By Olivia Ward, Foreign Affairs Reporter

Source:

September 7, 2010

As Iran defiantly pushes ahead with its nuclear program, and threatens a jailed Iranian woman with death by stoning, few would dispute that its regime is a menace to its people and its global foes.

Tuesday in Toronto a heavily disguised former CIA “double agent” and member of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary guards said that Tehran’s leaders must be ousted, but not by military force.

“Regime change is necessary and it should be part of our policy,” said Reza Kahlili, who belonged to the organization that is the backbone of Iran’s security in the 1980s. “But bombing is no solution. The whole order has to change.”

Kahlili, wearing a blue surgical mask, dark glasses and a baseball cap — and speaking through an electronic voice distortion device — talked to reporters at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. The disguise was a security measure, he said, to protect him from reprisals from the old allies he decided to betray when close friends were murdered by the regime.

“The people who are ruling Iran rape, torture and kill to stay in power,” he said. “If they have a nuclear bomb they will use it to confront the West.”

Tehran’s clerical regime also exports spies for espionage abroad, Khalili added, claiming that Canada has been a transit point for dozens, if not hundreds of young Iranian agents who are later planted in the United States.

“Canada is the first country of entrance for them,” he said. “Many come on student visas because they’re easier to obtain. Once they graduate they go to California.”

Confrontations over Iran’s nuclear program have continued for a decade, amid warnings that it is coming closer to producing a nuclear bomb.

Earlier this week, the UN’s atomic watchdog said that Iran had failed to ante up the information and access it requested to assess its nuclear program. While Tehran denies it is producing a bomb, it has boosted its uranium enrichment program, and barred UN inspectors from the country.

Although the regime is brutal and dangerous, Kahlili says, it can be easily changed without even a single bullet fired, “if the West cuts all economic ties with Iran, isolates it diplomatically and blocks its shipping and air transport.

“That will suffocate the government and it will crumble very quickly.”

But Marina Nemat, who escaped to Canada after being jailed at age 16 in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison — where Canadian Zahra Kazemi was reportedly tortured and killed — said that Western intervention will do little to change the clerical regime without grassroots support.

“Is Iran a threat to the world?” she asked. “Yes, but it is more of a threat to its own people, who have been massacred for 30 years. The best way to stop the regime is for the people of Iran to stand up to it. There is no other way.”

Nemat, author of Prisoner of Tehran, was rescued from a death sentence by one of her jailers, who forced her into marriage and was later assassinated. Now remarried, and living in Aurora, she wrote Prisoner of Tehran, an account of her horrific experiences.

Her latest book, After Tehran, will be published later this month.

Even in Canada, Nemat said, her life is not safe.

“I have received threats. I open my car door very slowly. But if I put a police officer at my door, that tells the Iranian regime I am frightened, and they have won.”