An Account of M, as told to John Rubens, San Diego, California, 1980-1981

Textbook Events of the Iranian Revolution of 1978

We begin by recalling some of the major political events that took place prior to the insurgent Iranian Revolution of 1978. The popular government of the Iranian People in 1953 was led by a man named Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq. His administration’s policy was directed toward supporting the masses of Iran, commonly referred to as a “Populist“. However, the populist stance of the Iranian leader became increasingly unpopular in the eyes of Mossadeq’s opposition: the huge oil companies of the West. To upbraid the troublesome politician, a coup was organized to topple the Mossadeq government.

The United States supported the coup because a new leader would allow them greater voice in Iranian foreign policy and greater control of their vast oil assets under the jurisdiction of Iran. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, hereinafter referred to as “Shah” or “the Shah” was re-installed as the leader in the so-called “renewal of relations” between Iran and the “West” [For purposes of this book, the “West” refers primarily to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States, and secondarily western industrialized democracies (see
Wikipedia under the search “define: western industrialized democracies 20^th Century) .

Shah Out, Shah In, Shah Out Again

The 1953 coup d’etat was spear-headed by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, hereinafter referred to as “CIA” or “the CIA”, in conjunction with an angry Iranian mob. The CIA paid commissions to the instigators of a riot in the streets of Tehran who used taunts, degrading the name of Mossadeq, and giving praises to the Shah. The mob was successful in kidnapping Dr. Mossadeq during the demonstration, a pre-requisite to the toppling of his democratically-elected Office and the collapse of his Administration. The resultant coup was the return of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from his hiding place in Italy to the Imperial Throne of Iran. The Shah is back in.

Let’s Flashback: the Problem’s Inception

The Mossadeq government gave people a sense of freedom and liberty that they had been denied for many years under previous leaders of Iran. The Mossadeq Administration was modeled after North American and West European democratized nation-states. Citizens were allowed certain inalienable rights that allowed them to think and act on their own initiative and to speak out for what they believed in. These freedoms were upheld as rights protected the Iranian Constitution in force during his Administration which ended in 1953.

The Communist Toudeh (a/k/a Tudeh) Party

The numerous political parties which existed in Iran during Mossadeq’s rule were not interfered with or suppressed by his Administration. This laissez-faire attitude of democratic government created an opportunity for the Communist Party, hereinafter referred to as the Toudeh Party, to gain a powerful foothold as members of the Constitutional Government of Iran. The CIA as one might expect, did not like Mossadeq’s tolerance of Toudeh Party members since they distributed pro-Soviet propaganda with bravado aimed primarily against the United States. The literature lambasted American foreign policy and the “imperialistic” motivation of its vital interests not only in the Middle East, but throughout the developing world. The populace was paying attention.

The Toudeh Party continued to gain popularity under Mossadeq until the United States took action to counteract their propaganda drive. The US plan for dissolution of Toudeh was two-fold: 1) to diminish Soviet influence in Iran and 2) once Soviet influence waned, the United States would be able to regain access to Iranian oilfields without public unrest [the West was shut out of the Iranian oil industry at the time by the Mossadeq Administration].

Many Iranians were very sensitive to oil-interested politics in the early 1950’s. Between 1951 and 1953 for instance, oil production in Iran was at a standstill because the service contracts between Great Britain and Iran to extract and distribute petroleum were seen by most Iranians as unconscionable. For instance, it was widely publicized that the British only paid royalties of 16% of the profits it made on Iranian Oil and that American interests were driving inflation higher.

In response to Iran’s oil embargo of the early 1950’s, Great Britain gave the Mossadeq Administration an ultimatum: either relent and end the embargo or suffer naval occupation of the Persian Gulf (with implications of a “blockade”). The Iranian populace responded tout de suite: oil businessmen and technicians that had been exploiting Iran’s natural petroleum resources since the turn of the 20^th Century were expelled. After the mass expulsion of the Western oil interests, Mossadeq set out to nationalize oil.

Once the oil sector in Iran had stabilized, foreigners could come to work in Iran, but solely for the nationalized program, not for oil companies under British jurisdiction. [Compare, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’ attempts to nationalize oil in his country during the Administration of George W. Bush in the United States 2007-2008]. Subsequently, British workers, primarily engineers, did not like working for the Iranian oil company and came disgruntled. Persuaded by the British government, they abandoned their positions in the Iranian petroleum industry and left the country. Iranian engineers and technicians did not have the expertise to run the petroleum industry in their country without outside help and the industry fell into disarray. If that was not enough, no one was buying Iranian oil due to political pressure from Great Britain. Furthermore, England made a spectacle of the breach of Iran’s “breach” of its contract with them and sued them in an International Court in The Hague, Netherlands. It was perceived by the author that the British relied too much on their outspoken political persuasiveness and economic clout than by contract law enforceable by the Court (according to the author, a United Nations (hereinafter U.N.) Court in those days) sat The Hague. As it was, the International Court ruled in favor of the Iranian Government. The ruling was based on the fact that Britain began exploiting Iran’s petroleum resources under alleged contracts that were not produced at trial by the British, and the Iranians allegedly did not have copies to enter into evidence either. The Court went on to point out that Iran was currently a sovereign nation and no longer a colony of the British Empire. As such, a sovereign nation not only has the right of self-determination, but the means to ensure that right. The decision of the Court was that Iran had the sole right to all mineral resources located beneath the ground of its territories. [The wording of the World (or as the author recounts, the U.N.) Court’s precepts have certainly evolved since the early 1950’s, as has the Court(s) corporate structure, membership and jurisdiction]. Although the Iranian government asked for restitution, it could not prove theft of its sovereign natural resources over the preceding sixty years and since neither Iran nor Great Britain produced copies or originals of any “agreements” the two sovereigns may have been working under since Iran separated from the British Empire in the late 19^th Century, the Court did not retroactively nullify the contracts but did nullify any supposed “agreements” either of the two countries may have thought they were working under going forward.

As Great Britain Recedes from the Iranian Oil Picture in the mid-1950’s, U.S. Oil Companies Step Up Their Efforts to Negotiate With Iran and Win Contracts in Petroleum Interests

Achilles Heel

Initially, U.S. Oil Companies supported the Mossadeq regime. Former President Harry S. Truman was sent as an Ambassador to Iran to discuss possible oil trade with Mossadeq in 1953. Then President Eisenhower knew it was important to send a diplomat of high regard to meet with the Iranian Prime Minister in order to show the enthusiasm the United States had to do business with them.

Mossadeq wanted to aggravate America, but at the same time continue to export oil to them. Meanwhile, England urged their allies in Europe and the Americas not to buy oil from Iran in order to suffocate their economy. Iran suffered severely from the embargo. They were not receiving income from oil as almost all of their production was barely enough to support their own domestic consumption. This inability to produce a surplus of oil production for export was a key cause of their rising inflation and huge trade deficit.

The Toudeh Party relished the fact that Mossadeq was in a bind, after all, they wanted to rule Iran in his place. On the issue of oil exports, the Toudeh Party actively opposed Mossadeq’s suspension of oil exports to the West and provoked a public outcry. Soon, Mossadeq’s adoring public was demonstrating in the streets of Tehran. In 1953 Iran, Mossadeq needed money more that the “West” needed oil (the Korean War was winding down as well). Mossadeq, determined to sell more oil to American oil companies, set about to quell Toudeh inspired rumors and retain his composure, after all, the plurality of Iranians still admired his steadfast political objectivity, honesty and manner.

The United States and Great Britain had and continue to have radically intertwined economies, and therefore, both countries had and continue to have almost identically vital interests in Iran. Mossadeq “blinked”. He was forced to sell oil to American companies because some of his major domestic political antagonists were impatient with the rising inflation and lack of revenue from oil, Iran’s primary natural resource. If that was not enough, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (hereinafter referred to as USSR) did not approve of the Mossadeq regime. Along with the US and Great Britain, theformer WWII allies devised a plan to boycott Iranian oil even if it was offered to them for sale. The three-way solidarity was enough to ensure an economic depression in Iran at the time.

The Toudeh Party stepped up their efforts and began ad hominem misinformation campaigns against Prime Minister Mossadeq, including rumors he was a “puppet of America”. Like bees buzzing around his head, Mossadeq’s adversaries began to overwhelm him. Divisive domestic and Western factions attacked him for a crippled Iranian economy. Inflation, along with the civil unrest that followed as a result, was Mossadeq’s Achilles heel.

At some point about this time while Mossadeq was still in office and the embargo ongoing, an Italian ship loaded with Iranian oil was seized by the British Navy in the Indian Ocean. As political tensions between England and Iran heightened to a crescendo, the United States for its part sought new methods of gaining access to Iranian Oil. Heightened political tensions in Iran led the former WWII allies to coordinate a coup d’etat together.

Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi

Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi sent a declaration to Prime Minister Mossadeq informing him he was deposed of his authority and that General Zahedi would assume the Office of Prime Minister. Mossadeq would have none of it. He had just won at the World Court in The Hague. He had some clout left, at least internationally. He could appeal to the United Nations (hereinafter referred to as UN). He was right. The Shah’s Plan A, the declaration, backfired and he was forced to leave the country, first to Iraq, and later to Italy in fear for his life.

Within three days the Shah and his close associates arranged Plan B: a plot to overthrow the Mossadeq Prime Ministership. The Shah’s flight to Italy provided a diversion for General Zahedi, who was also in hiding, to arrange the coup against the INF, Mossadeq’s political party. Mossadeq continued to maintain if not enjoy a large following in Iran and for this reason, the Shah and his associates were afraid of the people’s reaction to the coup. The principal and most vocal opponent of what became known as “General Zahedi’s plot” was the Toudeh Party, which had been growing progressively stronger under Mossadeq’s Administration. All three of the major interested parties in “General Zahedi’s plot”, the United States, Great Britain and the USSR, agreed not to interfere with the coup or stage a meddling counter-coup once the takeover of the Iranian government was completed by Zahedi.

Up until 1953, of the major world powers, England had the most influence over Iran and its affairs. As the year passed, American diplomacy and persuasiveness won out as did General Zahedi in the coup. The United States had two basic interests in Iran. The first and foremost concern was the dissolution of the Toudeh Party and its entrenched propaganda machine. Once dissolution was accomplished or nearly certain to be accomplished, the United States simply wanted to get Iranian oil into American oil tankers. To achieve these two objectives quickly, strategically and efficiently, the US decided it would be in its best interests to re-introduce the Shah as the dictator of Iran.

THE COUP’ETAT: 1953
    

A rabble of pro-Shah demonstrators, led by twenty-one military officers, staged the coup which was organized by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. Some of the twenty-one officers overseeing and/or carrying out the rebellion were enemies of Mossadeq and in Iranian prison(s) at the time. The coup was successful, Mossadeq was thrown in prison, and the officers that helped orchestrate the coup were freed from Iranian incarceration.

The Toudeh Party told its members and officers that a new Iranian government must be formed as soon as possible so that General Zahedi would not have time to consolidate his power in a military dictatorship. As far as the communists were concerned, anarchy and revolution were preferable to having all the authority with Zahedi, or anyone else. The Toudeh Party had a plan of their own and it did not include the Shah, Dr. Mossadeq or General Zahedi. The communists would “fatigue the new government”, then at an opportune moment, stage another uprising. Thus, the Toudeh Party would not have to “double-cross” their compatriots in the USSR at the outset, although they were allied with “the West” during the coup. Rather, they planned to allow the CIA devised coup to go forward and seize control of the Iranian Government at a later date. Toudeh organizers wanted to install a leader who they could manipulate while consolidating their own party’s political power. In 1978, The Ayatollah Khomeini was to become this individual.

Around the same period, a network of communist military officers were discovered accidentally by General Zahedi’s government. A specific officer was apprehended carrying a suitcase with the names of 1200 people that had infiltrated the Iranian military service. Six hundred of the names found were part of a conspiracy of anti-Shah military officers ranging from lieutenant to colonel (hereinafter Sr. Officers). The names of the other six hundred soldiers (hereinafter Jr. Officers) were written down in a complicated code. A major in the Zahedi armed forces, distinguished as an expert code breaker, was called in to decipher the names of the Jr. Officers found in the briefcase. Unknowingly, Zahedi had “hired” a communist infiltrator who took the codes of the 600 Junior Officers and fled the country, never to be found again. Fear and intrigue prevailed in the wake of the disclosures of the Iranian Major who left the service of the country. Since the identities of the 600 Jr. Officers remained unknown, the secret police and informants were investigating the case to uncover their identities. Communist influence seemed to pervade daily life, but such was the case in the United States and in the USSR as well in 1953(compare McCarthyism; Remnants of Stalin Purges, daughter’s defection).

The Reza Shah Pahlavi’s personal guard was not without its defectors [At an earlier time than 1953, Shah Pahlavi found a derogatory letter one morning at his bedside when he awoke. It shook his confidence immensely to the point it was visibly apparent to the Iranian public for some time]. Due to the present [1953] circumstances and the prior letter of warning, Pahlavi was suspicious of his allies, even his closest friends. Il etait raison (Fr.). What was not as apparent perhaps, was Zahedi’s transfer of power to the Shah.

The Shah Takes Over the Helm of a Persian Ship

Along with the six hundred Sr. Officers that were arrested by General Zahedi’s forces, the Iranian government arrested several communist politicians. Of these, forty were executed and the others imprisoned. The strong military response of the Shah and Zahedi frightened the Iranian population. The aggression was seen as a totalitarianistic gambit and short term (martial law) strategy, and unlike before, there were no protests over the government consolidative action. It was under these coercive circumstances that the Iranian Oil pact(s) with Western European powers and American oil companies was ratified by the Iranian parliament. It was decided that eight major concessionaires from different countries should undertake the production and sale of Iranian oil. Mossadeq’s government, and his goals for Iran were over. A new regime had begun to greet the populace with different goals and different ideals to focus upon—and it pleased the Shah’s Western benefactors.

 

Major Petroleum Concessionaires from the United States

The major concessionaires of Iran’s oil resources were based and/or headquartered in the United States and paid taxes to the United States. General Zahedi made a deal with the US oil companies and was awarded a fee of 60-70 million dollars to use as he pleased. In the new Iran-US Oil contract, 51% of the oil profits belonged to Iran, while 49% belonged to the oil companies that owned the concession: that meant they were the principal that was responsible for exploration, feasibility studies, production, sales, distribution including associated storage and transport of the petroleum product(s).

