4. Savak’s Insane Ayatollah

 

s August 1953. The rollercoaster reign of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh is coming to an en. After several years as the leader of Iran’s almost successful republican revolution, the tide is beginning to turn, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to bring the Shah back to Iran and restore him to the throne. Several years before, Mossadegh had ridden to power with the support of Iran’s communists and, especially, with the power provided him by several leaders of the Shiite clergy now in 1953 the clergy has abandoned Mossadegh. Their unofficial leader is Ayatollah Kashani, a mullah cast more in the tradition of an Al Capone gangster than a religious leader. Together with another mullah named Shams Qanad-Abadi, Ayatollah Kashani commands an empire of street gangs and religious fanatics now the CIA is ready to use them.

 

            In Tehran, agent Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt is passing out funds to the city’s underworld for a made-to-order “demonstration” in support of the Shah. The several thousands of demonstrators, who are even now trying to memorize the slogans they will chant, are only window dressing for the operation that, in a matter of hours, will turn the tables on the prime minister.

 

            It is at least marginally useful politically, the CIA reasons, to have some chanting Loyalists in the streets clamoring for the Shah, if only for newsreel footage and the world press. But the real “revolution” against Mossadegh is a decision that has already been taken by the leaders of the American, British, and Israeli secret services and the boards of major international oil companies. It is their petty cash that finances the mob demonstrations, and it is Ayatollah Kashani who “gets out the troops.”

 

            Lost among the 5,000 or so demonstrators shouting “Long Live the Shah!” is an obscure mullah named Ruhollah Khomeini.

           

            It is one of the finer ironies of history that the man responsible for bringing down the Shah in 1979 was a paid agent of the monarchist forces twenty-five years earlier. The complete story of Khomeini’s life probably will not be known for some time, but enough is known already about the mullah who has brought the middle Ages back to Iran to enable us to judge what jinn of a man he is today.

 

            To begin with, his name is not really Khomeini; he selected the name “Ruhollah Khomeini” for himself sometime in the 1930s. because his grandfather was born in Kashmir, India and the family was originally of Indian Muslim origin, one of Khomeini’s brothers chose the name “Hindi,” reportedly because of his business dealings with India. Some reports say that Khomeini himself was not even born in Iran, but in India, and migrated to Iran in his early youth.

 

            Some sixty years ago, during the upheavals in Iran in the early 1920s, when the late Shah’s father Reza Khan Pahlavi was in the process of seizing power, young Khomeini received his first political battle-scars. At the time, the young Reza Pahlavi conferred with the leader of the republican revolution in Turkey, the famous Ataturk. Ataturk urged the brash young military officer to follow his example and to establish a constitutional republic in Persia, urging Pahlavi to reject the concept of a monarchy as too rigid and confining, inappropriate for a modernizing nation. Initially, Reza considered the idea- until violent uprisings of the Iranian clergy forced him to decide in favor of a monarchy. And so he became Reza Shah. Khomeini, then in his teens and reportedly bearing a grudge against Reza for having somehow been involved in the death of his father, joined the mullahs’ protest.

 

            Decades later, it was the same Khomeini who would be the bitterest foe of the monarch-but not before he and his brother had become part of Ayatollah Kashani’s drive to put Reza’s son on the throne.

 

            The CIA was not the only agency sponsoring the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh. Ayatollah Kashni was close to the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iran, the Fedayeen-e Islam. In the 1950s, the acknowledged leader of the Fedayeen was Ayatollah Navansafavi. With between 200 and 300 members, the Fedayeen had been in secret existence since the early 1940s, when the Brotherhood’s apparatus in Egypt-which itself had been cut out of whole cloth by the British intelligence service-extended its reach into Iran. The Iranian branch of the Brotherhood was known almost exclusively for its spectacular assassinations, including the murders of at least two prime ministers.

 

            British secret intelligence’s influence over Iran’s clergymen was no secret, even many years ago. “Many influential clergymen formed alliances with representatives of foreign powers, most often the British,” wrote the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf Pahlavi, in her book Faces in a Mirror. “And there was, in fact, a standing joke in Persia that said if you picked up a clergymen’s beard, you would see the words ‘Made in England’ stamped on the other side.“ The other side.” After World War II, says Ashraf, “With the encouragement of the British, who saw the mullahs as an effective counterforce to the Communists, the elements of the extreme religious right were starting to surface again, after years of being suppressed.”

