Khamenei’s Spy Chief Confesses Live Jesus Freed Me From Iran

Khamenei’s Spy Chief Confesses Live Jesus Freed Me From Iran

I spent 15 years feeding names to Iran secret police.

Men disappeared because of me.

But Jesus appeared to me in a prison cell and told me my time of destruction was over.

If you think a man like me is too far gone to be saved, stay until the end of this testimony.

What happened to me will change how you see everything.

My name is Farad Teani.

I was born in Tehran, Iran.

I now live in the United States.

And before I tell you what Jesus did for me, I need to tell you what I did for the men who run Iran.

Because without knowing what I did, you will never understand why what happened to me is a miracle.

I was a spy, not the kind you see in movies.

I did not carry a gun or drive fast cars through European cities.

I was something far more dangerous than that.

I was the kind of spy who sat in ordinary rooms and listened to ordinary conversations and then reported those conversations to people who had the power to destroy lives with a single phone call.

I worked for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence for 15 years.

And the man whose household I ultimately served, the man whose inner circle I fed information to, was an adviser directly connected to Ali Kami himself, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I am telling you this today because I am no longer that man.

Jesus Christ appeared to me inside an Iranian prison cell and broke every chain that had been wrapped around my soul since childhood.

And the wife of the very adviser I served, a woman named Nasarin, saw a vision of Jesus standing over the nation of Iran with his arms open.

She has been telling everyone who will listen that Jesus is coming to rescue Iran.

Her testimony went around the world.

And when I heard it from inside a prison cell in solitary confinement, something inside me cracked wide openen.

This is my testimony.

I was born in the spring of 1977 in a middle-class neighborhood in eastern Thyran.

The Islamic Revolution had just happened.

Ayatollah Kummeni had just come to power.

Iran was still trembling with the energy of a country that had turned itself completely upside down in less than a year.

I was born into a world where religion and government were the same thing.

Where the mosque and the state spoke with one voice.

were to question the supreme leader was to question God himself.

My father, whose name was Mahmud, was a school teacher.

He was a quiet man who believed deeply in the revolution.

He had marched in the streets as a young man and chanted for Kmeni’s return from exile.

He believed that the Islamic Republic was the fulfillment of God’s promise to the faithful.

He hung a portrait of Kmeni on the wall of our living room next to a framed verse from the Quran.

Every morning he would point to that portrait and tell me and my brother that we lived in a blessed country.

He told us that Iran was the light of the Muslim world.

My mother was a softer person than my father but no less devoted to the ideology of the state.

She wore her hijab proudly and prayed five times a day without fail.

She taught me to recite Quranic verses before I could read properly.

She told me that the greatest honor a man could have was to serve Islam and to serve the Islamic Republic with everything he had.

I grew up believing every word they said.

I was a serious boy, not the kind who got into trouble or ran wild in the streets with other kids.

I sat in the front row at the school.

I memorized my lessons.

I memorized Quran verses until I could recite entire chapters without looking at the page.

My teachers praised me constantly.

They told my parents I was exceptional.

They told them I had a mind that Iran needed.

When I was 16 years old, a man came to my school.

He was dressed in plain clothes and he had no title that anyone mentioned out loud.

But the principal of our school treated him like a visiting general.

Every teacher in the building stood straighter when he walked past.

He came to our class and he watched us work for about 20 minutes without saying anything.

Then he asked three students to stay behind after the session.

I was one of them.

He asked us questions that had nothing to do with our schoolwork.

He asked how well we could keep a secret.

He asked whether we had friends who complained about the government.

He asked whether we had ever heard our parents say anything critical about the Supreme Leader.

He watched our faces carefully as we answered.

He was not just listening to what we said.

He was reading us.

He was measuring how loyal we were and how willing we were to prove that loyalty.

I told him everything he wanted to hear.

And I meant every word of it.

I believed in the Islamic Republic with my whole heart at that age.

I was not pretending.

