active and interfered in affairs. So he began interfering in all kinds of details, using the boundless powers he had under the law, and beyond those powers he overreached and absorbed a series of other things for himself.

17:02 He interfered in everything, right down to the members of the theater review board. I heard this from Mr. Larijani himself when he was Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance. We were at university together as students; he studied mathematics and I studied mechanical engineering. At the time I was publishing the Press Cooperative's newspaper and the Aineh magazines. They had shut down Aineh-ye Andisheh and Aineh-ye Eqtesad, two of the monthlies we published. I went to see Mr. Larijani and said, "The weekly I publish has a newspaper license. Give me your approval so I can publish it as a daily newspaper." At the time I had calculated that if I borrowed, say, 15 million tomans, I could

17:51 start a newspaper. Mr. Ali Larijani closed the door of the room and said, "I'm not saying this as Minister of Guidance to the managing director of the Press Cooperative and license holder of the Aineh publications, which is you. I'm saying it as Ali to Mohsen. I come and go at the Office of the Leader, and Mr. Khamenei does not view you favorably at all. If you start a newspaper, they'll shut it down, and then you'll be left with the debt." I was surprised and asked, "Does he interfere in such things?" Ali said, "When I was about to become Minister of Guidance, he called me in, sat me down knee to knee with him and said: 'Ali Agha, nobody recommended you. I

18:40 am appointing you Minister of Guidance.' In other words, I owe him, and I have to report to him. 'Not in general terms. I want reports on the details. Tell our office now: do you want one day a week, two days a week, or one day every two weeks? I'll set a regular time, and you come here and report.'" Then Mr. Larijani said that even for the members of the theater review board, which is something like a five-person panel that reads plays, issues permits, and censors them if they object, the Agha personally, after I gave him the list, said this person should be on it, that one shouldn't, or for example...

19:28 [Host:] What year was this meeting of yours with Ali Larijani? I mean, which period? [Sazegara:] Yes, yes, it was the period when I was publishing the Aineh publications, during Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani's presidency. Mr. Khamenei had harassed Mr. Khatami so much that he was removed, and then there was talk of Mr. Kamal Kharrazi, who had been head of the news agency, becoming Minister of Guidance. From the Office they told Kamal Kharrazi, "Before you're introduced to the Majlis, you have to come here; the Agha wants to see you." Kharrazi knew what they were after. He was the representative, excuse me, at that time he was Iran's representative at the

20:16 United Nations. He got up that very night and went back to New York, and simply gave up on becoming Minister of Guidance. But Larijani, whose last post before that had been head of state broadcasting [IRIB], accepted and became Minister of Guidance. I think... [aside] excuse me, adjust your headphones a little; sorry, I'll edit this out later. Mr. Larijani in fact became head of state broadcasting twice. Once he came in during Mr. Rajai's period and then handed over to Mohammad Hashemi and so on. After that, since he had been Minister of Guidance for a while after Mr. Khatami, he went back to state broadcasting.

21:05 What I want to say is this. From my own experience in prison, and that of others like me, Mr. Khamenei... For example, I heard from Mr. Kadivar, who said, "I came to the conclusion in prison that Mr. Khamenei personally reads the interrogations of people like us." He gives his opinion on what should be extracted from a given person, like an intelligence officer. In fact the interrogators are connected to the Office and report to it, either directly or through someone in charge of them. He personally gives his opinion even on furloughs for important political prisoners, or gives the interrogators a scenario, so to speak: interrogate this

21:55 person this way, pin this charge on him, for example. My point is that he was the kind of manager who liked to interfere in every matter. Now go from there to the areas he was especially interested in, like military and intelligence matters. He looked at every detail and every ins and outs. They wiretapped a number of people in the country; it was well known that he himself listened in on the country's officials. Yet he took responsibility for nothing. From this angle, as someone with management experience, I say he was a cowardly manager. Look, they make you a manager somewhere

22:47 so that you make decisions, and more important than making decisions is accepting their consequences. Every decision has consequences, good or bad, and a manager must have the courage to decide and, once he has decided, stand by the good and the bad and take responsibility. In his 37 years running the country, Mr. Khamenei held on to the absolute guardianship of the jurist with both hands. He added a series of things to it and stripped people of all their rights. Of course, the law had given him this authority. He added six more on top, which I will describe. His style of management was to interfere in every detail; as an example, people have related this memory.

23:35 And he took responsibility for nothing. For example, take the JCPOA. We know this because Ali Larijani once let it slip: he said that a total of 17 meetings were held in Mr. Khamenei's presence during the JCPOA negotiations and that he was aware of that document line by line. But he did not accept responsibility at all, and afterwards he put it on the government. He was in the habit of working through other people's gloves, sitting behind the scenes and saying, "I had said so too." If something turned out well, he would say "I did it"; if it went badly, he shirked responsibility. That is the first point: a manager who had boundless powers, who on top of that

24:26 acquired more for himself, who interfered in every detail, who imposed various policies, which I'll come to, and who took responsibility for nothing, preferring to remain, so to speak, untouchable. The second point I want to make about his management concerns his performance during Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani's presidency. Well, he became Leader and Hashemi became president. Let me digress here: over Mr. Khomeini's body, that night at 10 p.m.,

25:16 apparently the decision of the heads of the three branches at that time plus Ahmad Agha, that is, Khamenei, Hashemi, Ardebili and Ahmad Agha, was to form a Leadership Council. The first constitution included a leadership council; it said "the Leader or the Leadership Council." In the amended constitution, a leadership council exists only for a 40-day [interim] period until a new Leader is chosen; leadership is entirely individual. But the option of a leadership council existed in the Islamic Republic's first constitution. The decision there was that Mr. Khamenei, the speaker of the Majlis, and Ardebili, who headed the judiciary, would be on it. Hashemi also wanted to become president, and he would, since the post of prime minister had been abolished. And probably

26:07 they would bring in Ahmad Agha as the Imam's legacy, plus one of the senior marjas still alive, say Mr. Golpayegani or Mr. Najafi Marashi, as a member of the council. Naturally the majority would be theirs, and they would run the country. But when they went to the Assembly of Experts after Khomeini's death, during that week when the country was shut down, they saw it would not get the votes. The members of the Assembly, either because of their juristic belief that the Leader is an individual, that they see the Imam that way according to Shia beliefs, or because they feared that the country would fall apart amid disputes among these men, would not vote for a leadership council. They wanted one person. That is when

26:59 they fabricated it. Mr. Ahmad Agha Khomeini came forward and told the story that one night we were sitting with Mr. Khomeini, Mr. Khamenei was returning from a trip and it was being shown on television, and Khomeini said he would be very good for the leadership, and so on. This while the ink on Khomeini's will had not yet dried, in which he had written that after I die, anything attributed to me must either be a written document I signed myself or a video, audio or tape in which I can be seen. Well, Ahmad Agha told this story, Hashemi backed him up, and they made Khamenei Leader.

27:49 As for this Leader, the first thing... Let me again digress into memories, quoting someone, one of our friends who might not want me to mention his name. He has known Khamenei since perhaps 20 or 30 years before the revolution, from his youth; he associated with him and knew him. He said that Mr. Khamenei had been a planner since his youth. He was a seminarian who at the start of each year would write out his plan for the year and break it down by month and week. Each week he would write down what he had to do that week, and at the end of the week

28:37 he would take stock and tick off which tasks he had done and which he hadn't. In that sense he was personally an orderly man. When he became Leader, looking back now, in my view he had a complete plan to seize power, the very "take the Book with strength," to monopolize power. What did he do? Some of this I heard from Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani himself. The first thing he did: in Mr. Khomeini's time, Hashemi had in fact been deputy commander-in-chief. Hashemi ran the war while he was speaker of the Majlis.

29:26 Khamenei told Hashemi, "You know that in my youth I was interested in military matters. I won't delegate this to you anymore; I'll handle it myself." As a result, he delegated management of the country's military organizations, the army, the IRGC and the police, which fell under the constitution, to no one; he did it himself. And in doing so, he immediately appointed the commanders he wanted, so that these military forces would be in his hands. Then he moved on to the money of the Mostazafan Foundation, whose companies had been nationalized and which, under the statute

30:16 that had been written, were at the Leader's disposal. The Leader was, so to speak, the chairman of its general assembly. Mr. Khomeini had delegated this to the government, Mr. Mousavi's government, and Mr. Mousavi had appointed Mr. Mazaheri, the engineer, if I'm not mistaken, as head of the foundation. They had deputies and ran the foundation in coordination with the government. Mr. Khamenei was supposed, as in Mr. Khomeini's time, to give management of the foundation to the head of government, who was now Hashemi. Hashemi, as it happens, had talked with Mr. Mousavi about Mousavi, who was no longer prime minister, becoming head of the foundation, and Mousavi had even chosen his deputies

31:05 to go in and run the foundation. One of our friends, who was a deputy at the Mostazafan Foundation at the time, related this: "We were sitting in our office on the fifth floor of the foundation building on Keshavarz Boulevard when suddenly we saw Mohsen Rafiqdoost burst in with ten or twelve IRGC men. We thought a coup had happened, the way IRGC men poured into the foundation's office." Mr. Mohsen Rafiqdoost showed a decree and said, "I was in the car," back then there were car phones, not mobile phones, "I was in the car and they called me from the Office and said, 'Go

31:54 to the foundation; your decree is coming right behind you by telegram.'" And they had sent his decree to the foundation's office. In this way he presented Hashemi with a fait accompli, and Mr. Khamenei took the foundation, which is where the money was, into his own hands. Then he went after propaganda: the Kayhan and Ettela'at newspapers and radio and television, which were under the Leader's control. I'll come to that too. But on money, the second axis I want to mention in his record is that he was not content with the Mostazafan Foundation. He took the Imam's eight-article decree, which was originally about screening [for government posts] and such,

32:45 but had one article saying that the government should take charge of ownerless property and so on. He created a headquarters called the Headquarters for Executing the Imam's Order [Setad], through which, under his own supervision and in addition to the Mostazafan Foundation, he began laying hands on people's property. Several years ago, maybe nearly a decade ago, Reuters prepared a report on this Headquarters for Executing the Imam's Order, whose English acronym is EIKO, an unfitting name for a place that seizes people's property. Reuters said at the time that it had seized nearly 50,000 properties belonging to people. And it didn't stop there.

33:37 It wasn't only that he laid hands on people's property. Whenever they want to seize and confiscate the property of any dissident, like myself, and I am living proof, Setad steps forward and its representative comes and takes a seat. This continued, and Setad moved into many executive sectors of the country: oil projects, construction, road-building. And now, as we speak in 1405, it has become perhaps the largest cartel and trust in the country. So Mr. Khamenei

34:29 not only reached his own hand into people's property, stripped them of ownership, and entered the country's economy through institutions like Setad and the Mostazafan Foundation; he also gave a free hand to others, including the IRGC. In that same period of Mr. Hashemi, and Mr. Hashemi is also to blame for this, after the war Mr. Khamenei agreed and allowed the IRGC to enter the country's reconstruction, on the grounds that it had engineering equipment from the war, bulldozers, loaders and so on. A much simpler solution would have been that

35:19 the IRGC's engineering capabilities that were military engineering would stay, and the surplus they wanted to dispose of could have been put into an equipment pool under the Plan Organization, where contractors could go and rent it. There was no need for the IRGC itself to engage in economic activity. As Mr. Rouhani put it, they took it from the government without guns and gave it to the government with guns. But he allowed the IRGC to enter economic activity. And here too he didn't stop. As Saadi said, "If the king eats a single apple from a subject's orchard, his servants will pull the tree up by the roots." He didn't just eat one apple, one tree, of the people's and the public treasury; he handed over the whole

36:07 orchard to be devoured. As a result, his cronies as well, anyone who got connected to and close to this Office, whether in the IRGC or outside it, at Setad, at the Foundation, or at various other organizations, went into economic activity. In this way he created a kleptocracy, a government ruled by thieves. And he brought Ahmadinejad to power as head of government, because they rigged even Ahmadinejad's first election, and coming from the mayoralty he was just the right man for the IRGC, the Office, and

36:57 He had opened the way for these people in the municipal projects so that they could come into the country's affairs. When he became president, he in effect removed from the path all the control mechanisms of the government, the structure the state had, and he came in. As someone put it, in the Ahmadinejad era the first thing that happened was that they captured the Ministry of Oil. They took over the Ministry of Oil, and from there moved into all sorts of business. So my second point is that Mr. Khamenei, by reaching out his hand to the people's property and

37:48 violating the people's ownership, and by opening up economic activity backed by the power he had, the absolute power he had over affairs, laid the cornerstone of a system. That is, the Islamic Republic turned completely into a kleptocracy. Besides Khamenei himself, who was at the top of power, and the Office of the Leader, which also has many organs devoted to these activities, we in Iran now have an oligarchy. We have ended up with a group of people of whom, according to the Ministry of Intelligence a few years ago — I saw it quoted from a confidential Ministry of Intelligence report — almost the entire

38:40 Iranian economy is under the control of 140 mafia gangs, and at the head of each of these gangs sits an Al Capone, who has his gang, his people, his operations. Sometimes they compete with one another. If, today, in the year 1405, someone wants to understand many of the country's political fights, they have to look behind them to see which mafia gang's interests have come into conflict with whose, or where they have formed coalitions, because they want to influence everything. And the big Al Capone, the big Godfather, made himself the final arbiter who sits up there and keeps a balance among them. So,