USSR Bears Gift

In the 1950’s, the USSR wanted the ouster of General Zahedi at any cost [don’t know why]. In an act of goodwill, the Soviets returned eleven tons of gold it had acquired from Iran during World War II. Although former Prime Minister Mossedeq had demanded return of the gold previously of the Soviets during his administration, the Soviets did not oblige him with the transfer. Now, the circumstances and geo-political climate had changed and the Soviets hoped that the “gift” would help ease relations between the two countries. Iran had enough oil for export to make this initial gold “investment in the future” worthwhile.

Iran was enthusiastic about the gold returned by the Soviets to sovereign soil, however, trade relations between the two countries remained muted. With British and American concessions paying top dollar, the Soviets could not compete and took a “backseat” to their former WWII allies in Iran oil exports. However, the USSR made it clear they would not interfere with the West’s arrangement with Iran only if assurances were promised that first advantage or first look would be given to the USSR in other domains and endeavors in the future, whatever they may be (e.g. wheat from the US, most favored nation status, or future oil contracts). A “divide and conquer” strategy was replaced by one of bargain and compromise—the “cold war”. The understanding was “We’ll let you have your way this time but you better make sure we get ours “next” time or were taking it.”

BARGAINING WITH THE BIG GUYS

Negotiations with the Middle East in the early 1950’s became the precedent for a new type of agreement between the superpowers of the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom of Great Britain with respect to Iran. The USSR conceded to Zahedi’s policy in order to focus its attention in other areas of the world, such as Korea. The USSR felt that the North Korean government, an assured acquisition of theirs, could do their bidding for them against South Korea, without getting their own hands “soiled” in war. Once the Soviet’s found a sympathetic group to do their bidding for them, there was no reason why they should not aid their comrades and overcome their enemies.

In Iran, the situation was not as clear-cut. Those that opposed a communist state outnumbered those who wanted one; at least that was the pluralistic sentiment. But like a boat in rough water, Iranians were unsure what other residents favored in public policy or governmental structure(s). What the plurality did agree on was they wanted change. Change was the only “mantra” anyone had any assurance in.

As a result of the foregoing, the Soviets did not interfere with Iranian trade during the early 1950’s or threaten it with coercive tactics that would “rock the boat” now being led by the “West”. No, the USSR was determined to “wait it out” for the appointed time when they could tell the US or the UK, “Our turn now–move over!”

SHAH PAHLAVI AND THE FOUNDATION OF HIS SECRET POLICE FORCE #SAVOK

In 1958, the CIA established a secret police force (secret service) for the Shah of Iran called the Organization of Information and Security of Iran (translated and hereinafter referred to as SAVOK). SAVOK was established to maintain order and keep the power in the hands of its ruler, Shah Pahlavi. SAVOK used totalitarian techniques and used totalitarian methods to achieve political stability. This Unit would be known to capture and detain anyone who opposed the State or who displayed dissatisfaction with the new regime.

There were several groups of individuals (probably some individuals were in more than one group?) who opposed the Shah. The different types of organizations, or “groups” were: 1) the Iranian National Front, or INF of which Dr. Mossedeq was a party member and was imprisoned when the Shah seized power successfully after the recent coup, 2) the communist party, aka the Toudeh Party and 3) Clerics (i.e. the Ayatollahs). The Shah used his secret police force SAVOK to suppress all these “groups” from interfering with affairs of State in Iran.

PRESIDENT JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY’S INFLUENCE IN IRAN (circa 1960-1963)

During John F. Kennedy’s term of office (1960-1963) a wave of political “coup d’etats” swept the third world (hereinafter referred to as the “developing world”). Political unrest prevailed in many parts of Latin America and South-East Asia. The reasons for the unrest were a general dissatisfaction with their respective governments and the widespread desire to establish a “better society” even if by means of violent upheaval(s). Kennedy’s method of restraining communist governments from taking over smaller, underdeveloped countries was to influence the presiding government to respect human rights. Kennedy’s diplomacy acted as a deterrent to anarchy and revolution in Iran because it gave the Shah limitations in the way he ran the country. Kennedy’s theory was that if the people were content with their government and their leaders, they would have no imminent reason to break with the status quo and revolt.

Kennedy was the significant factor which led to many reforms in Iran under the Shah’s administration. He advised the Shah in the early ’60’s to moderate the use of his power keeping in mind his duty to serve his constituents. In other countries, where the close monitoring of its national rulers was not as comprehensively studied as it had been in Iran after the second World War, communist governments assumed power only after society’s became discontent with their leaders. Kennedy stressed the development of a policy for human rights that would appease the public and decrease the chance of a revolution from ever occurring. The Kennedy Administration recommended Dr. Amini, Secretary of the Financial Ministry in Zahedi’s Cabinet to be appointed the new Prime Minister. Amini was very close to the Kennedy family and had represented Iran in the recent oil pact with Western concessionaires. The Western nations of the US, UK, France and Germany seemed to agree on Amini as Prime Minister as they found him to be an able negotiator. Amini was ultimately appointed through Kennedy’s influence and the Shah made special efforts to tolerate his rival’s presence; they were not the best of friends. Since Amini had been installed at the urging of John Kennedy, he had a special distinction in Parliament that none of the other members had. Amini was relatively independent from the Shah’s jurisdiction and had the right to express his personal views at Parliamentary sessions even if they were incongruous to the Shah’s.

REFORMATION: THE SIX PRINCIPLES

The Shah and Amini worked together to reform the Iranian Constitution. The work product of their tenuous political alliance was called the Six Principles of the Shah’s Revolution. These principles were as follows:

• All large land owners transfer some of their land to the peasants who had worked it as lessees. Up until the reform, landlords would rent out their acreage to peasants much like European feudal lords had done with serfs in the Middle Ages. Now peasants could be farmers, ranchers or entrepreneurs with a chance to make a living for themselves and enjoy the windfall of fruits from their labor and management.
  
• Young, educated people were sent to villages to teach the peasants how to read and write. The young adults also familiarized the country-dwellers with recent technological advances in health, medicine and agriculture.
  
• Medical school graduates must spend at least two years serving the village poor in Iran without a salary prior to entering the greater medical profession (in lieu of mandatory military service).
  
• Nationalization of Iranian forests, which had been owned by private landlords before the reform.
  
• Bestow women with rights equal to those of men
  
• Establish new election regulations.
  

Two of the six points infuriated the clergymen. They didn’t like the transfer of land to the peasants or making women’s rights equal to those of men. The transfer of land to the peasants meant they would have to rely more on almsgiving from them rather than solely from the wealthy landowners. Prior to the reforms, clerics received an allowance from the rich landlords. After the reforms, they were at the mercy of the almsgiving of the peasants who were now endowed with the means to give back to the clerics what was once given to them directly from the wealthy. The clergymen’s “job” prior to the reforms had been to quell dissent among the poor so they would cause landlords a minimal amount of “trouble”. Clerics did not believe women should be granted equal rights to men but rather, subject themselves to the dictates of men. Accordingly, Ayatollah Khomeini accused the Shah of formulating the Six Principles due solely to American and Zionist influence. The Shah had the power to silence Khomeini and other clerics by imprisonment, so most of the Islamic priests obeyed the Shah, however reluctantly.

THE AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI AND THE SHIET SECT OF ISLAM

Both sects of lslam, Shiet and Sunni, co-exist in Iran, although the Shiet sect is much more prevalent within its borders. In fact, Iran is the hub of the Shiet sect. Khomeini was among the Shiets since birth, and had been recognized as a Great Ayatollah at the suggestion of Shariatmadari [Sayyid Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari (hereinafter referred to as Dari). Dari was of Azerbaijani descent [Məhəmməd Kazım Şəriətmədari, Persian: محمد
کاظم
شریعتمداری‎}, also spelled Shariat-Madari (1905 – 3 April 1986 )] and was an Iranian
Grand Ayatollah who recommended Khomeini become a Grand or “Great” Ayatollah during the reforms of the 1960’s-1970’s (from Wikipedia online in part 05-02-2014)]. The Shiets have a ceremonial rite in memory of Imam Hossein, the nephew of Mohammad the prophet, founder of Islam in the seventh century A.D. In 1963, during the ceremonial day of Hagation, an anti-Shah demonstration was held in Tehran, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The demonstrators shouted derogatory remarks and slogans against the Shah until the Shah ordered his guards to open fire into the assembly. Approximately one hundred people were killed in the shooting that afternoon, although Khomeini went on record accusing the Shah of executing 15,000 people.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s claim that 15,000 people had been summarily executed by the Shah’s guard backfired. There exists an allegory known to Iranians which the Shah used to persuade his people he was “right” and Khomeini was obviously “wrong”: Once there was a very powerful king who conquered India named Nader Shah. One day, he became very angry with one of his subjects and ordered he be given 1,000 lashes and thrown into the dungeon. The condemned man was giddy with laughter when he heard the sentence.

“Why are you laughing?” asked the king.

“Your highness” replied the sentenced subject, “either you have not had the experience of being whipped or you cannot count. If one is to endure 1,000 lashes, he certainly will not live to see his prison cell!”

The allegory was thus used to parody Khomeini’s penchant for exaggeration. A videotape of the incident clearly shows no more than 100 could have perished. Khomeini either “cannot count”, or he makes use of puffery and chicanery to prove his points of moral superiority. Since it had to be assumed the Ayatollah Khomeini learned to add long ago, the Shah’s regime persuaded the people that it was Khomeini, and not himself, who used exaggeration to shuffle the facts and hide the truth from the people.

Similar events led by the clerics beholden to Khomeini occurred elsewhere in Iran, but most people accepted the Six Principles because this aspect of the Shah’s reform freed them from the domination of the landlords. Khomeini had misread the sympathies of the majority of Iranians and his reputation was tarnished. Soon after the Hagation uprising and subsequent smaller demonstrations throughout Iran, the Shah sought punishment for Ayatollah Khomeini. The Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari was instrumental in saving Khomeini from execution as well as affording him exile in neighboring Iraq. The general population revered Ayatollah Khomeini as a figurehead of Shiet Islam and would have objected to any violent means of punishment. In a corner and wanting to wash his hands of the violent governmental responses to the Hagation and “after-shock” demonstrations, the Shah settled on the solution of exile as it would at least diminish his influence within Iran. Khomeini was made a “Great Ayatollah by Dari in 1965.

AFTER PRESIDENT KENNEDY

Some months after these demonstrations, on November 22, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated during a campaign trip to Dallas, Texas. After Kennedy’s death, the Shah removed Dr. Amini from office because of the absence of political pressure from the Kennedy Administration. The Shah had been afraid of Amini because of his power as a mouthpiece of scrutiny and a threat to his unquestioning control. The Shah chose a relatively inexperienced man named Amir Asadollah Allam to succeed Amini as Prime Minister. Allam was essentially another one of the Shah’s “yes-men.” Allam’s ignorance allowed the Shah to manipulate him as well as giving an impression to the populace that he was coordinating the power of government constitutionally between himself and the Prime Minister. In actuality however, the Shah had become the virtual dictator of Iran in the wake of Kennedy’s death.

Inflation characterized the term of Allam’s office, and after a few months, on March 7, 1964, Mansour, a more knowledgeable politician, became the new Prime Minister. Mansour was supported by the American government and raised the price of domestically purchased oil in order to sell large quantities at discount prices to the Western oil companies abroad. During his term in office, he raised the price of petroleum twice. The people of Iran were furious with Mansour’s actions, especially since they were still coping with the inflation brought about by Allam’s so-called “slipshod” Administration. Although the international spot price of oil remained relatively constant, Iranian domestic oil prices continued to increase under the Mansour Administration. The public grew increasingly furious.

The stage was slowly being set for revolution. Public sentiment was boiling over with negativity directed at the Shah’s regime and more individuals were speaking out and sharing their negativity with neighbors, friends and colleagues. The end of inflation and “hard times” seemed nowhere in sight and the populace found itself of the brink. Tension over the situation was causing fissures in the ancient civilization of Iran (see Persia at Wikipedia).

THE SIX PRINCIPLES: THEORY VS. PRACTICE

In time, the “Six Principles” of the Shah were not enforced by his administration and the populace began to believe the Shah had deceived them. The land that the peasants received from the landowners was rapidly being sold off to pay the loans they took out to begin farming the land. The bubble the Six Principles created was bursting. During the first year of the cooperative effort, the government stopped funding the peasants and they had no chance of paying back their loans unless they were extremely fortunate with their first harvest. There was no subsidy to save their land or a Make Home Affordable refinancing program. Without a ‘bumper crop’ and/or favorable commodities prices at which they could liquidate their agricultural products, the lack of government subsidy follow-throughs caused the eviction of many off the land that had been transferred to them just a year earlier. These vagabond peasants were forced to migrate to the cities where they could find jobs to support themselves and their families.

HOVEIDA AS PRIME MINISTER

Mansour was assassinated by a secret organization belonging to the clerics in February, 1964 and Hoveida, who was the Financial Minister in Mansour’s administration, became the new Prime Minister in January of 1965 and served in that position until his arrest following the Iranian Revolution of 1978 and ultimate execution on April 7, 1979. Hoveida’s first decision in office was to decrease the price of oil to domestic buyers. This was significant in that it was perceived by the public as a goodwill gesture and eased tense public relations between them and the Iranian government.

Hoveida’s political platform seemed honest and open to them. He criticized the way the previous government had mishandled its affairs, and accepted the shortcomings of his own role as financial minister under Mansour. He announced a new governmental policy was being formulated and his constituency was eager to believe his optimistic outlook for Iran was sincere. Hoveida’s dreams of effortless prosperity were short-lived however. In 1963, he had taxed the wealthy heavily for the property they already owned and luxury items they bought. During the next 14 years, Hoveida imposed 250 different kinds of taxes in addition to those the citizens were already paying under Mansour. For example, if an individual, group or family wanted to travel outside of Iran by air, the principal traveler had to pay a two hundred dollar travel tax in addition to the respective airfare charge(s). Subsequently, a one hundred and fifty dollar surcharge was imposed and collected for each additional passenger on the flight as well. This policy, as could be expected, infuriated the rich, but appeased the poor whom the Shah was most anxious to please—they rarely if ever flew.

 

GOVERNMENTAL CONTROL OF IMPORTED AND EXPORTED ITEMS

All important imports and exports were governmentally controlled under Hoveida’s Prime Ministry. The most important commodities traded in Iran were grain, sugar, oil and industrially manufactured items. The services the government controlled were the railroads, postal service and airlines. Managers of the various smaller divisions of commerce were bribed on a regular basis while others simply embezzled surplus money using accounting principles and methodologies enabling them to “skim off the top” of the accounts without anyone being the wiser (See also #slushfunds). The government was unable to supervise all the subsidiary commerce division heads and graft soon became prevalent. Division managers enriched themselves often without being called to account for their actions to the public’s detriment.