I genuinely wanted to serve.

I genuinely believed that protecting the revolution from its enemies was the highest calling a young Iranian man could answer.

Six months later, I was recruited into a youth intelligence program run by the Ministry of Intelligence.

They called it a patriotic service program.

They gave it a name that sounded educational, but what it really was was the beginning of my training on informant.

At first, the work seemed small and almost harmless.

I was asked to keep notes on conversations I heard among classmates.

I was asked to report if anyone expressed sympathy for the reformist political movements that were beginning to grow in Iran at that time.

I was asked to note which families in my neighborhood seemed to practice religion less visibly than others.

I was asked to flag any young man who seemed to be spending time with people connected to opposition groups.

I did all of this without guilt.

I was 17 years old and I was convinced I was protecting my country from people who wanted to destroy it.

My handler, a man I will call agent Kurush, told me regularly that the information I provided was keeping Iran safe.

He told me I was a young soldier fighting an invisible war.

He told me that the enemies of the revolution did not wear uniforms.

They wore the faces of ordinary people and they hid among the population waiting for a chance to tear everything down.

My job was to find them before they could act.

By the time I was 22 and had finished my compulsory military service, Agent Kurush approached me with that offer to work for the Ministry of Intelligence on a full-time professional basis.

I accepted without hesitation.

I felt chosen.

I felt important.

I felt like I was finally doing the work I had been put on earth to do.

The training I received over the next two years was intense.

I learned how to conduct surveillance without being detected.

I learned how to build relationships with targets and extract information from them without them realizing what was happening.

I learned how to write detailed intelligence reports that were clear and useful to the analysts who read them.

I learned how to identify people who were lying and how to appear completely trustworthy myself even when I was not telling the whole truth.

I was good at this work, very good.

My supervisors recognized it quickly.

Within 3 years of joining the ministry professionally, I had been promoted twice.

I was moved from monitoring student groups to monitoring journalists and academics.

Then from journalists and academics to monitoring people with connections to foreign governments and international organizations.

Each promotion meant access to more sensitive operations and more powerful people within the system.

It was through this progression that I eventually came into the orbit of a man I will call advisor Morteza.

He was one of the senior political adviserss to Ali Kam on internal security matters.

He was not a man whose name appeared in newspapers or on television.

He operated entirely in the shadow world where real power in Iran actually lived.

He had access to commune’s inner circle on a regular basis.

The decisions he influenced could determine whether a journalist lived or went to prison, whether a political reformer was allowed to run for office or was disqualified and arrested.

whether a protest movement was monitored and allowed to exhaust itself or was crushed immediately with arrests and violence.

I was assigned to his intelligence support team when I was 31 years old.

My job was to compile reports on individuals he was interested in.

dissident, reformers, journalists who were asking too many questions, lawyers who were defending political prisoners, religious minorities who were practicing their faith too visibly, young people on social media who were gaining followings with content the government did not approve of.

I compiled the report.

I wrote the names and I handed them to people who decided what happens next.

Some of those people were harassed, some were arrested, some disappeared into Evan prison and came out years later as broken versions of the people they had been before.

A small number did not come out at all.

I told myself the same thing I had been telling myself since I was 17 years old.

These people were enemies of the revolution.

They were threats to the stability of Iran.

They had been judged by men who understood the bigger picture in ways that ordinary citizens could not.

My job was not to question the judgments.

My job was to provide the information that allowed the judgments to be made.

This is what happens when a man builds his entire identity around a system instead of around truth.

He stops asking whether what he is doing is right.

He only asks whether he is doing it well.

I was 35 years old when I first began to feel something that I did not have a name for at the time.

I know now that what I was feeling was conscience.

But in that world, in that life, I had been trained so thoroughly to suppress conscience and replace it with ideology that I did not recognize it when I started to wake up.

It started with a woman named Sharin.

She was a human rights lawyer in Thran.

She had been filing cases on behalf of families whose relatives had been arrested during protest crackdowns.

