Iran’s Hezbollah Chief Financier Confesses LIVE on TV: ‘Jesus Visited Me and Showed Me My Wrongs’

I was the one Iran run to when they need funds to sponsor Hezbollah.

But after I met Jesus, I discovered I was doing the wrong thing.

There are billionaires in Iran that the world does not know about.

Men whose fortunes are hidden behind shell companies and secret bank accounts in countries across the globe.

Men whose wealth cannot be tracked by Forbes or any international organization because of sanctions and deliberate concealment.

men who have made their money from arms deals and oil and funding terrorism across the Middle East.

I know this because I was one of them.

My name is Kasm Muhammadi Nijad.

I am 73 years old.

For 40 years, I was the invisible hand that moved billions of dollars from Thran to Beirut to fund Hezbollah’s war machine.

I financed bombings that killed hundreds.

I funded rockets that destroyed homes and orphaned children.

I sat in private meetings with Ayatollah Kmeni himself and with Hassan Nasalla and with General Kazam Solmani and I did it all believing I was doing the will of Allah.

Then one night in 2020 motou my heart stopped beating in a hospital in Thran.

I was clinically dead for four minutes.

And in those four minutes, I stood face to face with Jesus Christ.

He asked me one question that destroyed everything I believed.

He said, “Kazm, why have you been funding the destruction of my children? Today, for the first time in my life, I am going to answer that question live on television before the entire world.

I was born in the spring of 1952 in the city of Tehran, the capital of Iran.

In those days, Thran was a different place than it is today.

The Sha was on the throne and the country was trying to become modern and western.

Uh there were cinemas and restaurants and women walking in the streets without covering their hair.

The mosques were still full of worshippers, but religion did not control every aspect of life the way it would later.

I grew up in a wealthy neighborhood in the northern part of the city where the air was cleaner and the houses were larger than anywhere else in Thran.

My family had money and status and connections to powerful people.

I never knew what it was like to be hungry or poor or desperate.

I never understood the struggles that ordinary Iranians faced every day.

I was born into privilege and I accepted it as my natural right without ever questioning where it came from or what it cost others.

My father was a man named Mustafa Muhammad Najat.

He was one of the most successful merchants in Thran during the time of the Sha.

He traded carpets and textiles and antiques with buyers all over the world.

He had warehouses in the bazar district and offices in Europe and connections to the royal court itself.

The Sha’s family bought carpets from my father for their palaces.

Foreign diplomats and wealthy tourists came to his showrooms to purchase the finest Persian rugs that money could buy.

My father was a proud man who believed that success was a sign of God’s favor.

He taught me that wealth was not something to be ashamed of but something to be celebrated and increased with every opportunity.

He taught me that a man’s worth was measured by the size of his fortune and the respect he commanded from those around him.

These lessons would shape everything I became in the years that followed and would lead me down a path that I could never have imagined.

When I was 18 years old in 1970, my father began teaching me the secrets of his trade.

He took me to his warehouses in the Grand Bazar and showed me how to judge the quality of a carpet by examining its knots and colors and patterns with careful eyes.

He took me to his offices and showed me how to negotiate with buyers and sellers from different countries who spoke different languages and followed different customs.

He introduced me to his context in the government who helped smooth the way for his imports and exports across international borders.

He taught me that business was not just about buying and selling goods in the marketplace.

It was about building relationships with powerful people who could protect you and help you grow.

It was about knowing which palms to grease and which favors to trade and which secrets to keep.

It was about understanding that the rules that applied to ordinary people did not apply to men with money and connections.

I absorbed every single one of these lessons eagerly because I wanted to make my father proud and prove myself worthy.

By the mid 1970s, I had become my father’s right hand in running the family business.

I traveled to London and Paris and New York to meet with buyers and established new markets for our carpets and textiles.

I negotiated deals worth millions of dollars with collectors and dealers and interior designers who wanted authentic Persian rugs for their wealthy clients in the West.

I was only in my early 20s, but I was already richer than most men would ever be in their entire lives.

I wore expensive suits tailored in London.

I drove expensive European cars through the streets of Thrron.

The I stayed in the finest hotels wherever I traveled around the world.

I ate at restaurants where a single meal cost more than what an ordinary Iranian family earned in a month.