For example, if an individual asked for permission to build a house, the housing office might say, “No, not unless you pay me this extra fee (as a bribe). During the rampant corruption of the division managers, one “minister” was found to have embezzled four million U.S. Dollars from an undisclosed sugar contract. When questioned by reporters about the embezzlement, Prime Minister Hoveida said that governmental officials “deserved” the added monetary job perks due to the important vital nature of the work they accomplished for the Iranian people.

IRAN AS A MEMBER OF OIL PRODUCING EXPORTING COUNTRIES (OPEC)

In an act of goodwill toward his people, the Shah had dissolved the foreign concessionaires in Iran and nationalized oil resources circa 1963. The oil companies could sell and distribute the oil, but the petroleum products themselves were declared a public trust by him.
The result of the Shah’s nationalization of Iran’s oil meant both increased revenues and greater political leverage within the OPEC cartel, of which they had by this time become members.

THE SHAH’S DOMESTIC POLICIES AND FOREIGN RELATIONS COMPARED

International investor was the Shah, and he placed large sums of money in foreign sources to assure him of assets were he to be thrown out of his home country as he had been in the early 1950’s during his confrontation with Dr. Mossadeq.
The Shah bought shares of foreign stock. Among his holdings was a 25% ownership in a German-based corporation named CROUP, and a relatively large position in Pan-American Airways. The Shah also built oil refineries in Africa, India, Pakistan and gave financial aid to the United Arab Republic, Great Britain, Pakistan and several African countries. In 1976, the economy of Great Britain was sagging and in dire need of economic stimulation. The Shah’s immediate investment and the currency float between Iran and the U.K. spelled increased British employment and a shot in the arm economically.

The domestic policy of the Shah was far different than his open-handed foreign policy. In the scholastic year of 1973-1974, the Shah allotted $1,500,000.00 per day to feed all students under sixteen years old, and gave $100.00 per month to each university student. In the elementary and high school programs for students under sixteen, the money for the food was sent in large quantities to the several different supervisors in the various districts of Iran. The supervisors in charge of distributing the lunch money for each child often found ways to withhold some of the money earmarked for the students. The district supervisors allowed skimpier lunches as time progressed and in doing so, were able to divert the more and more surplus money to themselves as an unsanctioned “reward” for their thrift and ingenuity. Sadly, the “unused” portion of the lunch money often surpassed the amount used to buy the student lunches and feed the children.

Of the 150,000 students in Iranian Universities some year in this period, 80,000 students were “foreigners”. Iranian students of age received one hundred dollars a month from the Pahlavi regime while “foreign students” received a four-hundred dollars a month allowance if they were sympathetic and receptive with the Shah’s regime (See foreign student subsidies). These gross imbalances in the student funding program did not content, but rather infuriated the public, especially parents of those participating in Iran’s education sector. Apparently, the foreign students were subsidized by the Iranian government and advanced funds before they were used in aid of its own people (this I suppose, angered the remainder of the population who weren’t involved in Iranian Public Education).

Of the utmost concern to the general public was lower prices on food; but it seemed Shah Pahlavi wanted a top down and lateral approach to “educating” its youth. The lateral being the “foreign students” used to fortify the Iranian Public Education at the expense of the “treasury”, whatever amorphous methodology or vehicle that treasury may have been housed in [due to lack of hard facts, editorial discretion utilized in last two paragraphs]. Food prices had been rising steadily since the Shah’s reintroduction to power in 1958, and the people became discouraged; beginning to think Shah Pahlavi was depriving them of their birthright. In retrospect, if the Shah had known beforehand the financing of the educational sector would break down and embezzling would occur, he might have used the student allowance money differently, to fight inflation, for instance. However, his advisors, like him, were out for their own gains but did not share the Shah’s altruistic sentiments toward the underprivileged classes. Since they were not the Shah, they may have felt underprivileged in a sense. A “me-first” mentality prevailed during this difficult time. At the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the sentiment was expressed as “I got mine, screw you.”

Embezzling fever spread all the way to the top of the political arena in Iran. One classic example of the government’s misuse of funds was discovered when a large sum of money was deposited in a Swiss bank under the name of Iran’s Federal Police Chief. As an alibi, the Chief said that he sent the money to the bank in his name so that no one would suspect it was Shah Pahlavi’s money. The Police Chief claimed he had every intention of giving the money back to the Shah when it was prudent to do so. It could be assumed Pahlavi was under extreme scrutiny and criticism of the free press at the time. The Shah accepted the Chief’s alibi, and kept the money for himself. People continued to demand lower food prices while concurrently, economists recommended to the Shah that he lower the price of gasoline instead of funding educational nutrition and foreign aid. The savings from cutting the educational subsidies would cover a wide range of goods and services in Iran. It would ease overall inflation, increase employment and raise the Iranian standard of living. For whatever reason, the Shah did not follow the advice of the economists and continued his education financing and nutrition program. As one might expect, civil unrest spread and the rally cry was “the government is ‘the Shah’—the economics are ‘the Shah’s'”.

POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY IN IRAN

The Shah was interested in Iran being seen as a modern democracy and demanded citizens have respect for the Constitution. There were three primary political parties in Iran. The leaders of each party were pre-selected by the Pahlavi family and were usually either relatives or close trusted friends. The three parties under the Shah’s regime were: 1) the Iran-Nowin Party, which was Prime Minister Hoveida’s party and had the majority in Parliament, 2) the Mardom Party, and 3) the Pan-Iranist Party. The parties were structured in a way that benefitted the Shah’s regime. Individuals the Shah and his council trusted were appointed as leaders of a particular party. In the three-party system, the Shah felt he could manipulate control of the government through “divide and conquer” tactics. The citizens of Iran knew the three-party system in Iran was “fixed” and many declined to vote or participate in Iranian democracy. As a result, the Shah’s secret police, SAVOK, forced people to vote or face the consequences of incarceration or worse. Despite the Shah’s intense scrutiny of his constituency and the terror tactics employed by his police force, if the requisite number of votes were not sufficient to elect a certain individual, SAVOK would see to it ballot boxes were stuffed with the name of the desired candidate.

SAVOK’S REVERSE-PSYCHOLOGY

In 1962, SAVOK ordered the less important members of Parliament to criticize the minor aspects of the Shah’s regime. The theory behind this policy was to get citizens more involved in politics and try to seek constructive rather than destructive changes. SAVOK’s plan backfired and “little criticisms” began to irritate and snow-ball into gigantic ones.

Underground coalitions distributed pamphlets criticizing the government, saying such things as “Even the government itself knows it is corrupted.” Propaganda tracts sent anonymously to houses and apartments aroused public interest in Iranian political corruption and mismanagement.

PRIME MINISTER HOVEIDA AND BALUCHESTAN

Baluchestan was in the far north-east corner of Iran and out of Hoveida’s “jurisdiction”. Hoveida referred the outlying region to the Shah. Relations between the central government and the public in Baluchestan were strained because of he had a “deaf ear” to their requests. When asked in Parliament why the people of Northern Iran were not allowed to fish, Hoveida replied “I am not your prime minister. Under the dictates of my appointment by the Shah, I have no jurisdiction in the matter. If you have any questions pertaining to that problem, you will have to address them to the Shah personally.”

Baluchestan, a city near the Pakistan-Iran border, ran out of water one summer because Afganistan, at the request of Soviet Russia, dammed the Hirmand, widely considered an ancient holy river. The farmers of the North-East region of Iran were forced to emmigrate to another province where there was sufficient water for their crops and/or livestock. The Hirmand was to Iran much like the Ganges is to India. The new Afgani dam was built in their own sovereign territory but upriver from the Iranian border and increased Afgani capacity to generate hydro-electric power and store water for their people(s).

One of the two members representing Baluchestan in the Iranian Parliament spoke at an assembly meeting asking Prime Minister Hoveida for the necessary funds to help villagers in his region to dig water wells in the North-East to enable them survive the summer drought. As it was, farmers in North-East Iran were evacuating to provinces that had water for their crops and livestock. The population of Baluchestan dwindled to approximately 900,000 people during this event due to lack of proper land management and public works. Hoveida remained indifferent to the plight of the North-Eastern farmers and their legal representatives. Baluchestan was geographically distant from the prosperous capitol of Tehran, which made it convenient for the prime minister to ignore them. Hoveida thought he could get by with the flattery he espoused in the capitol of Tehran by saying such things as, “The Shah takes care of his people”. It was inconceivable to the prime minister that the farmers were in the desperate conditions they claimed to be in. When Hoveida refuted the honesty of the representative from Baluchestan, he exacerbated the strife which already existed between the federal government and those empathizing with the Baluchestanis, but Hoveida made his position crystal clear: no aid of any kind would be sent to the North-East region of Iran.

The general public later found out Hoveida was the dishonest one. He had not done his due diligence on the region or he was simply lying. As soon as refugees from Baluchestan migrated to Tehran, they told their stories of hardship to those living in the capitol. Tehranians wondered if they were next to be “thrown under the bus.”

THE SHAH’S DIFFICULTY REGARDING THE CONTAINMENT OF PUBLIC UNREST; SAVOK CRACKDOWN circa 1975

The people of Iran felt that the representatives of the several parties should convene to discuss and perhaps litigate the country’s myriad problems. The Shah felt such a meeting would be counter-productive and weaken the morale of Iran. It would take aim at the countries deficiencies while leaving out the tremendous benefits his regime had introduced to the nation through industrialization. As a result, the Shah denied his people the representatives forum and instead, instituted a one-party political system which all Iranians had to join. This, the Shah hoped, would quell controversy by putting an end to factions hell-bent on victory for their allegiances.

It was the “allegiances” that were becoming a problem. Ministers could see the structure of the Iranian government was top-heavy. Whoever held the supreme office in the country had a ticket to riches beyond belief, or so some believed. The Shah surmised factions were actually beginning to ally against him as they had against Dr. Mossedeq during his term of office. The Shah proclaimed membership in the Rastahitz Party was mandatory. No dissenters, abstainers or other parties would be tolerated. Join Rastahitz or leave the country in disgrace was the implication of the Shah’s daring shift to one party rule.

In one instance, an engineer refused to become a member of the party and instead of being exiled as most dissenters had been, the government sent him to an asylum to be tortured and beaten. The courage and steadfastness of the engineer drew nationwide attention and SAVOK was put on alert to quash anti-Rastahitz rebels. SAVOK used this period of suppression to consolidate their power and learn about the workings of their people who they were assigned to watch. SAVOK brazenly wanted people to know how they would deal with dissenters and non-conformists. No longer afraid of the public, SAVOK all but boasted about their power to incarcerate and torture if necessary to achieve the Shah’s ends of a peaceful, prosperous and educated Iran. Dissenters would be singled out and beaten at will.

The Shah declared the Rastahitz Party would have three principles:

• The belief in an Imperial Regime with allegiance to the Shah
  
• Respect of the Iranian Constitution
  
• A strict belief and enforcement of the Shah’s “Six Principles” (see pp 8-11 above)
  

In the course of the next two years, the Shah asserted almost absolute control of the Rastahitz Party. Even though Hoveida was supposed to lead Party as acting prime minister, it was evident he did little to oppose the Shah and keep his power in check despite the Party’s principle to “respect of the Constitution.” In the summer of 1977, after two years in this state of affairs, the people grew increasingly restless and discontent with the tactics of their government. The Shah sensed it was time for a leadership change within the Rastahitz Party. Jamshid Amouzegar, who had been interior and finance minister in Hoveida’s cabinet and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Iran’s OPEC delegation, was selected as the Rastahitz candidate to follow Hoveida who had been prime minister for the preceding fourteen years.

Political life was not over for Hoveida however. As soon as he left office, he became the chief minister of justice. The chief minister of justice coordinated negotiations between the Shah and his cabinet. The new position, somewhat like a “Chief of Staff” in the United States, suited Hoveida. Coming off fourteen years of criticism for not listening to the public’s needs, he welcomed not having to dodge their complaints in public. As chief minister of justice, Hoveida could enjoy moving closer to the Shah’s “inner circle” and further away from public scrutiny.

Hoveida set out to transform the office as soon as his predecessor, Assadollah Allam vacated the post. Hoveida’s power was not diminished by his “demotion” from prime minister to chief minister of justice. As chief minister of justice, he was able to rub elbows with the other ministers, glean information and maintain his clout. During negotiations between the Shah and his ministers for instance, Hoveida was often a useful mediator and the Shah’s go-to man to get deals done. Although he had to share power, Hoveida was certainly a major figurehead of the Iranian government during Amouzegar’s Administration [August 7, 1977-August 27, 1978].

AMOUZEGAR AS PRIME MINISTER OF IRAN [August 7, 1977-August 27, 1978]

In 1977, Amouzegar (also known as Amougazar) raised the price of governmentally controlled items such as petroleum. The increase in fixed prices for nationalized products riled the public, which had been growing increasingly discontent with the Shah’s regime [this writer did not ask the source about specific incidents or details of the public’s response to the government influenced inflation rates during this period]. The people in Iran wanted to change the party system and began to incite passionate demonstrations in order to accuse the government of the injustice of economic hardships (perhaps boiling over from prior events under Hoveida). In response to the demonstrations, the Shah’s Rastahitz party was forced to protect itself through the use of surveillance and SAVOK police enforcement. The Shah used the Rastahitz Party as a tool to keep peoples thoughts and actions within the confines of one political ideology—his own. The Shah was able to establish and retain the one-party system in Iran through the use of his secret police, who continued to use totalitarian tactics against its own citizens.

SAVOK used brutal forms of psychological conditioning upon individuals (including its own members) to maintain authoritative control over them. This system was a “fatherhood”, Highlander top-down system as Adolf Hitler employed in Third Reich Germany. The regimes and citizens of the two countries, Iran and Germany, are not being compared here by the ghostwriter/editor as much as the “bones” of the political structure. Execution, exile and imprisonment not only petrified the public from acting against the regime, but it prevented the potential reactionaries from arousing widespread, outright contempt of the monarchy (see Amouzegar’s uniform on #Wikipediaonline). Without leaders to coordinate a counter-offensive force against the Iranian government, citizens opposed to the Shah became sitting ducks for a SAVOK attack. The Shah’s primary fear was that the public’s discontent and hatred would be unleashed upon the regime with the momentum to polish it off. As the years of Shah Pahlavi’s reign passed, the fabric holding it together frayed. The Shah became desperate, fearing thin fabric of his government would rip apart. He began to rely on SAVOK as the sole cohesive force to maintain law and a semblance of “temporary order”. From the public’s point of view, an unsettled social environment and sporadic, chronic civil unrest continued. As a result of the ever-increasing social unrest, the Shah became a nervous wreck. The thread-like tentacles of SAVOK’s organization began to lose their grip on the civilian masses and more and more individuals set their faces against the Shah. A unified, consolidated opposition had not entered the consciousness of the general public as of yet, but various alternative forms of government were being explored and openly discussed despite SAVOK.