She was not violent.

She was not a foreign agent.

She was not connected to any opposition movement with a radical agenda.

She was a lawyer doing the work that lawyers are supposed to do in a country that claims to have a justice system.

Her name came across my desk as part of a routine monitoring request from Advisor Morteza’s office.

I compiled the report on her.

I documented her movements, her clients, her communications, the people she met with, the articles she had written for international human rights organizations.

I handed over the report.

3 weeks later, she was arrested.

She was charged with acting against national security.

She was taken to Evan prison.

I knew this because it was my report that had been used to build a case against her.

I knew this because my supervisor told me directly that my work had been instrumental in her arrest.

He expected me to feel proud.

That was the culture we worked in.

A successful arrest was a trophy.

It meant your intelligence work had been effective.

It meant you had done your job well.

I sat at my desk after he told me and I waited for the pride to come.

It did not come.

Instead, something else came.

something quiet and cold that settled in my stomach and stayed there.

I pushed it down.

I buried it under the same layers of ideology and self-justification that I had been building since his childhood.

I told myself she had known the risks.

I told myself that people who chose to challenge the system accepted the consequences.

I told myself that the security of 80 million Iranians was worth the inconvenience of one lawyer who had made choices that put her in the government’s crosshairs.

But the quiet cold thing in my stomach did not go away.

Over the following 2 years, I began noticing things I had previously ignored.

I noticed how the language used inside the ministry to describe targets had systematically stripped those people of their humanity.

We did not talk about them as people with families and fears and hopes.

We talked about them as threats, as elements, as problems to be neutralized.

The dehumanization was so complete and as so automatic that most of my colleagues did not even notice it was happening.

I began to notice the gap between what the system told the Iranian public and what I knew was actually true.

I had access to information that ordinary Iranians did not have.

I knew how much money was being diverted from public funds into private accounts held by senior officials.

I knew about the businesses run by IRGC commanders who preached sacrifice to the people while living in enormous luxury.

I knew that some of the men who gave passionate speeches about dying for Islam were simultaneously moving their own children and their own money to Europe and Canada and the United States.

I began to see the whole structure differently.

Not as a sacred project for protecting the faith, but as a protection racket, a system designed to keep certain men in power and to destroy anyone who threatened that power.

Religion was the cover story.

God’s name was the permission slip.

But underneath it all, there was nothing holy.

There was only fear and money and the hunger to stay in control.

These thoughts were dangerous.

Not just dangerous in the sense that they could get me arrested if the wrong person overheard them.

They were dangerous because I could not unthink them once they arrived.

I could not put them back in the box.

And once you begin to see a system clearly for what it truly is, you cannot pretend to believe in it the way you did before.

I threw myself harder into the work to silence the thoughts.

I worked longer hours.

I filed more reports.

I took on additional assignments that kept me too busy to sit with my own mind.

I married a woman named Zeba who was the daughter of a ministry official.

She was a good woman, obedient and traditional.

She did not ask many questions about my work and I did not offer many answers.

We had a son named Darush in 2015.

I held him in the hospital room the night he was born and I looked at his small face and I thought that I would do anything to protect him.

It was a thought that would eventually betray everything I had spent my life building.

In 2019, I was given an assignment that I now believe was the moment God began pulling at the thread that would eventually unravel my entire life.

A house church had been reported to the ministry in the suburbs of Thran.

It was a group of Iranians who had converted from Islam to Christianity and were meeting secretly in a private home to worship.

This was illegal under Iranian law.

Apostasy.

Leaving Islam was a serious crime.

Converting others away from Islam was worse.

These people were breaking laws that carried sentences ranging from prison to execution.

My job was to infiltrate the group, document its members, and build a case for their arrest.

I approached the assignment the same way I had approached every other assignment, professionally, methodically.

I established a cover identity as a man who was spiritually searching.

I made contact with someone connected to the group through a chain of trusted introductions that had been carefully prepared.

