S8 Ep572: NUMBER FILE SEPARATE SINGLE PARAGRAPH 1-12 1. Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the *Wall Street Journal* explores the presence of Iranian assets in Venezuela, noting that Iranian technology was used to build an assembly plant for military drones in the state of
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
NUMBER FILE SEPARATE SINGLE PARAGRAPH 1-12 1. Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the *Wall Street Journal* explores the presence of Iranian assets in Venezuela, noting that Iranian technology was used to build an assembly plant for military drones in the state of Aragua. She discusses the status of acting president Delcy Rodriguez, whom the U.S. recently recognized as the sole head of state in federal court, a move that appears to sideline the democratic opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. O'Grady also highlights the legal significance of Alex Saab, an interlocutor between Tehran and Caracas, who is viewed as a "treasure trove" of information regarding the criminal charges against the Maduro regime. (1)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel. I welcome Mary Anastacio Grady, the American's editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal editorial page to ask a very good question. |
| 0:24.6 | Are there Iranians in Venezuela? Are they still there? What were they there to begin with? |
| 0:30.4 | Especially their association with war fighting, drones. Mary, a very good evening to you. I like the question. Iran was much involved in |
| 0:39.8 | illicit activity around the world for some time might still be. There was always stories |
| 0:46.0 | about Hezbollah using rest and recuperation camps in Venezuela and other parts of South America. |
| 0:52.8 | What do we know about the Iranians who were there once |
| 0:56.6 | upon a time and might still be there? Good evening to you. Well, good evening, John. If I had more |
| 1:02.2 | room in the headline, I might have said are the Iranian assets that Venezuela brought to the |
| 1:08.7 | Western Hemisphere still in the Western Hemisphere, |
| 1:12.3 | because it's not just a matter of the Iranians that Venezuela brought to Venezuela, |
| 1:18.9 | but there's also questions about those Iranians who were given Venezuela and passports |
| 1:25.3 | so that they could move around the Western |
| 1:27.9 | hemisphere without coming under any suspicion. |
| 1:31.8 | And we know that during the rule of Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro, there were direct flights |
| 1:39.4 | from Tehran to Caracas and Terracuse, and Terakal,Azami, who was once in the Chavez government and subsequently a governor of the state of Aragua, was very active with Middle Eastern groups. |
| 1:55.6 | His family, I think, is Syrian, if I'm not mistaken, and very active with extremist groups in Syria, Lebanon, |
| 2:04.5 | and of course, those groups supported by Iran. |
| 2:08.6 | So there was real camaraderie, solidarity, and cooperation between Caracas and Tehran for many years, and that included bringing agents into this hemisphere. |
| 2:22.1 | So now we have Maduro in a New York jail, and we have Delci Rodriguez governing the country. |
| 2:28.7 | The regime remains the same. |
| 2:31.0 | It's a dictatorship. |
| 2:32.6 | Political prisoners remain in the jails. People who are |
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