39:32 we also remember that when Mr. Mousavi, the engineer, came and ran as a candidate in Mr. Ahmadinejad's second round, and the people went and voted to make Mousavi president — because whatever anyone thinks of Mousavi, whether they agree or disagree with him and his beliefs, one thing can be said about him: he is an honorable, decent and clean man, a clean man who was not a thief. So the thieving operation that had been set up was not prepared to let a clean person come and be at the head of the government. They beat people, they killed people who protested, saying, "Sir, we voted, where is our vote?" And they kept Ahmadinejad, who later, in the second term, ended up fighting with Khamenei himself too. But this setup, this kleptocracy, in fact took shape slowly from the beginning of his leadership,

40:26 but from the Ahmadinejad era onward, at great speed, the country reached this state where it became a thieves' bazaar. The third point I can make about his record was bringing the IRGC into politics and repression. The IRGC, according to its original definition, was supposed to be a popular army organization, something like, say, the US National Guard, or a people's army — its resemblance to, say, the Swiss army or the Israeli army is less, yes — and in fact it was supposed to be a small organization with which the people, the general public, could cooperate in times of danger to the country,

41:14 and it was in fact to be of the people, for the people, by the people. Well, how this IRGC began to deviate in that very first decade is a separate story, and its entry into the economy, which I mentioned, can be called a second deviation. But its third deviation came during the period of the reform movement in Iran, during Mr. Khatami's presidency. When Mr. Khamenei saw that he had no place among the intellectuals, nor among the clergy, nor among the masses, who had gone and voted for Khatami against his wishes and were demanding reforms and so on, he came and brought the IRGC into politics like his own political party. And Mr. Khomeini's words,

42:04 which were still on the walls all over the city, that the military must not enter politics — they explained them away and wriggled out from under them. He made the IRGC his own political party and made the Basij like his own Communist Youth League, and with their help they set up political currents, so to speak, began interfering in elections, recruiting and enlisting people to come into politics. Ambitious and sometimes corrupt IRGC commanders became people who came out and made political statements. For instance, with the newspaper Jameh that we were publishing, Mr. Rahim Safavi gave a speech —

42:52 he was the IRGC commander — and threatened us: we'll arrest you, we'll lock you up, we'll kill you like, I don't know, cockroaches. Of course, I wrote a sharp reply to him in Jameh: by what right do you enter politics, what business is it of yours? You have a military job. Anyway, he didn't stop at that. He in effect turned the IRGC into the backbone holding up his own regime and his own person, and he replaced its commitment to the people and the country with a commitment to himself, to his own person. He tried to do the same with the army, and with the police, but with the IRGC he also expanded its instruments of repression. That is, according to the definitions that the regime's

43:45 repression machine now has, the IRGC became — if the people's protests become wider than a certain level, reach stage three or four, those four stages they designed for confronting the people's protests — the IRGC takes command. They have headquarters like Sarallah in Tehran and so on, and the security headquarters and so on. They connected the traffic cameras in parallel and put them in those headquarters. The IRGC takes command, and all the other bodies — the police, the Basij, intelligence — are all at its disposal for repressing the people. And we saw, for example, in Dey 1404, how this IRGC comes into the street, confronts the people, and

44:34 kills the people. An IRGC whose basic job is that the weapon in its hands, held in trust on behalf of the people, should be used to protect the country and the people of Iran, should have a national function — so that when there is a war, fine, that function is very good, it should defend the country. But unfortunately, because on the other side it is an organization that goes to war against the people, represses them, and then also has theft and corruption in it, it is an organization that instead of becoming beloved by the people has become hated by the people. From some IRGC friends who were at the front during the war, the whole eight years of the war, who were at the front and wounded many times, years later, during the period of the Green Movement and so on, I heard

45:27 them pour their hearts out. They said, we've reached a point where we don't dare put on our uniforms, because people look you straight in the eye, spit on the ground and say, "Murderer, thief." You can't hang a sign around your neck saying, "For God's sake, I was never a thief from the start, I'm not one, I haven't killed anyone, I sacrificed so much for the country, and now I'm sitting off in a corner." So his third act is that he brought the military into politics, and what happened was that now the military, which with its weapons had already entered the economy and trade, also entered politics. Or some of their commanders

46:20 became like political leaders, went recruiting and built gangs and networks for themselves; or the reverse happened: some of the country's politicians went and recruited members from among them, and in effect it became afflicted with internal divisions of opinion. This is exactly what those who say the military in every country must not enter politics understood: that when you bring an organization that is supposed to be responsible for defending the nation and the country, a military organization, into politics, well, political factions form inside it and division arises. Anyway, this is the third point that I think we had to make about his rule. The fourth point

47:08 I want to make in assessing his rule is that truly ominous and bizarre thesis of the "cultural onslaught" (tahajom-e farhangi) that he put forward. First of all, the word itself is wrong. Tahajom is of the tafa'ol verb pattern; it denotes something mutual. He should have said hojum-e farhangi, a cultural attack. But anyway, he came and made up a theory, coined a word — he did that sort of thing, he knew how to coin words — and said that the enemy — "enemy" being a keyword in so much of what he said — the enemy is waging a cultural onslaught against us and wants

47:57 to change our culture, wants to change our religion; they have a plan. So he brought military vocabulary right into the domain of culture: we must, in short, close ranks and fight and so on and so forth. We have "soft war officers," and, in short, with this story he concocted, any dissident — whether someone who didn't believe in Islam at all, the so-called secular intellectuals of the country, or even Muslims, anyone who didn't think like him — he stamped a label on their forehead that this person is an agent of the cultural onslaught, and in this way he could eliminate them. In fact, with this act

48:50 he took the state fully into the realm of totalitarianism, into a realm where it meddles in all the affairs of the people: interferes in theater, interferes in film, brings the Ministry of Intelligence into filmmaking, even concerns itself with street posters, with people's clothing, even with people's customs and traditions, with their beliefs, wants to censor publications and newspapers. He brought everything under this heading and cracked down. Let me again relate a memory here. When we were publishing Jameh — and, well, he shut it down — before that he had given a speech that these are the cultural

49:39 onslaught, these people. Mr. Karroubi, who was then Speaker of the Majlis, related to us that he had gone to see him and said, "Sir, these people you're talking about who publish this newspaper — we know them, they're good, Muslim, nationalist kids without any foreign ties." He had said, "Why don't you understand? These people are opposed to velayat-e faqih, and they are agents of the cultural onslaught." Moreover, after the closure of Jameh and Tous and so on, after which they imprisoned me — they had seized me and arrested me and so forth — maybe six or seven months later, a then deputy of the Ministry of Intelligence who knew an acquaintance of mine

50:26 told him that he'd like to see me. I said fine. He came to that person's office, sat down and talked. He told me — and he showed me Mr. Khamenei's handwriting — he said, when you were publishing Jameh — it was, of course, during Mr. Younesi's term as minister, during Mr. Khatami's time, when Mr. Khamenei was very unhappy that the Ministry of Intelligence wasn't in his fist the way he wanted, so he went for the IRGC Intelligence Organization; at first it was called the "parallel intelligence," he set up his own security organization in his office, which later they named IRGC Intelligence — this man told me, when you were publishing Jameh, the Leader, Mr. Khamenei, ordered us:

51:17 "I am certain these people are foreign agents; Ministry of Intelligence, investigate." He said, well, we came and tapped the phones of the Jameh office. We even set up a fixed surveillance post at Javanan Square — we had rented a place there, a house with a courtyard, and it later came out — that man told me that right on that square, overlooking our place, they had rented a building and were watching day and night with cameras. The newspaper, the bank accounts — he said we checked everything. In short, he showed me the report. He said we wrote a report saying: Sir, we investigated, and these people are not American agents, not British agents, not Russian agents, not anyone's agents, and they don't get money from anywhere. They are exactly what they write on the pages of their newspaper,

52:08 because I used to write a report to the readers once a month, in which I transparently reflected the newspaper's accounts. The accounting department gave it to me and I would write it up, because we wanted to later make it a public joint-stock company so that the people would become its shareholders. He showed me that with that left hand Mr. Khamenei wrote with, he had written in the margin: "Why is the Ministry of Intelligence being negligent? I am certain these people are foreign agents." That man said, "Do you know what it means when the Leader writes this? It means we have to search and find something to pin on you by any means, because what he says must not turn out to be wrong." He said, we came again and, across the whole range of

52:59 your friends and acquaintances and relatives, checked their bank accounts in case you were operating through some other account. Again, he said, we wrote a report that no, sir, we found nothing of the sort; these people are what they are. Even the simple things the private sector does, like, say, having two sets of books, I don't know — they don't have any of that; they're completely transparent. And then, of course, he wasn't satisfied with this report. He gave the order, and they stormed in and attacked. First they attacked the newspaper's office, under the leadership of Mr. Razini, who was sitting behind it, and then eventually they stormed in and seized it and shut it down. After they shut that one, we'd publish another; they'd shut that, we'd publish the next one; and he issued an arrest

53:48 warrant. I have given this example of something I witnessed myself, but people in the press have numerous testimonies. For example, the office of the magazine Kiyan, which was a theoretical journal of religious reformist thought — anywhere else in the world it might have had a circulation of, say, 3,000 or 4,000, but in Iran, because the newspaper Kayhan kept attacking it and so on, it had reached 25 to 30 thousand copies. Anyway, one night a group of the same kind of people who used to storm magazine offices and smash things and so on, in the name of Hezbollahis, broke in and wrecked it. Then a day or so later, apparently two or three of them,

54:40 who had recognized the people running Kiyan, like Mr. Reza Tehrani, who was a kid from Khorasan Square and was the manager of Kiyan, had been ashamed of themselves, and two nights later they came privately and apologized. I was there, though I wasn't in the meeting; I was in the next room and could hear what those attackers, two or three of them, were saying to Mr. Reza Tehrani and Shams ol-Vaezin. They said, "We take orders from the Leader's office." At that time a cleric, Mr. Moezzi, was in charge of these things; later Mr. Razini became in charge of these things. And they would attack — just as before that, the offices of the magazines Adineh and Donya-ye Sokhan and the like, which, from

55:30 Mr. Khamenei's point of view, were outright mahdur al-dam [people whose blood may be lawfully shed], just as in the chain murders they had them killed — those intellectuals and dissident thinkers. So with the theory of the cultural onslaught, he not only stamped a label on the forehead of anyone who had any thought or anything to say other than his way of thinking, he also acted on it: arrested, shut down, attacked. They planted a bomb in the office of Adineh. He put pressure on Khatami and had him removed from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance precisely because, for instance, he had given permits to these two magazines, and Khatami stood firm, saying, sir, these are nothing, we should allow them. And you can see from

56:21 this one item alone how much damage the country's culture has suffered from his method. The next axis I can mention is the axis of foreign policy. Look, the Islamic Revolution was born with anti-Americanism and the destruction of Israel. Both Mr. Khomeini and almost all of those early leaders of the Islamic Revolution — that whole revolutionary generation — were leftist and anti-American. And as for Israel, well, many of the early leaders of the Islamic Revolution had undergone armed training in Palestinian camps; they were comrades

57:08 of the Palestinian fighters. And Israel — well, it was the fashion of the day in the world; all the Arab countries had fought four wars with it, and the struggles of the Palestinian people and so on were the goal of revolutionaries all over the world, especially, say, Muslim ones. So from the day after the victory of the revolution, the policy of anti-Americanism and the destruction of Israel have been the two pillars of Iran's foreign policy, right up to today, to this year 1405, and all the closeness and distance in Iran's foreign policy has, you could say, been set according to these two pillars, which has damaged the country enormously.

57:58 But once the first decade of the revolution had passed, this fever had broken somewhat. Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani had been elected and was president, but was still sitting in the Speaker of the Majlis's office. I think he had been elected in Khordad, and the swearing-in ceremony and the oath and, I don't know, the decree were in Mordad, after which he would go to the president's office. In that interval — I had become head of the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization — I went again to see Mr. Hashemi. I had gone to tell him that we must now — there's no excuse anymore; a decade of the revolution has passed, the war is over, Mr. Khomeini has died — now we must build the country, we must do reconstruction; we have no excuse vis-à-vis

58:45 the people. I had gone to tell him that the industrial sector has these problems, it has obstacles to production, and we must remove them so that industry can move, which can also make agriculture technological, and in fact we become industrialized, not just have factories. I was having these kinds of discussions with him. Among the obstacles to production I listed for Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani — because I had earlier given a speech at Sharif University of Technology as "obstacles to production" — was this: sir, we must end this America business. This wall we built after the hostage-taking with the cutting of relations with America, and the American sanctions and so on, has cut us off

59:35 from a great many things, from many sectors of Western countries. And besides, right now, for example in the auto industry, it's much cheaper, instead of, say, coming and building the Japanese Nissan Patrol, to go and bring General Motors cars and build them, since the dollar's price has come down too — discussions like that. I remember Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani, after I listed these obstacles to production — he said, you're right; for example, another one was the multiple exchange rates. About America, since about a year or a little more before that Hashemi had gone to Moscow — because a Muslim revolution has to be against both the Soviet Union and America —

1:00:24 he said, "With the same courage with which I went to Moscow, once I become president I am ready to go to Washington, and I will solve this America problem." And I was very happy, and time passed. And of course I had decided to leave the government, and I came out and had gone on to publish the magazine Ayeneh, and Ayeneh-ye Eqtesad and Ayeneh-ye Andisheh. A year later, when on one hand I was forming the press cooperative and on the other publishing magazines myself, I went to see Mr. Hashemi, who was now president, in the president's office, and spoke with him: "Mr. Hashemi, last year when I saw you, you were very determined; you said you'd do a number of things.