I asked the right questions and said the right things and eventually I was invited to attend one of their gatherings.

I expected to find a group of naive people who had been deceived by Western propaganda.

I expected to find foreign influence and political agendas dressed up in religious clothing.

I expected to find something I could expose and report with a clean conscience.

What I found instead changed something inside me that I could not explain and could not control.

The meeting was held in a small apartment.

There were 11 people there including me.

They were ordinary Iranians, a retired teacher, a young engineer, a woman who worked in a bakery, a man who had lost a son in a protest crackdown two years earlier.

They sat in a circle and they sang songs quietly so the neighbors would not hear.

They read from a Persian Bible.

They prayed together.

And the thing that stopped me cold was this.

They were not afraid.

I had spent 15 years watching people who were afraid.

I had watched reformers look over their shoulders in cafes.

Then I had watched the journalists choose their words with trembling care.

I had watched ordinary citizens shrink themselves down to the smallest possible shape in order to avoid attracting the attention of the system I served.

Fear was the permanent weather of life in the Islamic Republic.

It was in every room and every conversation.

But these people were not afraid.

They prayed with a freedom and a joy that I had never seen on the faces of people who were living under the same government that could arrest them at any time for exactly what they were doing in that room.

They talked about Jesus not as a historical figure or a secondary prophet, but as someone they personally knew, someone they spoke to and heard from, someone who was present in their lives in a daily and intimate way.

The man who had lost his son in the protest crackdown stood up and spoke.

He said that the night his son was killed when the soldiers took the body away and he was left alone in his apartment with nothing but grief.

He had cried out to God in desperation.

He said he had not called on the God of the revolution.

He said he had simply screamed into the silence asking if anyone was there, asking if anyone heard him.

He said that a warmth had filled the room, a presence he could not explain, and a voice not audible but deep inside his chest, had told him that his son was safe, that his son was home, that the one who had created his son had also received him.

He said that from that night he had known that Jesus was real.

I sat in that circle listening to this man and I felt the quiet cold thing in my stomach transform into something else entirely.

It was not cold anymore.

It was burning.

It was the feeling of a man who has been asleep for his entire adult life and is being forced awake by something more powerful than his desire to keep sleeping.

I went home that night and I wrote the most incomplete intelligence report of my career.

I documented the location and the time of the meeting.

I listed some of the people present, but I did not describe what I had heard or felt.

I did not capture what that room actually was.

I filed a thin report that gave my supervisors just enough information to know the group existed and very little they could immediately act on.

I told them why I needed more time to fully infiltrate the network before recommending action.

I had never done anything like that before in my professional life.

I had always been thorough.

I had always been complete.

For the first time, I had deliberately protected the people I was supposed to be building a case against.

I told myself I was just slowing things down to gather more intelligence.

I told myself it was a professional decision, but I knew that was not the truth.

In early 2022, everything collapsed.

A colleague inside the ministry had been watching me for months.

His name is not important.

What is important is that he had noticed the same things I was starting to notice about the corruption inside the system.

But unlike me, he had not responded by becoming quieter and more careful.

He had responded by deciding to document what he knew and eventually hand that documentation to a journalist connected to an international news organization.

I did not know he was doing this, but because we had worked together and because some of our assignments had over overlapped when he was caught and arrested in March 2022.

My name came up during his interrogation.

The intelligency services came for me on a Tuesday morning.

Four men in plain clothes knocked on the door of my apartment before sunrise.

Zeba was in the kitchen with Darish when they came.

I saw her face when the door opened and she understood what was happening.

She did not scream.

She went very still and very pale and she held Darius against her body with both arms.

I was taken to AI prison.

I will not spend a long time describing what the first weeks of my detention were like.

I will say only that it was the most alone I have ever felt in my life.

I was placed in a solitary confinement.

The cell was small.

The light was artificial and never turned off.

There was no way to track the passage of days except by counting the meals that were pushed through a slot in the door.