I thought I had the world figured out.

I thought I understood exactly how everything worked and how to get whatever I wanted from life.

But I understood nothing at all.

I did not know that the comfortable world I had grown up in was about to be completely destroyed.

The first signs of trouble appeared in 1977 when protest began breaking out in cities across Iran.

People were angry at the sha for many different reasons.

Some were angry about corruption and inequality that left millions in poverty while the elite lived in luxury.

Some were angry about political repression and the Savak secret police who tortured anyone who dared to speak against the government.

Some were angry about Western influence and the way traditional Islamic values were being abandoned in favor of American culture.

The protests grew larger and more violent throughout 1978 as more and more people joined the movement.

The Sha tried to crush them with military force, but nothing worked because the people were no longer afraid.

They poured into the streets by the millions chanting slogans and demanding change and burning pictures of the sha.

And leading them from exile was a man whose name would become synonymous with revolution itself.

His name was Ayatollah Ruhola Kmeni and he was calling on the people to rise up and establish an Islamic government.

My family watched the revolution unfold with a mixture of deep fear and cautious hope.

In my father was worried about what would happen to his business empire if the sha fell from power.

He had built everything under the old system and he did not know if it would survive under a new government with new rules and new leaders.

But my mother was filled with excitement about the possibility of an Islamic government coming to power.

She believed with all her heart that Kmeni was a holy man sent by God himself to restore true religion to Iran.

She prayed for the success of the revolution every single day and encouraged all of us to support it as well.

When the sha finally fled Iran in January 1979 and kain returned in triumph on February 1st, my mother fell to her knees and wept with joy.

She said that a new and glorious era had begun for our country.

She said that God had answered the prayers of the faithful and that Iran would now become a shining beacon of Islam for the entire world to see and follow.

The revolution changed everything for my family and for every family in Iran.

The old elites who had been connected to the sha were swept away like leaves in a storm.

Some were dragged before revolutionary courts and executed.

Some fled the country with whatever they could carry and never returned.

Some lost everything they had worked their whole lives to build.

My father was terrified that we would be targeted because of his known connections to the old regime and the royal court.

But my father was clever and adaptable and he understood how to survive in dangerous times.

He quickly reached out to the new revolutionary leaders and offered his services and his loyalty to the Islamic government.

He donated large amounts of money to Islamic charities and foundations that supported the revolution.

He made sure that the right people in the new government knew that he was a faithful supporter of Kmeni and the new Islamic order that was being established.

His strategy worked brilliantly.

Instead of being destroyed by the revolution like so many other wealthy families, our business survived and actually grew stronger under the new regime.

The revolutionary government needed people who knew how to run businesses and manage large amounts of money.

it.

They needed people who had international connections and who could help them navigate the complex world of global trade, especially as Western countries began imposing sanctions on the new Islamic Republic.

My father was ready and more than willing to serve these needs.

He positioned himself as an indispensable ally to the new rulers of Iran.

He taught me that survival was always more important than principles or ideals.

He taught me that a smart man adapts to whatever system is in power and finds a way to profit from it regardless of who sits on the throne.

I learned this lesson well, perhaps too well, because the adaptability that my father taught me would eventually lead me into a darkness so deep that only a miracle could pull me out of it.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein sent his army across the border and invaded Iran.

The war that followed would last for eight terrible years and would kill nearly a million people on both sides.

It would destroy entire cities and leave scars on the land and the people that would never fully heal.

But for men like me, the war was something else entirely.

It was an opportunity.

The new Islamic government desperately needed weapons and military equipment to fight the Iraqis.

They needed bullets and rockets and tanks and spare parts for their aging Americanmade fighter jets that the Sha had purchased years before.

International sanctions made it nearly impossible for Iran to buy weapons through normal channels.

The Western countries that had sold arms to the Sha now refused to do business with the Islamic Republic.

So the government turned to men like me, men who had international connections and who knew how to move goods across borders without attracting attention.

Men who understood how to make deals in the shadows where no rules applied.

My father was the one who first introduced me to the world of arms dealing.

He had been approached by contacts within the new revolutionary government who asked if he could use his trading network to help acquire military supplies from foreign sources.

My father saw the opportunity immediately.

