Boys who had done nothing wrong except follow orders that sent them to a country they did not understand.

and my money had paid for their debts.

Jesus showed me the AMIA bombing in Venos Iris.

I saw an elderly woman being pulled from the rubble with blood streaming down her face.

I saw a young man searching through the debris, screaming the name of his sister who had been inside the building.

Jesus showed me face after face after face of people whose lives had been destroyed by the violence that my money had funded.

He showed me Lebanese civilians killed in crossfire.

He showed me Syrian families displaced by the wars I had helped to finance.

He showed me children in Yemen who had starved because of conflicts fueled by the weapons I had helped to purchase.

Each face burned itself into my memory with a pain that was worse than any heart attack.

These were real people.

They had names and families and dreams and hopes.

And I had helped to destroy all of it because I believed I was serving God.

Jesus looked at me with those eyes full of love and asked me one question that echoed through my entire being.

He said, “Kazm, why have you been funding the destruction of my children? I had no answer.

I could only weep.

Then Jesus spoke words that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

He told me that I had spent 40 years believing I was serving God while actually serving death and destruction.

He told me that the Quran verses the clerics had used to convince me were twisted out of their context to justify violence that God never wanted.

He told me that he was the way and the truth and the life.

He told me that no one comes to the father except through him.

He told me that despite everything I had done, despite all the blood on my hands, he was offering me forgiveness, complete, total, unconditional forgiveness.

He told me that if I would turn away from my old life and follow him, he would make me new.

he would wash away the blood and give me a fresh start.

He reached out his hand toward me and I saw the scars on his wrists where the nails had pierced his flesh on the cross.

And I understood that this man had died for me.

He had died for a monster like me.

He had paid the price for my sins with his own blood.

I reached out and took his hand.

The moment my fingers touched his eye felt a warmth flow through my entire body that was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

It was like being submerged in an ocean of pure love.

Every cell in my body was being renewed and restored.

The guilt and shame and darkness that had been building inside me for decades was being washed away by something more powerful than I could comprehend.

I wept and I held on to his hand and I told him that I was sorry.

I told him I was sorry for everything, for the Beirut bombing and the Amia bombing and every single act of terror that my money had paid for.

I told him I wanted to follow him.

I told him I wanted to be made new.

And Jesus smiled at me with a warmth that melted every last wall I had ever built around my heart.

And then slowly the light began to fade and I felt myself being pulled back toward the world I had left behind back toward the operating table and the beeping machines and the doctors who were fighting to save my life.

I opened my eyes in the hospital room.

The bright fluorescent lights above me were harsh compared to the heavenly light I had just been standing in.

Doctors and nurses were surrounding my bed, looking at me with expressions of relief and amazement.

Dr.

Shahhabi told me later that my heart had stopped for nearly 4 minutes.

He said they had almost given up on me.

He said that by all medical standards, I should have suffered severe brain damage from the lack of oxygen, but somehow I was alive and alert and my brain was functioning perfectly.

He called it a medical miracle.

But I knew the real reason I was alive.

Jesus had sent me back.

He had given me a second chance at life.

Not so I could continue living the way I had been living.

But so I could become a completely different person.

I lay in that hospital bed with tears streaming down my face and my body trembling from head to toe.

The nurses thought I was in pain and tried to give me medication.

But I was not crying from pain.

I was crying because for the first time in 70 years I had experienced true love and it had come from the last person I ever expected to meet.

I spent 3 weeks recovering in that private hospital in Thran.

My body was healing from the heart attack but my mind and soul were in complete turmoil.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the face of Jesus looking at me with that incredible love.

Every time I opened my eyes, I saw the world I had built around me and I felt sick to my stomach.

The expensive private room with its silk curtains and fresh flowers sent by government officials who wanted to wish me well.

The guards posted outside my door by the IRGC to protect one of their most valuable assets.

The visits from men in suits and military uniforms who came to check on me and tell me how important I was to the cause.

All of it made me feel like I was suffocating.

These people thought they were visiting the same kasmat who had served them faithfully for 40 years.

They did not know that the man lying in that hospital bed was someone completely different.

My wife Sarah came to see me every day.

She sat beside my bed and held my hand and told me how worried she had been.

She told me that the children had been calling constantly asking about my condition.

She told me that I needed to rest and not worry about business or politics or anything else except getting better.

I looked at her face and I wanted so desperately to tell her what had happened to me.

I wanted to tell her about Jesus and the visions and the love I had felt, but I could not.

I knew that if I told her, she would think the heart attack had damaged my brain.

She would call the doctors and they would run tests and conclude that I was suffering from some kind of psychological trauma.

or worse, she might tell someone else and the word would reach the IRGC and then everything would fall apart.

So, I kept my mouth shut and smiled and told her I was feeling better, but inside I was screaming.

Yeah.

After I was released from the hospital, I returned to my mansion in Navaran.

Everything looked the same as it had before.

the same expensive furniture, the same beautiful garden, the same servants and guards and luxury that I had surrounded myself with for decades.

