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 Kazem Mohammadinejad. I am 73 years old.
For 40 years I was the invisible hand that moved billions of dollars from Tehran to Beirut to fund Hezbollah’s war machine.
I financed bombings that killed hundreds. I funded rockets that destroyed homes and orphan children.
I sat in private meetings with Ayatollah Khomeini himself and with Hassan Nasrallah and with General Qassem Soleimani and I did it all believing I was doing the will of Allah.
Then one night in 2022, my heart stopped beating in a hospital in Tehran. I was clinically dead for 4 minutes and in those 4 minutes I stood face-to-face with Jesus Christ.
He asked me one question that destroyed everything I believed. He said, “Kazem, 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 Tehran was a different place than it is today. The Shah 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 worshipers, 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 Tehran.
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 Mostafa Mohammadinejad. He was one of the most successful merchants in Tehran during the time of the Shah.
He traded carpets and textiles and antiques with buyers all over the world. He had warehouses in the bazaar district and offices in Europe and connections to the royal court itself.
The Shah’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 Bazaar 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 contacts 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 establish 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 Tehran.
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 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 American-made fighter jets that the Shah 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 Shah 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 death 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 2 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 IRGC 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 Tehran.
The message said that the meeting was being organized by the office of the supreme leader himself.
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 Ruhollah Khomeini himself, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I had never been in the same room as Khomeini 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.
Khomeini 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.
Khomeini 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 Corps 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. Khomeini 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 say it prove 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 spent 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 Khomeini 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 Quds 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 flowed 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 Tehran 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 four-story 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 Iwo Jima in World War II.
When the news reached Tehran, 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 financier grew larger and more complex with each passing year.
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 weapon 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 Quds Force and its legendary commander who would later become known to the world as General Qassem Soleimani.
In the early days, Soleimani 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. 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 AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, 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. That 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 Nasrallah 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 cross-border 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?
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 Tehran.
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 Khomeini back in 1982.
I reminded myself that funding Jihad was a sacred obligation. I reminded myself that the scholars and the Ayatollahs 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 My job was to obey and to serve and to trust 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 Qassem Soleimani 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.
Soleimani’s death shook me deeply because I had known him personally for decades. We had worked together on countless operations.
And 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 mourners, 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 Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike in September 2024, uh whatever was left of my old certainty crumbled completely.
Nasrallah 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 Soleimani, 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 ears 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 Niavaran district of northern Tehran. My wife Soraya 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 deaths of Soleimani 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 could not work properly. The tea cup 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 Tehran 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 paddles 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 Tehran.
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 peace 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 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 Kawsam, 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 deaths. Jesus showed me the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires.
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, “Qasim, 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.
Uh 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, I 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 onto his hand and I told him that I was sorry.
I told him I was sorry for everything. For the Beirut bombing and the Shinrikyo 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. Shaybani 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 Tehran. 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 Kazem Mohammad Yazdi 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 Soraya 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.
After I was released from the hospital, I returned to my mansion in Niavaran. 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 Kazem 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 Farsi 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.
I 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 Dariush, 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 Tehran 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 Tehran, far from the well-to-do neighborhoods where I was known.
I came alone wearing simple clothes and driving an ordinary car so that I would not be recognized.
When Dariush opened the door and saw me standing there, he looked frightened. He knew who I was.
Everyone in certain circles knew who I was even if the outside world did not.
I could see him calculating the risks in his mind. Was this a trap? Was I going to have him arrested?
Was he about to lose everything including his life? But I looked into his eyes and I told him the truth.
I told him that I had met Jesus. I told him about my heart attack and my death on the operating table and the visions I had seen.
I told him that Jesus had spoken to me and shown me the blood on my hands.
I told him that I wanted to follow Jesus, but I did not know how.
And when I finished speaking, Dariush did something I did not expect. He began to weep.
He told me that he and his house church had been praying for years that God would reach the powerful men of Iran.
They had prayed specifically that the men who funded violence and terrorism would have encounters with Jesus that would transform their hearts.
He said that my standing in his apartment was an answer to years of faithful prayer.
He gave me a Bible in Farsi and he began teaching me how to read it and understand it.
Over the following months, I met with Dariush secretly whenever I could. He taught me about grace and forgiveness and the love of God.
He taught me about the life of Jesus and his teachings and his death and resurrection.
He introduced me to other believers in his house church who welcomed me with open arms despite knowing who I was and what I had done.