The profit margins on weapons were far greater than anything he had ever made selling carpets and textiles.

A single shipment of rifles or ammunition could earn more money than a year of carpet sales.

He brought me into these deals because I was young and energetic and I spoke English and French fluently, which made it easier to negotiate with foreign suppliers.

Together, we began building a new kind of business, a business that dealt not in beautiful Persian rugs, but in instruments of debt and destruction.

We sourced weapons from China and North Korea and Eastern Europe and smuggled them into Iran through secret roads that bypassed international sanctions.

The money poured in faster than I could have ever imagined.

Within two years of entering the arms trade, I had made more money than my father had earned in his entire career selling carpets.

I opened secret bank accounts in Dubai and Switzerland and Hong Kong to hide the profits from international investigators.

I set up shell companies in countries with weak regulations to move money around the world without leaving traces.

I learned the dark art of sanctions evasion and money laundering from experts who had been doing it for decades.

I became one of the most important suppliers of weapons to the Iranian military during the war.

Generals and I, our RGC commanders, called me personally to place orders for equipment they needed on the front lines.

Government ministers invited me to private dinners where deals were made over plates of saffron, rice, and kebabs.

I was becoming one of the most powerful men in Iran, even though almost nobody outside the inner circles of power knew my name.

It was in the spring of 1982 that everything changed in a way I could never have predicted.

I received a message through one of my government contacts telling me that I had been summoned to a private meeting at a secure location in Thran.

The message said that the meeting was being organized by the office of the supreme leader himself and I was told to come alone and to tell no one about the invitation.

My heart was pounding when I arrived at the location which was a large house surrounded by revolutionary guards with machine guns.

I was escorted through several checkpoints and searched thoroughly before being led into a room where some of the most powerful men in Iran were already seated.

There were senior IRGC commanders in military uniforms.

There were government ministers in suits.

There were high ranking clerics in turbans and robes.

And at the center of it, all sitting on a simple cushion on the floor, was Ayatollah Rouola Kmeni himself, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I had never been in the same room as Kmeni before that day.

I had seen him on television and heard his voice on the radio countless times.

But being in his physical presence was something entirely different.

He radiated an authority and a power that I had never felt from any other human being.

The room fell completely silent when he spoke.

Every man in that room, including generals and ministers who commanded thousands of people hung on his every word, like children listening to their father.

Kmeni looked at me with those deep piercing eyes, and I felt like he could see straight into my soul.

He knew who I was.

He knew what I had been doing for the war effort and he had something specific that he wanted me to do next.

Something that would bind me to the Islamic Republic and its mission for the next 40 years of my life.

Kmeni began by speaking about the situation in Lebanon.

He talked about how the Shia Muslim population in southern Lebanon had been oppressed and marginalized for decades.

He talked about how Israel had invaded Lebanon earlier that year and was occupying the southern part of the country.

He said that this was an attack not just on Lebanon but on all of Islam.

He said that it was the duty of every Muslim to fight against the Zionist enemy and to protect the oppressed believers in Lebanon.

Then he revealed his plan.

Iran was going to create and support a new armed movement in Lebanon.

A movement of faithful Shia Muslims who would fight against Israel and defend the honor of Islam.

This movement would be trained and equipped and funded by Iran through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard course guard.

It would become the tip of the spear in Iran’s resistance against Israel and American influence in the Middle East.

The name of this movement was Hezbollah, the party of God.

Kmeni turned his attention directly to me.

He told me that building this movement would require enormous amounts of money.

He said that my skills in moving money across borders and evading international sanctions made me the perfect person to help finance this sacred project.

He told me that funding the resistance against Israel was not just a political act but a religious obligation.

Then one of the senior clerics in the room opened a Quran and began reading verses that he sayeth proved that supporting jihad with your wealth was one of the highest forms of worship in Islam.

Uh he read verse after verse about how those who spend their money in the path of Allah will be rewarded with paradise.

He read about how the believers who fund the fighters are equal in reward to the fighters themselves.

He read about how Allah loves those who sacrifice their wealth for the defense of the faith.

Each verse hit me like a hammer driving the message deeper and deeper into my heart and my mind.

By the time the cleric finished reading, I was completely convinced.

