Ahmad Vahidi Is Now Calling the Regime’s Shots
“Donald Trump prides himself in his ability to strike a deal. But the real estate mogul turned president’s negotiating strategy has not worked with the government of Iran,” gloated the Financial Times before this week’s announced ceasefire.
The FT fails to mention that the Iranian bureaucrats exchanging messages with Trump report to Ahmad Vahidi, an international terrorist fugitive leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, who has survived Epic Fury and now calls the shots. His legitimacy rests on the control of a diminishing stock of ballistic missiles, thousands of kamikaze drones, some enriched uranium, Basij militia thugs operating with Chinese surveillance systems, and foreign terrorists coming in from neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan to boost the IRGC’s depleted ranks. This is “The Government of Iran.” (RELATED: Trump Confounds Critics Again)
His well-honed clandestine skills have kept him out of the crosshairs of Israeli killer drones so far, and he is the rump regime’s murky decision maker.
Vahidi has alternated between every key military and intelligence position under the now largely departed mullahs, including defense minister, chief of the armed forces, intelligence director, and most importantly, commander of Quds Force, the IRGC’s external spy agency and special operations unit that virtually runs Iran’s foreign dealings. He is the effective replacement of General Qassem Soleimani, assassinated by Trump in 2019. His well-honed clandestine skills have kept him out of the crosshairs of Israeli killer drones so far, and he is the rump regime’s murky decision maker.
The ceasefire agreed with Trump this week came after the U.S. president brutally threatened to “bomb Iran back into the stone ages” by taking out all of its bridges and electric power stations, which would have left IRGC units unable to communicate and move units to counter possible U.S. ground operations and internal uprisings. (RELATED: It May Not Be a Ceasefire. It Might Be a Strategic Pause.)
According to intelligence analysts, Vahidi had been reorganizing the IRGC into cell-structured groups able to continue fighting with limited centralized support. But this may prove insufficient against major U.S. ground challenges like taking Kharg Island. IRGC could not intercept a battalion-sized landing in the middle of Iran to rescue a downed F-15 pilot over Easter weekend. (RELATED: The Iran Rescue: The Payoff of Painful Lessons)
Vahidi is wanted by Interpol for directing a series of truck bombings that killed over a hundred people in Argentina, where he operated under diplomatic cover during the 1990s, rising to head Quds following the U.S. assassination of its founding general, Qasem Soleimani. His personal management of the IRGC’s external alliances, largely engineered by him, is now crucial for the group’s survival and geopolitical power plays involving closures of the Hormuz strait which he tentatively reopened this week under Trump’s threats of complete annihilation.
He is the very embodiment of the terrorist bureaucrat…
“The Government of Iran” is hated and despised by the vast majority of Iranians, 40,000 of whom have given their lives to topple this murderous bureaucracy, which produced Vahidi, who exercises power entirely through a criminally motivated police system, rarely if ever making speeches or public pronouncements. He is the very embodiment of the terrorist bureaucrat, the latest of a model started by Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It still holds much appeal to budding totalitarians of failed states and woke Europeans pulling out plugs to sabotage Trump’s efforts against Iran’s barbaric ruling caste.
Vahidi started as a covert Quds operative when the unit was developed in the 1980s. He trained with Hezbollah in Lebanon when the group was initially being armed by Syria’s Assad regime, recruiting suicide bombers from Lebanese Shia communities. IRGC-controlled cells rose to dominate Hezbollah, which went on to stage some of the most spectacular terrorist attacks on record. The 1983 truck bombing of a U.S. Marine base in Lebanon, which killed over 250 Americans, paid rich dividends: the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon, letting Hezbollah grow into the country’s shadow government, accumulating a massive military arsenal pointed at Israel’s throat.
Vahidi became general and was sent as military attaché to the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires when Quds was hustling the Argentines for nuclear and missile technology. Israel was getting in their way. His solution was to bring over the Hezbollah cell chief who pulled off the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, Imad Mughniyeh, to blow up the Israeli embassy. When some of Israel’s diplomatic functions were switched over to the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association, that building got blown away as well, together with 85 people.
It was an elaborate operation, requiring smuggling explosives and suicide drivers through Paraguay, handing out quarter-million-dollar bribes to police officials, and penetrating Argentina’s spy agency, which lifted surveillance of the Iranian embassy and a warehouse where the truck bombs were assembled, on the morning that AIMA was hit.
Despite being put on Interpol’s wanted list, Vahidi remained highly active internationally. He visited Cuba, personally meeting with Fidel Castro weeks before the Cuban dictator went to Iran in 2001 to declare before cheering Revolutionary Guard aspirants at the University of Tehran, “Cuba and Iran together will bring America to its knees.” That was two months before 9/11.
He set up IRGC/Hezbollah bases in Venezuela, where members of the cell involved in the Argentine attacks remain under state protection. In 2011, Vahidi, by then defense minister, appeared at an official military ceremony with President Evo Morales in Bolivia. The leftist government of Cristina Kirchner in neighboring Argentina at the time neglected to request his arrest, as would be required under “international law.”
Vahidi played a key role in organizing Hezbollah in Iraq and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to mount deadly guerrilla attacks against U.S. occupation forces, imparting IED technology for their roadside bomb attacks that dismembered and killed thousands of American troops.
These groups are now crossing into Iran in mile-long convoys of Toyota trucks waving the flags of their respective factions. Some have been observed manning checkpoints in Tehran, replacing IRGC and Basij militia units that have been decimated by air strikes on their bases, bunkers, supply depots, and private residences.
Iraqi Hezbollah is simultaneously launching pre-emptive strikes with drones and ground units against U.S. bases in Iraq and Kurdistan, where Mossad and the CIA have been trying to arm Iranian Kurdish rebels for planned revolts and guerrilla attacks on the IRGC.
Steve Witkoff’s proven patience in the psychological decryption of schizophrenic messages delivered through Pakistani intermediaries by a pathological regime trying to hold the world hostage may have played a role in securing a very tenuous ceasefire. But the real negotiators are CENTCOM’s admiral Brad Cooper and the 82nd airborne division commander, General Brandon Tegtmeier, recently arrived in theater, who is a Special Forces Ranger. (RELATED: Trump: A Real Commander-in-Chief)
“We negotiate with bombs,” said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in his most recent Pentagon briefing. U.S. precision-guided high-explosive munitions will need to remain locked and loaded as the U.S. keeps dealing with the world’s most experienced and dangerous terrorist, who will continue using deception, blackmail, and brutality in his global hostage standoff, as America’s traditional allies SIT, incapacitated by TDS-induced Stockholm syndrome.
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