For the first time in my life, I experienced genuine true community and genuine love from people who expected nothing from me in return.
As the months passed and my faith grew stronger, I began to quietly withdraw from my role as Hezbollah’s financier.
I did not make any dramatic announcements or sudden moves. I simply began slowing down the flow of money through my networks.
I made excuses about my health and told the IRGC contacts that my heart attack had weakened me and that I needed to reduce my workload.
I told them that some of my shell companies were having difficulties and that the money would take longer to process.
I told them that international sanctions were making it harder to move funds without being detected.
I used every excuse I could think of to gradually reduce reduce my involvement without raising too many red flags.
At first, they accepted my explanations with sympathy and understanding. They told me to take care of my health and not to worry about the financial operations.
They said other people could handle things while I recovered. But by the middle of 2023, the patience of the IRGC and Hezbollah began to run out.
Soon the money I was providing had slowed to a trickle compared to what it had been before my heart attack.
Operations were being delayed because of funding shortages. Commanders in Lebanon were complaining that they were not receiving the resources they needed.
Questions were being asked about what was happening with the financial networks that I had built and controlled for decades.
Men from the intelligence services began visiting my home asking polite but pointed questions about my business operations and my health.
They looked at me with suspicion in their eyes even as they smiled and wished me well.
I could feel the walls closing in around me. I know that it was only a matter of time before they discovered the truth about what had happened to me and what I was planning to do.
I began secretly transferring portions of my wealth out of Iran during the second half of 2023.
I moved money to accounts that only I knew about in countries where the Iranian government could not reach it.
I liquidated assets and converted them into gold and cryptocurrency that could be moved without leaving a paper trail.
I worked slowly and carefully because I knew that any sudden large movements of money would trigger alarms in the financial monitoring systems that the government used to track wealthy individuals.
I also began making preparations for my physical escape from Iran. I contacted people who could obtain forged travel documents.
I studied routes out of the country that would allow me to leave without passing through official border checkpoints where my name and face would be flagged.
I knew that when I finally left Iran, I would be leaving behind everything. My mansion, my businesses, my remaining assets, my reputation, my entire life.
And most painfully of all, I would be leaving behind my wife Soraya and my children who did not yet know anything about my transformation.
In early 2024, I made the hardest decision of my life. I decided that I had to leave Iran immediately because the intelligence services were getting too close to discovering the truth.
I could not tell Soraya everything because I was afraid that she would try to stop me or that she would accidentally reveal my plans to someone who would inform the authorities.
So, I told her that I needed to travel to Turkey for urgent business matters related to one of my companies.
Uh she did not question this because I had made similar trips many times before over the years.
I packed a small bag with only the essentials. I took my Farsi Bible that Dariush had given me and I hid it inside the lining of my suitcase.
I kissed my wife goodbye and told her I would be back in a week.
Then, I walked out of my mansion for the last time and drove to the airport where a private charter flight was waiting to take me to Istanbul.
I used forged documents that identified me as a Turkish businessman to avoid detection by the border security systems.
The flight took 3 hours and when I landed in Istanbul, I felt the weight of 40 years of darkness beginning to lift from my shoulders.
I was out of Iran. I was free. But the cost of that freedom was I had ever known and everyone I had ever loved.
If from Istanbul, I traveled to the island of Cyprus where underground Christian networks had arranged for me to stay in a safe house near the city of Limassol.
Cyprus has a significant Iranian diaspora community which made it easier for me to blend in without attracting too much attention.
I arrived exhausted and broken and carrying nothing but my small bag and my Bible.
The believers who received me in Cyprus treated me with the same love and kindness that Dariush and his house church had shown me in Tehran.
They gave me a room and food and time to rest and heal. They connected me with Pastor Dariush Karimian, an Iranian Christian leader in exile, who had been helping persecuted believers escape from Iran for years.
Dariush Karimian became my mentor and my spiritual father during those difficult months. He helped me process the grief of leaving my family behind.
He helped me grow deeper in my understanding of the Bible and my relationship with Jesus.
He helped me see that my story was not over, but was actually just beginning.
The months I I in Cyprus were the most transformative of my entire life. For the first time in 72 years, I was living without the weight of secrets and lies pressing down on my shoulders.
I woke up each morning in my small room in the safe house near Limassol and I thanked Jesus for giving me another day.
I read my Bible for hours at a time absorbing every word like a man who had been starving his entire life and had finally been given food.