I believed with absolute certainty that what they were asking me to do was not just acceptable but holy.

I believed that God himself was calling me to use my wealth for this sacred purpose.

I believed that funding the fight against Israel would earn me a place in paradise that no amount of prayer or fasting could ever achieve.

And I would be lying if I said that the religious argument was the only thing that convinced me.

There were other incentives as well.

The government promised me protection from any legal troubles.

They promised me exclusive access to lucrative oil contracts and government deals that would make me even wealthier than I already was.

They promised me influence and status within the highest levels of the Islamic Republic.

They were offering me everything a man could want, wealth and power and religious salvation, all wrapped up in one package.

How could I say no? What kind of fool would turn down an offer like that? I said yes to Kmeni that day.

I pledged my wealth and my resources and my networks to the cause of Hezbollah and the resistance against Israel.

So I shook hands with IRGC commanders who would become my partners in this enterprise for decades to come.

I left that meeting feeling like I was walking on air.

I felt chosen and special and important in a way I had never felt before.

I was no longer just a wealthy businessman making money from arms deals.

I was now a soldier of God fighting the greatest battle of our time.

I was a warrior for Islam using my wealth as my weapon.

I drove home that night and prayed with more passion and conviction than I had ever prayed in my entire life.

I thanked Allah for choosing me for this sacred mission.

I asked him to bless my efforts and to accept my sacrifice.

I had no idea that I was not serving God at all.

I had no idea that the path I had just chosen would lead me into 40 years of darkness and blood and destruction that would cost thousands of innocent people their lives.

Over the following months, I threw myself into the work of financing Hezbollah with everything I had.

I set up new shell companies specifically designed to funnel money from Iran to Lebanon without being detected by international authorities.

I created networks of trusted couriers who carried cash across borders, hidden in shipments of goods and merchandise.

I opened secret accounts in banks across the Middle East and Africa and Asia that could receive and distribute funds without leaving traces.

I worked closely with the IRGC secrets force which was responsible for coordinating Iran’s support for Hezbollah and other proxy groups across the region.

The amounts of money I moved were staggering.

Millions of dollars flow through my networks every month to pay for weapons and training and salaries and operations in Lebanon.

I became one of the most important financial links in the chain that connected Thran to Beirut.

I was the invisible hand that kept the money flowing and the resistance alive.

And I believed with all my heart that I was doing the will of God.

The first major operation that my money helped to fund was the bombing of the United States Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23rd, 1983.

A truck loaded with explosives drove into the building where American peacekeeping soldiers were sleeping.

The blast was so powerful that it collapsed the entire fourstory structure into a pile of rubble and dust.

and 241 American servicemen were killed in that single attack.

It was the deadliest single day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the battle of Evoima in World War II.

When the news reached Thran, there was celebration among the men I worked with.

They congratulated each other and praised Allah for this great victory against the American enemy.

I sat among them and accepted their congratulations because my money had helped make this attack possible.

I had funded the purchase of the explosives that had killed those young men while they slept in their beds.

And I felt nothing but pride.

I tell you this now with deep shame burning in my chest because I need you to understand what kind of man I was.

I was not someone who accidentally stumbled into evil.

I was not a man who was tricked into doing bad things without understanding what he was doing.

I knew exactly what my money was being used for.

I knew that the funds I sent to Lebanon were buying explosives and weapons that would be used to kill people.

I knew that innocent civilians would die as a result of the operations I was financing.

And I did not care.

I had convinced myself so completely that I was doing God’s work, that I could watch hundreds of people die and feel nothing except satisfaction that the mission had been accomplished.

That is what happens when you allow religious fanaticism to take root in your heart.

It turns you into a monster while making you believe you are a saint.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, my role as Hezbollah’s chief financeier grew larger and more complex with each passing year.

But the organization was expanding rapidly from a small militia into a powerful military and political force in Lebanon.

It needed more money than ever before to pay for its growing army of fighters, its weapons stockpiles, its social services programs that won the loyalty of the Shia population and its increasingly sophisticated operations against Israel.

I provided a significant portion of this funding through my networks.

I worked directly with the IRGC Kutz force and its legendary commander who would later become known to the world as General Kasm Solmani.