1:01:14 Why aren't you doing them? For example, this relationship with America — why didn't you do it?" There he told me, "Look, my experience is greater than yours." I said, "Certainly." He said, "There are certain constraints, like, for example, the Imam's words, which are still on the walls, this and that. And as for America," he said, "the Leader is opposed, and I don't want to fight with him, I don't want to have a falling-out." Anyway, during Mr. Khamenei's rule — that was with Hashemi — then, for example, in the reform movement, Khatami became president against Mr. Khamenei's wishes. Well, at that time Mr. Nasser Hadian and Hadi Semati, two American-educated people,

1:02:03 I think either both of them or one of them had been a student of Madeleine Albright at university — what they call Track Two — through lobbying and so on. In short, it was Mr. Clinton's administration. Since the world had really embraced the reform movement, the perception not only of America but of all the countries of the world was that Iran's revolutionary fever had broken and it wanted to come and work with the family of nations. The world really embraced the reform movement. Among others, these two people had talked with America, saying, sir, the obstacle to this relationship with America is this story of the 28 Mordad coup, where the Americans did a wrong thing,

1:02:54 and this won't be erased from Iranians' memory. If you apologize for this, the way will open; one of the important foundations [of hostility] will be removed. Mr. Clinton's administration accepted this, and Ms. Madeleine Albright, his secretary of state, in the Nowruz message she gave congratulating the Iranian people, apologized to the people of Iran for the 28 Mordad coup. And before publishing this message, through the intermediary of, so to speak, that Swiss embassy that was their protecting power, or some other intermediary, they sent it to Iran's Foreign Ministry, where Mr. Kharrazi

1:03:41 was foreign minister, asking whether this is fine, and whether those behind-the-scenes discussions that took place are right, so that we can publish this. The Foreign Ministry gives no reply, and Ms. Albright takes this as approval. When that message was published — again I'm quoting a person who was at that point the Ministry of Intelligence's liaison with the Foreign Ministry — he said, "I, who was in contact with the Foreign Ministry on behalf of the Ministry of Intelligence, immediately contacted Mr. Kharrazi and said, sir, now's the time; you give a reply and go welcome this before it falls apart." And here, in my opinion, Mr. Kharrazi makes a mistake.

1:04:32 Either he's afraid — he sends it to the Leader's office to get its view: "I want to reply and welcome Ms. Albright's apology; what do you say?" Nothing — Mr. Khamenei put his hand on it. Not only did he not allow them to give Ms. Albright a response, as had been agreed and arranged, but he also immediately gave a speech, his Nowruz message, attacking America again. And right up to the Obama era, right up to this recent war in which he was killed in this war — that is, this enmity toward America, which he placed under the heading of independence, "they're after our independence, and in order to be independent we must be hostile to America" —

1:05:20 he took to its most extreme. He did not allow this hostility to diminish at junctures like the Hashemi government or Mr. Khatami's government; far from it, he intensified it. In addition, with his issuing of the "Look to the East" policy during the reform movement era, he took us toward Russia and gave Russia a free hand in our country in all affairs of our nation, from the IRGC and intelligence and the army and so on, to the nuclear project and oil and so forth. And China too, which was a fresh new power. Likewise, his ideal was in

1:06:10 fact that a new Eastern Bloc, as it were, should be formed, and he was thinking in the atmosphere of the Cold War, so to speak. And of course we don't have a new Eastern Bloc. As Ms. Applebaum puts it, we have a joint-stock company of autocratic, kleptocratic governments led by Russia and China, and a number of dictatorships like the Islamic Republic and, what do I know, Venezuela and Zimbabwe and Cuba and Bolivia and so on and so forth, who lend each other a hand and keep each other in power, and whose common axis is hostility toward America and undermining democracy and the West. Mr. Khamenei brought us here. And as for the destruction of Israel — when I became a presidential

1:07:00 candidate in [13]80, in the speeches I gave at universities, which students welcomed very warmly — in 1380, in those two or three months from announcing my candidacy until they disqualified me — one of the things I said was: Sir, Israel neither shares a border with us nor has fought a war with us, like the Arabs. If it's about Judaism, well, we have in fact always been a refuge for Jews, from the time of Cyrus the Achaemenid until now. If the argument is that this country should never have been created, as they say, and that it's the Palestinians' right — we shouldn't be holier than the Pope [lit. "the bowl hotter than the soup"], when the Palestinians themselves, people like Mahmoud Abbas,

1:07:50 who have grown gray in the struggle, have come and recognize two states. America is behind it, Europe is behind it, everyone says so; there are Security Council resolutions too. We're not saying we should establish relations with Israel, but at least, enmity — what business is it of ours? What are we to it? Let's get behind that part of the Palestinians who say, fine, two states are acceptable, one state Israel and one state per the first resolution, of the year 1348, and let's accept that. And let's see what, I don't know, Malaysia does, or Pakistan. Don't they have no relations with Israel? Yet their foreign policy isn't built on the axis of destroying Israel; they don't needlessly pick fights with the world's Jewish community. Well, Mr. Khamenei — no, he took this one too

1:08:42 to its most extreme possible degree. And this act of his caused that now, for 47 years, especially during his rule and especially in the past decade, they created a direct confrontation with Israel. And especially after October 7 and the Hamas affair and so on, this confrontation turned, as journalists say, from a war in the shadows into a war in the sunlight. That is, two countries, two states, were hostile to each other, assassinating people, stirring up unrest, planting bombs — Iran did it in Israel, Israel did it in Iran — but from October 7 onward this escalated and turned into a direct war, which still

1:09:31 continues. So the fifth axis I have described is that in his 37 years of rule, not only did he not back down from the policy of anti-Americanism and the destruction of Israel, not only did he not change it, he strongly prevented any change in this policy, took it to the most extreme degree possible, increased the tension of the hostilities, and on the back of this very policy he took our politics into the arms of the Eastern Bloc, the so-called "Look to the East" policy, and set up an arrangement whose result was not only sanctions and troubles and the like, but also war and so on.

1:10:19 ...had. The next axis, the sixth axis, grew out of this same foreign policy, that is, anti-Americanism and the annihilation of Israel, which has been the backbone of the Islamic Republic's foreign policy from its founding until today. Two projects were also born in Mr. Khamenei's era that have truly, for 20 years, wrecked our country, and I have called them "Iran-destroying, futile projects." This is the sixth axis I want to present. The first is Iran's nuclear project. Look,

1:11:10 in 2001, during President George W. Bush's term, America attacked Afghanistan after the events of September 11, and in 2003 it attacked Iraq. In Iran, there was a wrong analysis: that America had attacked these two countries and next wanted to attack Iran, that it had firmly planted its feet on both sides of Iran, and that it was therefore ready to attack Iran whatever we did or didn't do. Mr. Khamenei, in a meeting of the Supreme National Security Council... well, Khatami was president and, under the constitution, the head of the Supreme National Security Council, but Khamenei used to do this kind of thing: he would have some

1:11:58 sessions of the Supreme National Security Council convened in his own presence. There, in effect, they finalized the analysis that America was going to attack Iran. Now what do we do? So two strategic tasks were, in effect, put on the agenda. The first was that we go after building, in short, the atomic bomb. Not that we build it now, but that we do all the work for building an atomic bomb, so that we are, as they say, one screwdriver away from an atomic bomb, so that whenever we wanted, within say a week or a month, we could assemble it. And if we became an atomic power this way, America would no longer launch a conventional attack on us.

1:12:50 They called it the policy of turning Iran into North Korea, meaning America would no longer dare launch a conventional attack on us or send armies. The second was that, once there was no longer a danger of conventional attack, we would go for asymmetric warfare, which in my view is a respectable name for terrorism. In the region, we would create so-called partisan, guerrilla, terrorist forces, whatever we call them, in various countries, so that if there was a conflict with America, we would have the upper hand here in asymmetric warfare, against which

1:13:40 a conventional army can't do much. The first was called the policy of deterrence. The second was, in effect, asymmetric warfare. For the first, Mr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh became head of a project called AMAD, which was classified and secret. From 2006, you could say, they began, spending billions of dollars, to go after uranium enrichment at high concentrations and the Arak heavy water reactor, so as to pursue plutonium, the second method of making the bomb, and get that going. And as a

1:14:30 physics graduate, I can tell you that they went and did all the work needed to build an atomic bomb. You see, building an atomic bomb is nothing strange, scientifically or technologically. It's 1940s technology, and its scientific and technical problems were solved by Oppenheimer's team at Los Alamos, starting in 1943. They really solved these problems and arrived at the bomb. That's why, after them, everyone else in the world who went after it was able to build it. It had a set of scientific problems such that, for example, the British gave up at the time and said it wasn't at all practical to release, say, the energy of nuclear fission.

1:15:17 But Iran went after it, and secretly at that. First it was enriching in secret. Then, when the Israelis effectively leaked it, it was exposed by the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK). After that, the three European countries, the European troika of Britain, France and Germany, sent their foreign ministers to Iran, where they met with Mr. Hassan Rouhani, who was secretary of the Security Council. It's well known that Mr. Hassan Rouhani had started talking and Joschka Fischer, who was then German foreign minister, cut him off and said: we didn't come to listen to you, we came so that you would listen to us. You

1:16:05 are a member of the NPT, but you hid uranium enrichment and were enriching in secret. This has to be settled; you are heading toward the bomb. From then on, as you know, Iran always claimed: no, my work is peaceful, within the framework of the NPT. But the reality is that anyone who has studied a little physics, or nuclear engineering, or even chemical engineering, knows very well that the processes Iran went through are useful for a bomb. When you go and test and work on high-voltage switches for the trigger of an atomic bomb, or when you build a neutron source in Parchin and conduct neutron emission tests, well, it's obvious that you want to go and build a bomb with it

1:16:54 and that you're working out the critical dimensions. And of course, the story of going after the atomic bomb didn't start in 2006; it was raised in the 1360s (1980s) too. When Mr. Amrollahi became head of the Atomic Energy Organization, he took up the Bushehr project, which had been shut down under the Bazargan government because it truly had neither technical nor economic justification. He convinced Hashemi, who was the war commander, that we should get it going, and that with the plutonium it produced we could go and build a bomb, in time to use it in the Iran-Iraq war too. And they went after it. In practice, of course, it was only after the war that they found the Russians to come and work on this project.

1:17:43 But from 2006, with Mr. Fakhrizadeh and huge budgets, it went into the IRGC sector, and you could say this was launched behind the scenes there. Consider what this one project has done to our country over the past 20 years. From the start it was clear that the whole premise was wrong. It doesn't even provide deterrence. Suppose Iran tests an atomic bomb, has it, and says "I have it." Israel is said to have about 400 atomic bombs. Has that stopped Iran from attacking it? Pakistan is said to have twice as many atomic bombs as Israel, and India has them too. How many times have they fought each other, over

1:18:33 Kashmir? But could they use them? Russia has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth twice over, but now that it's at war with Ukraine, can it use them? Apart from Truman, in World War II, for the first time, who dropped two bombs on Japan, no one has used one since. And this deterrence of the atomic bomb is itself an open question. From the start this project was wrong, and its very conception was wrong. But the calamity it brought on our country is this: day after day the world came, and Iran was defiant, kept raising ifs and buts, kept going this way and that, and the sanctions arrived.

1:19:22 US sanctions, then UN sanctions, then European ones, right up to today. Estimates are that, directly because of the sanctions, nearly half a trillion dollars of damage has been done to our country, meaning not being able to sell oil, not being able to sell petrochemicals, all these years of sanctions. And indirectly, through lack of investment, Iran being cut off from global banking, and political and economic isolation, it's estimated that about 2 trillion dollars of damage has been done to our country. And a generation: in the 1360s (1980s) we had a population explosion, and the country invested,

1:20:11 built schools, built universities, built Azad University, so that this generation would be educated and enter the job market. It could have produced an economic leap. That population growth of three-point-something percent in the 1360s (1980s), they're called Iran's baby boomers, born from 1359 to 1367 (1980 to 1988). Just when this generation was ready to enter the job market and build the country, this project brought about sanctions and brought to power an incompetent, ignorant person like Ahmadinejad with destructive populist policies, and in effect a generation was sacrificed. The country made no economic leap. On the contrary, with wrong policies it went downhill, and the sanctions ruined the country.

1:21:02 Even today, look: this war that has broken out, at least its pretext is this very nuclear project. And in the end it all came to nothing. Whatever they built, they came and bombed from above and destroyed: Natanz and Isfahan and Fordow and here and there. And now they're waiting to see whether there's something underneath Pickaxe Mountain so they can go and hit it. So in my view, regarding Mr. Khamenei, this decision and this project, which entangled the whole country, sacrificed a generation, and drove our country to bankruptcy, is one of the great sins he has committed, with wrong analysis, wrong policy,

1:21:53 wrong strategy, and by going after something that has no justification whatsoever. The second, in effect, was to go and strengthen proxy forces, that same asymmetric warfare, and Mr. Qasem Soleimani was put in charge of this. Here too, of course, creating pro-Iran forces in other countries had started earlier. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran supported Saddam's opponents, the Islamic Dawa Party, the Badr Corps and so on, just as Iraq supported opponents of the Islamic Republic like the MEK, so they would come and carry out terrorist operations and gather intelligence, things they did.