KHOMEINI BECOMES AN AYATOLLAH FOR PURPOSES OF DIPLOMACY AND SELF-PROTECTION

In 1965, Great Ayatollah Shariatmadari invited six religious leaders to elect Khomeini a top religious position, making him insusceptible to execution under the law. The position Khomeini was granted was that of a “Great Ayatollah” (translated as “Word of God”) or “Imam” (one of an oligarchical council of Islamic leaders, similar to the figurehead of the Papacy in the Roman Catholic Church). In Iran, it is law that the Ayatollah proclaims the word of God and is therefore immune to any governmental intervention that is a threat to his bodily person. Once regarded as an Imam, Khomeini’s fear of execution would vanish.

KHOMEINI’S ROLE IN THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION OF 1978

In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini used his physical distance from Iran during his exile in Iraq to enable sharp criticism directed against the Shah’s regime. The attention of the Iranian people quickly focused on Khomeini’s speeches as he was the only Iranian leader familiar enough with Iranian politics and religion to speak openly about the Shah’s regime. Before his exile, Khomeini could not speak out against the Shah and draw crowds due to SAVOK’s jurisdiction over him at that time.

Without SAVOK breathing down his neck (and perhaps with the aid of Shiet supporters in Iraq), Khomeini’s following grew. He denounced the Shah on a regular basis and the crowds were enthralled as they listened. Now here was a #leader. They were looking for “reform” and a new father, and Khomeini fit the bill in 1978. Before Khomeini arrived on the scene and became popular, most had wanted to follow the political leaders who were already well known. The Shah suppressed their voices, so the Ayatollah Khomeini’s voice by comparison rang clear over the air waves in print and by word of mouth. His words played to their heartstrings the songs of religion their souls longed to hear. They were tired of empty speeches that led to dead-end reforms—they wanted action and to get one over on the Shah’s secret police force SAVOK.

Khomeini’s political, social and religious platform became ever more popular among the people of Iran because his proposals became the will of the people: most wanted the Shah and his regime ousted. Khomeini promised the “uprooting and removal of the evil tree” that was growing stronger, sapping the strength of the Iranian people and providing no meaningful fruit to the people. The Shah, Khomeini would proclaim contemptuously, took more goods than he gave back. The Shah was a one-way ticket to a disintegrated, demoralized Iran. The people wanted the Iranian economic tree to flourish and they were optimistic Khomeini’s resilience and Islamic-focused doctrine could take them to prosperity. After removal of the “evil tree”, Khomeini believed he would become fertilizer for a petro-plenty tree to be shared by all in Iran. Khomeini’s movement toward counter-dictatorship was increasing in momentum like a huge boulder rolling down a hill destined to crush Shah Pahlavi at the bottom of its trajectory. The bulk of Khomeini’s support came from peasants, lower class city-dwellers and illiterate religious disciples of the Islamic clergymen. The illiterates were subservient to the cleric’s will and did not question their methods, credibility or authority. They had limited capacity to discern what was happening around them and relied on the clergymen to be their “eyes”. The power of the Ayatollahs was centralized in the mosques and that is where they organized masses of peasants against the Shah. The mosques imbued a sense of sanctuary even SAVOK might not breach. Khomeini became the archetypal savior and the Shah his evil counterpart. [Compare parables of the good and evil trees from the Bible, as well as “fertilizer for the new tree” versus the Christian “holy communion” “I am the vine, you are the branches.”].

The Iranian National Front and the Toudeh Party

Two other fronts were staking out positions against the Shah’s Rastahitz Party: The Iranian National Front or INF and the Toudeh or Communist Party. The INF was more moderate and business-oriented than either the clergymen or the Rastahitz Party. It was comprised mostly of merchants, middle-class citizens and students. Its leaders were the colleagues of the former Prime Minister Mossadeq, who by 1978 was deceased. These colleagues carried on the traditions of the party in secret since the Shah had placed a moratorium on freedom to associate in a political party other than the Rastahitz Party.

Another movement opposed to the Shah’s regime was the communist party (Toudeh), whose members were primarily students, workers and educated people dissatisfied with the Shah, democracy and capitalism in general. The base of the Toudeh Party was located at Tehran Technical University (hereinafter referred to as TTU]. All three movements, the clergy, the INF and the Toudeh Party worked from different vantage points (loci) against the Shah: the clergy with Khomeini’s followers at the mosques, the INF in secret and the Toudeh Party from the universities. SAVOK could not be everywhere at once.

The Toudeh Party’s centralization at TTU gave them immediate recognition and widespread notoriety in the public eye. So much was their popularity among the people from that location that the government thought it necessary to transfer TTU out of Tehran and into the suburbs of Esphahan, Iran. The move would disrupt the triad aligned against the Shah and the lines of communication among TTU faculty, students and administrators.

The Shah and his cabinet made the claim that the move was not essentially political in nature but would enable the universities to be closer to the metal smelting factory near Esphehan. The closer proximity of the smelter to TTU had several advantages but the timing was not lost on the Toudeh Party. During pre-arranged demonstrations, the communist speakers used the university relocation as political ammunition and blasted the Shah. University students and faculty resisted the move even before the demonstrations began and now they had communist mouthpieces going to bat for them. As a result, the faculty and students sensed a “solidarity” and empowerment. The TTU relocation was another example of the Shah’s program of bullying. For his part, the Shah had dissenting university faculty “laid off” for their disregard of his decision to relocate TTU. Laid off professors gained the support of factions who felt the relocation to be another underhanded scheme of the Shah’s. One of these factions was the merchants of Iran. The merchant faction wanted the university professors who were laid off paid their forfeited salaries. Merchants offered the professors money to recompense them for their lost jobs. In a show of unity and self-respect, the professors did not accept the merchants’ offer of money but rather opened a bank account and distributed information about the account, including the account number, and asked that all teachers and educators in the country donate whatever they could to the account. Their colleagues responded generously to the request and the unemployed professors limited themselves to only half of their former salaries although the donations far exceeded the capacity to pay them a full paycheck.

The restraint of the professors in utilizing the charitable trust (not used necessarily here as a legal term of art) account was designed to demonstrate suffering and self-sacrifice. They wanted to show the attentive and anxious people of the country that the time to revolt was at hand. Their restraint of material livelihood came down to a quiet impression of a collective fast. The fast concomitant with the sacrificial and suffering had a bout [end (Fr.)], a deepening cause and determination to overthrow the Shah. Removing the present regime in Iran meant single-minded thinking of the people was in order, just like the communists, the merchants and now the teachers were telling them. They desired to come together to protest the mishandling of the government and its current leaders in the Rastahitz Party. In order to make the daily demonstration more effective, the professors asked for everyone to live a more frugal existence in order to strengthen solidarity against the Shah’s regime.

A NEW BOARD OF DIRECTORS APPOINTED IN RASTAHITZ PARTY–1977

Many of the lawyers working for the revolution wanted to re-elect a new board of directors because they were dissatisfied with its present “pro-Shah” constituents. The Chairman of the Board was a close friend of the Shah’s. The lawyers were unhappy with this man representing them and they fought for someone else who would represent their interests more succinctly. The lawyers finally succeeded in getting a new board of directors and with it, much of the Shah’s clout among the eschelons of lawyers disappeared. All the new members of the council were persons who had previously fought against the Shah and had not changed their view of him much if at all. The transition made a transformative change in the psyche of the population of Iran and more particularly, the Rastahitz Party. It was a significant blow to the strength of his regime.

The new Board acted as the liaison between the citizens of Iran and its government officials. They defended the constitution and the moral rights of citizens and prisoners of the country by working on various reform programs in the penitentiaries. It sent people to investigate SAVOK’s treatment of prisoners and those that had been released from incarceration to tell their stories. The findings of the investigators revealed that the prisoners had been tortured by the secret police illegally while under arrest for political crimes. The Board defended the prisoners and “ex-cons” while prosecuting SAVOK and its coercive tactics beyond the pall.

SAVOK ON THE “WHIPPING POST”

Judicial proceedings were instituted wherein the Board would represent the mistreated prisoners pro bono (for the public good without a fee) and news of the proceedings helped to incriminate the illegal and inhumane activities of SAVOK.

SAVOK was the main cause of the Shah’s problems from which all others followed like his own shadow. The shadow seemed (“mother I know not seems“,
Hamlet from Hamlet) to follow the Shah as a reminder of the self-perceived horror that his people did not love, respect nor obey him. SAVOK was the major cause of the peoples dislike for the Shah. The Shah used SAVOK to achieve his own ends in keeping his grip of control over the country. SAVOK began to conduct themselves atrociously in beatings and threats as far as the end justified the means. The coercive tactics were left to the discretion of the police without proper review, checks or balances. The police were allowed to use a subjective view of “reasonable force” when interrogating, executing or incarcerating their arrestees. Perhaps it was the Shah’s distrust in his countrymen and women which forced his hand on brutal methods if he wanted to maintain his position in Iranian society. The more force and violence SAVOK used to suppress dissidents after the new Board had ruled, the stronger the retaliation by the public against SAVOK and other elements of oppression in the Shah’s regime. In fact, the people began to think of SAVOK and Shah Pavlavi as one, although the two were not one. SAVOK, one of the strongest, most expansive and expensive organizations at the time and the Shah did not communicate well with each other under the intense scrutiny of the Board. The Shah’s lack of a peculiar coordination with SAVOK which would be necessary for such a government to prevail intact was woefully lacking, at least as far as the Board was concerned. Not only the lawyers, but the prisoners, ex-cons, the collective will of an entire nation was determined to oust the dictator. Thus, it was not only the Shah’s inability to adequately control his subjects that bought on his exile from Iran in 1978 but also the weapon he had used as a means to achieve his vision for the Iranian people, SAVOK, proved a rather blind albeit not objective ally in law enforcement under their jurisdictions

SAVOK’S RETALIATION AGAINST AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI

In the months immediately preceding Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran from Iraq in 1978, SAVOK was busy devising a scheme to degrade his reputation. SAVOK printed an article in the daily newspapers alleging that Khomeini was not a descendant of Mohammed, the prophet, but rather, the descendant of an untouchable from India. SAVOK claimed Khomeini’s brother, who was born in India, carried the name Hendizandh. “Hendizandh” was a name given to his brother because SAVOK alleged that Khomeini’s grandfather was an untouchable.

Citizenship in Kaom, Iran’s holy city, were aggravated with SAVOK’s accusations. It didn’t take long before the aggravation of the masses was turned to anger. The clergy led a rally in support of the Ayatollah against the government’s subversive activities contrary to Islamic doctrines. A police force was called in to confront demonstrators at the rally and at some point opened fire on the demonstrators. Some of the crowd fled to the nearby home of Great Ayatollah Dari for asylum or “sanctuary”. The Shah’s police followed the rabble into the house, killed a clergyman and wounded others present.

The aftermath of the affair left the government much to explain to its people…and the Board. Because Great Ayatollah Dari was a very popular figure in Iran, it was difficult for Savok to justify the event without some degree of taint due to the death in the Dari compound. High ranking officials in the Shah’s government representing him apologized for the unfortunate occurrence. The argument of the Shah’s lawyers and representatives was that the police that stormed the Dari compound were not local police and did not know the home they entered was that of Great Ayatollah Shariatmadari. If the police were locals, they would have known the house belonged to Dari and would not have followed the rabble in hot pursuit and would not have attacked anyone there.

SHARIATMADARI [DARI]

Shariatma Dari is from the Osaboyjam province, the capitol of which is Tabriz. On August 11, 1978, the people of Tabriz, in empathy for the martyred of Koam, demonstrated in the suburb of Istafan. More than 100,000 people were involved in the demonstration, making it large enough to shake the government’s confidence in itself. The demonstration was so successful that it began to tip the scales of domination away from the government and toward the anti-Shah movement of the clergymen (compare “Movement of Jah People” by Bob Marley and the Wailers). The people felt that the Shah was even taking their privacy and freedom of religion away from them.

In hopes of quick-quick stabilization of the civil unrest in Iran, SAVOK brought 200,000 peasants of their own from all over the country to show
the still remaining wide-spread hearty support for the Shah.

STUDENTS ARE QUICKER THAN OLD MEN: STUDENTS ACT AGAINST THE SHAH’S DICTATORSHIP

On September 7, 1978, students joined together to protest the Shah’s move to send university professors to Isfahan, a city 300 miles south of Tehran. As soon as school resumed in September, the students became active in the socio-political affairs of Iran. They often argued with the government on ways to support the former professors of TTU. This topic was only a ploy used by the students in an attempt to weaken the political fabric of the country and shake regime confidence: the fighting and hysteria had already begun unbeknownst to “anyone over 30”. Whenever students demonstrated in the streets, the Shah’s anti-riot squads attacked the crowds and beat them with clubs. The brutal activity angered the students and fighting broke out often between the two factions. The students continued to riot successively day after day, breaking windows of government banks and office buildings. The people looked at each violent event as one step closer to their liberty and freedom.

                Two Years Earlier

In 1976, the government approved a bill that would raise the price of oil in Iran by sixteen cents a gallon annually. The Iranian National Front and the clergymen invoked the populace to protest the bill. The design for the protest was devised by boycotting oil for one day. [Edward James Olmos invited me to such a demonstration of solidarity in Los Angeles, but I was going nowhere fast back then as an extra. Later in the day he asked me “Are you an extra?” “Yes I responded at the construction site.” He had Tony Plana, the director, who I recently worked with as an extra on a tv movie where he played the Arizona prosecutor (Jose Martinez) leading to the conviction of Jodie Arias, remove me from the set to sit in the back seat of an automobile. Later in the day I saw Olmos driving a new red Ferrari. Got the feeling he bought or rented it with the pay from the film. What’s the saying? Someone’s got to enjoy this world. “It’s A Wonderful World” Louis Armstrong.] The clergy asked people not to work or drive their cars for one full day to show the government they could do without gasoline for one day. Most people in Iran were still afraid to miss work because of the consequential retribution delivered care of SAVOK. Traffic in Tehran the day of the moratorium was less than usual, but not so scant as to attract significant attention to the boycott. Because of the stress the clergy and the INF had placed on the importance of the boycott, the Shah believed his worries were over when the protest “failed.”