In the early days, Solmani was just a young officer rising through the ranks of the IRGC.

But I could see even then that he was different from the others.

He was brilliant and ruthless and completely dedicated to the cause.

The he and I developed a working relationship that would last for decades.

In 1994, my money helped finance another devastating attack.

A car bomb exploded outside the MIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Iris, Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds more.

This attack was carried out by operatives connected to Hezbollah and Iran, and it was planned with meticulous precision.

The target was chosen to send a message to the Jewish community worldwide that no one was safe from the reach of the resistance.

When I learned about the attack, I felt the same cold satisfaction I had felt after the Beirut bombing.

85 innocent people were dead, men and women and young people who had nothing to do with the conflict in the Middle East.

uh they were just ordinary people going about their ordinary lives in a country thousands of miles away from Lebanon and Iran and my money had helped to murder them.

I accepted this as the cost of the holy war I believed I was fighting.

The years passed and my wealth continued to grow at a staggering rate.

The Iranian government rewarded my loyalty and my service with access to the most lucrative business opportunities in the country.

I was given exclusive contracts to trade Iranian oil on the international black market, bypassing the sanctions that were supposed to prevent such trade.

I was allowed to import goods that were banned under international restrictions and sell them at enormous markups to the Iranian market.

I invested in real estate and construction and telecommunications.

Tate, I built a hidden empire worth billions of dollars that was scattered across dozens of countries in shell companies and secret accounts that no international investigator could ever trace back to me.

Forbes magazine and the other organizations that track the wealth of the world’s richest people had no idea I existed.

I was invisible to them because my entire fortune was designed to be invisible.

I met Hassan Nasalla for the first time in the mid 1990s after he became the leader of Hezbollah.

He was a small man with a thick black beard and round glasses who spoke softly but carried an authority that made everyone around him listen carefully to every word he said.

I traveled to Beirut secretly several times over the years to meet with him and discuss the financial needs of the organization.

We would sit together in safe houses that were moved regularly to avoid Israeli intelligence.

He would thank me for my generosity and tell me that the resistance could not survive without the support of faithful men like me.

He would look into my eyes and tell me that I was earning my place in paradise with every dollar I gave.

His words reinforced everything I already believed about myself.

I was a holy warrior.

I was a servant of God.

I was one of the chosen few who had been given the privilege of funding the most important struggle in the history of Islam.

The 2006 Lebanon war was another turning point in my involvement with Hezbollah.

When Israel launched its military offensive against southern Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s crossber raid, then the organization needed massive amounts of money to sustain its fight against one of the most powerful armies in the world.

I worked around the clock with my networks to funnel emergency funds to Hezbollah during those 33 days of intense fighting.

Millions of dollars flowed through my channels to pay for rockets and missiles that were fired at Israeli cities.

Millions more went to pay the fighters and support their families.

When the war ended with Hezbollah still standing and declaring victory, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment.

My money had helped the resistance survive the full might of the Israeli military.

I was praised by the IRGC and by Hezbollah’s leadership as one of the heroes who had made this possible.

I accepted their praise with a humble smile while inside I felt like the most important man in the world.

But somewhere during those decades of funding death and destruction, something small and quiet began to stir inside me.

I cannot tell you exactly when it started because it was so gradual that I barely noticed it at first.

It was like a tiny crack appearing in a massive dam, so small that you would miss it if you were not looking carefully, but it was there.

And over time, that crack grew wider and deeper.

Even as I tried to ignore it and pretend it did not exist, the crack was doubt.

It was a faint whisper in the back of my mind asking questions that I did not want to answer.

Questions like why does God need my money to kill innocent people? Questions like why are women and children dying because of my financial support? uh questions like, “Is this really what the God who created the heavens and the earth wants me to do with the wealth he gave me?” These questions came to me late at night when I was alone in my mansion in Thrron.

They came to me when I read news reports about the victims of the attacks I had helped to finance.

I pushed these questions away every time they appeared.

I reminded myself of the Quran verses that the clerics had read to me in that meeting with Kmeni back in 1982.

I reminded myself that funding jihad was a sacred obligation.

I reminded myself that the scholars and the ayatollus and the supreme leader himself had all told me that what I was doing was right and holy.