 

            Kashani and the “religious right” based their power on the shock troops of organized crime in Iran. In Iran, the mafia is called chaqou-kesj. The words mean. “Knife Slayers” in Persian, derived from their trademark of stabbing people to death with concealed daggers.

 

            The Iranian mafia is found in the bazaars, the marketplaces, especially in the critical fruit and vegetable markets·. From this powerful base, it also controls prostitution, gambling-and especially the extremely lucrative narcotics racket. Like some exotic version of a New York or Chicago “godfather,” in 1953 Ayatollah Kashani simply order his lieutenants to put together a rent-a-mob for the CIA.

 

            After the 1953 putsch, with the Shah back in power, a certain military officer named Teymour Bakhtiar emerged into the limelight. Promoted to the position of general and then named military governor of Tehran and director of army intelligence, Bakhtiar became a trusted aide to the Shah. In 1957, when the State Security and Intelligence Organization (Savak) was established, Bakhtiar became its first director. From the start, Iran’s new intelligence service received a great deal of support of support from Israel’s Mossad, especially relying on Israeli torture specialists.

 

            The Savak also began to put on its payroll a vast army of mullahs and ayatollahs, preferring those with links to the chaqou-kesh. Salaries from Savak to the mullahs ranged from as low as $100 a month to as high as $ 1,000 a month. One of the people placed on the Savak payroll was Ruhollah Khomeini – at a stipend of $ 300 per month.

           

            At the time, Khomeini was a low- ranking teacher at the important theological center of Qom, Iran. Reports in the New York Times and elsewhere have tried to portray Khomeini’s role in Qom as a major scholar of religious law and an advocate of the system of Plato’s Republic. It is there, that Khomeini, acting as a parody of the fanatical mullah, began to building his cult following.

 

            The Israeli connection to Savak at this time undoubtedly penetrated deep into Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist clergy; it would not be surprising to find that agents of the Israeli intelligence service made contact with Khomeini as early as 1957. In that year, there were eleven Mossad and Shin Beth agents in Iran to help organize Savak By 1976 over 500 Israeli intelligence personnel were stationed in Tehran, where they were involved in almost every branch of the Savak apparatus. The Mossad’s influence was reputed to be concentrated in the super secret Special Intelligence Bureau, established as an independent entity inside the Savak. The Bureau’s chief was General Hossein Fardoust. Through Savak and the Special Intelligence Bureau, the entire organization of mullahs was penetrated and controlled.“ There were only two kinds of mullahs in Iran in the 1950s,” said an informed source. “Those that were pro-Savak, and those that were in Jail.” Khomeini was not in Jail,

 

            Teymour Bakhtiar was a sadist, who developed a reputation for the cruelest sorts of tortures and confinement. But he was also an agent of the British – and the Kennedy administration.

 

            After John F. Kennedy came to the White House in 1961, Washington soon began placing enormous pressures on the Shah of Iran. The Shah had been showing unfortunate signs of wanting to cooperate with the non seven Sisters oil companies, especially Italy’s state-sector oil company, ENI. To reassert control over Iran's oil for the Anglo-American consortium, headed by British Petroleum, Kennedy threatened the Shah’s regime·. In January 1961, coinciding almost to the day with Kennedy’s inauguration, demonstrations and the clergy, exploded the country. Early in 1961, Kennedy sent Averell Harriman, the former New York governor and patrician, to present the U.S. demands to the Shah. Behind the scenes, Bakhtiar was secretly funding anti- Shah demonstrators with Savak funds. The Shah realized that Bakhtiar was acting as a traitor, and he dismissed him from his position as head of the Savak. Several other top-ranking military men were fired at the same time. But a few months later, under pressure of a teachers’ strike that led to violence, the Shah bowed to the pressure from Kennedy and Harriman and installed Ali Amini as the new prime minister. It was rumored that Teymour Bakhtiar had been working to stir up the teachers’ demonstrations.