The clergymen of Quom demanded that the Shah permit the Ayatollah Khomeini to return peacefully to Iran. The people, led by the clergy, demonstrated to make their position clear to the Shah and his “regimsters” (sic). After being provoked by the demonstrators to violence, the police tried to intervene, and rioting broke out. The police tried to disperse the crowd with machine gun fire before the rioting got out of control. People of all Iranian provinces mourned for the dead after the unrest and brought up fresh protests against the Shah’s brutal regime.

THE SHAH’S LAST TELEVISION INTERVIEW

In an interview broadcast over national television, the Shah blamed Prime Minister Hoveida for the most recent “mishap” in Quom concerning the entry into Dari’s home. The monarch said that he knew nothing of TTU’s demands and accused Hoveida of mishandling the affair. The Shah centered his attention upon the shopkeepers because during the time in which Hoveida had been prime minister, a Trade Commission controlled the price, quality, standardization and quantity of goods. The Trade Commission bothered shop-keepers by imposing fines upon them if certain specifications were not met. The Shah thought the demonstration was simply a matter of “shopkeeper discontent”, but he underestimated the counter-current pounding against the walls of his regime, until they see them cave. Because there were over 250 different kinds of taxes in 1978, the Shah felt that the financial strain of the people was caused by the Trade Commission, and played some part in the social unrest. Somewhat like the colonies of North America in 1765 however, the Stamp Act and subsequent “Boston Tea Party”, were only the early warning indicators of a much bigger revolution to come.

ANALOGY OF SPRING TECHNOLOGY

There were several causes, acting together, which effected the outbreak of the Iranian-Islamic Revolution in 1978. In Iran, the situation was different than for America in 1765 because there were many causes of the people’s hardship(s). The problems in Iran accumulated to the point that the excess tension let loose a massive “Marcusian” explosion. Like a spring that can absorb only so much shock before it reaches capacity of movement, the Iranian people were nearing the end of their patience and ability to cope with the restraints put upon them by the government. They had been compressed to the limit, and were ready to spring back upon the regime [1]. The pressure directed against the government had been building for decades. It first began with the Shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, and continued through the broken expanses of years that Mohammad Reza Shah (his son) was in and out of power as a monarch. In reaction to their frustration and dissatisfaction, common civilians joined the radical students in demonstrations and protests. They broke windows of governmental buildings, burned movie theaters, liquor shops, dance halls, bars and restaurants; anything that resembled the “West”. For their part, the clergy found these night club establishments immoral places where evil was found and may have given a tacit approval to the destruction (Compare Jesus at the moneychanger tables).

SAVOK took a rash action against the anarchists because they were helpless to do anything else on such a large scale. In Abandan, a key city for oil production in SW Iran, SAVOK was suspected of having set fire to a theater filled with 600 spectators inside. SAVOK first accused the clergymen of setting the fire but then the clergymen, as many suspected, blamed SAVOK. There were motives for setting the fire on both sides, but no party could prove the guilt of the other.

MASSIVE COALITION OF DEMONSTRATORS INCLUDE THE SELF-STARTING AS WELL AS THE PEASANTS MOTIVATED AND LED BY THEOLOGICAL CLERICS OF ISLAM

Students, merchants, industrialists and businessmen and industry led one huge faction of the grand coalition standing against the Shah’s regime. The other massive front in the coalition against the Shah, led by the clerics, consisted largely of uneducated “common folk” or “peasants”. The peasants for the most part, could neither read nor write and those that could often had trouble analyzing political events in their proper context and relied on the clerics to guide them. The discerning cleric shepherds of the largely illiterate, the revolutionary leaders, were university or seminary-educated theologians of Islam.

Call No Man Father [2]

(Matthew 23)

 

In time, the Shah became perplexed about the political situation in Iran and had Prime Minister Amouzegar replaced by the Chairman of the Senate, Sharif Emami. Emami was an engineer and had been the Shah’s financial secretary for many years. He monitored many of the Shah’s private investments such as hotels, restaurants, farm acreage—real estate and the businesses in them. Under Emami’s oversight, the businesses were well run and the Shah had the utmost trust in him as a leader. Some of Emami’s family were members of the clergy, whom he kept close relations. The appointment of Emami was favorable for the Shah’s regime as a sign of change—friends of the clergy were becoming prime ministers!

During WWII, Emami was one of the fascists of the Kabud Party of Iran who helped the Nazi regime distribute propaganda. In 1942, the Allies occupied Iran. Emami and other Kabud fascists were captured by allied agents and placed in prisoner of war camps under allied control.

When a new cabinet member was suggested by the prime minister, the people of Iran became excited about the prospects of an entirely new cabinet. Shah Pahlavi had a different idea in his mind. He ordered Emami to shuffle the ministers of the various departments around but not lay them off. Thus, the Minister(s) of Arts would be transferred to the Ministry of Education, for instance. Many of the newly appointed transfers were not qualified for the new positions in government, but this was of secondary concern to the Shah. His primary concern was not whether the appointees were qualified, but whether they were loyal and faithful.

The Shah’s display of political deceptiveness was an insult to the people’s intelligence and just another reason to oppose him and his leadership efforts. The public was excluded from the affairs of State to such an extent, they concluded the only way they would ever be “heard” was to try and overthrow the government. The developing image of the Shah as a domineering father figure and his constituency prattling, submissive children took shape as a collective negative connotation in many people’s minds.

THE PAHLAVI’S—IRAN’S ROYAL FAMILY

The Shah’s ministers were either personally close to him or to his wife, Empress Farrah, whom he married in 1959. One example of the nepotism the Shah displayed was the appointment of Empress Farrah’s brother as the Minister of Culture and Art.

Sharif Emami told newsmen that all political parties were free to be active as he considered appointments to his new cabinet. Emami’s purpose to welcome all parties to apply to his cabinet was designed to alleviate some of the national tensions and rivalries at hand, but on the contrary, glasnost (openness, Rus.) only delayed a mood of intensified wrath in the zeitgeist (Ger.) of the collective public psyche when public demands were not up to snuff.

THE AYATOLLAHS’ REIGN BEGINS WITH A SEPTEMBER RAMADAN

September saw the rise of more frequent public and religious protests against the Shah and his family. In 1978, Ramadan, the Moslem Holy Day of fasting and prayer, fell in the month of September. Nothing is to be ingested from 4:30am until dusk (approximately 6:30pm). The extent of the fast is so orthodox that bathing in water above the head is not allowed because drops of fluid could be taken into the body by the tongue or nose. During Ramadan, even the sick and injured must not take medication for their illness(es). This religious day of penance and reflection was a golden opportunity to bring people together to unite in solemn solidarity against a commercialized government.

The Demonstration of Ramadan, Tehran, Iran, 1978

During Ramadan, the clergymen led the people down the main boulevard of the city where people would sit down to pray. At a central square in Tehran, the clergy announced that they would repeat the march the following day and invite all Moslems to attend the procession and pray. The following day’s emphatic demonstration activity would take them to Jhaleh Square, one Tehran’s largest.

The Shah became frightened by the assembly of over 300,000 participants and declared martial law. The new military restrictions on the people included a moratorium on associations of more than three people in a public place for any purpose. If more than three were engaged in an assembly, the militia could arrest the “transgressors” without further ado. All those placed under arrest as a result of the new restriction on association were subsequently tried in military, not civil or criminal forums. Martial law also forbade citizens from being up and about in the streets between the hours of 9 pm and dawn. At seriously critical moments in the crisis, the Shah’s staff extended the curfew one hour to include the period of 8 pm to 6 am. Promoters of the Jhaleh Square assembly obviously did not abide by the Shah’s anti-humanist assembly laws because they maintain they over-reached and were not reasonable under the circumstances.

The Shah’s suppressive plan for martial law in Iran backfired and as a result, many people were discontent with their monarch and wanted vengeance for depriving them of some basic freedoms and inalienable rights. The way the 900,000 people gathered the next day as directed by the clergymen in Jhaleh Square could be described as a “huddle”. Men stood, sat or reclined next to each other in the center of the square while the women and children stood around them to prevent the militia from attack—an interesting defense later colloquially referred to as a “human shield” defense. No wonder it drives armed forces of the opposition up the wall. Maybe I’m just a cowering man and like the idea of female protectors. What brave women in Iran. Anyway, back to the Account: as expected, armed militia showed up at Jhaleh Square too with megaphones announcing, “Martial law prohibits these unlawful assemblies. If you do not leave the premises, we will begin to open fire.” All at once, the people sat down in silence as though it were a pre-staged play. This unified act of defiance had a pronounced, threshold effect of aggravation turning to rage on the militia officers. An order was made to open fire on the uncooperative civilians. Shooting ensued for four straight hours via tanks, helicopters, machine guns and SWAT (special weapons teams formed and organized to deal with public rioting and hand to hand combat). At the end of the day, approximately 4,000 people were killed (though the government reported that less than 100 had perished in the conflict).

All doctors, nurses and medical personnel had to attend o the injured patients privately in their homes or the Shah’s militia would apprehend them once they were discharged from the hospital. When the newsmen got word that SAVOK was arresting wounded demonstrators from their hospital beds, it was too much for them to tolerate. Following the reporting of the hospital room arrests, people became angry and it was necessary to bring in the National Guard until all cities and towns were occupied by soldiers to keep peaceful law and order. Under Prime Minister Sharif Emami, a new wave of political influence cast a pall over Parliament. Of the 300 deputies in Parliament, fifteen opposed Shah Pahlavi’s regime. These fifteen dissidents blamed governmental policy as the major cause of the gap between the nation and the Shah. When the prime minister came to Parliament after the massacre, the fifteen deputies shouted “Your hands are stained with innocent people’s blood!”

DEMANDS LODGED ON MOHAMMED REZA SHAH PAHLAVI’S GOVERNMENT BY THE CITIZENS OF IRAN

Iranians were weary and upset with the totalitarianistic leadership in their country. They demanded three fundamental changes to occur, or threatened more radicalized demonstrations going forward.

1. The Shah shall no longer hold the position of supreme governor and law maker of Iran but his position in affairs of government shall be primarily ceremonial in nature as those of the supreme monarch in Great Britain, influential albeit without a pen.
   
2. The Shah and the governmental representatives shall obey and respect the Constitution.
   
3. The return of Ayatollah Khomeini with asylum in Iran.
   

Three days after the massacre at Jhaleh, when the demands were made public, most were still in a state of shock over what happened to their countrymen and women just a few days before. In an address to the Iranian Parliament, Deputy Pezeski expressed the dismay that the Shah should be allowed to stay in the country. At first, the people thought it must be another of the Shah’s reverse-psychology tricks to plant Pezeski to call for the monarch’s departure.

During a lull in activism after the massacre, the lawyers began to establish a new front against the Shah. This front emphasized human rights, the dignity of the individual, and other freedoms for all Iranians under internation laws and norms. Pezeski declared publically that he was not a member of the Rastahitz Party but was forming his own party called the Pan-Iranist Party.

The organization for the defense of political prisoners was active defending political offenders for both past and present offenses. Those individuals arrested for political crimes in the past had been tried in civil courts of law. As a result of the lawyers’ actions, all of those convicted in military courts were able to appeal any conviction and/or sentence they received from them in the appellate courts. The lawyers’ demands took a great deal of power away from the Shah and his regime. He could no longer be described as the man with “all” the power in the country.

In former years, political enemies of the Shah and so-called “undesirable” clergymen were exiled to the far-reaching corners of Iran by a five-member panel of government officials where weather, and or living conditions were poor and undesirable. The organization for the defense of liberty and freedom said those forced into exile through the use of unconstitutional means against the rights of the individual should now be freed. The previous violations of personal liberties violated international law and human rights norms as well as statutes in Iran’s own Constitution.

LAWYERS’ ROLE IN THE REVOLUTION

Experienced lawyers successfully reinstituted professionals who had been forced out of office or their business. Judges, teachers and other government officials had been given stiff sentences by the Pahlavi regime for what they considered “serious political crimes”. The lawyers usually charged astronomical rates, but chose to defend their clients pro bono (free of charge as they were unable to pay while in prison and the defendants’ need was great). Victories were tallied for the Appellants, freeing many of the political criminals at the appellate level.

When those who had been exiled were again brought to trial in Iran, their “criminal” file was drawn and the appellate case would proceed. The public seemed to celebrate the lawyers’ successful appeals and welcomed the former exiles home when their convictions were overturned on appeal. These acts of amnesty given to the many political prisoners and exiles freed in Iran brought joy and gladness to those welcoming them home. The re-integration of the former prisoners and exiles into Iranian society demonstrated the lawyers’ political adeptness had now translated to clout and their swagger bolstered the general sense of rebellion they and the Iranian people felt regarding some of the Shah’s more notorious recent activities. Consequently, as the Shah began to see his power gradually slip away, he became more desperate in regard to his own place in the country.

AYATOLLAH TALEQUANI

Ayatollah Telequani, a seventy year-old leader, returned to Tehran after his imprisonment. More than one million people went out to greet him as everyone stood marching in the streets of the capitol city. Talequani spent over ten years in a prison so there was a season of celebration upon his return to Tehran. [During Talequani’s detention, he was tied to a tree and forced to watch SAVOK agents rape his daughter because he remained uncooperative. Because Ayatollah Talequani did not bow to SAVOK’s demands, he was often whipped with cables by their agents.

Talequani believed that the clergymen must only lead their followers in the struggle against the present government, but not take positions of political prominence after the revolution. Several times after the Shah was deposed, Talequani told the clergymen to return to their mosques, which was their rightful place, and allow the Iranian people to adopt their own form of government: their right of self-determination. All the other clergymen were opposed to Talequani at this time due to his democracy oriented self-determination position on how the Iranian government should be structured after the revolution. The other Ayatollahs believed Talequani too naïve and idealistic in regards to self-determination and threw their weight behind an Islamic Republic. Their leverage in the legislature was relatively powerful at this time and everything that passed into law had the stamp of the Ayatollahs’ “supreme” influence.

Despite wide-spread opposition and perhaps contempt from the other clergymen, Talequani remained the most respected Ayatollah in the nation. Because of his sway over the people, his adversaries were fearful of him. This is some indication of foul-play in the religious leader’s death. He passed away one night after eating dinner with several Soviet diplomats. He suffered from excessive heart palpatations late in the evening and was not properly attended to by physicians. His fellow clergymen neither sent for an ambulance or a heart specialist, but sat idly by waiting for the seventy year-old to perish. Talequani had addressed four million people in a speech earlier that day, and many felt the timing of his death peculiar and mysterious. In the speech, he expressed the opinion that people should establish their own government and the clergy should not intervene in the electoral process.

