Iran-Israel Relations Are Not What They Seem

Is Iran Implicated in Israel's Assassination of Hezbollah's Commanders?

Voltairenet is an indispensable source of daring, well-documented and original interpretations highlighting vital backstories of what is really going on in the Middle East. The journal’s Damascus-based founder and primary writer, Thierry Meyssan, has just come up with an especially revealing commentary entitled “Iran and Israel.”

https://www.voltairenet.org/article221335.html#nb5

Meyssan concludes his account with a blockbuster of a comment describing how it was that the Israeli Armed Forces have succeeded in assassinating so many of the high-ranking commanders of Hezbollah. Some of the lethal hits on high-ranking Hezbollah officials have entailed massive bombing assaults on southern Beirut apartment complexes where thousands of civilians are being indiscriminately slaughtered, Gaza-style.

Those targeted and killed include Hezbollah’s martyred General-Secretary, Hassan Nasrallah.

In eliminating Nasrallah, his assassins took out one of the most revered holy warriors ever to emerge in the bloody history of indigenous resistance against the US-Israeli occupation of the Arab world. The conquistadorial character of the occupying powers is presently on full public display for the people of the world.

In his essay Meyssan asserts,

“Under these conditions, it is not surprising that an Iranian source informed Israel of the places and times when it could assassinate the leaders of Hezbollah one by one.”

https://www.voltairenet.org/article221335.html#nb5

The largest part of Meyssan’s brief essay addresses his finding that the assault on Hezbollah’s leadership has been facilitated by a spy working for Israel within Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus.

Continuity and Change in the History of Iran

Meyssan outlines the dynamics of factionalism within the Iranian side when it comes to the conduct of relations with Israel. One faction is seeking to improve relations with the Zionist oligarchs governing the USA and Israel. This faction is largely motivated by business ties that go back to the era from 1953 to 1979 when the Shah of Iran was Iran’s puppet governor.

The Shah’s regime emerged from the covert operations of the Anglo-American CIA and MI6. A close partner of these intelligence agencies, Israel’s Mossad, basically took over the operation of Iran’s security apparatus following the coercive removal from office of Mohammad Mosaddegh.

The elected Premier of Iran from 1951 to 1953, Mosaddegh had been engaged in nationalizing the people of Iran’s oil and gas resources. These resources had first been harnessed by the pioneering operations of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP).

Mohammad Mosaddegh

In the early years of the twentieth century, this military company became the major source of energy for Britain’s Royal Navy. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill oversaw the shift from coal to oil in naval operations. These days China is the major purchaser of Iran’s massive oil resources.

http://kkft.bme.hu/attachments/article/70/From%20Coal%20to%20Oil.pdf

With Mosaddegh out of the way, Iran’s titular imperial monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was installed as the country’s puppet leader. The Shah ruled Iran until 1979 when the Islamic Republic came into being. The transformation has been described as an Islamic revolution. It reordered the government of Iran to combine theocratic principles embodied by a Supreme Leader with the partial authority of an elected legislature.

The Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, played an important role in maintaining the authority of the main puppet and puppeteers running the country. The SAVAK was organized with the advice and direction of Mossad’s assassination branch then run by Yitzhak Shamir, a full-fledged Nazi during WWII and a future Israeli Prime Minister.

The page may have been turned in 1979 on the legacy of Mossad in the national-security history of Iran. However, old patterns of governance can sometimes survive efforts to shut the door on the past by putting in place the framework of a different governing architecture.

One of the outgrowths of this period when Israel and Iran were key partners in the Zio-American Empire, is the Eiliate-Askkelon pipeline company connecting the movement of oil from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean coast through southern Israel. The company continues to be under the joint ownership of parties in Israel and Iran. In Israel there is a law that forbids discussion about the ownership of this enterprise.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article199332.html

Israeli Spies Infiltrated the Highest Level of Power in the Islamic Republic. 

Meyssan explains further the historical background of how it was that an agent of Israel within the Iranian government released information that proved to be instrumental in Israel’s decapitation of a significant portion of Hezbollah’s top leadership. He comments

In 2011, the head of Iranian counter-espionage in charge of combating Mossad infiltration who was appointed was... an Israeli agent. He remained in office until 2021 and now lives in Israel. He surrounded himself with a team of about twenty people who fled with him to Israel. They were the ones who organized the assassinations of the nuclear scientists and the theft of the archives exhibited by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Meyssan’s account is backed and corroborated by the testimony of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former Iranian President from 2005 to 2013.