Pastor Darish Karimian met with me several times each week to study the scriptures together and to help me understand the depth of what God had done in my life.
He was patient with me in ways that I did not deserve. He answered my endless questions without ever growing tired or frustrated.
He helped me understand that the journey from darkness to light was not something that happened overnight.
It was a process that would continue for the rest of my life. One of the hardest parts of those early months in exile was dealing with the separation from my family.
My wife Soraya had been trying to reach me since I left Tehran. She had called my phone hundreds of times before I finally changed my number for security reasons.
Through a trusted intermediary, I managed to send her a message telling her that I was safe but that I could not return to Iran.
I did not tell her the full truth about my conversion because I was afraid of what the consequences might be for her and our children if the government found out.
She was angry and confused and heartbroken. She thought I had abandoned her for another woman or that I had lost my mind from the heart attack.
My eldest son Amir sent me a furious message through the same intermediary calling me a coward and a traitor for leaving the family.
His words cut me deeper than any knife ever could. My daughter Layla was different.
She sent me a message that was short but filled with something that gave me hope.
She wrote that she did not understand what was happening but that she loved me and wanted to know the truth.
She asked me to tell her everything when I was ready. She said she would not judge me no matter what.
Uh her words brought tears to my eyes because I could feel that God was working in her heart even though she did not know it yet.
I prayed for her every single day. I prayed for Soraya and Amir and all my family members.
I asked Jesus to protect them and to open their eyes to the truth. I asked him to give me the opportunity to share my story with them one day face-to-face but I knew that day might never come.
I knew that going back to Iran would mean certain death and I knew that my family might never forgive me for what I had done.
As 2024 turned into 2025 something began stirring in my heart that I could not ignore.
I had been living quietly in Cyprus for nearly a year. I had grown strong in my faith.
I had studied the Bible extensively with Pastor Darius. Yeah, I had connected with other Iranian believers in exile who had their own incredible stories of encountering Jesus.
But I felt that Jesus was calling me to do something more. He had not saved me from death just so I could live quietly and comfortably in a Mediterranean island for the rest of my days.
He had saved me for a purpose. He had given me a testimony that the world needed to hear.
He wanted me to speak publicly about what I had seen and experienced. He wanted me to expose the truth about the system I had served for 40 years.
He wanted me to stand before the camera and confess everything to the whole world.
The thought terrified me more than anything I had ever faced in my life. I talked to Pastor Dariush about what I was feeling.
He listened carefully and then told me something that confirmed everything in my heart. He told me that he had been praying about the same thing for months.
He said he believed that God was calling me to share my testimony publicly through Christian satellite television.
He mentioned SAT-7, a Christian broadcasting network that transmits programs in Arabic, and Farsi, and Turkish across the entire Middle East and North Africa.
Millions of people in Iran, and Lebanon, and Syria, and other countries watched SAT-7 secretly using satellite dishes even though the government tried to ban them.
Pastor Dariush said that if I shared my testimony on this network, it would reach the exact people who needed to hear it most.
It would reach Muslims who were questioning their faith. It would reach Iranians who were tired of the lies and oppression.
It would reach people connected to Hezbollah and the IRGC who might be having the same doubts that I had experienced before my encounter with Jesus.
I knew that going on television would make me the most wanted man in Iran.
The IRGC would put a price on my head. Hezbollah would send assassins to find me and silence me permanently.
My family in Iran would face intense scrutiny and possibly punishment for my actions.
Everything about this decision was dangerous and potentially fatal, but I kept thinking about what Jesus had told me during my near-death experience.
He told me that I had spent 40 years funding the destruction of his children.
Now he was asking me to spend whatever years I had left telling the world about his love.
How could I refuse him after everything he had done for me? How could I stay silent when millions of people were trapped in the same darkness I had been trapped in?
How could I choose my own safety over the truth that had set me free?
I could not. I would not. I told Pastor Darish that I was ready. I told him to make the arrangements.
I would go on television and confess everything. The preparations took several weeks. The producers at the network worked carefully to arrange a secure broadcast that would protect my physical location while still allowing me to appear live on camera.
They set up a small studio in an undisclosed location in Cyprus with cameras and lighting and sound equipment.
Security measures were put in place to prevent anyone from tracing the broadcast signal back to my actual location.
I was given instructions on how to present myself and what to expect during the live interview, but when I asked them what I should say, they told me something simple and powerful.