Who was I to question the wisdom of men who had spent their entire lives studying the word of God? Or who was I to doubt the teachings of the greatest religious minds in the Shia world? I was just a businessman.

I was not a scholar.

I was not qualified to interpret scripture or to make judgments about right and wrong.

My job was to obey and to serve and to tr that the people above me knew what they were doing.

So I silenced the doubts and I continued doing what I had always done.

I continued sending money to Hezbollah.

I continued funding the resistance.

I continued telling myself that I was serving God.

By the time General Kasim Solmani was killed by an American drone strike in January 2020, the doubts that I had been suppressing for years had grown into something I could no longer ignore.

Solmani’s death shook me deeply because I had known him personally for decades.

We had worked together on countless operations.

We had shared meals and conversations and secrets that could never be spoken in public.

And now he was dead.

Blown apart by a missile fired from a drone flying high above Baghdad.

The man who had been the architect of Iran’s entire regional strategy was gone in an instant.

I attended the massive funeral ceremonies in Iran where millions of people poured into the streets to mourn him.

I watched as grown men wept and beat their chests and swore revenge against America.

But I did not feel what they felt.

I felt empty.

I felt hollow.

I looked at the faces of the mourers and I saw genuine grief and rage.

But all I could feel was the growing weight of doubt pressing down on my soul like a stone that was getting heavier with every passing day.

When Hassan Nasallah was killed by an Israeli air strike in September 2024, uh, whatever was left of my old certainty crumbled completely.

Nasallah had been the face of Hezbollah for over 30 years.

He had been the man who told me I was earning my place in paradise.

He had been the voice that reassured me that my money was being used for a holy purpose.

And now he was dead.

Just like Solmani, buried under the rubble of a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

The leaders I had served and believed in were being eliminated one by one.

The cause I had devoted my life and my fortune to was being dismantled piece by piece.

And the questions I had been running from for decades were now screaming in my ear so loudly that I could not silence them anymore.

Is this really what God wants? Has any of this been worth the suffering it has caused? Uh, have I spent my entire life serving God or have I been serving something else entirely? I did not know the answers, but I knew that I could not continue living the way I had been living.

Something had to change.

I just did not know what.

It happened on a cold night in late November 2022.

I was alone in my mansion in the Navaran district of northern Thran.

My wife Sora had gone to bed early and the house was quiet except for the sound of wind blowing through the garden outside.

I was sitting in my study surrounded by shelves of expensive books that I had collected over the years but rarely read.

I was drinking tea and staring at the wall thinking about everything that had been weighing on my mind.

The debts of Solmani and the growing sense that everything I had built my life around was crumbling at the doubts that I could no longer push away.

The emptiness that had settled into my chest like a permanent guest that refused to leave.

I felt tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

I felt tired in my soul, tired of pretending, tired of justifying, tired of running from the truth that was chasing me.

Then, without any warning, a sharp pain exploded in my chest.

It felt like someone had driven a hot iron rod straight through my rib cage and into my heart.

I gasped for air, but my lungs would not work properly.

The teacup fell from my hands and shattered on the marble floor.

I tried to stand up from my chair, but my legs collapsed beneath me and I fell to the ground.

The pain was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my entire life.

It was not just physical pain.

It was as if my entire body was shutting down all at once.

I could feel my heart beating erratically inside my chest.

It would pound hard three or four times and then stop for what felt like an eternity before pounding again.

I knew immediately that I was having a heart attack.

I tried to call out for my wife, but my voice came out as nothing more than a weak whisper that could not possibly reach her bedroom upstairs.

I do not know how long I lay on the floor of my study before someone found me.

It could have been minutes or it could have been much longer.

Time had lost all meaning.

The pain came in waves, each one worse than the last.

I felt cold sweat pouring down my face and soaking through my shirt.

My vision was blurring and darkening at the edges.

I thought about my children.

I thought about my wife sleeping peacefully upstairs, not knowing that her husband was dying on the floor beneath her.

I thought about all the money I had accumulated over my lifetime.

Billions of dollars hidden in accounts and shell companies around the world.

None of it could save me now.

Not a single dollar of it could stop the pain or restart my failing heart.

All the wealth and power and influence I had spent my life building meant absolutely nothing in that moment.