Ahmadinejad has made no secret of his understanding of Israel’s penetration of Iran’s national security system. He explains how this saga was kept hidden even from intelligence ministers including Ali Younesi. Israeli spies “had infiltrated the highest level of power in the Islamic Republic.” Among their many breaches, this gang of 20 Israeli agents confiscated large loads of some of Iran’s most secret documents.

https://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/ahmadinejad-irans-counterintelligence-chief-was-israeli-spy/2021/06/12/

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/113856020.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Iran-Contra in the Shaping of Iran-Israel-US Relations

Right up to the present day, the Iran-Contra episode in the 1980s did much to shape the political culture of Iran-Israel relations. Two former Iranian Presidents, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and Hassan Rouhani, were deeply involved in the Iran-Contra episode that became the basis of a major scandal that rocked the final years in the late 1980s of Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency.

The Iran-Contra scandal helped express and solidify a division between hardliners and so-called “moderates” whose adherents have created the context enabling deep infiltration by the intelligence agencies of Israel and possibly the United States as well.

The framework of the Iran-Contra scandal involved the convergence in the 1980s of two conflicts, one with Latin America in the forefront and the other revolving around the tensions in the Middle East. The nexus between both conflicts put Israel in a position to sell weaponry secretly to the government of Iran and then to funnel a portion of the proceeds to the US-backed proxy army fighting the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua.

This proxy army was widely referred to as “the Contras” whose much publicized anti-communist militarism became a kind of Reaganomics trademark meant to signify the “free market” underpinnings of America First patriotism.

Intrigues around the retention or release of hostages, pertain centrally into the Iran-Contra scandal at two points. The first episode has to do with the fate of US hostages held in 1979-80 by Iranian government. The second episode has to do with a large contingent of America and European hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon after 1982.

By now it is widely known that Iran had from the founding of Hezbollah, an instrumental role in arming, funding and training the organization. This experience was important in setting patterns for the genesis of a larger network of Shia militias that has come to be essential to The Axis of Resistance.

Iran-Contra in the Politics of investigation, Deception and Control in the Effort to Shape Public Opinion

As for the first episode, when the new government led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979, Iranian students famously seized control of the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran. The US officials thereby became hostages placed under the control and care of Ayatollah Khomeini.

The fate of these hostages became a core controversy in the presidential contest which culminated in the Reagan administration denying to Jimmy Carter his October Surprise. The one-term President Carter thought he had the conditions in place to announce the release of the hostages just before the US presidential elections..

Ronald Reagan beat Carter to the punch. By breaking the rules his people dealt directly with factions within the Iranian government. The national security practitioners on Reagan’s campaign team, prominently including William Casey and George H. W. Bush, negotiated a deal with the Iranian government on Reagan’s behalf.

With Rafsanjani playing the key Iranian role, the Reaganites persuaded the Iranian government that they would get a sweeter deal from a Reagan presidency than from a Carter Administration. The result was that the release of the hostages was postponed until the very moment when Reagan was inaugurated.

The negotiation of the release of the hostages on which the outcome of the US elections seemed to depend in 1980, has recently attracted renewed attention given to Gary Sick, President Carter’s National Security adviser with a special emphasis on Persian Gulf Affairs.

Author of the book, October Surprise, Gary Sick explained in a story published in Esquire in March of 2023, that a deal was

finalized whereby the Iranians would coordinate with the Reagan campaign on the timing of the release of the hostages in exchange for a promise that, after he was elected, the new president would unfreeze their assets and — through the Israelis — provide spare parts for Iranian weapons.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a43368900/reagan-iran-hostages/

How come the Iranians needed to go to such lengths to obtain spare parts “through the Israelis” for their weapons? Between 1980 and 1988 the Islamic Republic was engaged in a war with the US-backed government of Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein.

As hostage takers and then as the formal enemies of the US government’s official ally, Saddam Hussein, Iran was penalized in a number of ways. One of the penalties the Iranians sought to address was the fact that they had been cut off from access to spare parts for their weapons which the Islamic Republic had inherited from the Shah’s regime.

The efforts of the Reagan election team to establish relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran would prove to have sweeping implications. The US Executive branch together with the governments of Israel and Iran would become increasingly accustomed to dealing secretly with one another. The flow of weapons and money between the three polities became a key to developing the means for funding the raids of the Contras on Nicaragua. The transactions were structured in this way to escape the financial oversight of Congress.

On the US side these covert operations comprising the Iran-Contra episode took place under the auspices of Oliver North, a US Marine Corps officer and a member of the National Security Council. North teamed up Elliot Abrams, a Zionist kingpin in the US State Department whose unrelenting Israel First orientation is well known.

