Agreement on lifting the sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear programme would be a “giant step” forward after decades of hostility by the United States, according to Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Islamic republic’s former president and its greatest political survivor.

Rafsanjani, a close confidante of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, and a heavyweight leader himself for 40 years, hailed Iran’s decision to negotiate directly with Washington. “We have broken a taboo,” he told the Guardian in a rare and exclusive interview in his Tehran office.

Rafsanjani is a highly influential supporter of the current president, Hassan Rouhani, whose election in 2013 paved the way for nuclear talks. He was speaking on Tuesday before it was announced that the Vienna negotiations between Iran, the US and five other world powers had been extended for an additional three days after missing a second deadline. The first deadline on 30 June also passed without agreement.

“Having face-to-face negotiations is better than talking at long distance through the media,” Rafsanjani said. “Iran is dead serious. If the other parties are as serious we will have an agreement for sure. That Iran is talking directly to the US is a good move. We have broken a taboo.”

Rafsanjani said US hostility to Iran had long been the main problem. “Before the [1979] revolution the US was the main supporter of the Shah’s regime and after the revolution, in the imposed war [with Iraq] it was against us too. Now in the nuclear talks, if we see a different US, it will have a positive impact on the Iranian public.” It was “not impossible” that an American embassy – scene of the 444-day hostage saga from 1979 to 1981, and still known in Farsi as “the nest of spies” – could reopen in Tehran. “But that depends on the behaviour of both sides.”

He quoted Khomeini’s famous saying: “If the US behaves in a humane way we will have no problem with it.”

Rafsanjani, 80, is chairman of Iran’s expediency council, which mediates between parliament and the president under the overall authority of Khomeini’s successor as supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rafsanjani was de facto commander in chief of Iranian forces during the bloody eight-year war with Iraq. In his two terms as president from 1989 to 1997 he mended fences with the wealthy Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, which had supported Saddam Hussein.

Now, at a time of high tension, strategic rivalry and sectarian tensions across the region, he attacked the Saudis for “interfering in the nuclear talks” as well their “bombardment of the Yemeni people”.

The Saudis had also “lost their sensitivity to the Palestinian cause”,” he said. “We would like to have friendly relations with them.”

He added: “The holy Qur’an says that Muslims are brothers and should live in brotherhood. They must not be tyrants to each other.”

On hostility to Israel – a centrepiece of Iranian policy since 1979 – he saw no prospect for change. “We don’t need to change.” he said.” We support the rights of Palestinians. We are not participating in any military action in Palestine but we advise them on political issues. As long as Palestinian rights are not taken into account we cannot have good relations with the US.”

Israel, which has its own undeclared nuclear arsenal, opposes the emerging P5+1 agreement with Iran and sees Iran as a sworn enemy that backs the Palestinian movement Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon.



Islamic State (Isis), referred to in Farsi, as in Arabic, by its pejorative name Daesh, was “humiliating Islam”. Iran was helping fight it in both Syria and Iraq at the request of their governments. “Syria is under attack by so many terrorist groups,” he said. “We are against terrorism anywhere in the world.”

Rafsanjani faced angry criticism in 2013 when he said that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against its own people – a rare sign of dissent over Tehran’s unstinting support for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

Rafsanjani, like Rouhani, is usually described as a pragmatic moderate rather than a reformist in the lexicon of Iran’s complex political system. He said he was optimistic about the future of the country because it had an increasingly educated population and elections at all levels.

Hardliners dislike him and often insult him by referring to him without his clerical title, accusing him of abandoning the revolutionary ideology of the past and advocating rapprochement with the US – still “the Great Satan” to that camp. He lost a third presidential bid to the populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Two of his children were prosecuted in the wake of the “stolen” election that gave Ahmadinejad a second term in 2009. Sanctions over the nuclear issue were ratcheted up after that.

In July 2009, as the post-election crackdown intensified, Rafsanjani gave a famous sermon criticising restrictions on freedom of expression and the detention of political activists. Asked in the interview about a continuing lack of personal and cultural freedoms under a system which routinely blocks access to websites and social media sites, and about the espionage trial of the Washington Post journalist, Jason Rezaian, a dual US and Iranian national, Rafsanjani answered simply: “People wisely participate in elections. The people who are elected decide.”