They interrogated me repeatedly.

They wanted to know everything I knew about my colleagues activities.

They wanted to know whether I had helped him or had known what he was doing.

They wanted to know whether I had any contact with foreign intelligence services.

They wanted to know whether my deliberately incomplete report on the house church had been an act of deliberate sabotage.

I answered every question carefully.

I denied everything I could deny.

I gave them enough truth to seem cooperative while protecting the things I most needed to protect.

This was after all exactly the kind of interrogation I had been trained to conduct on others.

I knew the techniques from the other side.

But the interrogations eventually slowed down and what I was left with was the silence of that cell hour after hour, day after day.

There is a particular kind of thinking that only happens when a man is stripped of every distraction and forced to sit alone with himself and with God for an extended period of time.

I had never experienced anything like it before.

My entire life had been constructed around motion and purpose and work and ideology.

I had never simply sat still and asked myself the most basic questions a man can ask.

Who am I? What have I done? What is true in that cell? With no television and no phone and no reports to write and no ideology to defend.

I sat with those questions and I could not run from them anymore.

The faces came to me in the silence.

the lawyer Shireen who I had written reports about, the people she had been trying to help, the men and women whose names I had turned over to people who destroyed their lives with that information.

I had told myself for 15 years that they were abstractions, elements, threats to be managed.

But in the silence of that cell, they had faces.

They had families.

They had done nothing except try to live with some measure of freedom and dignity in a country that treated both as crimes.

I began to weep in my cell in the middle of the night, not a dignified cry.

The kind of weeping that tears itself out of a man against his will.

The kind that comes from somewhere deeper than the chest.

I wept for the people I had hurt.

I wept for the years I had spent serving a system I now understood to be built on lies.

I wept because I was alone and afraid and I did not know if I would ever see my son Dario again.

I had never in my life prayed in a way that felt real.

I had prayed the required prayers with the required words in in the required positions since his childhood.

But I had never spoken to God as if he were actually present and actually listening in that cell because I had nothing else and no one else and nowhere else to go.

I did something I had never done before.

I simply spoke into the darkness.

I said out loud in a whisper that I did not know if God was real.

I said I did not know who God actually was.

I said that everything I had been told about God my entire life had led me into becoming someone who hurt innocent people.

I said that if there was a God who was actually good and who could actually hear me.

I needed him to make himself known to me because I could not find him on my own.

I had spent 47 years looking for God inside a system that used his name as a weapon and I had found nothing real.

I said I had heard about Jesus.

I said I had sat in a circle with people who knew him and I had felt something in that room that I had never felt in a mosque or a government meeting or anywhere else my entire life.

I said that if Jesus was real and if he could hear a man like me, I needed him to show himself.

I lay down on the floor of my cell.

The concrete was cold beneath my back.

The light overhead buzzed and hummed the way it always did.

I closed my eyes and I waited in the silences.

What happened next? I cannot fully describe in human language.

I will try anyway because it is the most important thing I have ever experienced it.

And I will not let the inadequacy of words stop me from telling it.

The light in the cell did not change.

The temperature did not change.

There was no earthquake and no thunder and no voice from the ceiling.

But something changed in the room that was as real and as undeniable as if the walls had moved.

A presence entered that space that was entirely unlike anything that had ever been in that cell before.

A warmth that was not temperature.

A light that was not physical.

A piece that had no explanation given the circumstances.

And then I saw him.

Not the way you see a person standing in front of you.

Not a hallucination or a dream.

something in between and beyond both of those things.

He was standing in the corner of the cell and he was looking at me with an expression that I do not have adequate words to describe.

It was the look of a man who has been waiting for a very long time for someone he loves to finally turn around and see him.

It was patience and relief and love all at the same moment.

He was wearing simple robes.

His face was calm and full of something that I can only call authority.

Not the authority of generals and supreme leaders and intelligence chiefs that I had spent my life around.