1:22:41 Or in Lebanon, Hezbollah had been formed earlier, because the cultural connection and companionship between Iran and the Jabal Amel region, today's Lebanon, has existed from the Safavids until now, and many activists and leaders of the Islamic movement in Iran spent periods of their lives in Lebanon, Dr. Chamran, for example. So this had been done before, but from 2005-2006 it became systematic: a policy, with huge budgets. Mr. Qasem Soleimani, as a man with suitcases full of money in the region, reached the point where he claimed that

1:23:30 we control four Arab capitals, and that, in short, like the Achaemenids, we have reached the shores of the Mediterranean. And then Syria, which was their base, where they wanted to share a border with Israel. From here, in effect, the Butcher of Damascus, the dimensions of whose crimes became even clearer when he fell: Syria's prisons, and the killing in the Syrian civil war, in which nearly 500,000 people were killed in a country of twenty-some million, and nearly 12 million people were displaced, of whom at least 5 million, they say, left Syria, were forced to leave. In my

1:24:20 view, Syria is the bleeding wound of the twenty-first century and a source of shame for humanity, and Mr. Khamenei is a partner in this crime. He stood right behind the Butcher of Damascus. Otherwise, the Syrian people, like other countries in the region, had their Arab Spring; every Friday they went out and demonstrated. They dragged it into violence and so on. On top of that, there are organizations like Kata'ib Hezbollah in Iraq and the Badr Corps and so on, which make up dozens... 14 organizations, not all of them very close to Iran, 8 of them part of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, or the Houthis of Yemen, or Lebanese Hezbollah, or the way they stretched their reach

1:25:13 to Boko Haram and, I don't know, al-Shabaab, all the way to the other side of Africa, and the things they did. These proxy forces gradually... it's not just that you're working with terrorists, because many of them carry out terrorist acts, but as a result things like money laundering and income from narcotics came into it, and in practice these proxy forces turned into a huge terrorist smuggling network stretching from Kabul to Caracas. And those in the Quds Force, now 14 or 15 thousand people in the Quds Force, have effectively become agents

1:26:04 of a kind of international smuggling and terrorism. And this second one, in effect, the region... And then the Syrian war, for which Syria was their bridgehead. It was also a bridgehead for drug smuggling: Captagon, one of the synthetic narcotic products they produce, they actually produced in Syria with Hezbollah, and also in Iran itself, where IRGC Commander Morteza Rezaei was in charge of this section, the so-called industrial kitchens. I don't know about now. In short, in this sixth axis my emphasis is on the two main projects carried out in Mr. Khamenei's era. Leaving other projects aside, specifically these two projects, which grew

1:26:54 out of that same foreign policy and his clinging very intensely to those two axes of foreign policy during his era, have inflicted damage on our country that still persists, that still remains. I remember that when I said these things, some Iranian friends would say: well, since Israel is like this and America is like that, we have to have some solution. My point was, and this was during Mr. Khatami's time, I would say: take those and moderate them. Who said we have to constantly clash with a giant like America? This idea that they want to destroy our independence is also a joke,

1:27:42 "so we're forced to confront them." These ideas were Mr. Khamenei's theory. He said: because we created a religious government, and this global arrogance is against its understanding, so to speak, against its way, and so on, we are forced, for the sake of our independence and to preserve our country, to clash with America; the best defense is offense, for example. Well, if this man knew the ABCs of American politics, he would know that America is a capitalist country and a pragmatist country in its policy. So many countries in the world, religious and non-religious, like Saudi Arabia and others, have relations with America. Does it want to go and overthrow all of them? And besides,

1:28:30 the CIA used to commit a lot of these blunders at one time, in the 1960s and to some extent the early 1970s, going around staging coups. The first, of course, in the 1950s, was the 28 Mordad coup in Iran itself. But since the 1970s, when the uproar arose, it has quit this business altogether, as anyone who followed American politics a little would know. Anyway, look, this political astigmatism that Mr. Khamenei had: in his imagination, and he didn't deny it, you could see it in his speeches, he thought the world has a board of directors standing behind it, among them Zionist Jews who

1:29:20 want to preserve the state of Israel. Their heads are all one, and they run the whole world. That enemy... they counted that in a one-hour speech he used the word "enemy" 54 times. What he meant went beyond even America. He meant those people behind the curtain, as if everyone in the world were a puppet in a shadow play. Once, in one of his talks, he said that the problem is these European leaders don't understand. I said at the time: these European leaders, who run their countries like a bouquet of flowers, don't understand, and you, sitting on your floor cushion in a corner of Iran, have discovered a great secret that no one else has ever discovered? We have so many seasoned politicians, so many

1:30:09 university professors, so many journalists, so many experts in the world, and none of them has discovered that behind it all there's a conspiracy, a great conspiracy theory, running the whole world. Ahmadinejad said the same thing. He was the one who said they themselves made up the Holocaust, those same people behind the scenes, and he even claimed they started World War II. You know, there are books like this that are sometimes written in the West too; conspiracy theories exist there as well, like the book "No One Dares," or, for example, the documentary Michael Moore made after September 11. These things exist in the world, but nowhere in the world do those who believe in such nonsense become rulers.

1:30:59 They don't get to sit at the head of government. In Iran, Mr. Khamenei was someone who thought like this and was at the head of the country, and he looked at the world through this very notion. And conspiracy theory... well, we're a nation of "My Uncle Napoleon," after all; it sells. He pushed this idea in his various talks. Right here, before I move past this axis, let me mention one point. A book was published in Iran called "Development and Contradiction," by Mr. Faramarz Rafipour. He was a professor at the National University, Shahid Beheshti University, a sociologist, I think. I don't know whether he is alive or dead now. In that same decade of the eighties,

1:31:50 when the Soviet Union had already collapsed, I saw a booklet that this Mr. Faramarz Rafipour had prepared for Mr. Khamenei. Apparently the Office of the Leader had signed a contract with him for 13 million tomans at the time to study this and so on. I didn't see the whole booklet, but I saw a summary, an abstract of it. What he had done in that booklet was cater to Mr. Khamenei's wishes. I don't know whether he himself believed it or not. In short, the gist of that so-called research of, say, 10 pages was that all the collapses of the Eastern Bloc, from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, which was the last, and all

1:32:39 movements like the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, in short, all of these were planned, a predetermined plan of that same so-called board of directors of the world. In my view, in that booklet he poured water on the mill of Mr. Khamenei's delusion and paranoia. His book, of course, is about the Singapore model, and says that if you want to develop, then for a period, if I remember correctly from looking at it back then, you need a period of dictatorship and that sort of thing. But in

1:33:26 that booklet he said this, and Mr. Khamenei reflected it fully in one of his talks. He said that Gorbachev, for example, came out of the party and so on, but that Yeltsin was a CIA agent. In effect, he thought the collapse of the Soviet Union was planned, that certain people planned for the Soviet Union to collapse, that it was a conspiracy. Now, so many books and articles have been written in the world about Marxism and the Soviet Union, how it happened, what developments, glasnost, and whatnot. But it's easy, you see, to just pin it on a conspiracy theory, on some bizarre plan in the world.

1:34:15 I remember in prison too, the last time I was taken, these IRGC Intelligence interrogators approached me on the basis of conspiracy theory. I realized that the one who had fed them this was probably Khamenei himself, judging by what they had seen. Why? Because, for example, while I was in prison, and I didn't know this myself, I had gone on hunger strike and didn't know what had happened outside, an American senator had mentioned my name, saying that so-and-so is in prison. Later, when I came to America, I found out that a relative of ours here had a friend, and he had told him: this relative of ours is dying in prison. That friend was acquainted with the senator from their state and told him, and senators are only too happy to have

1:35:02 something like that to go and put on the record. He said it. In prison they grabbed me by the collar and said, well, you Americans are behind you, you know, the kind of analysis whose source is obvious, and so on. And right there I really mocked these interrogators a lot. I really told them they were very ignorant, and I also recommended that book "Conspiracy Theory" to them, which has three good articles by Ahmad Ashraf, Ervand Abrahamian, and Homa Katouzian on conspiracy theory. Go and read it, I said, to see what this thing is. And in prison I remembered that before they arrested me, first the Ministry of Intelligence arrested me, before Nowruz,

1:35:52 then IRGC Intelligence, Saeed Hajjarian, whom I had seen once, told me: look, this Mr. Khamenei has a list of Yeltsins, people he thinks are agents of that so-called world board of directors, whom the Americans want to bring to power. And well, some of the left faction got news from inside intelligence. He said: the news I have is that you've reached the top of Khamenei's list of Yeltsins, and they'll arrest you soon. And he had guessed right, and that's exactly what happened. What I want to say is that he grew out of that conspiracy theory, and out of the idea that he has a divine mission. This I

1:36:42 once heard from Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani, from Khatami's time. He and Khamenei had dinner together one night a week; relations hadn't yet soured to the point where they would push Hashemi aside, and their Tuesday night dinners were well known. I heard two things from him. One was that he had told Khamenei: sir, this path you're on, wanting to suppress, you'll have to keep suppressing to the very end. And Khamenei had said: yes, but repression works. The second was that he had told him that this clash with the world... well, there's a good opportunity, for example, since Hashemi was a pragmatist: now is a good time for us to reconcile.

1:37:31 And Khamenei had said: no, we have a divine mission, and it doesn't matter if we're killed on this path. Like Imam Hussein's movement, movements and uprisings will later arise in our name, and so on. For God's sake, look at this. This was another of his masterpieces: he constantly committed the fallacy of analogy. As the philosophers say, one of the common fallacies is argument by analogy. You liken something to something else, and then you think your claim has been proven. And one of the most common kinds of the fallacy of analogy is historical analogy. You take a historical event, then say the current situation is like that one, and then you think your claim

1:38:22 has been proven. Then you go into it and keep equating the two, and you think that event is going to repeat itself exactly. One thing he did many times in his talks was to take the history of early Islam and, very modestly of course, I say this jokingly, put himself into that historical story, in the place of either the Prophet of Islam, or Imam Ali, or Imam Hussein. Then he would put everyone else into that historical story: these are the Khawarij, these are the Mariqin, these are the Nakithin, these are the infidels, these are such-and-such. And whatever had happened, one way or another, in an event 1,400 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula under the conditions of that day,

1:39:13 he would then use as the basis for crushing his enemies and opponents, or dissidents. And in this historical analogy, he would come and say: I'm supposed to be Imam Hussein, and America and the rest are the Yazid of our age, and we must fight them, martyrdom, killing them. Wasn't there anyone to smack him on the back of the head and say: my good man, it was Imam Hussein himself and his family. And besides, he said: sir, I don't want to pledge allegiance, what do you want with the others? And on the last night he even put out the lamp and said: whoever wants to leave, leave; it's me they're after. He wasn't responsible for 90 million people. And if you were sincere, you should have asked the people.

1:40:01 If you wanted to put out that lamp like Imam Hussein, the way to do it today is this: you would have held a referendum. You would have said: you, my people, I am making certain decisions about the fate of all of you. Are you willing, for example, for me to go and build an atomic bomb and for this much sanctions to come down on the country? Or for me to go and create proxy forces and for this much conflict to break out in the region? To steal from your tables and give to Gaza and Lebanon, for example? Or to go and clash to the bitter end with America and Israel and Western civilization and become Saladin, for example? Because sometimes he also talked about the Crusades. Anyway, this was the sixth axis on Mr. Khamenei, concerning the two futile projects. The

1:40:53 last axis I want to present... as I said, otherwise one could weigh him from many angles; I came up with these seven axes. The last axis is, in effect, the story of his machine of repression, the same one about which he told Hashemi, "repression works." Over his 37-year rule he built a huge machine of repression. I'm not saying there was no repression in Khomeini's era. The first two decades of the revolution, the decade of revolution and war and clashes, yes. The Ministry of Intelligence itself was created in that very decade. A lot happened. But in his era, first of all, 16 intelligence organizations were created.

1:41:42 Second, a machine of repression was created. One end of it was in the intelligence apparatuses, especially the Ministry of Intelligence and IRGC Intelligence. At another end, he brought in the IRGC as the backbone of the machine of repression and set it face to face with the people. He made the Basij the infantry of the machine of repression. Then he imported the tools of repression from China, installed cameras, and set up cyber units so that, when the internet arrived, he could control people's information, and all the other things that machines of repression do. And he was a cunning man, too. In this respect, one can boldly

1:42:32 say that the machine of repression he built... in the whole Middle East, because the Middle East, thank God, is full of dictators, but among the dictatorial regimes of the Middle East, the machine of repression he built in Iran was in a sense the most complex, most elaborate, and most cunning machine of repression ever built in that region. And along the way, he made Iran's judiciary an instrument of his will. He effectively stripped Iran's judiciary of its independence. The constitution also allowed him to appoint its head. First he removed Mr. Ardebili and brought in Sheikh Mohammad Yazdi, a notorious sheikh, who, along with his son, was deeply involved in buying

1:43:22 ...factories had been tainted, and he was a disreputable man, and in Mr. Khomeini's time he had been cast aside. That "American Islam" Mr. Khomeini spoke of, and so on, had been abandoned. As someone put it, one of these clerics (I've forgotten who), after Mr. Khamenei put Sheikh Mohammad Yazdi at the head of the judiciary: "Apparently he is even above the Messiah, because he brought a political corpse back to life." After the slap in the face Mr. Khomeini had given Sheikh Mohammad Yazdi, he had become a political corpse, and Khamenei brought him back and handed him that post, and if the judiciary became corrupt, so be it. After that, he put people at the head of the judiciary who would listen to him and be subordinate to him. Nor was he content with that; he went ahead and

1:44:15 separated several branches of the Revolutionary Court from the judiciary, so they would be in direct contact with the Office of the Leader itself. These were people who had nothing to do even with the head of the judiciary or the Supreme Judicial Council and took their orders directly from the Office. Judges, that is, people like, say, Mr. Mortazavi, the prosecutor, his favorite jurist. Once he even said, "So-and-so is a brave jurist." Later, in Ahmadinejad's time, Mortazavi went to the Social Security Organization, and there was the money and the corruption and so on, and in these fights between corrupt gangs they kicked him out, and Khamenei didn't stand behind him. But with this one man as

1:45:05 the prosecutor he had appointed, he became the butcher of the press. He used as a pretext a certain clause of the law on discretionary punishments and crime prevention, under which a judge could, for example, issue an order to prevent a crime. Say you have a revolver or a knife and might use it to kill someone; that clause says the judge can order it taken from you. Using that pretext, this Mr. Mortazavi turned into a court branch that brought in publications and shut them down as "crime prevention." I think everyone who, during Mr. Khamenei's era and Mr. Mortazavi's tenure, especially people in the press, dealt with him,

1:45:57 who went to prison, has memories of this mercenary who obeyed the Office's orders. He even told me proudly that he was in contact with the Office and listened to them. When I was on hunger strike they had taken me to Baqiyatallah Hospital, and I didn't have the strength to move from my bed. This Mr. Mortazavi would come to see me and insisted that I break my hunger strike, and he said proudly, "We are in contact with the Office." And he was someone who also had a hand in the killing of Zahra Kazemi. The head of Baqiyatallah Hospital had also come, because they had seen some signs in my heart. They knew I had previously had a heart attack and heart surgery, and I had stopped all my heart medications. He insisted

1:46:47 that they do an angiogram on me, since I might die. Anyway, I said, "No, I won't." One day the head of the hospital, I don't remember who he was, came into my room with another doctor and said, "Look, we are doctors here, and if it goes on like this, we have to absolve ourselves of responsibility, and they'll take you back to Evin." I said, "That's exactly what I want. Tell these gentlemen to take me back to Evin so they know I'm serious." Then he said, "When they brought Zahra Kazemi here, these Mortazavi people, she was in fact already dead, and I told the Canadian ambassador, who came to see me, that we did nothing more in this hospital." In any case, he truly corrupted the judiciary.