But nothing felt the same.

I walked through the rooms of my own house, feeling like a stranger who had wandered into someone else’s life.

I sat in the study where I had collapsed on the night of my heart attack and I stared at the spot on the marble floor where I had lain dying.

I could still see the small crack in the tile where my teacup had shattered when it fell from my hands.

That crack was the only physical evidence that anything had happened.

But inside me, everything had changed.

I was a dead man walking through a living world.

The old chasm had died on that operating table and a new person had come back in his place.

I knew that I needed to find a Bible.

I needed to read the words of Jesus for myself.

I needed to understand who he really was and what he wanted from me.

But finding a Bible in the Islamic Republic of Iran was not a simple matter.

Christian books were banned.

Possessing a Bible in Farsy could result in arrest and imprisonment.

The government monitored bookshops and online activity for any signs of interest in Christianity.

Anyone caught distributing Christian materials faced charges of acting against national security.

But I was not an ordinary citizen.

I was a billionaire with connections to the most powerful people in the country.

I knew how to find things that were supposed to be impossible to find.

So I reached out carefully and quietly to contacts who operated in the shadows of Iranian society.

I asked subtle questions and dropped careful hints until I found what I was looking for.

A man I will call brother Dario was the one who finally put a Bible in my hands.

He was an underground Christian pastor who had been secretly leading a house church in Thran for over 15 years.

He had converted from Islam as a young man and had spent his entire adult life sharing the gospel with Iranians in secret.

He lived under constant threat of arrest and execution.

He moved from house to house, never staying in one place for too long.

He trusted almost no one because informants for the government were everywhere.

When he was first contacted about my interest in obtaining a Bible, he was terrified.

He thought it was a trap set by the intelligence services to catch him and shut down his network.

A billionaire connected to the IRGC asking for a Bible seemed like the most obvious trap imaginable.

But something in his spirit told him to take the risk.

Something told him that this was real.

We met in secret at a small apartment in the southern part of Thran, far from the wealthy neighborhoods where I was known.

I came alone wearing simple clothes and driving an ordinary car so that I would not be recognized.

When Dario opened the door and saw me standing there, he looked frightened.

He knew who I was.

Everyone in certain circles knew who I was, even if the outside world did not.

I could see him calculating the risks in his mind.

Was this a trap? Was I going to have him arrested? Was he about to lose everything including his life? But I looked into his eyes and I told him the truth.

I told him that I had met Jesus.

I told him about my heart attack and my death on the operating table and the visions I had seen.

I told him that Jesus had spoken to me and shown me the blood on my hands.

I told him that I wanted to follow Jesus, but I did not know how.

And when I finished speaking, Darush did something I did not expect.

He began to weep.

He told me that he and his house church had been praying for years that God would reach the powerful men of Iran.

They had prayed specifically that the men who funded violence and terrorism would have encounters with Jesus that would transform their hearts.

He said that my standing in his apartment was an answer to years of faithful prayer.

He gave me a Bible in Farsy and he began teaching me how to read it and understand it.

Over the following months, I met with Darush secretly whenever I could.

He taught me about grace and forgiveness and the love of God.

He taught me about the life of Jesus and his teachings and his death and resurrection.

He introduced me to other believers in his house church who welcomed me with open arms despite knowing who I was and what I had done.

For the first time in my life, I experienced genuine community and genuine love from people who expected nothing from me in return.

As the months passed and my faith grew stronger, I began to quietly withdraw from my role as Hezbollah’s financeier.

I did not make any dramatic announcements or sudden moves.

I simply began slowing down the flow of money through my networks.

I made excuses about my health and told the IRGC context that my heart attack had weakened me and that I needed to reduce my workload.

I told them that some of my shell companies were having difficulties and that the money would take longer to process.

I told them that international sanctions were making it harder to move funds without being detected.

I used every excuse I could think of to gradually reuse reduce my involvement without raising too many red flags.

At first, they accepted my explanations with sympathy and understanding.

They told me to take care of my health and not to worry about the financial operations.

They said other people could handle things while I recovered.

But by the middle of 2023, the patients of the IRGC and Hezbollah began to run out.

Then the money I was providing had slowed to a trickle compared to what it had been before my heart attack.

Operations were being delayed because of funding shortages.

Commanders in Lebanon were complaining that they were not receiving the resources they needed.

Questions were being asked about what was happening with the financial networks that I had built and controlled for decades.

Men from the intelligence services began visiting my home, asking polite but pointed questions about my business operations and my health.

They looked at me with suspicion in their eyes even as they smiled and wished me well.

I could feel the walls closing in around me.

I know that it was only a matter of time before they discovered the truth about what had happened to me and what I was planning to do.

I began secretly transferring portions of my wealth out of Iran during the second half of 2023.

I moved money to accounts that only I knew about in countries where the Iranian government could not reach it.