The Union of the National Central Bank published a list of government officials who had sent money out of the country to have exchanged for foreign currency. Bank employees told newsmen that 60,000,000 dollars had been diverted to foreign banks during a two month period. The Union took advantage of the news by organizing a worker’s strike against the government. The reason given for the Union strike was the flight of Iranian capital out of the country, but this turns out to have been a planted alibi—misinformation. Anarchists, working in Iran for the past 30 years, were devising more and more ways to destablilize the Shah’s regime.

During the reign of Shah Pahlavi, all major banks were government owned and operated. When the employees of a bank went on strike, it weakened yet another strand of cord holding his government together. When the banks did not function, the flow of money in the economy slowed to a dangerously low level. Repatriating large sums back into the hands of the Iranian investment community was not allowed which would have offset the money leaving the country. As a result, the economy stagnated.

One of the deputies during a Parliamentary session said that the Minister of Education, Mr. Ganji, sent five million dollars to a European bank in his own name and provided evidence to show Ganji embezzled the money from earmarked government funds. This news made it an opportune moment for the public to demonstrate. They burned government buildings, buses and troop carriers. The rioting mobs used psychological warfare by igniting rubbish and causing rubber tires to smolder, emitting profuse amounts of nauseous, billowing smoke. The demonstrators’ tactics worked: the soldiers became scared and did not react against them. Of all the methods that the anarchists used to fight the Shah, it was their psychological putsch (Ger. push; see also blitzkrieg) of invading and ransacking government buildings and property and setting it on fire which demoralized and frightened the Shah’s soldiers. The mobs did not stop after the government’s property was burned because private property could provide the Shah with tax revenue. Cinemas, salons or any other establishment that would not join their cause was burnt to the ground. The anarchists wanted to fatigue the governmental structure and they were succeeding.

Meanwhile, educated people thought the clergymen wished to attain the political power in the country but the clergymen when asked asserted they had no such aim or interest in political affairs. To assure the skeptics and to put to rest the fears of the prominent citizens of the country that the clerics wanted to establish an Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini said that the clergymen were not interested in political affairs in the least. He said politics were outside of their realm of “duty.” Iranian political experts however, were convinced by Khomeini’s Parisian Declaration while in exile, that if Khomeini did come home and rise in the Shiet ranks as Ayatollah, he would have more power than the professional politicians who had more experience leading the country than him.

PRIME MINISTER SHARIF REMOVED FROM OFFICE, GENERAL AZARI, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE ARMED FORCES INSTALLED

Prime Minister Sharif Emami was fired and the Shah handed the power of managing the government to the military. General Azari, Commander-in-Chief of all armed forces was appointed by the Shah as the new prime minister. This cabinet appointment was designed to frighten the people than a military crack- down was imminent. The Shah and his advisors were worried that a coup, a very savage coup may be staged very soon against the regime. His military arm, some might say totalitarianistic arm, was established to curb attempts to overthrow his regime. This new tactic of the Shah worked for a few days as there was no unrest and the opposing forces led by Khomeini were devising a plan against the new government. Basically and fundamentally, the country was for all intents and purposes under martial law. The Shah had become a nervous wreck regarding the absolute stability he believed he needed to maintain order over his people. He implored clerics in a radio and television broadcast to reassure their members that a new, more liberal government would be considered if calm prevailed. For his part, Khomeini used the down time to consolidate his front and mobilize the various factions into one common aim: the ousting of the Shah. Their scheme to undermine the Shah’s power began with the new prime minister, General Azadi.

It was evident to qualified observers that the Shah wanted to maintain order and control over his subjects more than anything else. When General Azadi, the highest ranking officer in the Armed Forces went to the Parliament to introduce his new cabinet, he pretended to be a religious man, not the vengeant Gestapo-type the Shah would have him to be. Azadi’s statements to the people and acceptance speech for the prime ministry were meek at a time when the Shah could have used swagger [3]. Azadi was conciliatory to the clerics and deferred to their religious zeal. As could be expected, a few days after Azadi’s acceptance speech
the public demonstrated in the streets. They saw a weakness in Azadi’s character and knew he would not use force to attack them during demonstrations. The rebels felt as if they were given free reign and one of the four holy months in Islam, that of Moharam was near. Had Azadi’s acceptance speech been more hard-nosed and included warnings that expressed the gravity of the Shah’s determination to purge all dissidents, the revolution may not have come with Moharam.

Traditionally, on the first day of the holy month of Moharam, people asked the government if they could assemble in honor of Saint Hossein, who was slain during Ramadan near the time of the birth of Islam in the 7^th Century. This year, the request proved to be a touchy subject for both the Shah and his people. For the Shah, martial law had just been imposed and to allow them to assemble at this volatile period might be political suicide. On the other hand, if he refused, they might lose control of themselves and try to overthrow the government.

Mohammed, the initial “founder” of Islam, had one daughter who in turn, had two sons. The younger grandson of Mohammed was called Hossein and the older one Hassan. Hassan was a weak ruler and allowed his cousin Yazid, his mother’s nephew, to call the shots in his kingdom. Even when Yazid was cruel and unjust toward those in Hassan’s kingdom, he did not rise to their defense. When Hassan finally died, Hossein became the new leader of the people known as the Imam in the Shiet sect of Islam. But also surviving Hassan as leader was former joint leader Yazid who vied with Hossein to be the new Caliph, successor to Mohammed’s throne. Yazid was known as the “prodigal ruler” and Hossein as the noble and proper heir to Caliph. However, Yazid had ruled over Hassad and was practiced in achieving leadership among leaders. Yazid assumed the position of Caliph based upon his will to assume it, not any vested authority of what was dignified or proper. Hossein challenged Yazid’s authority to assume the throne as Caliph and Yazid ordered Hossein and the men accompanying him in the challenge murdered. To this day, the story of Saint Hossein’s murder is told as a cruel reminder of the strong overpowering the weak, however unjustly. Since then, in the Shiet sect, Hossein has taken on the symbol of a popular underdog who was slain because he fought for a just cause against his cousin the tyrant Yazid. Iranians have always been sympathetic toward underdogs because of this central lesson they learned from childhood on the relationship between Yazid and Hossein.

Because this legend is embedded in the Iranian culture and inherent in the foundations of Islam, the anarchists and clergymen used the relationship of Hossein as an “underdog” figure to symbolize the present-day situation between the Shah and the people, led by Khomeini ; the Shah was portrayed as the wicked Yazid and Khomeini and all those who fight for justice as Hossein. A holy demonstration in memory of the martyred Saint Hossein was planned for the first day of Ramadan, in September of 1978. At the demonstration, the clergymen reiterated publically what had been spread in private: the Shah was a tyrant paralleling Yazid and everyone who opposed him was like the martyred Hossein, who, though perhaps not victorious in the flesh, would come back to avenge his death and establish justice in the world.

After the speech, the citizens gathered together every night in Ramadan, many with megaphones, to chant “Allaho Akbar” (God is Great) toward the Shah’s palace.
For one hour every night, the Shah and all others within earshot of the chanting were forced to listen to the frightening howls. The new method of psychological warfare dehabilitated the government and gave impetus to an oil worker’s strike which the opposition forces led by Khomeini hoped would make the national economy of Iran effectively bankrupt.

The strike did in fact crush the government’s power over the population. On the ninth and tenth days of Moharam, the days in which Hosain was killed at the inception of Islam in 600 a.d., the people of Iran demonstrated in huge numbers crying, “The Shah is the symbol of Yazid in our time!” Martial law was ineffective when three million people had taken to the streets demonstrating against the government.

Communist guerrillas arrived at 5 a.m. one morning and ransacked a central police station in Tehran. They killed several guards in the attack by bombing parts of the station with grenades and Molotov cocktails. The guerrillas distributed tracts asking for individuals’ cooperation during the transition to a new government by violent means. These guerrillas had access to the weapons and small bombs needed to carry out the revolution. Sometimes, these guerrillas attacked soldiers as they rode by in personnel carriers, killing many of them, and making them wary of any further travelling on main thoroughfares. This type of guerilla activity sparked a flame of concern in the Shah’s quarters and they were perplexed about ways they could bring back law and order. The daring of the guerrillas in their confrontations with the Shah’s guard gave people the courage to carry on with the coup–the communists’ tactics were effectively working step by step towards an end–the ouster of the Shah. The communists desperate, hasty attitude to bring about the revolution quickly was contagious and spread throughout the country as the month of Moharam progressed. Newspapers went on strike because the Shah had tried to control their content, denying journalists and readers freedom of the press. The media was not allowed to write or broadcast what they wished, and as a result, many of the radio and television stations joined the press in a general strike.

As winter progressed, heating oil became unavailable to the public due to increased demand and a virtual stand-still in production due to strikes. General Hoiser, a high ranking officer in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (hereinafter NATO) studied the political unrest in Iran for one month. Hoiser’s report was sent to United States President Jimmy Carter and NATO chairpersons meeting in Western Europe. It advised the support of Ayatollah Khomeini instead of having the country descend further into disintegrating chaos and allow the communist guerrillas to organize a Soviet-controlled government. If the communist forces assumed power in Iran, the people would follow them like another of the Soviet’s socialist satellite countries which existed at the time of the late 1970’s. The NATO committee concluded that a religious government in Iran would tend to counteract any communist infiltration since one of the Communist Party’s main tenets is a determinant disbelief in God and that religion is “an opiate of the people”. [4] If a religious republic replaced the Shah’s monarchy, it was believed by the NATO analysts that monetary support and/or military intervention in Iran would be less likely to be required from the international community to circumvent extreme Soviet influence. Part of this conclusion was based on the presumption Ayatollah Khomeini would institute rigid adherence to an Islam code of conduct in the newly proposed Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Shah, knowing his situation as the countries continuing monarch was growing dire, asked Dr. Sanjabie, the leader of the Iranian National Front, to become the new prime minister. Dr. Sanjabie flew to Paris to meet with Khomeini and seek his approval of the appointment by the Shah. There was some argument at the outset of their discussion, but it was decided as long as the Shah was in power, Sanjabie would not become prime minister or take responsibility for the Shah’s government. Hosier, in the company of the American ambassador to Iran and several members of the press, went to the Shah’s palace to discuss the monarch’s departure from Iran.

DR. SHAPOUR BAKTIAR ACCEPTS THE OFFICE OF PRIME MINISTER OF IRAN’S PARLIAMENT–1978

After the press conference, the Shah asked Dr. Saleh Zehedi to become the new prime minister since Sanjabie declined to accept the position. Zahedi consulted leaders of the INF, but they refused to support him as prime minister. After repeated attempts to persuade his colleagues to allow him to take on the job, Zahedi dejectedly turned down the Shah’s offer. Having failed twice to appoint a prime minister, the Shah asked Dr. Saleh Baktiar of the Iran Party, a sub-party of the INF, to be prime minister. The Iran Party was established during the Second World War and Baktiar followed only Sanjabie as the most powerful politician in the INF-Iran-affiliated party structure. Dr. Baktiar accepted the Shah’s offer, but the INF and the Iran party drove him from power and the alliance. Baktiar was known as a brilliant and experienced politician, possessing a fluency in three foreign languages: English, French and German. He was a well-travelled man and proficient orator.

When Baktiar was 17 years-old and a student in France, he joined the French Republican Party and helped fight Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. During WWII, after France had fallen and was occupied by Nazi Germany, Baktiar joined the French resistance to combat the fascists. When WWII was over, Baktiar returned to Iran in the ranks of the Iranian National Front and fought off British oil companies who were interested in exploiting Iranian oil. Baktiar was a very close companion to Dr. Mossadeq who led the INF Party and Iran itself in the early 1950’s. After the coup d’etat removed Mossedeq from power in 1953, Baktiar was arrested and sent to prison without trial where he remained for the next five years. The same man that jailed him was now exalting him to the second most powerful position in Iran: prime minister.

Baktiar’s father was the leader of the nomadic Bakhtiary Tribes. In 1900, Baktiar’s father fought against the dictatorial monarchy in Iran in favor of a democratic form of government. After a dozen years of democracy at the turn of the 20^th Century, Reza Shah, Shah Pahlavi’s father, reinstated the king’s ultimate and comprehensive dictatorship in Iran. Although all parties and factions seemed aligned against him, Dr. Baktiar accepted the prime ministry provided Shah Pahlavi leave the country.

During the search for a successor, General Azadi remained the acting prime minister. General Amir Hossein Rabii, commander of the Iranian Air Force who went on trial immediately after the revolution, invited all military commanders to attend a conference organized by General Abbas Qarabaghi . Qarabaghi met General Hosier at the conference, who told him that he thought the Shah should leave the country. Hosier referred Qarabaghi to three or four individuals who coordinated Khomeini’s activities in Tehran. General Hosier later met with Ayatollah Beheshtie about the expulsion of the Shah. At the time of these discussions regarding the removal and dismissal of the Shah as the supreme monarch of Iran, General Azadi had a heart attack and immediately left the country for “treatment.” Dr. Baktiar stepped into the position of prime minister after these “coincidences” and the Shah made it apparent he was leaving the country on a “long vacation”.

Behind the domestic scenes of everyday life among the peasants, NATO members met in Europe to discuss the Shah’s predicament and decided it would be best if he left his throne. As soon as the Parliament officially elected Baktiar as the new prime minister, the Shah left on a plane to Egypt where he was given political asylum. Baktiar declared he supported Iran’s Constitution and the rights contained therein that protect the rights of individuals to be free.

AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI CLAIMS BAKTIAR A TOOL OF AMERICA

Ten Thousand (10K) Iranian demonstrators chanted in the streets of Tehran to show their support for the new prime minister. Some of the clergymen, including Ayatollah Shariatmadari supported the Iranian Constitution, but Khomeini said that anyone who supports the Constitution is his enemy and an enemy of all Moslems [A Roman Catholic priest recently [2013] downplayed the significance of the U.S. Constitution compared to the Catholic faith]. Khomeini claimed further that Baktiar was a tool of America and would enable them to bring back the Shah once the people tired of demonstrating. Khomeini told journalists one month prior to the Shah’s exodus that he condoned the Iranian Constitution except the Article allowing the Shah to hold the highest position in the country, making laws by executive order and using his veto to defeat proposed legislation. When the Shah left, Khomeini changed his platform to suit his new taste: he wanted the Iranian Constitution to be scraped and rewritten [without a completely new draft of the Constitution, Khomeini could not take the country’s power into his own hands. Prime Minister Baktiar would retain most of the control over policy in Iran while he would fade helplessly into the background, another feeble clergyman sent to pasture.