 

            The organizer of the teachers’ strike was Mohammed Derakhshesh, an opportunist who hired himself out as a spy for the British and who became minister of education in the Amini Cabinet; eighteen years later, Derakhshesh would travel to the United States to meet the National Security Council through Richard Cottam, the University of Pittsburgh professor and former CIA agent. The Shah himself confirmed, in an interview several years ago in Newsweek, that Kennedy forced him to name Amini as prime minister. When, asked about such reports, the Shah declared: “It’s past history but correct.”

           

            In 1962, the Shah visited Washington for a face-to-face meeting with Kennedy. Earlier that year, the Shah had also confronted Bakhtiar with the evidence of his sedition and fomenting of rebellion, whereupon Bakhtiar fled Iran into exile in Switzerland. Now, in his meeting with Kennedy the Shah proposed an amicable agreement: if Kennedy would allow the Shah to oust Prime Minister Amini, he would agree to the policies demanded by Washington. Upon his return to Iran, the Shah fired Amini-and then reneged on the deal Kennedy was enraged.

 

            Thus, later that year the American president called General Bakhtiar to the United States.

 

            Ostensibly arriving in the country for medical treatment, Bakhtiar flew in from Switzerland and went directly to the White House, where he met with JFK. The subject of the meeting: to plot against the Shah. The means they selected: Ruhollah Khomeini.

 

            During the previous year, the elderly ayatollah had been working extensively with General Bakhtiar’s Savak Building a reputation for himself as an uncompromising, fanatical ideologue, Khomeini was fast becoming for more and more Iranians a cult hero. It was Khomeini who would be pushed forward to lead the fight against the Shah’s 1963 “White Revolution.”

 

            The White Revolution was the Shah’s project to undercut the power of the reactionary opposition, which for many years had been a British asset.

 

            “Who were the British agents in Teheran who led the anti-Shah revolts of 1963?” A broadcast of the Free Voice of Iran, an anti-Khomeini radio station, on June 5, 1980, explained:“ The British mercenaries in Iran could generally be classified into four groups. The first group was the paid politicians and journalists… whose numerous treacheries were revealed during the struggle for the nationalization of the oil industry, after which they were greatly weakened and did not have the power to stand up. The second was the Freemasons, the treacherous members of which were and continue to be the tools of British policy and protectors of British interests in Iran.

 

            “The third group of agents implementing British policies in Iran were some of the Khans, feudalists, and big landowners whose filthy face in treason against the homeland and service to the British Empire has been revealed on many occasions in the course of Iran’s history… Finally, some of [the] pseudclergy have been on Britain’s payroll for a long time.”

 

            It was the alliance between the Freemasons, the old landowners, and clergy that mounted the operation against the Shah in 1963. Its leader was Khomeini, but only as a symbol.

           

            Concerning Khomeini, the Free Voice of Iran reports that “since the days he was a religious student, he received rations from the British, and under the label of monthly tuition from the proceeds of the Indian awqaf [religious affairs department], received monthly payments from British agents and was in constant contact with his masters.”

 

            In 1962, the bearded ayatollah with the evil stare issued his first major proclamation, attacking the government’s plan to enfranchise women as a violation of the status of women under Islam. Then, in 1963, when the White Revolution wa underway, Khomeini had his first serious confrontation with the Shah-ten years after he had marched in the streets to bring the monarch to power.

 

            The White Revolution challenged Iran’s old families, since it expropriated feudal estates and either handed them over to peasants or turned them into state cooperatives. The act struck the heart of the feudal-clergy alliance. By January 1963, Khomeini was arrested for issuing angry pamphlets accusing the Shah of violating Islam’s precepts by the nationalization measures. Islam guarantees the sanctity of private property, Khomeini argued.

 

            Though Khomeini was acting clearly on behalf of the landlords and the British, his cult followers took to the streets. Clumsy arrests of Khomeini partisans by the police and the Savak-which may have been seeking a provocation and probably was working in collaboration with Khomeini and Bakhtiar-fueled the protests even more. During the religious holidays of that year. Portraits of Khomeini stared down from the bazaars and the mosques. In early June 1963, he was arrested by the police for the first time, then released two months later after an “understanding” was reached. He was arrested twice again, in October 1963 and in May 1964. In October 1964 he was finally sent into exile by the Shah.