1:47:37 You know, it's said that if you want to ruin a country, you must corrupt and ruin its judicial system, its system of justice; we must do away with law and the rule of law. He created Revolutionary Court branches like that of Mr. Zare'-Dehnavi, whose alias was Haddad, a killer who in the [13]60s [1980s], as one of the former prisoners put it, killed as many people as there are hairs on his head. He had become a judge, and had also taken 600 million tomans in bribes, and he was issuing verdicts. Later came the likes of Salavati and Moghiseh, and you've seen these branches; it's a shame to call these people judges. They obey the intelligence and security apparatus, which in turn are

1:48:27 connected to the Office, or some, like Mortazavi and his kind, took orders directly from the Office. I remember, let me also mention this, Mr. Khamenei... When I was on hunger strike that last time in prison, someone would come on behalf of Hashemi Shahroudi, who was head of the judiciary. He too insisted that I break my hunger strike and so on, and said, "Mr. Hashemi Shahroudi insists; for God's sake, do this," and, "You know he has no involvement in these matters." He made it appear that Hashemi Shahroudi was impartial and on our side, and that despite the pressure of the Office and these Mortazavi types and

1:49:15 the rest, he had come and was telling me this out of compassion. I remember that when he said these things, I told him: "Give my regards to Mr. Hashemi Shahroudi and tell him: you are the real head of the judiciary. You can't come and say, 'I've closed my eyes to some corners of this place, they work with the Office, I have no responsibility, let them do it.'" Then I told him this story. I said that when Hitler's justice minister was tried at Nuremberg, three judges sat in each trial, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. At the end, one of those three

1:50:04 judges, an American judge, went into his cell to say goodbye before leaving, and Hitler's justice minister said to him: "Now that it's over and I have a life sentence, as a colleague I wanted to tell you that I did not consent to the crimes that came later." He gave him a very good answer. He said: "The very first day you closed your eyes to an injustice, you should have known it would end up here." I told that man: "Tell Mr. Hashemi Shahroudi this from me, and tell him it is not enough to say you've given up on some branches of the judiciary, the Revolutionary Court, and let Khamenei give whatever orders he wants there and have them carried out

1:50:53 by these security and intelligence people, and then think you have no responsibility. You can resign and leave. You are the head of the judiciary, and you cannot say you are closing your eyes to injustices." In any case, his machine of repression, in effect, and the corruption of the judiciary so that it would close its eyes to a great deal of theft... You'll remember that when the fights over corruption sometimes heated up, he made that famous remark, "Don't drag it out," and swept it under the rug, because a number of these thieves who had come out of his system were the keepers of his throne and crown, and still are. That is where he took the structure of the state.

1:51:41 Ruining and corrupting the judiciary is among the evils and the notable features of his era, and it became the end point of the repression machine he had built, connected to it, and it still goes on. They arrest people's young sons and daughters who demonstrated in the street, take them away and execute them. Some of these judges, in fact, find the verdicts already written and placed on their desks: sentence this one to this, sentence that one to that. Let me finish what I was saying here. I remember, again that last time I was in prison, one day, in that miserable state of hunger strike, when

1:52:31 they had to hold me up under the arms, they took me from Evin, blindfolded, to the Revolutionary Court. There, in a room, they removed my blindfold. This same Mr. Zare'-Dehnavi, Haddad, was sitting behind a rickety desk, and a little to his side was Mr. Arjmandi, I think, and they said, "He's the prosecutor. They've written an indictment for you; come and defend yourself here. This is the court." I could barely even sit on the chair. I turned, looked at this Mr. Zare'-Dehnavi and said: "Look, this is not a court, and you are not a judge. I know that outside you have a 600 or 700 million toman embezzlement case against you,

1:53:22 and your hand is under the cleaver of the intelligence people and the Office and the rest of them. Whatever they tell you, you have to do. I recognize neither you, nor him, nor this court, and I have nothing to say." This Mr. Zare'-Dehnavi got angry and said, "You're being insolent. I can sentence you to 20 years in prison." I said, "Put a zero after it and make it 200 years. In fact, just write execution. I'd be a coward if I even objected; I won't. I have just one condition. This ridiculous indictment you've written, the six charges you've written for me and the nonsense in it: since they don't release it to be published outside, they don't even give it to your lawyer; if you have a lawyer,

1:54:11 he has to go there and sit and read it, and they don't even let him copy its pages." I said, "Give this to whoever is my lawyer." Three lawyers had agreed to represent me: Mr. Ghasem Sholeh-Saadi, Ms. Shirin Ebadi, and Mr. Shirzad Heydari, who did the legwork; he was a young lawyer at the time. I said, "Give it to this Mr. Heydari who comes and goes, and let him publish it outside. That's all. Then sentence me to whatever you want. Didn't you say you want to give me 20 years? I'm telling you, just write execution; I won't object at all. Just give this out to be published, so people know over what nonsense you bring the country's young people here, convict them, and hand them prison,

1:55:01 confinement and even execution." He thought for a moment and said no, and in effect rejected such a deal. I'm telling this as a personal experience, but I'm sure that everyone who went to prison has had these experiences, and worse. They have seen, and they know, how he created a corrupt judiciary and how it became his instrument during his era, and a machine of repression with which to suppress, imprison

1:55:51 and arrest every opponent and every dissident, and it goes on to this very day. On the headings concerning his period of rule, I'll stop here. I also have a few personal memories that I can tell, if you allow.

1:56:43 you; there was Mr. Nourizad, for instance, and others: something called the movement of writing letters to the Leader, that is, "advising the leaders of the Muslims," where people would say, "Sir, we are telling you this out of compassion. We have no weapons in our hands, no guns. This path you are taking is wrong." About this letter-writing: how many did you write, and who were the others? I remember Nourizad. Please explain this for us.

1:57:32 to that extent. Through a friend who I knew had known him since before the revolution and had family visits with him, I asked that it be delivered to him personally so that he would read it. This friend of ours gave it to his wife, who knew Mr. Khamenei's wife, was in contact with her and used to see her. She gave it to her and was assured that his wife would give it to Mr. Khamenei personally to read, and I was sure that he read that first private letter of mine. At the end of that letter I had explained: "So-and-so, you've become Leader, and you are heading somewhere on a path that is wrong."

1:58:20 I remember this sentence of mine that I wrote at the end: "If you continue this, I see a day when you are standing on one side and a nation is standing on the other. Don't do this. Don't go down this path." That was the private letter I first wrote to him, in the hope it would have some effect, as you put it, in the spirit of advising the leaders of disbelief, or the leaders of the Muslims. The next letter, which I wrote publicly, was when the reform movement had gotten underway. Mr. Khatami was president,

1:59:09 and when two years of Mr. Khatami's first term had passed, I came to this conclusion. I said it once in our circle of friends at Kian. This was Dr. Bashiriyeh's phrase: that the goals of the reform movement very quickly hit the narrow walls of the constitution. So I told our friends at the time: "Sir, with the program we had in mind for the movement, with a Velayat-e Faqih who is watching closely to make sure it doesn't succeed, we won't reach our goal. He shuts down newspapers. He closes this one, won't let that one work, imprisons people, and has formed an army that pours in and beats people." They used to beat Khatami's ministers. They attack

1:59:58 gatherings. "We must make a referendum on the constitution our central slogan, and the constitution must be changed. Otherwise, as long as we have an institution called the absolute Velayat-e Faqih, and this man who is tightly gathering all his resources to prevent the reform movement from succeeding and has taken various instruments into his service... Let us, while the people are behind the reform movement, use the people's power to go for changing the constitution. It can't be changed from within either, because again it's in the Leader's hands; under Article 177 of the constitution, he must approve even the referendum. We

2:00:50 should go outside the constitution and demand a referendum, under the supervision of international organizations, yes or no on the constitution as a whole." Well, some of our friends were against this. I made it a public letter and wrote it openly. In fact, before publishing it, I remember I raised it with various political currents, such as the Participation Party, the Freedom Movement, the National-Religious, and the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution, with people from each of them, and said, "Sir, come, let's put a collective signature on it."

2:01:37 Of course I knew beforehand. None of them agreed. They went and raised it within their organizations, but their answer was, "No, this is radical." The reformists said, "This means going beyond Khatami, and we don't want to do that," and they didn't come forward to sign collectively. I published it under my own personal signature. That was the second, a public letter. And in fact, when I had been arrested, one night this same Mr. Mortazavi I mentioned... they brought me from my cell in that same Ward 2-A, which belonged to IRGC Intelligence, to a room in its entrance hall. There I

2:02:27 removed my blindfold and saw it was Mr. Mortazavi. He had come to tell me, since I had started my hunger strike, "Break your hunger strike." That's why he wanted to talk, but among the things he said was: "Look, you thought you could talk about a referendum and just walk around freely. It doesn't work like that." Later, when these interrogators tried to deny it, I told them: "Hear the truth from the mouth of a child. This Mr. Mortazavi is clearly stating the reason for my arrest. He's saying, 'You said referendum, so you have to come to prison.'" Is it a crime for someone to come out and say, "Sir, hold a referendum"? Well, say you won't do it. Arresting him? It's unimaginable, what kind of treatment that is.

2:03:15 That was another letter I wrote to him. After that I may not have written another letter until Ahmadinejad came to power, by which time I was abroad. I wrote a public letter then too and told him, "This is a wrong path. You are taking the country to ruin. Don't." The last time, if I wrote any more letters... why? Because from a certain point on, I saw it was useless. I wrote a letter in which I proposed to him: "Mr. Khamenei, look, sooner or later you will die," and this was after the Green Movement and, I think, Aban '98 and so on, "and history will remember you very bitterly." Because I knew that history

2:04:06 matters a great deal to him. Someone from inside the regime once told me that he cares very much about what name of his will remain in history, and that's why he strongly dislikes written letters, because he knows they endure. Of course, nowadays, with the internet and videos like this one in which you and I are talking, all of these remain in history too. That last time I wrote to him: "Look, you still have an opportunity. Come, while you're alive. Article 110 of the constitution, clause 8, gives you the authority, in times of crisis, to resolve the crisis however you see fit, in consultation with the Expediency Discernment Council.

2:04:56 Come and set aside the Raisi government, an incompetent government that has come to power, and the Majlis, which is even more incompetent, and hold a referendum under the supervision of international organizations. Ask the owners of the house, the Iranian nation: 'Gentlemen of the nation, you are the owners of the house; do you want this whole constitution or not? Do you want us at all? Islamic Republic, yes or no?'" Because Mr. Khomeini had no right, in [13]58, to ask that "Islamic Republic, yes or no." He had the right to ask the people "monarchy, yes or no," because people had lived under it and knew what the monarchy was. But the Islamic Republic was a sealed watermelon, and the people at that juncture, myself included, thought

2:05:46 they had made a revolution and won, and that this referendum was a confirmation of their revolution's victory, a kind of international legal document on which the people had now put their seal. But what the Islamic Republic actually meant became clear a few months later, when its constitution was written. For that very reason, 25 to 30 percent fell away right away in the referendum on the draft constitution. And then in [13]68, when a decade had passed and they wrote the constitutional amendment, less than 50 percent voted in the referendum they held, and that's with their fraud. So my point in this last letter of mine was: "Come and

2:06:36 while you're alive you still have time; you can still make amends for the past. Come, take this chaotic country you've created and refer it to the owners of the house, the people. See what they say. And if the people say, 'No, we don't want this whole system, we say no to it,' then another constitution must be written and there must be another system. You can do this peacefully." And my last sentence, though I knew he wouldn't do it, but I wanted this page to be in history, I wrote: "If you do this, perhaps a good name of you will remain in history." But he didn't. I also heard later that in his Office

2:07:29 they had put this in his folder and he had seen it, because they didn't let him see everything, and he had become very angry. His reaction was: "This man sitting abroad doesn't know what's going on here. Someone has to go, seize this traitor and bring him here, so that he gets what he deserves and confesses to his treason." In effect, his plan was that, if they could, they would take me to Iran, first torture me thoroughly, then I'd go on TV and confess that I was an agent of, presumably, Mossad and the CIA and MI6 all together, and then, say, they would execute me. Let me also mention this: in these years that I've been in

2:08:19 America, at least three times the FBI, which is in effect responsible for federal security in America, warned me, "We have information that they want to assassinate you." And actually the last time... They also gave me some simple instructions, telling me, for example, don't meet people you don't know, don't go to dangerous places, in short, be careful. Their advice was also that America is safe, but don't go to certain countries, because they might kidnap you and take you away: at the very least, don't go to any country that borders Iran, and some other countries too, like Malaysia and, say,

2:09:09 at that time Cyprus and places like that, don't go there; but if you're in America, Canada or Western Europe, it's safe. But what I want to say is this: well, he didn't assassinate me or kidnap me, but we've seen that in the years he has ruled, and in the Islamic Republic as a whole, killing or kidnapping opponents abroad has been another of the things this regime has done.