The flow of weaponry from the United States to Israel and then to Iran, kept Israel and the USA happy for a variety of reasons. These reasons included the fact that the US-Israel partners both sought to prolong the war between Iraq and Iran. This diversion kept the two Middle East polities busy fighting each other rather than joining forces to push back on the occupation of the Middle-East and Eurasia by the US-Israel partnership. Moreover it enabled Reagan and his supporters to bask in the heat of their anti-communist aggression by making the so-called Cold War somewhat hot in Latin America.

The flow of money and arms helped make many middlemen wealthy by taking their cuts in the complex flow of transactions. Among the arms merchants was the flamboyant Saudi arms dealer, Adnan Kashoggi. Another is the Iranian politician, Ali Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani is said by Meyssan to have become the most wealthy man in Iran. He was also the elected President of Iran between 1989 and 1997.

The presidential Administration of Ronald Reagan at first rejected the Israeli request to allow them to sell a small number of BGM-71 TOW anti-tank weapons to “the moderate faction” in Iran.

A tripod-mounted BMG-71 TOW Missile Launcher

Then Israel officials went to work to persuade the US President that the “moderate faction” connected to Rafsanjani was “opposed to terrorism and had fought against it.”

The appeal worked. When he later tried to explain his decision in the Iran-Contra episode to a Congressional Committee investigating the matter, Reagan explained that his primary motivation was to create the conditions for the release of the hostages being held by Hezbollah.

The following is a partial list of weapons shipped from Israel to Iran for which the government of Israel was reimbursed. The list is taken from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

• 20 August 1985 – 96 TOW antitank missiles

• 14 September 1985 – 408 more TOWs

• 24 November 1985 – 18 Hawk antiaircraft missiles

• 17 February 1986 – 500 TOWs

• 27 February 1986 – 500 TOWs

• 24 May 1986 – 508 TOWs, 240 Hawk spare parts

• 4 August 1986 – More Hawk spares

• 28 October 1986 – 500 TOWs

  One might speculate that this export of military technology to Iran helped contribute to the learning curve that would lead to the Islamic Republic’s cutting edge development in the making of sophisticated projectiles of many sorts.

The Iran-Contra investigation sputtered to a close in the late 1980s. Much of the most important information was held back from release. The fact that George H.W. Bush, a former CIA Director and Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President, was able to get elected as US President in 1988, is indicative of the circumscribed and limited character of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Although Bush was deeply involved in many aspects of the scandal, he nevertheless came through the episode more or less unscathed in the eyes of the public.

How Is It Possible for the Iranian Person Charged With Stopping the Incursion of Israeli Spies, to Be an Israel Spy?

A dozen or so individuals faced some sort of legal prosecutions as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations. Most of these criminal proceedings fizzled out in ways designed to protect the reputations of the accused. Oliver North faced 16 charges that were eventually all thrown out on appeal. Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State, was convicted of withholding evidence, but after a plea bargain was given only two years probation. He was later pardoned altogether by President George H. W. Bush.

Elliot Abrams became a leading neocon who played an instrumental role in the Project for the New American Century. PNAC was a key organization in the genesis of the 9/11 false flag and in the staffing of the post-9/11 war cabinet of US President George W. Bush. Like Antony Blinken, Abrams is a good example of the large array of Jewish Zionists who pursue Israel First objectives in the name of formulating US foreign policy.

Thierry Meyseen picks up the story of Abrams as a key player in putting together the primary figures in Israel’s current Netanyahu government. Meyssan writes,

“Elliott Abrams organized Benjamin Netanyahu’s last election campaign, his alliance with the Kahanists (Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Force and Bezalel Smotrich’s Jewish Home) to reform the revisionist Zionist movement (of the fascist Zeev Jabotinsky [5]) and his transformation of Israeli legal constitutional rules (what the opposition and many commentators have called a “coup d’état”).”

Abram’s career helps suggest the continuing effects of the Iran-Contra scandal right up to this day. In Iran those described by the Israeli government as “moderates” derived wealth and influence from the Iran-Contra transactions that continue to define many important alignments of power within the Islamic Republic.

“Moderates” Ali Rafsanjani and Hassan Rouhani held Iran’s presidency for much of the period between 1997 and 2021. Their approach to governance was quite different from that of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who held the Office of Iranian President from 2005 to 2013.

Ahmadinejad persevered in spite of the tsunami of bad media coverage he received in response to the his organization in 2006 of the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad’s nationalist and rationalist attitude can be seen in his insistence on drawing attention to a basic problems he sees inside the Iranian government. His observations beg the question: How was it possible for the very individual meant to protect the country from Mossad’s intrusions to actually be an Israeli agent who was able to go undiscovered from 2011 to 2021?

This recent history surveyed above helps explain Meyssan’s observation that, “Under these conditions, it is not surprising that an Iranian source informed Israel of the places and times when it could assassinate the leaders of Hezbollah one by one.”