 

            Meanwhile, General Bakhtiar had quietly moved from his Swiss headquarters to Iraq, where he operated secretly in Baghdad. British influence in Iraq was then particularly strong, and General Bakhtiar cooperated closely with the British embassy in Tehran to fuel the anti-Shah riots and support the Khomeini movement. Over 5,000 people were killed in two years of violent demonstrations. 

 

            The Shah minced no words concerning his opposition: “We are done with social and political parasites, he said “I abhor black reaction even more than red destruction.”

 

            Hinting at the connections of the rebels to British the Shah declared, “The agents of foreign influence in Iran were the politicians, the feudal lords……. Some self-styled religious leaders who ever since the establishment of the constitutional monarchy were generally known to be at the beck and call of one foreign power in particular.”

 

            When he was exiled, Khomeini’s choice of refuges revealed whose “black reaction” it was. He fled first to Izmir, Turkey, sire of the NATO installation, where he stayed for a period; he then traveled to Baghdad, Iraq where he contacted the networks around General Bakhtiar.

 

            Together, Khomeini, Bakhtiar, and British intelligence continued to stir up trouble in Iran. During the rest of the 1960s Bakhtiar was involved in several conspiracies, including the 1965 assassination of Prime Minister Ali Mansour and a botched assassination attempt against the Shah.

 

            Traveling between Geneva, Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad, Bakhtiar built his connections throughout the Mediterranean world. One of his closest associates was François Porteau de la Morandière, a member of the extremist Secret Army Organization that was responsible for the repeated assassination attempts against French President Charles de Gaulle. Bakhtiar also strengthened his links to the underworld, procuring his funds through drug smuggling and gun running.

 

            In 1970, in August, he was killed in what was said to be hunting accident in the hills of Iraq near the Iranian border. There is little question that he was assassinated on orders from the Shah. Later that year, Iran announced the discovery of a plot to overthrow the government led by partisans of General Bakhtiar, and hundreds of military men were arrested.

 

            For Khomeini, now a lonely mullah in Iraq, his chief sponsor and patron was dead.

 

            Khomeini's return to Iran on February 1, 1979, marked the end of a years' long British campaign to destabilize Iran. Not for a moment during his exile was Khomeini out of the control of the British intelligence service.

 

            With the coming to power in 1968 of the Iraqi government of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, Khomeini was kept under a careful watch by the Iraqi authorities, who did not want him stirring up trouble among the very large Shiite community of Iraq. In the mid-1970s, he was found lending his support to the rebellion of Iraq's Kurdish tribes in the north. But because of his status as a religious leader, the Iraqis believed it impossible to arrest him.     

 

            Today Khomeini is a character out of a Kipling novel. According to those who have known him, he is a vegetable, and is said to sleep up to twenty two hours a day, awaking only for a dazed excursion into the real world for a few hours. He is rarely rational. His son Ahmad Khomeini told le Figaro magazine that his father is usually “in another world” and that he “doesn't pay attention anymore to what is happing around him.”

 

            Khomeini resembles nothing so much as the fictional Wizard Oz, a puffed-up puppet whose controls are operated from behind the scenes. For  the most part, his declarations and pompous pronouncements are statements issued in his name, or statements written for him by his intimate circle of advisers.

 

            But Iranian politics today is dependent on the symbol of Khomeini and on his authority as the “imam,” and Iran's battling political factions must win the approval of the drooling ayatollah for any major decision. No sooner has one faction of Khomeini's advisers spent time coaxing the senile fool into adopting some position concerning an issue of importance than they leave and in comes another coterie, prepared to persuade His eminence of the opposite point of view. By manipulating the aged man. Iran's factions wield life or death power over their rivals. Reasoned argument, of course, does not work with Khomeini; more useful is an argument that is based on accusing one’s opponents of anti-Islamic behavior or “warring against God.”

 

            Hence, political decisions in Iran over the period since the revolution are always subject to instant reversal. President Bani-Sadr has several times lined up the imam’s support for some policy or initiative, only to find a day or two later that Khomeini has reversed position and sided with the more extreme, fundamentalist faction around Ayatollah Khalkhali.