Not the authority of men who have power over other men because of weapons or money or fear, something else entirely.

An authority that came from within himself.

An authority that needed nothing outside of itself to be real.

I knew who he was immediately.

the same way you know the face of someone you have been looking for your whole life the moment you finally see it.

He said my name Farad in Persian and the way he said it broke through every wall I had ever built in 47 years.

He woke to where I was lying on the floor and he crouched down and he looked at me and he said something that I have turned over in my mind every single day since that night.

He said, “The names you gave them did not escape my sight and neither did you.

I thought he had come to condemn me.

I lay on that floor waiting for judgment because if anyone deserve a judgment for the things I had done, it was me.

But what came was not judgment.

What came was his hand reaching toward me.

And when I looked at that hand, I saw the scars, the marks on his wrists from the nails.

And I understood in a flash that this man had suffered.

This man had been treated the way the people I had betrayed had been treated.

He had been handed over to a system of power that crushed him.

He had been imprisoned and tortured and killed and he had come back and he was standing in my prison cell and he was reaching toward me.

I grabbed his hand with both of mine and I wept so hard I could not breathe.

I said I was sorry.

I said it over and over.

I said I was sorry for every name I had ever turned in.

I said I was sorry for every report I had ever written.

I said I was sorry for the years I had spent calling myself a servant of God while actually being a servant of the fear and power of men.

He stayed with me.

He did not rush me or try to stop the weeping.

He let it come all the way out.

Then he spoke again.

He said that what I had done had been seen, that the suffering I had contributed to had been witnessed.

But he said that he had not come to bury me under the weight of it.

He said he had come because I had called for him and because he had been waiting my entire life for me to call.

He said that forgiveness was not the absence of truth about what I had done.

It was the presence of something stronger than what I had done.

He said his blood was that something stronger.

He told me that Iran was not forgotten.

He told me that his eyes were on every prison cell and every interrogation room and every family that had lost someone to the system I had served.

He told me that rescue was coming to Iran, not through armies or politics, but through the same thing that was happening in my cell at that moment, one heart at a time.

He told me to live, to get out, to tell the truth.

He told me that my voice, the voice of a man who had been inside the system and knew its darkest rooms, was a voice that people needed to hear.

He told me that the testimony of a man who had been forgiven from as deep a hole as the one I was in would reach people that no other testimony could reach.

Then the presence faded and I was lying on the cold floor of my cell with tears and snot on my face and the fluorescent light buzzing overhead.

Everything looked exactly the same as it had before, but nothing was the same.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

I spent four more months in Evan prison after that night.

The charges against me were eventually reduced because the case against my colleague had weakened in ways that also weakened the case against me.

By the summer of 2022, I was released on the condition that I surrender my passport and report to a ministry office every 2 weeks.

I walked out of Evan prison into the Thrron morning.

Zeba was waiting for me outside with Dario.

My son was 7 years old and he ran to me and wrapped his arms around my legs and called my name and I held him and I could not let go.

I held him for so long that Zeba put her hand on my back and asked it quietly if I was all all right.

I was not all right in any way that I could explain to her.

I was a completely different man than the one who had walked into that prison.

I was a man who had met Jesus Christ in a solitary confinement cell.

I was a man who now knew that everything he had given his life to was built on blood and lies.

I was a man who had been forgiven of things that he still could not fully face in the daylight hours.

And I was a man who knew he had to leave Iran.

He just did not know yet how to do it.

I returned to my apartment.

I was not permitted to work while I was under the travel ban and the reporting conditions.

I had plenty of time to sit and think and pray.

I prayed every day now, not the prescribed prayers of my childhood with their memorized Arabic words that I had never fully understood.

I spoke to Jesus the same way I had spoken to him in that cell directly, honestly, often without any real structure at all.

I told him what I was afraid of.

I told him what I was grieving.

I told him about Darush and how much I needed my son to grow up free.