I was just a 70-year-old man lying on a cold floor waiting to die.

Eventually, my wife woke up and came looking for me when she noticed I had not come to bed.

She found me unconscious on the floor of my study and she screamed so loudly that the guards posted outside the mansion came running in.

Uh they called for an ambulance immediately and within minutes I was being rushed through the dark streets of Thran toward a private hospital that treated only the elite members of Iranian society.

Dr.

Yousef Shahabi, one of the best cardiac surgeons in the country, was called in from his home to operate on me.

They wheeled me into the operating room where a team of doctors and nurses worked frantically to save my life.

They hooked me up to machines that monitored my heart and my blood pressure and my oxygen levels.

They injected me with medications designed to stabilize my condition.

But my heart was failing.

The muscle was damaged and it could not pump blood effectively anymore.

My body was dying from the inside out.

Then it happened.

The machines connected to my body began screaming with alarm signals.

Then the steady beeping that indicated my heartbeat suddenly turned into a long continuous tone.

My heart had stopped beating completely.

The doctors began performing emergency resuscitation.

They pressed on my chest with their hands, trying to manually restart my heart.

They used electrical pedals to shock my chest, hoping to jolt my heart back into rhythm.

But nothing worked.

For several minutes, that felt like an eternity to the medical team working over my lifeless body.

I was clinically dead.

My heart was not beating.

My lungs were not breathing.

My brain was receiving no oxygen.

By every medical definition, I was a dead man lying on an operating table in a hospital in Thran.

But something extraordinary was happening to me in those minutes between life and death.

Something that no medical textbook could ever explain.

I found myself standing in a place that was not the hospital.

I was no longer lying on an operating table.

I was no longer surrounded by doctors and machines.

I was standing upright in a vast open space that stretched in every direction as far as I could see.

The ground beneath my feet was solid, but I could not tell what it was made of.

It was not earth or stone or anything I recognized.

The air around me was warm and clean and filled with a piece so profound that it made my chest ache with longing.

Above me was not a sky in any normal sense.

It was a canopy of light that pulsed with colors I had never seen before.

Colors that do not exist in the natural world.

Colors that seemed alive and conscious as if they were aware of my presence.

I stood there in complete silence trying to understand where I was and what was happening to me.

My heart attack and the hospital and the pain all seemed like distant memories from another lifetime.

Then I saw a figure approaching me from within the light.

He walked slowly and deliberately like someone who had all the time in the world and would never need to hurry for any reason.

As he came closer, I could see that he was dressed in white robes that shone with a brightness that should have been blinding but was not.

His face was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

Not beautiful in the way that humans use that word to describe physical attractiveness.

Beautiful in a way that transcended everything I understood about beauty and goodness and truth.

His eyes held a depth of love and compassion that I had never encountered in any human being I had ever met.

When he stopped in front of me and looked into my eyes, I knew exactly who he was.

This was Jesus.

The one the Christians called the son of God.

The one I had been taught my entire life was just a prophet and nothing more.

He was standing before me now in a glory and majesty that left no room for doubt about who he truly was.

Jesus spoke my name.

He said, “Kazm.

” And the way he said it broke something inside me that I did not even know was there.

He said my name with a tenderness and a familiarity that told me he had known me before I was born.

He had watched me take my first breath.

He had watched me grow from a child into a man.

He had watched me make every choice and every decision throughout my entire life.

He had watched me walk deeper and deeper into darkness for 40 years.

And through all of it, he had loved me.

I could feel his love washing over me like waves crashing on a shore.

It was overwhelming and terrifying and beautiful all at the same time.

I fell to my knees before him because I could not stand in the presence of such holiness and such love.

My legs simply gave way beneath me and I collapsed onto the ground weeping like a child.

Then Jesus began to show me things that shattered my heart into a million pieces.

He showed me the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut.

But he did not show it to me the way I had seen it before on news reports.

He showed it to me through the eyes of the young American soldiers who had died that morning.

I felt their fear as the building collapsed around them.

I felt their pain as the rubble crushed their bodies.

I heard them crying out for their mothers in the darkness.

I saw their faces, young faces.

Boys who were barely old enough to shave.

Boys who had families waiting for them back home in America.

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.

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