It was raining heavily, Vienna that day, Thursday, May 27, 1993, the day Majid Abbaspour, technical adviser to Hashemi Rafsanjani, then president of the Islamic Republic, met Nahum Manbar, an Israeli arms dealer, at the five-star Marriott Hotel near Vienna City Park on Coburgbastei, was rainy and gray. On the way, Abbaspour noticed two Mossad agents were following him. When he arrived at the hotel, he informed Manbar. Nahum Manbar surprised Mossad agents, telling them he knew their identities. Abbaspour, who had now found out he had been identified, left the hotel immediately and wanted to get to one of the safe houses of the Islamic Republic Embassy in Vienna as soon as possible. Mossad agents on a motorcycle chased Abbaspour’s car, an Islamic Republic arms dealer, on the wet and rainy streets of Vienna. When they came up from an underpass, the bike slid down the wet and slippery street and was run over by an oncoming car. Both agents were killed that day. [1]
Four years later, Nahum Manbar explained in court: “Now, let’s say, I bought a T-55 tank from the Polish army, for $35,000 each. I put a kind of fire control system on these tanks, which I bought from Israel for $20,000 per machine. I used to sell these to Iranians for $200,000. It was a very sweet profit. “[2]
But Nahum Manbar did not just sell tanks to the Islamic Republic. Between 1992 and 1993, he sold large quantities of components needed to produce chemical weapons to the Islamic Republic and after delivering required parts to produce Mustard gas, and 3 nerve agents, “Tabun, Sarin and Soman”, received $16 million from “the holy system” in 1994. The court sentenced Manbar to 16 years in prison, and in the same year Akbar Rafsanjani wrote in a note: “Dr. Abbaspour came. Reported on special defense industries and asked for comments. He asked permission to resign from his responsibility for being identified.”
In the same years, Rafsanjani justified the purchasing, manufacturing, and use of chemical weapons of mass destruction against humans as follows: “Chemical and biological weapons are the ‘atomic bomb of the poor,’ and they are relatively simple to manufacture and produce. We should consider these weapons at least as defensive weapons.”
One month before the Nahum Manbar trial began, the International Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, of which Iran was a signatory, had been implemented. Mohammad Alborzi, the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic to the UN Office in Geneva, officially announced in 1998 that the regime had been developing and producing large-scale chemical weapons during the eight-year war with Iraq. Not only Alborzi, but also other officials of the regime have always emphasized that the production of chemical weapons in Iran stopped with the end of the war. But this was not true. In 1993, Russia’s secret service reported the “production of sarin nerve agent on an industrial scale.” Two US intelligence services, the CIA and the DIA, announced the continued development of the “Chemical Weapons Production Program” in the Islamic Republic. The report of these organizations mentioned the accumulation of at least 2,000 tons of chemical weapons. The CIA reported in 2001 that China and Russia had delivered large quantities of chemical pre-products to Iran. This report was confirmed by the European secret services in later years. German BND, for example, in 2004: “Iran has a growing chemical industry. The Islamic Republic’s chemical weapons program is specifically supported by India and China. Iran most likely has mustard, sarin, tabun and VX gas.” [3]
A year later, Jane’s Defense Weekly published a report announcing an arms deal between the Islamic Republic and Syria. Under the agreement, the Islamic Republic was tasked with building the necessary infrastructure in Syria to produce chemical weapons in the country, so that Syria would no longer need to buy and import anything in the industry: self-sufficiency in the production of weapons of mass destruction. When the civil war in Syria erupted six years after the agreement was signed, the Assad regime had thousands of tons of deadly chemicals as weapons to kill its own people; Almost as much as, according to Western intelligence estimates, the Islamic Republic kept secret in its warehouses. And exactly the same kind of material. That is, mustard gas, tabun, sarin, and the terrifying compound, VX. “VX is so deadly that just a drop of it is enough to kill a human being,” says German military and weapons expert Hans Rühle. “You can kill a million people with one liter of VX!” In recent years, chemical weapons production facilities and industrial infrastructure in Syria have been repeatedly attacked by US forces and European allies. Whenever it was thought the Assad’s criminal regime no longer had access to these inhumane weapons, new reports of the use of chemical weapons were published.
A new document released by the US State Department, which has just been declassified, provides new information on the uninterrupted development of the Islamic Republic’s chemical weapons program over the four decades of the regime. The report, whose main issue is the Islamic Republic’s non-compliance with the provisions of the International Convention for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, refers to specific violations and concealment of the regime.
The Islamic Republic, as a signatory to the International Treaty on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, violated one of the provisions of the Convention by transferring chemical weapons to Libya during the war with Chad between 1978 and 1987 and concealing these exports from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Other violations include:
Use of mustard gas during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war by the Islamic Republic,
Production of weapons and chemicals to use by antiriot units to counter street protests and to use them extensively to suppress protesters, as we saw during Bloody November;
Research and development in order to develop the “Chemical Weapons Program” by “Shahid Meysami Group”, a subsidiary of the “New Defense Research Organization of Iran” (SPND, its accronym in Persian), efforts and research to build new chemical weapons of mass destruction at Malek Ashtar University of Technology and Imam Hossein University, which its Chemistry Department bought large quantities (more than 10,000 doses) of metedomidine through Chinese intermediaries in 2014, the report said.
Terrorist organizations and groups have a strong interest in chemical weapons. Chemical weapons are exactly what a terrorist wants: to kill people quickly and without distinction, to use them to create public panic in society, and to be widely reported in the media. Exactly the same inhumane package that is intertwined with the identity and ideology of the Islamic Republic. Lying and secrecy on a global scale are hallmarks of state terrorism. This means that in order to advance its nuclear military program, the Islamic Republic, on the one hand and in appearance, enters into formal negotiations and deals with the world powers, signs the JCPOA, sends Hassan Rouhani to the UN General Assembly to look into the eyes of the world and say:
“Atomic bomb and [weapons of] mass destruction have no place in our defense doctrine and are in contradiction with our basic ethics and ideologies.”
On the other hand, at the same time, it takes its nuclear activities with specific military objectives to Turquzabad and underground. On the one hand, it’s apparently signing the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development of Chemical Weapons, and on the other hand, it does not give up even a moment of research, development, production and distribution of lethal and inhumane chemical weapons, as we have seen in this article. In November 2019, we saw that this regime, in the face of the will of the people, where it sees its survival in danger, will not hesitate for a moment to use heavy military weapons and lethal chemical weapons, which have been self-sufficient in their production for many years, in order to oppress and massacre defenseless people. Propaganda machine and killing machine: Two parallel tracks on which state terrorism runs.
1. The Israeli Kibbutznik Who Dealt Weapons to Iran
2. Ronen Bergman, The Secret War with Iran
3. Cordesman, Proliferation in the “Axis of evil”
Translation of this article by Sahar.