When Baktiar became prime minister, he returned freedom of the press to publishers, released all political prisoners, dissolved SAVOK, discontinued martial law, cut exorbitant taxes and gave the right of exiles to return home. However, when the newspapers began to roll the presses again, they did not praise but attacked Baktiar severely.

KHOMEINI ACTS

Khomeini gave a declaration to an engineer named Bazargan to go to the south of Iran to talk with the oil production workers to arrive at a suitable oil production quota to meet the needs of the country. After one week, the workers agreed to produce about six to seven hundred thousand barrels of oil per day for their own country. After the limitation was established, the electric company in Iran went on strike to protest Baktiar’s position as prime minister. Without electricity, the oil could not be distributed adequately and shortages were widespread. The strike was another ploy used by employees to mobilize revolutionary forces around Khomeini and drive Baktiar out of office. The electricians’ and laborers’ strike succeeded and all political parties followed the advice of Ayatollah Khomeini. They believed, as Khomeini informed them, that Baktiar was a puppet of America and Israel.

Three weeks after Baktiar’s appointment as prime minister, Khomeini decided to return to Iran from Paris. Baktiar asked one of the political leaders, named Nahzi, to give Khomeini advance notice so that he and the Ayatollah could meet when he arrived in Iran. At first Khomeini accepted, but the next day, he retracted his acceptance and said Baktiar must resign as prime minister and would not meet or discuss the matter further with him. The reason that Khomeini would not meet Baktiar was because he wanted to control the country by himself and would not concede power or office to the prime minister.

During the revolution in Iran, Khomeini revealed a lack of self-confidence when confronted with issues before the media or in public view. He would not debate with other leaders whether they be Iranian or foreign. For instance, he did not accept an audience with Kurt Walheim of the United Nations to negotiate with Khomeini over release of the 52 American hostages who had been captured by “students” from the American Embassy in Tehran. Khomeini did not meet with foreign leaders because he did not like to compromise if he didn’t have to and he didn’t have to. As long as he held ultimate power in Iran, his diplomatic style tended to be stubborn and unyielding. When Khomeini found himself in front of television cameras, he often looked down at his knees or hands self-consciously. At times, it seemed to some that Khomeini had faith, but no confidence in himself. Others noted his nervous “stage fright” was not due to modesty or being shy since he was not known to be a man one might describe as “humble”.

THE MEN BEHIND KHOMEINI

The three people who backed Khomeini in his quest for dictatorship were Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi, Naser Ghobadzadeh and Bani Sadr. These men planned to groom the Ayatollah for the coming riots, strikes and demonstrations. Many people, suspicious of Yazdi’s status as a naturalized American citizen and Ghobadzadeh’s training there asked them whether their allegiance was with America or Iran. Newspapermen were suspicious of the duality expressed by Yazdi and Ghobadzadeh backing of an Iranian political figure while holding U.S. credentials. They had Yazdi and Ghobadzadeh in a Catch-22 [5]—if Yazdi’s allegiance was still with the United States then his allegiance could not be said to be entirely supportive of Iran. Many also thought Yazdi was a member of the CIA because he swore an oath to the United States when he became a citizen of that nation. If his allegiance was not with the United States, the Iranian journalists did not see how they could take him at his word. If he lied to one country, what would stop him from lying to them?

Yazdi and Ghobadzadeh were never popular politicians and it appeared to some they used Khomeini as a tool for their political maneuvering. Ghobadzadeh lived in the United States on two separate occasions. Once as a young student where he was expelled for mischievious conduct and later on, after jumping into politics and becoming a Syrian citizen, he studied psychological warfare at a premier American intelligence university and became an expert in the field. Ghobadzadeh’s interests led him to acquaint himself with Yosef Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (hereinafter PLO), and the two men became close collaborators and friends.

BAKTIAR’S SHORT TERM OF OFFICE

Baktiar’s plan to begin a liberal republic designed around the Constitution, and not based on the Shah’s whims. People were relieved after Baktiar’s speech, and hoped their freedoms and the government’s liberal attitude would continue. The public’s attention however, soon became transfixed by the savior of the Iranian people, who promised instantaneous results: Ayatollah Khomeini!!

Baktiar did not allow the free-functioning of the airport to the public in an effort to hamper Khomeini’s arrival. Iranian Air Force officials and/or functionaries failed to completely obey Baktiar’s orders and “others” found out. Without directly disobeying the prime minister, air force personnel offered to pick up the Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris, France. The French Government did not allow foreign military jets to land on their airstrips at the time, but understood the military was taking orders from Khomeini, not Baktiar, who continued to take orders from the Shah. The news of the Air Force Officer’s proposal to pick up the Ayatollah in Paris also bolstered rising internal dissent which represented the rebellion in the military (army) ranks. After the incident, insubordination and outright flagrant failure to follow orders spread rapidly throughout the Iranian military services. More servicemen were opposed to the Shah than ever before. Within the Shah’s special guard, a soldier killed more than twenty officers by machine gun fire while they were dining. A number of soldiers deserted their encampments and fled to neighboring rural villages Absent Without Leave (AWOL).

A GREAT DEMONSTRATION OCCURS

The people gave Baktiar an ultimatum: if he does not allow Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran, they would begin firing ammunition on all government agencies and their employees. The threat was one of guerrilla-type warfare, and Baktiar could not overcome the public’s insistence on bringing the Ayatollah home to Iran. After one week of negotiations, Khomeini landed in Tehran. Seemingly every business and organization had a secret plan designed to diminish if not dissolve the Shah’s control and influence over them. For instance, an organization was set up among members of the Iranian Air Force designed to co-opt the military commanders. Once the threshold of defectors into the organization was met, the political power of the Shah’s was siphoned off to Khomeini. The organization was able to convert the air force officers by emphasizing service to Islam, not the Shah.

The rebels who organized the arrival of Khomeini planned a mission to receive the Ayatollah which ran like clockwork. Khomeini’s arrival marked his first time in Iran since he was exiled by the Shah in 1963. At his arrival in the Capitol of Tehran, Khomeini’s visage revealed its all-too-familiar signs of grim seriousness. He had presence. It was arranged that he go to Tehran University to meet with professors and discuss plans for the revolution. Khomeini’s council however, advised him to go to Behesht Zahra, a public cemetery, instead. A meeting at the university with the revolutionary coordinators would only weaken the Ayatollah’s power at a “petit summit”. If he agreed with their proposals, he would give their sector more power once the revolution was over and if he disagreed, it might conflict with his orders in the post-revolutionary regime. The Khomeini clan (inner circle) claimed that the streets of Tehran were too crowded to meet with the professors but they would do so as soon as time permitted it.

BEHESHT ZAHRA CEMETERY—AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI PRESIDING

At the Behesht Zahra Cemetery, Khomeini was able to impart a religious significance to all those who perished in the recent spate of guerrilla warfare and to emphasize that there was nothing more important for him to do than honor of the first fallen in noble cause of freedom. His supporters advised him to quiet the crowd in reflection upon the freedom fighters who made the moment possible at the cemetery to bring them together as one in solidarity. The Ayatollah came a long way from Paris to mourn the dead at Behesht Zahra and nothing, neither the up-and-coming rebellion nor matters of State would make him divert his focus.

Khomeini’s speech at the cemetery made it clear that he knew very little about mere politics. He spoke like a parrot, dictating the points told to him by his tutors [reminds me of the Carter-Ford Presidential debates where Carter had statistics on the tip of his tongue]. He renounced the Iranian Constitution and said their forefathers had no right to dictate the way of a “new Iran.” In renouncing the old constitution, Khomeini proposed adoption of a new constitution, one in which he will “choose his own prime minister.”

Ayatollah Khomeini rejected life in a palace and resided in a school dormitory. He led a simple life just like the ancient prophet Mohammed. Different groups of people went to visit the Ayatollah in his apartment, and they passed by the austere black-robed figure with waves and cheers of admiration. Throughout the cheering, Khomeini remained motionless (no one must get a view of his new dental work!) In the days of the prophet Mohammed, the oral orifice was often closed for hygienic purposes to hide decayed teeth and their odor from bystanders. In the 7^th Century A.D., it was regarded as indecent as it was now in Khomeini’s case, to show the interior of one’s mouth. Did he have dental work or didn’t he?

Khomeini was soon transfigured into a demigod among the citizens of Iran. The five other Ayatollahs were more learned in Islamic doctrine that Khomeini, but nevertheless, they were forced to pay homage to him as their leader or be accused of high treason. The other Ayatollahs recommended Khomeini as the new leader of Iran with the hopes that in time, his power would diminish.

BAZARGAN AS PRIME MINISTER

Khomeini appointed Bazargan as the new prime minister of Iran. He requested that Bazargan, the leader of the INF, resign his post as President of the Iranian National Front Party and follow him unconditionally. The power could remain under the clergy’s umbrella. Although the INF did not foresee Khomeini’s tactical move to consolidate power under himself and neutering the independent decision-making capabilities of their politicians, they continued to show support for the Imam.

The power over the country began to change hands when the Ayatollah’s staff did not allow former Prime Minister Baktiar’s appointees to be installed in their posts. All previous appointment orders made by Baktiar were revoked and any such further orders would be made by Bazargan, Khomeini’s “First Officer.” Havoc brewed in the military ranks as well. When a regiment was out on patrol, soldiers would often disobey their commanders’ orders to execute dissenters of the Shah by turning around and shooting the commanders!

One week after his arrival in Tehran, Khomeini’s revolutionary council began to spread the rumor that soldiers appearing at Khomeini’s residence were sent by SAVOK to frighten him. The rumor was unfounded, but it attracted the public’s attention and gave Khomeini’s camp additional impact in criticizing the existing government. On February 10, 1979, a clash arose between the government soldiers and the general public due to the rumor and many casualties ensued. The next day in a town east of Tehran, Khomeini supporters met at a local air force base to discuss plans for the revolution. The Shah’s guard was still in the country trying to maintain order after the Shah had left and attempted to break up the meeting once they found out where it was being held. Within half-an-hour, news of the confrontation spread throughout the city and martial law was re-instituted by the new prime minister. People were told to vacate public streets from 6 pm until noon the following day.

Khomeini reacted strongly to the violent intervention of the Shah’s guard at a private meeting to discuss the revolution at the air force base. The Ayatollah ordered everyone to demonstrate that evening in protest to show the government that they were not to be bullied by the Shah’s guard or any kind of martial law oppression procedures. He accused the Shah’s guard in the military of planning to stage a coup and reinstate the Shah! Khomeini and/or his advisors used psychological warfare to frighten the Shah’s last remaining loyal guardsmen. His forces burned all flammable material and filled the streets with smoke. The smoke screen terrified the Shah’s guard because they were unaccustomed to the eerie gloom cast upon the city. On the main street of Tehran, the crowds shouted out to Khomeini that he allow them permission to engage in holy war. The crowds were ecstatic over the prospects of fighting for their benevolent leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Meanwhile, in the east corner of Tehran, a group of Iranian Air Force soldiers were found demonstrating against the Shah. When the pro-Shah command heard this, they ordered a nearby outpost to quell the demonstration and punish the transgressors. “Punishment” for the Iranian High Command meant deploying tanks and automatic weapons in the police action. The commander at the scene used an army installation on the outskirts of the city as a forward base to use in the assault on the mutinous soldiers. If the installation was on the outskirts of the city, the motorcade of army personnel would not have to traverse the streets of Tehran which were full of rioting people and smoke by this time.

Communication of the attempted “punishment” was quickly intercepted by Khomeini forces. Two polically active military organizations that had been in hiding, Mojahedin Khala, a religious-socialist group and Fadayan Khala, a radical communist organization, heard that the Shah’s guard were soon to attack the air force installation east of Tehran. They took the opportunity to intervene, supplying rebels with Molotov cocktails, rapid-fire machine guns and various automatic rifles. When the two rebel organizations came to the aid of the protesting soldiers, their guerrilla-like warfare outfoxed the Shah’s guard. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the Shah’s tanks, setting them afire, debilitating their forces. When all the soldiers in the Shah’s tanks were dead, rebels salvaged whatever working weapons they could and distributed them among the people with the proviso they were to fight off what remained of the Shah’s small army.

When the Shah’s guard was all but defeated by the guerrillas, the Guard commander in Tehran asked for the assistance of the commander in Kermanshah, a city about 400 miles west of Tehran to fight the mounting aggression of rebel forces. The newly summoned regiment moved toward the districts of Tehran and halted when they came upon Karadj, a city 20 miles north of Tehran due to an angry, uncooperative rebel mob. Residents had been foretold of the movement and were ready with machine guns and Molotov cocktails to greet them. The citizens put up such a persistent and effective fight that the soldiers never did arrive in the capitol city.

In Tehran, most of the civil police stations were seized by the guerrillas. People defied any and all civil authority departments affiliated with the government. Women had important roles in fighting the troops as well. They made sand-bag barricades for the rebel fighters and nursed the hungry and wounded in their homes. At the end of the day, eastern Tehran was occupied and controlled by the rebels.

The next day as could be expected, the city was in a shambles and the political tension rose to an alarming degree, one could probably say redline. Dr. Baktiar, the former prime minister, spoke in the Parliamentary Senate asking all the commanders of the legitimate army to return to their posts and carry on with their usual duties. However, many of the commanders already sympathetic to the cause of Khomeini saw opposition to the growing rebel forces both unwise and unproductive. The soldiers having heard the political arguments, were seen placing flowers in their gun barrels as a gesture indicating they would not shoot their own–peace was at hand.

At two o’clock in the afternoon local time, the national broadcasting radio station issued a report describing the Karadj showdown. Hoards of citizens, led by the two guerrilla organizations, attacked both military garrisons and police headquarters in downtown Tehran. General Rahimi, the former Chief of Police and commander responsible for enforcing martial law was taken captive in the raids. After Rahimi was arrested, the entire city was engulfed in chaos. No one from the Shah’s former government held any position of authority in Tehran. Each sector of the city had an organizing arm represented by committees made their headquarters in the local mosques of each strategically significant neighborhood. Armed youths, taking their orders from various committees, began to control the affairs of the capitol city. Armed confrontations and skirmishes that befell other major cities in the country were similar in nature to the conflict transpiring in Tehran, it was after all a revolution.

The street rioting was well staged by the two guerrilla groups: Fadayan Khala and Mojahedin Khala.

