On Aug. 23 Frontpagemagazine.com interviewed Regnar Rasmussen, a military expert and interrogation specialist. The interview is of interest because of Rasmussen's testimony indicating that Iran purchased nuclear warheads from the "former" Soviet Union in autumn 1992. This is a story that confirms a similar claim made by Yossef Bodansky in his book The High Cost of Peace. Bodansky says the Iranians initially intended to use their newly acquired nuclear weapons in a jihad to destroy Israel. The plan involved strategic coordination with Hezbollah, Syria and communist North Korea (which agreed to a simultaneous attack against American forces in the Far East). Tehran asked its terrorist allies "to refrain temporarily from attacking Western objectives in order not to attract attention to the Iranian-sponsored buildup until they were ready to strike out decisively." Once the necessary forces were in place, Hezbollah was to play a unique role by setting up the pretext for a devastating assault on Israel. According to Bodansky, Hezbollah would provoke Israel into "a major escalation in Lebanon - so that the planned Syrian and Iranian ballistic-missile barrage against Israeli civilian and strategic objectives could be presented as retaliation for Israeli aggression." Bodansky also says that a simultaneous terrorist offensive would be launched against the United States while Iranian kamikaze-style attacks would be organized against U.S. aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf.
As Bodansky explained in his book, an Iranian nuclear assault on Israel was thwarted when an Israeli helicopter gunship attacked and killed Sheikh Sayyid Abbas al-Mussawi, the secretary-general of Hezbollah (roughly coinciding with the demise of North Korea's dictator and a subsequent transition crisis in Pyongyang). Those who doubted the veracity of Bodansky's work must now account for the testimony of Rasmussen, who learned many things from Iranian asylum seekers, including Iranian communists who had been trained in Soviet bloc countries. "The education was genuine and serious," said Rasmussen, "but what really made my hairs stand on one end was the immense overweight of practical training in the preparation and use of explosives. It was taught to the Iranian students even down to the minutest details that these skills were deemed necessary if their 'revolutionary aims' were to succeed."
The Russians also trained Middle Eastern men at the science of engineering, not so much from the standpoint of building large structures, but from the standpoint of knocking them down at a single blow. The communist bloc had an overall plan when it initiated its massive course of instruction for Muslim youth. And it was Rasmussen's sense of this plan that was awakened as he watched the events of 9/11 unfold five years ago. "It is very important to bear in mind that the Iranians were nothing more than a tiny minority amongst the recruits of the Soviet Union," he explained. "My Iranians told me that they had to stick together and protect each other ... against the hordes of Arabs surrounding them everywhere on campus."
Although the majority of communists in revolutionary Iran were slated for Islamic persecution, an elite subset of communists (trained in the Soviet Union) ended up working for the Islamic regime. "I would describe this group as the most dangerous and unpredictable of them all," noted Rasmussen. The best and toughest communist agents working in Islamic Iran were tasked with infiltrating the Islamic hierarchy and intelligence services. The purpose of this infiltration should be obvious to any student of strategy: namely, to steer a regime of fanatical psychopaths toward conflict with America. This would not prove difficult because, as Rasmussen pointed out in the Frontpagemagazine.com interview, communism and Islamic fundamentalism share a common hatred of individualism and Western values. Furthermore, in terms of Moscow's current objectives in the fight against Islamic terrorism, the Russians retain the files of each and every foreign student ever trained in the Soviet Bloc. So why haven't they shared these files with the United States? (The answer should be abundantly clear.)
It seems that the Russians are following the same path they followed during the Cold War. As for Moscow's supposed war against Islamic terrorism in Chechnya, the Chechen conflict is nothing more than a KGB/GRU organized provocation. The mild and unorthodox Islam practiced by the Chechen people bears no resemblance to the more virulent forms of Islam practiced in the Middle East. Furthermore, the terrorism of the Chechen bandits has been described by former KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko as staged diversionary operation for renewing Russia's police state under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. According to Litvinenko, Chechen terrorism was organized and directed, from the outset, by Russian special services and the Russian General Staff. Last year, in an interview with a Polish journalist, Litvinenko stated that bin Laden's right hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a long-time KGB agent trained in Russia.
Given all of this, it should not surprise anyone that Iran may have acquired nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union. According to Rasmussen, Russia trained many Iranian physicists (a fact reported by many researchers). And Russia continues to train Iranian nuclear experts, as a matter of policy. As anyone who consults a newspaper will see, the Russians will not back down from this activity. Together with their communist Chinese allies, the Russians lend practical support to the Iranians by threatening to use their veto in the U.N. Security Council (to prevent economic sanctions against the Iranian mullahs).
How did the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union?
Rasmussen describes his involvement with sincere Soviet intellectuals who were moving toward political power after the collapse of Soviet power. The political failure of these people was due, says Rasmussen, to the "intrigues and dirty workings of the old KGB structures behind the curtain we all thought had fallen." He further added, "Alas, no curtain ever fell. It was only moved to a position further backwards and deep into the dark shades of backstage." Such a position is necessary if one intends to trigger a nuclear exchange between Muslim and Western countries.
It was a matter of profit and strategic convenience that the communist boss of Soviet Khazakstan, Nursultan Nazerbayev, sold three nuclear warheads to the Islamic leaders in Tehran. The price was supposedly $7.5 billion. This story has been confirmed by other sources, and has remained a closely guarded secret of the Israeli and American governments. Obviously, the Iranians could use the acquired Soviet nukes as models for making their own weapons. Furthermore, it may only be a matter of time before they initiate a nuclear war against Israel and the United States on their own timetable (in coordination with their Chinese, North Korean, Syrian and Russian allies).
A strategic sequence logically follows from the thinking of Iran's leadership, which may be summarized by the oft-heard cry of "death to Israel, death to America."
