Tuesday, October 20, 2009

A ‘Cold War’ against a Nuclear Iran


Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

The recent defection of the daughter of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s film advisor to Germany is the latest clue to a non-military "cold war” against a nuclear Iran. Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, whose father is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cultural affairs advisor and a media spokesman, has applied for political asylum in Germany. After making a film critical of torture in the Islamic Republic, she told Der Spiegel during a film festival in Germany, “I was told that it would be better not to come home and that if I went back now, I would be met at the airport by the secret police. There were a lot of people at the festival who are against the Iranian regime. I did not have permission to make my film in Iran either…. I have no options. I cannot go back to Iran.”

Her defection, along with the suicide bombing that killed six Iranian Revolutionary Guards commanders, is a feather in the hat for Western nations who reportedly are taking a page out of the U.S.-USSR Cold War in the 1950s and are trying to undermine the Iranian regime.

Missing documents, unexplained fatalities of nuclear scientists and the disappearance of others, are part of the effort to defuse Iran’s nuclear program, according to Peter Goodspeed of the Canadian National Post.

Three months ago, a Tehran physics researcher went missing during a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, which, along with the United States, has been blamed by Iran for whisking him away to an unknown location. Last month, another scientist, who was visiting the country of Georgia, was arrested and apparently extradited to the United States.

The most widely-known disappearance is that of Revolutionary Guards general Ali Reza Asgari, who disappeared two years ago during a trip to Turkey, slightly more than a week after 10 members of his family also left Iran and never returned. Asgari was privy to highly classified information concerning Iran’s nuclear program.

One theory has suggested that he was a spy for the Israeli Mossad secret service while thinking his bosses were a Europeans intelligence agency. He also may have been involved in providing information on the nuclear facility in Syria that Israel reportedly bombed two years.

Other tactics being used in the “war” against Iran are currency manipulations and disinformation programs, according to Goodspeed.

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