I found a Persian Bible through a contact I will not describe in detail for the safety of everyone involved.

I read it slowly and carefully.

Every word felt like it was written for me personally.

The Psalms especially, the words of men crying out to God from inside their darkest places and finding that he had not abandoned them.

I read them in my apartment in Thran with tears running down my face and I felt less alone than I had ever felt in my entire life.

About 6 months after my release from prison, something happened that accelerated everything.

A video began circulating among Iranian Christians both inside the country and in the diaspora.

It was a testimony from a woman I will call Nasarin.

She was the wife of Adviser Morteza, the same man I had worked under for years.

the same man whose intelligence requests had driven me to compile reports that had destroyed lives.

Nazarin had given a recorded testimony to an Iranian Christian ministry operating from outside the country.

She had filmed it secretly.

Her face was partially hidden, but her voice was clear and her words were unmistakable.

She said that she had been a devote and committed Muslim her entire life.

She said she had believed wholeheartedly in the ideology of the Islamic Republic.

She had believed it was holy and right.

But she said that over years of living in close proximity to the real operations of power in Iran, she had seen things that had destroyed her belief.

She had seen her husband come home from meetings with blood on his conscience that he tried to wash away with whiskey in private while preaching Islamic virtue in public.

She had seen the gap between the words spoken from pulp pits and the actions carried out in basement.

She had watched the system chew up ordinary Iranians and spit them out broken.

And she had eventually been unable to reconcile any of it with the god she had always believed was watching.

She said she had begun crying out to God alone in her room.

She had said she needed to know who he really was.

She had said she needed to know if there was anything real behind the religion she had been handed.

And she said that Jesus had appeared to her in a dream so vivid that she had woken up weeping and shaking.

She said he had stood before her in a brightness she could not look at directly and he had told her that Iran was not abandoned.

He told her that the rescue of Iran was already underway and that it was happening not through weapons or revolution but through the hearts of ordinary Iranians who were calling out to the true God.

She said he told her to tell people to tell anyone who would listen that Jesus was real and that he was already moving across Iran in ways that the government could not see and could not stop.

Her testimony went around the world.

Iranians in the United States and Canada and Germany and the UK shared it thousands of times.

Underground believers inside Iran is it shared it through encrypted messaging apps and deleted it after watching.

It reached into the most unexpected places.

It reached into a small apartment in eastern Thran where a former intelligence officer was reading a Persian Bible and asking Jesus what to do next.

When I watched her testimony, I sat completely still for a long time after it ended.

I knew who Nasim was.

I had seen her at official functions.

I had been in the same building as her husband dozens of times.

The woman in that video was real.

Her pain was real.

What she described was real.

And Jesus had appeared to her and told her the same thing he had told me.

That Iran was not forgotten.

That rescue was coming.

I knew then that I had to get out of Iran, not just for my own safety, but because I had a testimony that needed to be told.

I had been inside the machine.

I knew its workings from the inside.

I knew the names and the methods and the money and the ideology that held it together.

And I had been personally visited by the one who was going to dismantle it from the inside out.

Getting out of Iran under a travel ban required planning and help and a willingness to risk everything.

I worked quietly over several months to make arrangements.

I will not detail the specific route or the people who helped me for reasons of their safety.

I will say that there are networks of courageous people who help Iranians escape dangerous situations and that without them I would not be sitting in the United States today.

In the spring of 2023, I left Iran with Zeba and Dario.

Zeba did not fully understand what I had become since his prison.

I had told her some things, but not everything.

She knew I was no longer the same man.

She knew I had changed at a level she could not completely reach.

She did not know yet what I now believed about Jesus.

She was frightened and grieving the life she was living behind.

But she came with me and I believe with everything in me that God honored her trust.

We traveled through Turkey and eventually made it to the United States where I applied for asylum on the basis of the genuine persecution I faced from the regime I had served and then broken from.

The asylum process was long and difficult.

But I had documents.

I had knowledge.