I liquidated assets and converted them into gold and cryptocurrency that could be moved without leaving a paper trail.

I worked slowly and carefully because I knew that any sudden large movements of money would trigger alarms in the financial monitoring systems that the government used to track wealthy individuals.

I also began making preparations for my physical escape from Iran.

I contacted people who could obtain forged travel documents.

I studied routes out of the country that would allow me to leave without passing through official border checkpoints where my name and face would be flagged.

I knew that when I finally left Iran, I would be leaving behind everything.

My mansion, my businesses, my remaining assets, my reputation, my entire life.

And most painfully of all, I would be leaving behind my wife Sora and my children who did not yet know anything about my transformation.

In early 2024, I made the hardest decision of my life.

I decided that I had to leave Iran immediately because the intelligence services were getting too close to discovering the truth.

I could not tell Sora everything because I was afraid that she would try to stop me or that she would accidentally reveal my plans to someone who would inform the authorities.

So I told her that I needed to travel to Turkey for urgent business matters related to one of my companies.

She did not question this because I had made similar trips many times before over the years.

I packed a small bag with only the essentials.

I took my Farsy Bible that Darush had given me and I hid it inside the lining of my suitcase.

I kissed my wife goodbye and told her I would be back in a week.

Then I walked out of my mansion for the last time and drove to the airport where a private charter flight was waiting to take me to Istanbul.

I used forged documents that identified me as a Turkish businessman to a avoid detection by the border security systems.

The flight took 3 hours and when I landed in Istanbul, I felt the weight of 40 years of darkness beginning to lift from my shoulders.

I was out of Iran.

I was free.

But the cost of that freedom was everything I had ever known and everyone I had ever loved.

If from Istanbul, I traveled to the island of Cyprus where underground Christian networks had arranged for me to stay in a safe house near the city of Limasol.

Cypress has a significant Iranian diaspora community which made it easier for me to blend in without attracting too much attention.

I arrived exhausted and broken and carrying nothing but my small bag and my Bible.

The believers who received me in Cyprus treated me with the same love and kindness that Dario and his house church had shown me in Tehran.

They gave me a room and food and time to rest and healed.

They connected me with Pastor Darush Kariman, an Iranian Christian leader in exile who had been helping persecuted believers escape from Iran for years.

Darush Karimian became my mentor and my spiritual father during those difficult months.

He helped me process the grief of leaving my family behind.

He helped me grow deeper in my understanding of the Bible and my relationship with Jesus.

He helped me see that my story was not over but was actually just beginning.

The months I spent in Cyprus were the most transformative of my entire life.

For the first time in 72 years, I was living without the weight of secrets and lies pressing down on my shoulders.

I woke up each morning in my small room in the safe house near Limasul.

And I thanked Jesus for giving me another day.

I read my Bible for hours at the time, absorbing every word like a man who had been starving his entire life and had finally been given food.

Pastor Darish Karimian met with me several times each week to study the scriptures together and to help me understand the depth of what God had done in my life.

He was patient with me in ways that I did not deserve.

He answered my endless questions without ever growing tired or frustrated.

He helped me understand that the journey from darkness to light was not something that happened overnight.

It was a process that would continue for the rest of my life.

One of the hardest parts of those early months in exile was dealing with the separation from my family.

My wife, Sora, had been trying to reach me since I left Tehran.

She had called my phone hundreds of times before I finally changed my number for security reasons.

Through a trusted intermediary, I managed to send her a message telling her that I was safe, but that I could not return to Iran.

I did not tell her the full truth about my conversion because I was afraid of what the consequences might be for her and our children if the government found out.

She was angry and confused and heartbroken.

She thought I had abandoned her for another woman or that I had lost my mind from the heart attack.

My eldest son Amir sent me a furious message through the same intermediary calling me a coward and a traitor for leaving the family.

His words cut me deeper than any knife ever could.

My daughter Leila was different.

She sent me a message that was short but filled with something that gave me hope.

She wrote that she did not understand what was happening, but that she loved me and wanted to know the truth.

She asked me to tell her everything when I was ready.

She said she would not judge me no matter what.

Her words brought tears to my eyes because I could feel that God was working in her heart even though she did not know it yet.

I prayed for her every single day.

I prayed for Sarah and Amir and all my family members.

I asked Jesus to protect them and to open their eyes to the truth.

I asked him to give me the opportunity to share my story with them one day face to face.

But I knew that they might never come.

I knew that going back to Iran would mean certain death.

And I knew that my family might never forgive me for what I had done.

As 2024 turned into 2025, something began stirring in my heart that I could not ignore.

I had been living quietly in Cyprus for nearly a year.

I had grown strong in my faith.

I had studied the Bible extensively with Pastor Dario.

I had connected with other Iranian believers in exile who had their own incredible stories of encountering Jesus.

But I felt that Jesus was calling me to do something more.

He had not saved me from death just so I could live quietly and comfortably in a Mediterranean island for the rest of my days.

He had saved me for a purpose.

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