They told me to just tell the truth. They said the truth was the most powerful weapon in the world and that no amount of preparation or scripting could match the impact of a man simply telling the truth about what God had done in his life.
On the day of the broadcast, I sat in a chair in front of a camera and looked into the lens knowing that millions of eyes would be watching me across the Middle East and beyond.
My hands were trembling. My heart was racing. I thought about turning around and walking out of the studio.
I thought about all the reasons why this was a terrible idea. I thought about the assassins who would be dispatched to find me within hours of this broadcast going live.
I thought about my family in Iran and what they would think when they saw their father and husband confessing on Christian television.
But then I closed my eyes and I felt the presence of Jesus surrounding me with his peace.
The same peace I had felt when I stood before him during my near-death experience.
The same love, the same warmth, and I knew that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I opened my eyes and I began to speak. I told them everything. I told them about my childhood in Tehran and my father’s business empire and how the Islamic Revolution had changed my family’s life.
I told them about the Iran-Iraq War and how I had entered the world of arms dealing and made my first fortune from selling weapons of death.
I told them about the private meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 when I was recruited to finance Hezbollah.
I told them about the Quran verses the clerics had used to convince me that funding terrorism was a sacred religious duty.
I told them about the Beirut barracks bombing and the MIA bombing and the decades of violence that my money had paid for.
I told them about the billions of dollars I had moved through secret networks to fund the destruction of innocent lives across the Middle East.
I spoke without stopping and without holding anything back. Every word was a confession. Every sentence was an act of repentance.
Then I told them about Jesus. I told them about my heart attack and the moment my heart stopped on the operating table.
I I told them about standing in that vast space of light and seeing Jesus walking toward me in his white robes.
I told them about the visions he showed me of every person my money had helped to kill.
I told them about his question that had shattered my heart. “Why have you been funding the destruction of my children?”
I told them about his offer of forgiveness and his invitation to follow him. I told them about reaching out and taking his scarred hand and feeling the ocean of love wash over me.
I wept openly as I spoke these words on live television. I did not care about looking strong or dignified or composed.
I was a broken man confessing his sins before the entire world and I was not ashamed of my tears because every tear was proof that Jesus had given me a new heart.
I looked directly into the camera and I spoke to the people of Iran. I I told them that the the regime they lived under was built on lies and blood and fear.
I told them that the money they were told was being used to defend Islam was actually being used to murder innocent people in countries they had never visited and would never see.
I told them that the Quran verses being used to justify this violence were being twisted and distorted by men who cared more about power than about God.
I told them that I knew these things because I had been one of those men for 40 years.
I told them that there was a God who loved them more than they could imagine.
A God who did not demand blood and death and submission. A God who offered forgiveness and grace and eternal life.
His name was Jesus and he was waiting for every single one of them with arms wide open.
Then I spoke to my family. I looked into that camera knowing that Soraya and Amir and Leila might be watching somewhere in Tehran.
I told them that I was sorry for leaving without explaining everything. I told them that I loved them more than words could express.
I told them that I had not abandoned them. I had been called away by a power greater than anything on this earth.
I told Soraya that she was the love of my life and that leaving her was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I told Amir that I understood his anger and that I did not blame him for calling me a traitor.
I told Leila that her message of love had kept me going during my darkest moments.
I told all of them that I prayed for them every single day and that I would never stop praying until we were reunited either in this world or in the next.
I told them about Jesus and I begged them to seek him for themselves. I begged them to open their hearts to the truth that had set me free.
Finally, I spoke to anyone watching who was involved with Hezbollah or the IRGC or any organization that used violence in the name of God.
I told them that I understood them because I had been them. I told them that the certainty they felt about their cause was the same certainty I had felt for 40 years.
I told them that it was possible to be completely sincere and completely wrong at the same time.
I told them that Jesus was not the enemy they had been taught to despise.
He was the savior they had been searching for without knowing it. I told them that if Jesus could forgive a man like me, a man who had founded the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, then he could forgive anyone.
No sin was too great. No crime was too terrible. No heart was too hard for the love of Jesus to break through.
I am Kassem Muhammad Nagadi. I am 73 years old. I am a former billionaire and a former chief financier of Hezbollah.
>> >> And I am alive today because Jesus visited me and showed me the blood on my hands.
And then he washed those hands clean with his own blood. If this testimony has touched your heart, then write in the comments the blood has been washed away.
Let it be a declaration. Let it be a prayer. Let it be the beginning of your own journey from darkness into the light of the risen Christ.