2:09:59 Mortazavi specifically was heavily involved compared to others. Mr. Sazegara, you yourself put quite a few publications on the market: I don't know, Jameeh, Tous, Golestan, Ayeneh, Ayeneh-ye Andisheh. We've touched on the press question to some extent, but Mr. Khamenei and the press and the media... Later, of course, these new media came along, social media came along, and the same behavior was repeated. The pattern that was applied to such-and-such paper newspaper was applied to such-and-such media too. He once even put it this way: "I have told these officials many times that this

2:10:50 media space is, by God, unbridled, out of control." The same pattern. Now, since you have memories of newspapers being shut down, give me some information about this as well.

2:11:37 positions were offered to me, even, once, heading the Plan Organization. I said, "I've decided not to accept any position anymore." I went into the press. Mr. Sattari, I think, was director-general of domestic press. He told people who had done management in other places, "We want to grant licenses in order to break the monopoly of Kayhan and Ettela'at, which has been left over from before the revolution." Among others, he gave me the license for Ayeneh. Ayeneh's license was for a daily, and since I had no money, I first published it, with the permission of the Ministry of Guidance, as

2:12:26 a weekly. Then, since I wanted to set up a press institute, I got licenses for two more magazines, one Ayeneh-ye Andisheh and one Ayeneh-ye Eqtesad, which were monthlies. Then, when the Minister of Guidance, Mr. Khatami (those are long stories), was replaced under pressure from Mr. Khamenei, Mr. Larijani became Minister of Guidance, and his deputy for press affairs was Mr. Pournejati. He shut down Ayeneh-ye Andisheh and Ayeneh-ye Eqtesad. Because the weekly Ayeneh carried entertainment content so that it could make money and keep things running, so that we could publish those two,

2:13:14 as I've recounted before, I went to Mr. Larijani and said, "Look, you've shut down these two in which I wanted to say my serious things. It no longer holds any appeal for me. My license is for a daily. Give it to me, or, since you give paper to the newspapers, tell them to give me some too, and I'll go and publish a daily." As I said before, Mr. Larijani gave me advice as an old friend: "So-and-so, if you publish it, they'll shut it down. The Office is sensitive about you, and you'll just end up in debt." I said, "You're right. I can't carry that much debt." So I handed over that weekly too, so that someone else

2:14:04 would publish it. But after that, he still didn't leave me alone. For instance, the Iran Data Processing Company: I had once been chairman of its board, because I was the deputy of Mr. Zanjani, the Minister of Plan and Budget, on the Supreme Council of Informatics. By that route, two data processing companies of Iran's were under the Plan Organization's management, and by virtue of that position I was chairman of both. After I had left office, I had no position. The people at Data Processing had invited me to work in their operations department, meaning marketing and

2:14:55 sales, marketing in industry and so on, and to pay me a salary. We didn't do bad work, either. For factories we knew, we tried both to do strategic planning and to mechanize them; computers were just starting to come into industry and so on. Mr. Khamenei, even after Mr. Zanjani left the Plan Organization and Mr. Mirzadeh was put in charge of the Plan Organization, ordered through him to Engineer Ghaemian, the managing director of Data Processing: "So-and-so cannot be at Data Processing, even if he's working in some corner of this company." I remember Mr. Ghaemian

2:15:43 said, "Sir, they're talking nonsense. I told Mirzadeh, 'We'll stand behind you.'" I told him, "No, don't do this. My fight with Mr. Khamenei is bigger than the size of your data processing company. You're doing useful work here, providing a service. I'll go." And I left. Later, when the reform movement came, well, we published the newspaper Jameeh. Mr. Jalaeipour had gone and obtained the license, and we came in and published it. Again I wanted to set up a press institute. We founded a company, Jameeh-ye Rooz, and we wanted the newspaper... because it took off, the newspaper

2:16:33 grew enormously, and we had managed it in such a way that we had covered its initial losses and turned a profit; we even published its financial performance report in the paper. With the Central Bank, too, when Dr. Nourbakhsh had again become governor of the Central Bank, I had spoken to him, and we had obtained permission; the Central Bank had a regulation under which we could sell participation bonds through Bank Mellat, so that these bonds could later be converted into public shares. Perhaps we would turn Jameeh-ye Rooz into a public joint-stock company on the newspaper's anniversary, because it had really reached a circulation of 500,000, and with savings in producing the newspaper, producing it with domestic paper at the time, and with

2:17:27 We had raised the sale price, and the newspaper had passed its break-even point on every issue. The circulation was several hundred thousand, and each copy brought in a profit of maybe 15 [tomans] at the time. We were moving forward. I was preparing to set up a center and buy a rotary printing press, so that this would no longer be the monopoly of two or three big newspapers, along with a building and so on, and to turn it into a public joint-stock company. Out of that 500,000 circulation, at least 200,000 or 300,000 of our readers would come and buy these participation bonds. We had projected 5 billion tomans, and the bonds would later become shares in the newspaper. My reasoning was that if it went this way, then shutting the newspaper would no longer

2:18:16 be simple, because they would be up against 200,000 to 300,000 people. I think Mr. Khamenei saw what we were up to, because before it got that far he shut our newspaper down. First they attacked the newspaper's office in the name of the families of the martyrs. Besides what I've already told you, he had also put the Intelligence [Ministry] fully on our case to find some pretext against us, to accuse us of something. The Intelligence Ministry had reported twice: no, sir, these people have nothing hidden, they are exactly what they appear to be. Then one day, as it happened, I, Mr. Shamsolvaezin the editor-in-chief, and Mr. Jalaeipour were all out of the newspaper office. It was a Thursday, I think, when the newspapers are closed.

2:19:05 A number of people from the financial and administrative sections were at the paper, along with some staff who had work that was behind. These so-called Hezbollahis that they organized poured into that square right there, shouted abuse, and wanted to attack the newspaper office. Mr. Ahmad Bourghani, God rest his soul, was in charge of press affairs at the time. From his side he was in contact with Mr. Razini, who was behind these groups, and told him: "Sir, this is a disgrace, you're attacking [a newspaper]." Razini told him: "No, they deserve it," and so on. I even remember that the newspaper staff had called the local police station. The police came too, and they were told

2:19:55 "Sir, after all, a group has poured into this square, they're making threats and want to attack in the name of the martyrs' families, but they're all burly, thuggish types." The police said: "Sir, don't pit us against these people, we can't handle them. They have orders from somewhere else." It was completely obvious. Anyway, they made that attack on the newspaper office, and they did the same thing to other newspapers too. The stroke of luck we had at that point was that Anwar Faruqi, the regional editor of the Associated Press, who was based in Cyprus, had come to Iran. Because he was of Pakistani origin, he looked like an Iranian, and his father, because

2:20:46 he had lived in Iran for a period before the revolution, [and] he also knew Persian. That day Faruqi happened to come to the newspaper office to see us. He arrives and sees the door is closed. There was a courtyard, and he rings the bell. One of these so-called thugs, these attackers in the square, comes up to him: "What business do you have here?" He was a well-known journalist. He turns around and says: "None of your business, it has nothing to do with you." He knew Persian. The moment he says this, the man beats him. He beats Faruqi, his shirt gets torn, and so on. He went back from right there, and... [Interviewer:] What was his name? Anwar what? [Sazegara:] Anwar Faruqi.

2:21:35 We were friends with him. He was the chief editor for the Middle East region of the Associated Press international news agency, and their main office was in Cyprus. He had come to Iran because at that time a lot of press people, reporters, were coming to Iran to prepare reports. As I said, the reform movement had drawn the whole world's attention. They took it very seriously, and it was an important event. Anyway, on his way back, Faruqi apparently, since these laptops had just come out, writes the report of this incident, of which he himself was the victim. He gets to the hotel, puts it on the fax machine, and faxes it

2:22:26 to their office in [Cyprus]. There they put it on the AP news wire, and it goes all over the world. On the other side, as Mr. Bourghani at the ministry told it, he said: "I saw this news from Anwar Faruqi come over the wire, and I immediately called Mr. Razini again: There you go, they've beaten up the AP editor, he's an eyewitness. This is the disgrace I was telling you about." Mr. Razini was taken aback and suddenly said: "Wow, what's happened?" About half an hour later, apparently, orders came from behind the scenes and they left. Otherwise they meant to attack, to pour into the newspaper the way they did with some other magazines, like Kiyan, and smash things, break

2:23:15 the chairs, and beat anyone who stood in their way. It passed without harm there, but anyway, they shut down Jameh. Then [we brought out] another newspaper, and Mr. Mortazavi did this... we brought this one out, I think it was Aftab or something. Mr. Emamzadeh Khalili held its license. He came at night and said: "Sir, I have this license, bring it out." We brought it out, and they shut it down. Toos: Mr. Javadi Hesar had [its license], he brought it, and they shut it down. Then they saw that we had also spread a rumor that we had, say, 10 licenses up our sleeve, when in reality we didn't. With great difficulty we'd get hold of the next one so there wouldn't be a delay. They called them "chain newspapers" and I don't know what else. In short,

2:24:05 the readers really did find it. Mr. Jiroudi was in charge of distribution at the company that distributed the paper; we had a contract with them. Every night we'd ask him how many copies to print, and he'd say: "People will find it, don't worry. You [print] Toos, and we'll tell the kiosk guys to say: sir, these are the same Jameh people." And people would line up to buy it. Anyway, they saw they couldn't win, so they simply ordered arrests. They seized the newspaper and [ordered] arrests. As it happened, I had gone abroad. I was in Malaysia, and from there I wanted to go see our brother who was abroad. I came back from right there.

2:24:53 But the seizure and arrest orders were [issued] for Mr. Jalaeipour, the managing director; Mr. Shamsolvaezin, the editor-in-chief; Mr. Javadi Hesar, who held the license for Toos; me, as publisher and CEO of Jameh-e Rooz; and Mr. Ebrahim Nabavi, God rest his soul, whose satire column, "Fifth Column," had really taken off. To be fair, Mr. Nabavi was the star of Jameh. They had arrested him too. I came back to Iran, and they took me into custody right at the airport. Because my heart needed surgery, they took me to the hospital, with two agents standing over me. He [Khamenei]

2:25:45 then struck and shut things down. In fact, Mr. Khamenei turned that Press Spring into autumn. He arrested many journalists and imprisoned them. Later on, the reformists had promised that once they won a majority in the Majlis they would change the press law and reopen the newspapers that had been shut. He sent a decree to the Majlis, a note to Mr. Karroubi. Mr. Asghar Hejazi took it and delivered it: remove this from the agenda. Unfortunately, the reformists obeyed, though in my opinion they shouldn't have. They had the backing of the people. They should have put it on the agenda, and

2:26:35 if these thugs and club-wielders poured in, they should have called on the people for help. They would have backed down, because the majority of the people were still behind the reform movement and behind the reformist press. Now that I've said this, let me recount another memory. As I said, there were a lot of foreign reporters around. One night, around 9:30 or 10, Mr. Scott MacLeod, a writer for Time magazine who was also in Iran, came to the newspaper office at that hour. The pages had already been closed, and the press staff had gone for dinner. Mr. Jalaeipour usually did these interviews, but he wasn't in town,

2:27:25 and since he was the one who knew English and he wasn't there, it was Mr. Shamsolvaezin and me. Mr. Shamsolvaezin knew Arabic but not English; I knew English. I didn't give interviews; I tried to stay behind the scenes so I could do my work. Out of necessity, I did the interview with Mr. Scott MacLeod. Over dinner it became interesting to him, meaning he saw that my background was this and that, going back to Khomeini's time, and so on. I also translated for Mr. Shamsolvaezin. Altogether, he prepared a report, took a photo, and gave the report the headline "Press Spring," on the model of Dubček's Prague Spring. It ran a full page in Time magazine, a page and

2:28:14 a bit. It was a report that told a story. That's the custom in this kind of journalism, "storytelling," as they call it, telling a story. I'm saying this happened by chance. If Mr. Jalaeipour had been there that night, I wouldn't have given the interview; we would have had them do it. Later, when they arrested me, that last time, the IRGC Intelligence interrogators said: "So-and-so, Time belongs to the Zionists." For God's sake, look at how they stitch things together. "And they devoted a page to you. They don't do that so easily. They're working on you, they have plans for you, based on that very theory of yours." In short, that you would be the Yeltsin,