 

            There is another reason for this. Many people believe that the depraved Khalkhali is, in effect, Khomeini's boss, since Khalkhali is the head of the Feared Fedayeene Islam. According to French sources, Khomeini himself is a member of the Fedayeen and is therefore subject to organizational discipline under Khalkhali.

 

            The Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali is a mystery man in Iran. He holds no official position in the government, but he wields enormous power. In the first months after the revolution, it was Khalkhali who served as the unofficial judge and executioner for hundreds, probably thousands, of political prisoners. He sadistic temperament and lust for blood earned him the nickname “Judge Blood.” He is a certified lunatic and spent a number of years in a mental asylum for torturing and killing small animals, such as cats and birds. Wags have called him Ayatollah Khalkhali.

 

            More recently, Khalkhali has served as the head of Iran’s antidrug program, a sick joke given the fact the Fedayeen is probably the biggest drug-smuggling ring in Iran. From this position, he has used his authority to order hundreds more executions of people condemned to death allegedly as drug traffickers – but, in fact, guilty only of political opposition to Khomeini’s rule.

 

            Following the raid into Iran by U.S forces last April, 24, Khalkhali gained notoriety for displaying the dead bodies of American service men killed in the action, including holding up charred pieces of flesh and bone.

 

            Now, he is said to live inside the depths of Qasr Prison outside Teheran. Location for most of the secret trials and brutal, machine-gun executions of Khomeini’s enemies. Like a sewer rat, he scuttles through the dungeons, gleefully clapping his hands at this or that little irony of his task. Once, during a macabre guided tour of the prison for reporters, Khalkhali delivered his lecture in between eating mouthful of vanilla Ice cream from a gallon tub that he carried with him. At the end of the tour, when several reporters’ questions angered him, he threatened to have them all executed right then and there. The reporters hastily departed.    

 

            For many, it may be hard to understand how a nation could allow itself to be ruled by such madmen. Khomeini and Khalkhali are truly insane. But the conditions of their rule must be understood.

 

            Millions of Iranians, especially those of the middle class have fled the country rather than endure the regime’s horrors; according to U.S government estimates, up to six million people may have left Iran since 1978. Those that remain live under the gun of the Revolutionary Guard and the Komitehs, or Revolutionary Committees.

 

            At the beginning, because many Iranians chafed under the Shah’s one man rule, they naively thought that by supporting Khomeini’s movement they could rid themselves of the monarchy, and then dispense with Khomeini. Such was not to be the case.  With the passing of time, most of Khomeini’s support has dissipated, leaving only the cult followers of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is that section of Iran’s population upon which Khomeini’s rule now rests exclusively, and the insane mind of the mullah is perfectly matched to its constituency.

 

            In any developing country, the ruler- if he is even remotely concerned with his country’s welfare- is faced with the fundamental problem: how to end the misery and backwardness of the rural peasants and their donkeylike life. The peasants existence has been entrenched in that mode of day-to-day life in many centuries, and the mind of the peasants- uneducated and unaware of the world outside-is locked at a level not much higher than his beasts of burden. Such a population is desperately in need of an education program, to enable it to become capable of assimilating modern technology. Without that, without the beginnings of progress making  itself felt on the mind of the peasant , he is condemned  to a hell more horrible than anything described  in Dante’s Inferno.

 

            The life of rural idiocy makes the peasant population vulnerable to manipulation or bribery that molds it into a “popular rebellion.” So with Khomeini: his chief supporter were not the skilled workers of Iran, nor the middle class, but the millions of displaced peasants with little education who had streamed into Iran’s cities and eked out an existence in the shantytowns and the slums of southern Teheran.

 

            In the Middle East, for fifty centuries such populations have been reduced to dependency on the priesthood, going back to the days when the cults of the ancient world dominated political life. Often described as “magicians” or sorcerers, cult priests have used the tricks of psychology and superstition to weave a mystical web of enchantment around their followers. Their techniques include the use of psychosexual fears, fantasies and drugs. So with Khomeini. If one could truly enter into the mind of a mullah like Khomeini or Khalkhali, perhaps then one would fully comprehend the pure evil that is represented there.