I had evidence that no one could dispute because I had been part of producing it.

There are organizations in this country that help people in situations like mine and I found them and they helped me.

We now live in a city in the southwestern United States.

I will not say which city.

Dario goes to school here.

He speaks English better than I do already.

He plays soccer with kids from every background imaginable.

He is free in a way that I never was at his age.

When I watch him run across a field, I feel something that I spent 47 years not knowing I was missing.

Zeba has begun asking questions.

She has seen how I am different.

She has seen that the change in me is not temporary and is not trauma and is not political.

She has seen me read my Bible and pray and speak about Jesus with a certainty that she cannot dismiss.

She attended a gathering of Iranian Christians with me 3 months ago.

She sat in a circle and heard [clears throat] people worship freely and she was very quiet on the ride home.

I did not push her.

Jesus did not push me in that cell.

He waited until I called.

I am praying for her.

The same way that underground pastor in Thran prayed for me with faith and patience and the certainty that what Jesus starts he finishes.

I am telling this story today because of what Nasarin said in her testimony.

Jesus told her to tell people.

Jesus told her that the rescue of Iran was already happening.

I believe her.

I am one of the pieces of evidence that she’s right.

If he could reach into a solitary confinement cell in a prison and find a man who had spent 15 years feeding names to the Islamic Republic’s secret police, then there is no one and no place beyond his reach.

I am [clears throat] not sharing this for political reasons.

I am not working for any government or any opposition movement.

I am a man who met Jesus in the darkest place a man can go and was pulled out of that darkness by a love I did not deserve and could not have earned.

I want to speak directly now to the Iranians who are watching this.

The ones inside Iran watching on a satellite dish they hide from their neighbors.

The ones in diaspora communities across the United States and Europe and Canada and Australia who carry the weight of a homeland that is suffering.

the ones who grew up inside the ideology the same way I did and who are starting to feel the cracks appear.

I know what you have been told about Jesus your whole life.

I know he was presented to you as a minor prophet at best and a western lie at worst.

I know that turning toward him feels like betrayal, like abandoning everything your family and your culture and your faith taught you.

I know that fear because it was inside me too.

But I am telling you from the other side of that fear that what is waiting for you when you walk through it is more real and more solid than anything the Islamic Republic has ever offered you.

The system I served promised me God’s favor and delivered only blood and lies.

Jesus promised me nothing except himself and himself turned out to be everything.

I want to speak to people who are working inside systems like the one I worked inside.

people who are doing what I did, who are writing reports and making calls and moving information in ways that end with innocent people in cells like the one I sat in.

I am not judging you because I was you.

I know the arguments you use with yourself.

I used every one of them for 15 years.

I know how real the ideology feels from the inside.

I know how completely a man can convince himself that he is serving a holy purpose while actually serving the machinery of fear and control.

I am telling you that there is a way out.

Not just physically.

There is a way out of the darkness that that kind of life builds around the soul.

I found it on the floor of a prison cell with nothing left to lose.

You do not have to wait until you have nothing left to lose.

You can call on Jesus right now exactly where you are.

And I want to say one thing to Nasarin wherever she is.

I do not know if she is still in Iran or if she has found her way to safety.

I do not know what has become of her since that video went around the world.

But I want her to know that her testimony reached one more person than she will ever be able to count in this lifetime.

It reached a man who had served her husband’s network for years.

It confirmed for that man that what happened to him in prison was real.

It gave him the courage to finish what Jesus started in a cell in Eden.

Tell people Jesus told her I am telling people and I will keep telling people for as long as I have breath to speak.

I am Farad Tyrani.

I am 47 years old.

I am a former intelligence officer of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ and I am proof that no sin is too small and no sin is too great and no darkness is too deep for the light of Jesus to find you and bring you home.

If this testimony has reached your heart, write in the comments right now, Jesus finds us in the dark.

Let it be your declaration.

Let it be your first prayer.

Let it be the moment your life begins to change.