2:29:04 that they wanted to promote you so you'd become [Iran's Yeltsin]. You see, in my view this shows Khamenei's mentality. In fact, he was the one who gave these scenarios to the interrogators, or his office did, the team they have, or his key people in the intelligence apparatus. After that, Mr. Alizadeh, I didn't put out any more publications, because I predicted it. I told my friends: if we bring out another one, he's figured us out, he'll just shut it down again. Others have come into this field too. Mr. Hajjarian has gone and is putting out a publication, Mr. Abdollah Nouri has come in. They're taking the path we opened. Let's go, with these people who bought Jameh and showed interest,

2:29:59 let's found a party and organize these people. Of course, those two others said no, we're not in, we want to go put out newspapers. So at that point I stepped away from that work. In the meantime, since I could no longer work in any government position, I tried to open a bookstore, for example. I remember you have to submit the request for a bookstore and publishing license to, say, the Tehran office of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. It goes to the Intelligence Ministry, which checks it. After a week or two had passed, and you also have to submit a clean criminal record, I went over once

2:30:47 to ask, to see what had happened. The director general knew me. He closed his office door and said: "So-and-so, look, the Intelligence Ministry has to approve, and they've said they won't give you a publishing or bookstore license either." I said: "God bless your father," and left. Later I said: well, what should I do now? I'll go set up a workshop. I know a bit about industry. A small workshop where, say, 10 of us workers would work together, 200 square meters of space, as much as I could afford. We'd borrow about 50 million tomans and make PVC doors and windows. I used to sit in a friend's office, since I didn't have a place of my own, an office where I could do the studies

2:31:38 and the planning for all this. When they arrested us, they raided this friend's office. I was so ashamed afterwards, because it was on my account. They had [torn into] the walls, saying "here." They had dug up his garden with shovels: "So-and-so used to sit here, he had weapons," I don't know what. They harassed him a lot, and they also clamped down on his business. As it happened, he manufactured auto parts on order for various places; he was also a designer. My point is, another thing they did was this: when they went after you, and I'm not talking about me, I didn't suffer financial loss, this regime has learned to ruin you completely. It won't let you work, it won't let you open a shop,

2:32:29 it won't let you set up a workshop, and then it takes your property. For example, when I got my master's in history, I also took the doctoral entrance exam. The professors in the history department at Shahid Beheshti University were kind to me and said: you probably came first in the exam. But then they didn't allow it; they tampered with the score weightings. Dr. Khalafi, one morning when I went in, said: "So-and-so, I didn't sleep at all last night. They told us the exam weightings had been altered, and in short, you've been dropped. Of the 10 we had selected for interviews, four or five were to become doctoral students. Here they won't let you continue your studies, because

2:33:21 I remember Dr. Soroush also told me at the time: "So-and-so, I knew they wouldn't let you through, because by the Ministry of Science's own rules, if you get a doctorate you can teach, and they won't let you continue your studies." That is, they deprive you of education. Later I corresponded with the University of London and actually worked on a dissertation. Or they take your property. Fortunately, I didn't have any property. But recently my sister and brother, my older sister and my younger brother, passed away. Each of them had one apartment, and since they had no children, it went to the siblings. They seized the part that came to me. The Execution of Imam Khomeini's Order Headquarters actually comes and

2:34:13 takes it. It's a huge hassle too, because it has to go to the court, the judiciary's appraiser, I don't know what. It's been two years now; a simple matter has been dragged out. What I want to say is that Mr. Khamenei, in this repression apparatus of his, has carried out executions, imprisonment, torture, whatever you name, he's done it. And even at the minimum, there are things like, for someone like me, ruining you completely, depriving you of education. There are many such people. They make life so tight for you that you can't even exist.

2:35:02 Actually, now I remember: the last time I was in prison, one day these interrogators were again talking from behind me. Unlike IRGC Intelligence, where those two would sit face to face with us, these ones didn't show themselves. They'd sit us facing the wall and talk from behind. One of them said: "So-and-so, we know you're an entrepreneur and could own 100 factories. Why [do this]? Come, give up this politics, and we're ready to help you go and build businesses. Why have one workshop making doors and windows when you could set up 100 factories?"

2:35:50 Of course, I didn't say the answer out loud. In my heart I said: "Go set this trap for some other bird." If it were a matter of financial dishonesty, I would have gone corrupt long before them. Anyway, I didn't put out a newspaper again until several years later, when I had an idea. I had been lecturing at universities and had set up various classes for students, around that candidacy for which they disqualified me, and there,

2:36:37 in this work, Mr. Asef Nakhaei, if I'm not getting his surname wrong, had a license called Golestan-e Iran. We talked with him. It was the custom, since they wouldn't give me a newspaper license, [to use someone else's license], so we would put out his newspaper as a student publication, by students and for students. He agreed. We worked the whole summer. Maybe 40 or 50 students came and volunteered, and they trained. I asked people like the late... God forbid, he hasn't passed away, Mr. Akbar Ghazizadeh, and a few other journalists

2:37:29 to hold classes for the students over the summer on how to do the work, and it was ready. Our editor-in-chief was Mr. Amin Bozorgian, who was himself 23. I wanted it to be entirely student-run. Two weeks before the first of Mehr [start of the academic year], we published it. Even for the very first issue we printed 50,000 copies, and we knew it would sell. And then, really, within two weeks, before we even reached the first of Mehr, he seized it and they shut it down. That was another of the things they wrangled with me about when they arrested me. Then, after Golestan-e Iran was shut down,

2:38:20 websites were just emerging, and I created a news-and-analysis website called Aliran. Two or three people helped, and my friend Mr. Bouzari, an engineer, managed it. When they raided and arrested us, they shut down that website too, and took the two desktop computers that were there. As it happened, they also arrested Mr. Manzari along with me that last time. They didn't allow us to do anything, not even a website. As you say, this story has continued ever since.

2:39:08 It's no longer limited to newspapers and books. Now with social networks, there are many young people in prison because of a post they put on social media, or even for liking something. [Interviewer:] Yes, excellent. I'd like to start wrapping up the discussion. This has been one of our very long interviews, but very rich in content. But allow me to take up an expression you used, something to the effect that in the history of Iran's rulers you don't know of anyone worse than Khamenei, or some such expression,

2:40:00 you used, even in this interview. So I want to ask: in 37 years of his leadership, do you see no positive point at all in Mr. Khamenei? Is it entirely dark, or do you see some positive point as well? [Sazegara:] Yes. As Mash Qasem says, why lie? It's only a hand's span to the grave; tomorrow we'll each sleep in a hand's span of earth. One has to be fair in one's judgment. Honestly, Dr. Alizadeh, over dinner, because of this conversation, I thought about it: "If you've spoken of his faults, speak of his merits too." Let me see,

2:40:50 so as not to speak only of Mr. Khamenei's bad points, of what he has done and the calamities he has brought on our country and our people. Let me see if there's some positive place where I can say: this was a positive thing he did over 37 years. Honestly, in every field: Iran's economy, for instance, "bring oil money to people's tables," which he told Ahmadinejad, and that one created a disaster; or these thefts; or the judiciary; or the press and culture, with that nonsensical theory of "cultural invasion"; foreign policy, domestic policy. I went over a lot of these to see

2:41:41 if there's any place where I could say he did a good thing. Or religion, for example: after all, he was a cleric and wore clerical dress; maybe a religious generation was raised there. In reality, I found nothing, except one case I'll mention. But since you brought up religion, let me say that another very bad thing he did was to clamp down on the Shia clergy, whose pride for ages had been its independence from governments. As someone used to say, it was like our traditional civil society. Throughout the Qajar era, the clergy was on the one hand a partner of the government

2:42:28 and on the other hand opposed it and was in conflict with it. And in the movements of our last 100 years, wherever the clergy came over to the people's side and stood against the government, the movements succeeded, like the Constitutional movement, the nationalization of oil, or the Islamic Revolution itself. But he clamped down on the clergy's independence too. It was in his era... I first heard this from Mr. Ardebili. Mr. Ardebili had been sidelined and had gone to Qom, where he was building Mofid University and teaching advanced jurisprudence [dars-e kharej], which is the course that leads to becoming a marja. He said people from the Beit [the Leader's Office] came to me and said: "Sir, if you want to collect religious dues,

2:43:18 you must deposit them all in this account," an account under the Beit's supervision. The religious dues had to go there. That is, they wanted to take away the marjas' financial independence. Mr. Ardebili said: "I told him, I neither want to collect religious dues nor want to see your faces. Go mind your own business." I first heard it from him. Later I heard, for instance, about Mr. Vahid Khorasani, who was known in the seminary for having the most crowded advanced classes and for being the most learned of all; they wouldn't let him publish his treatise [risaleh], and in the end they didn't. He created a number of manufactured marjas, like Noori Hamedani and

2:44:07 Makarem and others, and these also became tainted with financial matters. Then the Qom intelligence office went after all the marjas. Then there's the case of Mr. Montazeri, whom he put under house arrest; he kept Montazeri under house arrest for four or five years. As they say, the marja-killing that Khomeini had started, he continued. And he took it all the way down to Friday prayer leaders, congregational prayer leaders, mosque preachers, and so on. It was in his era, and I heard this from Mr. Anvari, who was in charge of the office for congregational prayer leaders. The prayer leader who runs a mosque

2:44:57 there. Previously it worked like this: if a few wealthy bazaar merchants got together and became founders and built a mosque, they would then go to the marja they followed and say: "We've built a mosque and we want a prayer leader." He would say, for example: "This student of mine, Seyyed Mohsen, is good," and introduce him. He would go there and become the mosque's prayer leader. But in Mr. Khamenei's era, they took this authority away from the mosque founders. I heard this from Mr. Anvari: when Agha Ebrahim Shobeiri of the Mirza-ye Shirazi mosque passed away... Dr.

2:45:47 Soroush's lectures were held there. They put in another prayer leader, and his very first act was to shut down those lectures. I went to see Mr. Anvari, whom I knew, and said: "Mr. Anvari, 2,000 young people come to that mosque every week, and your people shut it down. Who is this man you put there?" He said: "I didn't put him there." Then I said to him... and he laughed and said: "Give my regards to Dr. Soroush and tell him not to take this desk away from us. This one desk is all we got out of this revolution." He was a witty man. Mr. Anvari was actually Mr. Mahdavi Kani's deputy. Nominally, the head of the headquarters for mosques and for Friday and congregational prayer leaders was Mr.

2:46:41 Mahdavi Kani, but Mr. Anvari ran it. In short, he said: they won't let me. And they clamped down. Then they went after the mosque preachers. I saw this myself when my father died. If you held a memorial service at a mosque, you couldn't just bring any preacher you wanted to give a talk, advise people, and remember the deceased. They had to give permission; the Islamic Propagation Organization had to give permission. They set up a central body to control mosque preachers. That's why now, and there has been a cultural change in our society, most people, when a loved one

2:47:32 dies, don't go to mosques at all anymore. They go to a hotel, a hall, some place, and hold the ceremony there. Anyway, he clamped down and went so far as to make the Shia clergy, whose pride was its independence from governments, completely governmental and state-run. He did it, and he took it all the way down to the mosque prayer leader and the pulpit preacher. So, honestly, Mr. Alizadeh, I went over the various fields to see what there was. Maybe I can name just one place where I'd honestly say: yes, he had the right idea there. Everywhere

2:48:22 else, I sat and thought about it and saw that he took a crooked path and a wrong policy. And that one place was Iran's military development. In my view, it was the right choice to develop the drone and missile industries. This was in fact the technology of the future, and, God's truth, good work has been done, I mean the missile and drone capability. Mr. Elon Musk, during those six months at the start of Mr. Trump's administration, this second one... he is after all an entrepreneur and in some ways a genius in certain things. He once said: they're wasting money on

2:49:10 air forces; the future isn't fighter jets, it's drones. And I think here one can say that at least the diagnosis was correct. Although I believe that if we had removed "wiping out Israel" and the issue of anti-Americanism from the foreign policy table, perhaps this much development of military industries wouldn't have been necessary. We should have spent it on developing the country, a country that has had population growth and needs so much economic development. But anyway,

2:49:58 to some extent, after all, we're in a turbulent region of the world. Our neighbors aren't Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Switzerland. If you're weak, this very Iraq, with which you fought for eight years, might take it into its head to attack your country. At a minimum, a country needs defense, and I think the choice to develop the drone and missile industries was the right one. However much I looked, I saw that yes, this one can [be credited]. Of course, the credit should go above all to the scientists who worked and put in the time,

2:50:49 whose brains did the work, and who did good work. But as for the rest, honestly, however much I searched, and I'm sorry, I couldn't find another positive point to tell you now. Perhaps there are others who see something positive and can tell you, but I couldn't. [Interviewer:] Well, for example, one of the people I was talking to said: sir, for someone in the position of Leader and source of emulation, making [his house] a venue for Shia literature, for poetry gatherings, is a nice initiative, that he did this. Anyway, as a leader, when there are poetry gatherings, which of course in

2:51:37 There are remarks on that there too. Now, if you have a point here as well, please share it, regarding the matter of the poetry gatherings. I strongly disagree with that friend who told you this. Look, it's not that I disagree with that... yes, yes, yes, in fact this is a very bad thing. If only Mr. Khamenei, yes, if he were a marja' who held neither power nor wealth, just a religious authority sitting in a corner of Qom teaching his classes, living on bread and cheese and burning the midnight oil, and also a man of letters, that would be wonderful. We have had clerics who were men of letters and poetry, and of mysticism too. But when he, like Sultan Mahmud, yes, yes, when he is the Leader and also controls the wealth, this spectacle he would stage during the months of Ramadan, to