 

 

            Recently, translated into English, there has appeared a book in which Khomeini’s proclamations have been gathered into one place from several of his works. The book’s maxims appear incredible and even laughable to us, but one must consider them from the vantage point of their intended audience.  For these pathetic people of their troubled not by concerns of politics, business, law, or even more simple problems such as which television program to watch, Khomeini’s word is law. Their concerns arise out of an unfathomable depth of backwardness verging on the insane, rooted in superstition.

 

            “There are eleven things which are impure,” Khomeini declares. “Urine, excrement, sperm, bones, blood, dogs, pigs, non-Muslim men and women, wine, beer, and the sweat of the excrement-eating camel.” He adds, “Wine and all other intoxicating beverages are impure, but opium and hashish are not.”

 

            Says Khomeini; “ It is forbidden to consume the excrement of animals or their nasal secretions. But if such are mixed in minute proportions into other foods their consumption is not forbidden. The meat of horses, mules, or donkeys is not recommended. It is strictly forbidden if the animal was sodomized while alive by a man. In that case, the animal must be taken outside the city and sold.

 

            “ If one commits an act of sodomy with a cow, a ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrements become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must quickly be killed  and the price of it paid to its owner by him who sodomized it,” says Khomeini.

 

            Khomeini himself is reported by many resources to be practicing homosexual, which is not uncommon-is even the rule- among the mullahs. During his years in exile, especially in Paris, his sexual partner was said to be Sadegh Gotbzadeh, Iran foreign minister.  Gotbzadeh reportedly is a notorious homesexual-sadist, like Khalkhali, and the fact that he is not married has long been the subject of jokes among Iranians. Given this background, Khomeini prescribes in great detail on the sexual habits of his followers:

            “ During the time a woman is menstruating, it is preferable for a man to avoid coitus, even if it does not involve full penetration –that is, as far as the circumcision ring- and even if it does not involve ejaculation. It is also highly inadvisable for him to sodomize her during this time.”

            Other superstitions are covered by Khomeini:

            “Namaze-ayat is the name given  to the prayer to be said when one witnesses natural phenomena that inspire fear. This prayer is required in the four following cases: total or partial eclipse of the sun; total or partial eclipse of the moon; earthquake, even though it not be fearsome; and thunder, lightning, and black or red winds. If several of these phenomena occur simultaneously, for instance, if an eclipse should be accompanied by an earthquake, two prayers are required. In case of earthquake or lightning or thunder, one must pray immediately; failing to do so is a sin which is not pardoned until after this prayer is said, no matter how much later, even to the last day of a person’s life.”

 

            Endless rules and regulations are put forward by ayatollah concerning when and how to pray, to eat, to drink, to go to the bathroom. “When defecating or urinating, one must squat in such a way as neither to face Mecca nor to turn one’s back upon it,” he says. On prayer: “ If a person who is praying turns red in the face from suppressing an impulse to burst out laughing, that person must start the prayer over again ….Clapping one’s hands or jumping up in the air during a prayer makes it null and void.”  And so forth.

 

            Khomeini’s insane version of Islam has made him the subject of ridicule among other Muslims, both Sunni and Shia. Many of the highest authorities in the Muslim world, among the Ulema (clergy) in particular, condemn him as a heretic for, among other reasons –probably the most sacrilegious thing that a Muslim could say claiming that he himself is more powerful than the Prophet Muhammad.  Many Shia resent the fact that Khomeini has usurped the title of the “imam” for that title is an extremely solemn one for those of the Shiite faith. Many even argue that Khomeini cannot even legitimately be called an “ayatollah.”

 

            How long will the world continue to be plagued with the made ayatollah? Of course, he is very old, and he has had several heart attacks. Many Iranians expect him to die quite soon. And there are a number of political power centers that would like him dead immediately – even if not by strictly natural causes. One thing is certain: when Khomeini dies, there is no one that can replace him. He is unique focus of his cult following in Iran. When he dies he leaves a profound vacuum of power.

 

            The most likely result will be the eruption of a civil war in Iran, in which the two most powerful forces will be the Communists, especially strong in the north of Iran, and the conservative opposition to Khomeini, including the military and some of the tribes such as the Kurds; joining the later will probably be many of the more moderate religious leaders  who presently are held hostage to Khomeini’s lunacy, such as ayatollah Shareatmadari.

 

            For thousands of Iranians, whatever the outcome, Khomeini’s death cannot come too soon.