 

 

 

[Caution: if you try this on Hillary expect her to say: “Let the chips fall as they may.”]

 

 

***

[To be edited and continued in Installment 39. Preview: Ayatollah Khomeini drafts clergy-oriented judicial system into new Iranian Constitution].

Copyright ‘M’ As told to John Rubens (July 7, 1980, 1981); [author’s working title 1980: Iran Rises Against Godfather, later entitled, The Iranian Revolution: Iran’s Struggle with a New Father, Copyright M, as told to and edited by John Rubens (1980, 1981) (title also by M.]

 

Compilation Copyright ‘M’, John Rubens (1980; 1981, online 2014); Recent titles by John Matthew Rubens (2014): The Iranian Revolution 1978—Islamic Fatherhood Revisited; The Iranian Revolution 1978—Islamic Fatherhood Questioned?; The Iranian Revolution 1978: Islamic Fatherland Questioned?(2014)].

 

Research notes to be incorporated or edited later

[1] See Herbert Marcuse Theory of the Dialectic; an expanding balloon needs an escape for gas or will burst, from Social Philosophy Professor (Jean?) Michel lectures, Schiller College; Universite de Strasbourg, Strasbourg France, 1978-1979, 1983). [In 1969, Marcuse wrote An Essay on Liberation celebrating liberation movements such as those in Vietnam, which inspired many radicals](from Wikipedia online 05-17-2014).

I found these balloons at my doorstep later in the day I wrote footnote [1], above. Ever see The Prisoner starring Patrick McGoohan? Then I found a similar bag with two more from the garbage pail area. These six must have blown over to my door in the breeze. Still strangely prescient. I put them in my wife’s Cadillac to take to the kids at work and three of them popped in the heat the next afternoon. The three that remained found their way to a cute Russian-American boy with his father and a joyful smile my wife Lucia later told me.

[2] Care of: EWTNonline: Don’t get trapped or lost solely in one’s own psyche

In his daily homily Pope Francis explained that it takes more than intellectual assent to truly get to know Jesus – we must also develop a personal relationship of joy through prayer and works.

“Ideas by themselves do not lead anywhere and those who pursue the path of their own ideas end up in a labyrinth from where they can’t get out again!” the Pope stated in his May 16 daily Mass.

Addressing those present with him in the chapel of the Vatican’s Saint Martha guesthouse, the Pope explained that getting to know Jesus is the most important work in our lives, and warned that just studying about him or having an idea is not enough.

Noting how often times those who pursue their own ideas end up trapped in them, the pontiff pointed out that “It’s for this reason that heresies have existed from the very beginning of the Church.”

“Heresies are this: trying to understand with our minds and with only our personal light who Jesus is,” he observed, adding that “A great English writer wrote that a heresy is an idea that’s gone crazy.”

“That’s right! When they are ideas by themselves they become crazy…This is not the right path!”

Going on, Pope Francis said that in order to really get to know Jesus there are three doors that we must open, naming the first as “praying to Jesus.”

“You must realize that studying without prayers is no use. We must pray to Jesus to get to know him better” he noted, explaining that “the great theologians did their theology while kneeling.”

“Pray to Jesus! By studying and praying we get a bit closer… But we’ll never know Jesus without praying. Never! Never!”

Pope Francis went on to say that the second door we need to open is that of “celebrating Jesus,” because “Prayer on its own is not enough, we need the joy of celebration.”

“We must celebrate Jesus through his Sacraments, because these give us life, they give us strength, they nourish us, they comfort us, they forge an alliance with us, they give us a mission,” the pontiff observed, adding that “Without celebrating the Sacraments, we’ll never get to know Jesus.”

“This is what the Church is all about: celebration” he repeated, stating that “the third door is imitating Jesus. Take the Gospel, what did he do, how was his life, what did he tell us, what did he teach us and try to imitate him.”

Entering these doors “means entering into the mystery of Jesus,” the Bishop of Rome continued, “and it’s only in this way that we can get to know him and we mustn’t be afraid to do this.”

Bringing his reflections to a close, Pope Francis encouraged attendees to think “about how the door leading to prayer is proceeding in our life,” warning that “prayer from the heart is not like that of a parrot!”

“How is prayer of the heart? How is the Christian celebration in my life proceeding? And how is the imitation of Jesus in my life proceeding? How must I imitate him?” he asked.

“Do you really not remember!” the Pope chastised, explaining that “The reason is because the Book of the Gospel is full of dust as it’s never opened!”

In opening the bible and reading it “you will discover how to imitate Jesus” the pontiff observed, so “Let’s think about how these three doors are positioned in our life and this will be of benefit to everybody.”

Following Mass Pope Francis canceled his morning meetings and appointments due to having a minor cold, but is expected to be present for all of his engagements over the weekend with the exception of his visit to a Roman shrine, which was postponed so that he can prepare for his upcoming pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

[3] Word used by Peggy Noonan in Wall Street Journal online op-ed column regarding authority to liberate Nigerian Schoolgirls: online.wsj.com/news/column/Declarations

May 16, 2014 · America has forgotten how to exercise power without swagger. … Peggy Noonan @Peggynoonannyc; Peggy … as the story of the kidnapped girls …(from google search online 05-19-2014)

[4]
See, The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

[5] Catch- 22 (1961) Novel by Joseph Heller wherein the protagonist wanted to get out of active military duty under a theory of being insane but one could only plead insanity if one was sane (aka “damned if you do and damned you don’t”).

Women don’t suck, they blow me over.

 

#twitter is to #copyright what #KareemAbdulJabbar was to the #NBA.

These Catholic Sisters are somethin’ else. Talk to them #Ayatollah. They are not dirty.

 

T. Boone Pickens: “I’m not a raider…I’m giving them money.”

Copied and pasted from #twitter:

• Galatians 4 Paul says He took Eve out of Adam’s Rib and Jesus out of Mary. Flesh and @Faith4Hillary
  
• Retweeted by Recovering Liberal

  John Betts ‏@JohnFromCranber
  1h
  

  Bill Clinton Wonders Why No Ones Worried Over Diplomats Murdered Under Bush http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/14/bill-clinton-defends-hillary-on-benghazi-video/ … … Bush Didn’t Lie About a Video! #tcot
  

• RT ‏@RT_com
  4m
  

  Gitmo detainees fight destruction of force-feeding footage http://on.rt.com/ljab32 
  

• #EzraKlein wonders why insecure Ivy League Grads #1 fish to secure by employers.
• margaret brennan ‏@margbrennan
  29m
  

  Here at Hatzor, US & Israeli troops will conduct a joint military exercise to counter missile & rocket threats #Iran
  pic.twitter.com/59aONxkYsK
  

Iranians perhaps love their leaders like fathers…aye, and therein lies a problem: criticize loved ones + Freud #OedipusComplex.

“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” Malachi 4:6

 

Call No Man Your Father on Earth for One is Your Father Which is in Heaven [Matthew 23:9].

 

Sigmund Freud: #law of the flesh and psyche; Carl Jung:#collectiveunconscious , A Dangerous Method
#SundanceTVOnDemand.

 

Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers? [Malachi 2:10 KJV; modified with capital letters beginning a sentence].

 

From Twitter (brackets added and typeset changed from twitter mode in editing):

 

Khamenei.ir ‏@khamenei_ir
3m

Then the US president shamelessly says that: to prevent terrorism we cooperate with Israel!

@khamenei_ir [From John Rubens] Dear Ayatollah, why “shamelessly”? Are you suggesting it is a movement (discernment in Jesuit faith in Jesus) toward brutality?

[From @khamenei.ir] Which terrorists?!The Palestinian who’s been driven out of his homeland?! No! The most wicked #terrorists of the world is fake Israeli govt.

 

@khamenei_ir [From John Rubens] Native americans driven out by settlers and immigrants who followed? Do you forgive us for a stained history in blood? #slavery

Compilation copyright Ayatollah Khamenei and John Rubens

May 14, 2014

 

According to Jan Michiel Otto, Professor of Law and Governance in Developing Countries at Leiden University, “Anthropological research shows that people in local communities often do not distinguish clearly whether and to what extent their norms and practices are based on local tradition, tribal custom, or religion. Those who adhere to a confrontational view of sharia tend to ascribe many undesirable practices to sharia and religion overlooking custom and culture, even if high-ranking religious authorities have stated the opposite.” Otto’s analysis appears in a paper commissioned by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.^{[73] [From Wikipedia online 05-13-2014 under search “Sharia law definition”]}

On Kidnapping of Nigerian Girls 05-16-14:

The kidnapper in Nigeria does not appear to be torturing the children, but under those robes, one cannot really tell… Well paid babysitter

[May 5, 2014: Cinco De Mayo Los Angeles: Correction: Supreme Leader Khamenei, President Hassan Rouhani. {Re: following tweet from Ayatollah Khamenei received by retweet (RT) via Margaret Brennan of #BloombergNews today: “Around 1979 during Friday prayers,I talked about Irish #freedom fighters & #BobbySands that a street in #Iran bears his name.” From Khamenei’s official #twitterpage: “Follow for regular updates and news about Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader.” Thank you for the corrections.}]

[O4-29-2014: Tweet received from President Hassan Rouhani : “Today, the world is witness to how we are engaging with the international community with a voice of reason. #ConstructiveEngagement.” Back to the Future (1985) A Film by Robert Zemeckis, starring Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox #UniversalPictures].

[See also: Accounts by Principal for Occidental Petroleum from Wikipedia: Occidental Petroleum Corporation (Oxy) is a California-based oil and gas exploration and production company with operations in the United States, the Middle East, North Africa, and South America. Its headquarters is in Westwood, Los Angeles California^[4][5] but the company has announced it will move to Houston in 2014 or 2015.^{[6] Wikipediaonline 2014]}

[The Iran–Contra affair [#IranContra] (Persian: ایران–کنترا‎, Spanish: caso Irán-Contra), also referred to as Irangate,^[1]
Contragate^[2] or the Iran–Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that came to light in November 1986. During the Reagan administration, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo.^[3] Some U.S. officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of several hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan
Contras. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

The scandal began as an operation to free the seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by a group with Iranian ties connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the U.S. hostages. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.^[4][5] Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.^[6][7]

While President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause,^[8] the evidence is disputed as to whether he authorized the diversion of the money raised by the Iranian arms sales to the Contras.^[4][5][9] Handwritten notes taken by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on December 7, 1985, indicate that Reagan was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran, as well as the sale of Hawk and TOW missiles to “moderate elements” within that country.^[10] Weinberger wrote that Reagan said “he could answer to charges of illegality but couldn’t answer to the charge that ‘big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free the hostages'”.^[10] After the weapon sales were revealed in November 1986, Reagan appeared on national television and stated that the weapons transfers had indeed occurred, but that the United States did not trade arms for hostages.^[11] The investigation was impeded when large volumes of documents relating to the scandal were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials.^[12] On March 4, 1987, Reagan returned to the airwaves in a nationally televised address, taking full responsibility for any actions that he was unaware of, and admitting that “what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages”.^[13]

Several investigations ensued, including those by the U.S. Congress and the three-person, Reagan-appointed Tower Commission. Neither found any evidence that President Reagan himself knew of the extent of the multiple programs.^[4][5][9] Ultimately the sale of weapons to Iran was not deemed a criminal offense but charges were brought against five individuals for their support of the Contras. Those charges, however, were later dropped because the administration refused to declassify certain documents. The indicted conspirators faced various lesser charges instead. In the end, fourteen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal.^[14] The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been vice-president at the time of the affair.^[15]]

[“Iran-Contra Affair” and “Shariatmadari” courtesy of and special thanks to Wikipedia online 05-02-2014; Wikipedia Sources. See also Michael M. J. Fischer. Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Moojan Momen Shi’i Islam Yale University Press 1986

Shaul Bakhash, Reign of the Ayatollahs, ISBN 0-465-06887-1

Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran] {credits related to “The Iran-Contra affair” courtesy of Wikipedia}

 

#Refreshment is a spinning top’s pause [attempted koan]. #ThePausethatRefreshens (didn’t Coke already think of that? Not Lord Coke, Coca-Cola Co. Inc.

Re:
A Spinning Top, Polarities and the Axis of Pull in International Relations & Domestic Finance

 

#relationshipdiametrics

From Wikipedia 05-16-2014 Search: “Alger Hiss Trial”, Anthony Summers on “Nixon tapes”, date(s) not stated, but presumably post-trial [Hiss had two trials]:

Schmahl had worked for either the OSS or army intelligence during the war, then joined the Central Intelligence Group, which operated between the closedown of the OSS and the inception of the CIA. After his stint for the Hiss side, Schmahl defected to the prosecution team.^[77]

(see also ^
Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York, London: Penguin-Putnam Inc, 2000), p. 77).

 

@BloombergRewind
@BloombergTV
@BloombergWest Looks like I’m a “loser” too in so-called “net neutrality”. “We saw (it) them coming.” #NNNSA

[regarding recent net-neutrality decision of the FCC 05152014]

 

Current California Education Finance Documents and Nutrition Reimbursement Rates

From California Dept of Education website: See Telephone # below for more information.

I googled: education finance and nutrition and clicked on CA Dept of Education.

 

2014-15 CNP Reimbursement Rates

Child Nutrition Program meal program reimbursement rates.

Summer Food Service Program

Reimbursement Rates for
January 1, 2014, through December 31, 2014

Total (Combined) Reimbursement

Includes operating and administrative components.

Questions:   Nutrition Services Division | 800-952-5609

Download Free Readers

CA Dept. of Education Website:

My tweet of paraphrase of description of its State and Federal mission:

The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is a CA and federally funded program that provides funding to care centers. See also
#sponsoredcare.

Personal Fitness ‏@YouLoveMyCurves

Anyone who wants to lose weight & get that bikini body FAST needs this! Thank me later http://sIim.me/tfBhMh 
pic.twitter.com/9C2Fi3kZJ0

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5:36 PM – 15 May 2014

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@YouLoveMyCurves
@OFFICIALALEXJAY I put some elements of your RT in the research appendix of the book #AnAccountofM
https://johnrubens.wordpress.com

 Now welcoming #MedalofHonor recipient @USArmy Sgt #KyleWhite to the #NYSE: pic.twitter.com/MfEB19Yv21
#ThankYou
#SOT
@CMOHfoundation

 

9:21 PM – 20 May 2014 · Details

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Reply to @NYSEEuronext @USArmy @CMOHfoundation 

 

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 John Matthew Rubens ‏@raftofwater
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@NYSEEuronext
@USArmy
@CMOHfoundation THANK YOU 4 BRAVERY. Courage to go forward.

 

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