2:52:29 gather court poets, to patronize "Anvaris," so to speak, to say "Bravo, bravo," and sit there while they recite his praises, some of them shamelessly sitting and reciting his praises while he says nothing, and then hands out rewards like the kings of old and so on: this, Mr. Alizadeh, does great harm to art. Look, commissioned art, or let me call it "committed art," meaning art in which the artist works within a framework set by the government, whether it is poetry, fiction, film, theater, painting, whatever, is the death of art. That is,

2:53:17 the artist is a free-spirited being who must be able to create in freedom of spirit and freedom of thought, without fear of brand and awl and repression, and without greed for money and rewards and so on, and then the people should judge. As for his whole setup, if only... I sometimes say this, because in my view, from the literary and artistic opinions of his that I have seen, he was at the level of an average person who has read a few novels and a few poems. Otherwise, he was not a man of letters or a scholar of poetry and literature. If he had been, we would have seen

2:54:06 his works. People like Dr. Shafiei Kadkani at present, may he live long, or those who have passed, like Master Jalal Homaei and Forouzanfar and others, these are literary scholars whose opinions carried weight and who created works. But he, one could say, was a consumer, like me, who liked and read a few novels and read some poetry. That is very different from coming out and making literary pronouncements and then insisting that this framework, what I say, is what's good. Look, Mr. Khomeini understood neither what a novel was, nor what modern poetry was, nor literary subtleties. There are some poems

2:54:55 attributed to him, which in my view are second-rate poems, I say this as a reader. But precisely for that reason, perhaps because he didn't understand these things, he left them alone. As for him [Khamenei], if only... those few novels, his favorite novel was "And Quiet Flows the Don" by Sholokhov, he once mentioned it in one of his talks... these few books and novels and poems he had read became a headache for an entire country. Because with that self-regard and self-importance he had, first of all, he believed he was better than everyone. What was the story? What was it, and why did it cause a crisis? What was the story? Because, look, I am quoting one of my friends, who said that once he

2:55:46 had told this trustworthy friend, so to speak, "No one in this country knows Iqbal Lahori as well as I do." For God's sake, look at that. Iqbal Lahori was, after all, a renowned Persian-language poet who was also a philosopher and a religious reformist. Or he had said that hardly anyone knows Ferdowsi the way he does, that "I am a first-rate Ferdowsi scholar," for example. Or in novels, in screenplays: he had checked the Imam Ali series. He had read its individual episodes, its scripts, and many television screenplays, and in the margins he had written notes:

2:56:34 "No, change this part, do that part this way," or comments he made on films. Once he even said, "If you don't know how, come and ask us." He said this when he was president, addressing television. With that meager capacity, in my view, the meager capacity he had in the field of art, as a reader of works like you and me and others, yes, well, he had read things. But his misfortune was that, as the leader of the country, first, he thought very highly of himself and believed he understood better than everyone; and second, he turned the framework he liked into the government's framework, within which you must produce. Look, if you put an artist inside a framework, under whatever

2:57:26 name, whether it is out of greed for rewards and money, or by government coercion, or wanting to produce within an ideological framework, like what the Marxists did, history has usually shown that very worthless works will be produced. That bird of the artist's feeling and intellect, which must fly freely, gets caged. And that is why that patronage of court poets, even in the era of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, never produced anything worthwhile. They say 400 poets frequented the court of Sultan Mahmud. As my literature professor used to say, say "400 bakers" instead of "poets," because they were just earning their bread from it. And if there were great figures like Ferdowsi, well, Ferdowsi

2:58:15 started the Shahnameh when Sultan Mahmud was a nine-year-old slave boy, and later, when he composed the Shahnameh, he did not compose it at Sultan Mahmud's court. And if, when the Shahnameh was finished, they said Sultan Mahmud was going to give a reward and so on, he said some things, and Ferdowsi then died. If he had joined the likes of Onsori and Asjadi and, I don't know, Manuchehri Damghani, he would not have become Ferdowsi. Sa'di may have praised Sa'd ibn Zangi somewhere, for example, but Sa'di did not write the Golestan and Bustan or compose those exquisite ghazals on commission from princes. In most places, look at the Golestan, Sa'di opens his mouth to give advice,

2:59:03 Sa'di's sharp tongue that cut like a blade. Rumi is another matter altogether, unrelated to this; he moved in another sky. Or Hafez, say, may have praised someone somewhere, but Hafez did not become Hafez at court. Or every famous artist... at the beginning of the revolution, he, I think when he had not yet become president, or maybe he had, sent a check to Akhavan-Sales, because he considered it a great honor. Famously, in his youth he wandered around the literary circles of Mashhad, hoping to get in somewhere, to see the likes of Akhavan with his own eyes,

2:59:51 and the famous story is that Akhavan wrote on the back of the check and returned it to him. He wrote: "We artists, we intellectuals, are against the government, not with it." I also heard this from Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Back then, he had made "Tobeh Nosuh," a film which, as he himself says, he no longer likes. He had just entered filmmaking. Mr. Khamenei sent him a check for 40,000 tomans. Mohsen Makhmalbaf told me, "I wrote on the back of that check that I am not for sale and I don't need it." So his assumption was that everyone could be bought, to work for him within the framework he set, including intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, poets, and others. And well,

3:00:43 Yes, I understand. So what you want to say is, yes, you want to say that he did to art, literature and poetry the same thing he did when he made the marja'iyat a state institution, what he did with the judiciary, what he did with the newspapers, what he did with the IRGC and so on; he did the same with the field of art. Of course, it is also well known that the gatherings he held were completely filtered; people were screened, and not everyone could speak freely. Very well. But, Mr. Sazegara, from all the guests who discuss these matters... and you know, my view is always that in producing this program, I want to entrust it to history. That is, God willing, may you have a long

3:01:31 life, but 30 or 50 years from now, they will want to look at the foundation of Mr. Khamenei's performance. In my view, you presented it here in a very well-organized way: you described what you saw as positive points and what the negative points were. But I ask everyone two questions. The first question: if you were to give a grade from zero to 20 to the record, since the name of this project is "The Record of Ali Khamenei's Rule as Seen by Others," what grade would you give Mr. Khamenei's record? Interesting. Well, in my view he definitely fails, below ten. Out of zero to 20, if you

3:02:22 were lenient with him, you might give him four, on account of the one or two positive points I mentioned. Three or four, if you are willing to give him that. Otherwise, in my view, the reason for his failure is clear. As that verse of Rumi goes, it is evident on its face, from this country he has handed over and left behind. This is the outcome of his 37 years in power, during which he insisted on keeping everything under his own control, and whoever wanted to say anything, even his closest allies like Mr. Hashemi, he would push their heads under water. He monopolized power, monopolized wealth, interfered in everything. Therefore, the current state of the country is without doubt the responsibility of

3:03:13 Mr. Khamenei personally. A tree is known by its fruit. By a wide margin compared with everyone else, since, after all, he was not alone, there was a group, a regime, but by a very wide margin, perhaps 80 or 90 percent of where the country is now is the responsibility of Mr. Khamenei personally, his policies and his performance. This is the state of the country, this miserable life they have created for the nation. We are speaking in the year 1405, and we have this catastrophe in the economy, culture, society, war, troubles, sanctions, misery, repression, murder, massacres. In my view, as you say, years later, in

3:04:02 that part, the grade I gave, some may even cross it out and say, "So-and-so, you gave him a bit too much." Yes. On that part about building military power, where you said, for example, that the drone and missile program was a very commendable thing, please say very briefly: do you consider this regional power, meaning these proxy groups, the "Axis of Resistance," a positive achievement or not? No, negative, negative. Because, as they themselves say, an axis of resistance against whom? Against Israel. That's what it is. The Axis of Resistance means creating things in various places so that in the end you can wipe out Israel. And as I said, if you

3:04:53 had changed that policy of wiping out Israel, none of these would have been needed. And the result of these proxy groups, about which our people have been saying for years, "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I give my life for Iran," and they are not willing for you to take a single rial or a single dollar from their tables and give it to them. Billions were spent, and the result is that they created a bunch of mafia gangs, smugglers, terrorists, doing who knows what. And the disputes that arose with Arab countries, with neighboring countries, and all these troubles, and then the crimes in Syria they became partners in, all of this stems from what they did. Now, of course, as we are speaking, there is war, and the Houthis in Yemen on the other side. Look at

3:05:41 what misery there is in Yemen. If we step back a bit, look how many years this civil war in Yemen has been going on, north and south, and so on. Compare these poor people of Yemen with their neighbor Oman, roughly the same size, and both have oil; it is not as if Yemen has no oil. Look, Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East, while Oman is reported as one of the richest countries. That's how it is. What crime did the poor people of Yemen commit to deserve this? Very well, Mr. Sazegara, let me bring the discussion to a close. Of course, I think if we wanted to go deeper into the discussion with you, there would still be much more to discuss. I think you are also writing your memoirs?

3:06:30 That's right. I am not writing my memoirs; I have recorded my memoirs, and Abdi Media is supposed to release them in the form of a podcast, God willing. Well, very well, many things that have been said will be there, and we will refer people to that. I want to close the discussion now. You have given your grade, and just one final question, since I will have a great many guests whom I am, so to speak, inviting. Sometimes I think that, well, I may have forgotten some, for example, or not been able to find them. Among the supporters of Mr. Khamenei, one or several people, or among his opponents, one or several people, if you could name names and say, for example, "Invite so-and-so,"

3:07:21 whom would you recommend? Well, among the supporters, if he accepts, which of course he very likely won't, perhaps Mr. Haddad-Adel would be the best person, because he would fit your format as well. After all, he is the father-in-law of Mr. Khamenei's son. Or people who work in his office, like Haddad-Adel's son Farid, for example. After all, these people had close contact. Or people who were responsible, for example, in the Vali-ye Amr Corps. If they spoke, naturally,

3:08:12 from their own point of view, they would exalt Mr. Khamenei to the highest heavens. These are people who had direct contact with him, like General Nejat, for example. Others aside. But among the opponents, in my view, Mr. Alizadeh, since he stuck his nose into everything and got involved in every detail of the country, whatever profession you invite from among those who have suffered at his hands will certainly have plenty of memories. For example, from the student movement: he went after the Office for Consolidating Unity and in the end they shut it down. Mr. Ali Afshari spent several years in prison as political secretary of the Office for Consolidating Unity. Or Mr. Akbar Atri was a member

3:09:04 of the council during the period when Mr. Khamenei started cracking down on the Office for Consolidating Unity, and the events of 18 Tir. Or journalists, there are countless of them. In my view, there are many journalists who have felt his wrath, who went to prison, who faced Mortazavi, and whichever of them you take will certainly have a lot to say about his performance. Or writers, filmmakers, artists. In my view, if they are willing to talk, also some of the IRGC people, people who spent their lives at the front, for example, the whole

3:09:56 eight years of war, and afterward did not become thieves or murderers, and were cast out and even imprisoned, as we have seen recently, like Mr. Rahim Ghomeishi or General Bakhtiar and others. These are people who are out there. In my view, in whatever profession you go to, because he interfered in everything, there are people, I mean as opponents, whom his wrong policies in that area brought disaster upon, and brought disaster upon the country. In my view, these are people who can complete this portrait of his record.

3:10:44 Yes, that's quite right. Just so I can say which areas I will be conducting interviews on, I have specified at least the areas, and it would be good to mention them here so that our viewers know which topics I will cover. One is the economy, for example whether he had a development-oriented outlook, sanctions, inflation and so on. Foreign policy and international relations. The press, media and cyberspace, part of which you explained. The environment, Mr. Sazegara, we did not discuss the environment; the environment, the water crisis and so on are very important issues. In the area of religion and religiosity: the marja'iyat, mosques, the clergy, eulogists and so on; there must be a lot of focus on that. In the area of military power, which you

3:11:34 mentioned, for example drones, missiles, security institutions, military and law enforcement institutions, I will go into those. The war and the nuclear dossier, which you mentioned. The engineering of public opinion. The power structure in the Islamic Republic and the question of succession. On this point of succession, everyone used to speculate about what would or would not happen. You saw that suddenly it ended up with Mr. Mojtaba Khamenei, who is still nowhere to be found. Social issues, especially women. The topic of poetry, literature and art as well. These are the topics on which I am trying to talk with various people, whether one person or several, in each of these areas. Our discussion today

3:12:23 lasted more than three and a half hours, nearly four hours, and in my view it was truly a substantive discussion, because you made your points item by item, under specific headings. I'll close the discussion too, unless, since you said you have memories, is there any discussion left or not? No, I have recounted memories in the course of my explanations. I think we are imposing too much on your viewers already. Thank you very much for your invitation, and I wish you success in your work. In advance, on behalf of the historian 50 years from now, we thank you. Yes, thank you. I hope that will be so and that it will be well received by future generations. To the audience of this

3:13:12 program, since my view in particular is that perhaps 50 years from now they will see two people in this frame, each of whom, in some way, Mr. Sazegara specifically, came from within the heart of the Islamic Republic, and then our personal fates and the country's changed. For future generations I say that this is a project titled Oral History, on the subject of the record, I emphasize, "The Record of Ali Khamenei's Rule as Seen by Others." This was the fourth part of my conversation with Dr. Mohsen Sazegara. Before this, I also interviewed Mr. Shahinnejad and Ms. Fatemeh

3:14:01 Haghighatjoo. I have many other interviews in hand, which I will release one by one, including in audio and podcast form. With Dr. Sazegara's permission, I want to bring the program to an end, with the hope that positive changes will take place in our Iran. After all, it is our motherland, and we must wish the very best for it. To the future of dear Iran. Farewell until next time. Stay with me a few more seconds.