by Kim Ghattas
2
TODAY TEHRAN, TOMORROW JERUSALEM
IRAN
1979–80
When the demon goes out, within the angel’s light will come.
The darkness of night is the close companion of dictators.
—Hafez, Divan, 159
Mohsen Sazegara did not have time to think about what it meant to be landing in Tehran on February 1, 1979, on the plane that was bringing Ayatollah Khomeini home after fifteen years in exile. The devout graduate student with an organized mind had been so busy from the moment he had arrived in Neauphle-le-Château just a few months earlier that he couldn’t process information at the speed with which things were happening. A slow simmering revolution, years in the making, was suddenly hurtling forward. They had taken off from Paris around one in the morning, and he hadn’t slept a single moment. He was busy making a list for the LMI welcome committee in Tehran with the names of the journalists on the plane. The departure had been rushed. Mohsen and his colleagues had initially planned to bring two hundred fifty journalists along on the Air France Boeing 747. Tickets were issued for $500 each. Prime Minister Bakhtiar had reopened the airport and indicated he would allow Khomeini’s plane to land, but there were no guarantees beyond that. Air France asked to reduce the number of passengers so it could carry enough fuel to fly back to Paris if landing rights were not granted. Mohsen and the team wanted as many high-profile journalists on the plane as possible, human shields to deter the Iranian generals, still loyal to the shah, from shooting down the plane.
As the plane entered Iranian airspace, snowcapped Damavand Mountain appeared in the morning light. Khomeini had slept on the floor, in the lounge area of the first-class upper cabin. He performed his morning prayers on an Air France blanket, then went to sit by the window, stroking his beard and smiling contentedly for the first time in months, maybe years. The American reporter Peter Jennings and his ABC News crew were allowed into the first-class section to ask a question. “Ayatollah, would you be so kind as to tell us how you feel about being in Iran?” In his tie and jacket, a beaming Sadegh sat next to the ayatollah and translated. “Hichi”—nothing—came the answer. Sadegh paused, smiled and echoed him, somewhat incredulous: “Hichi?”
Khomeini repeated the sentiment. “Hichi ehasasi nadaram.” I don’t feel a thing. Sadegh did what he and others had done for weeks in France; he softened the edges. “He doesn’t make any comment,” said Sadegh. Jennings pressed: “Is he happy, is he excited?” Sadegh again said the ayatollah had no comment. But the real meaning of hichi would not stay hidden long—there were too many people watching those few seconds once ABC’s tape was beamed to America and the rest of the world. The ayatollah’s words were a portent, parsed and understood differently by supporters and foes, in the moment, and in hindsight.
Sitting in Texas, at Reese Air Force Base, where he was on a pilot training program, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled shah’s son, was among those stunned by the lack of emotion he saw in the television footage. Khomeini had no attachment to the grandeur of the Persian empire, or the cultural and intellectual richness of its history, only to his own sense of importance. He had been that way ever since he was a young boy, when he insisted on playing the role of the shah in the games he played with friends. Confident of his relationship with God, Khomeini had seemingly no connection to the worldly concept of nation—he looked beyond countries and borders to the Muslim nation, the ummah.
For his most ardent supporters, this imbued him with the charismatic mysticism of a savior. Mohsen was mesmerized by such spiritual composure. Later that week, in Tehran, Mohsen’s father would try to warn his son that this was a sign of danger, but the young student wouldn’t hear it. Years later, on hunger strike in solitary confinement in the jails of the Islamic Republic, Mohsen would think back to that one word, hichi, and wonder how he had not understood the warnings, in Khomeini’s response but also in his writings. At the time, there was only elation—a sense of accomplishment, yet also trepidation at what was bound to be a drawn-out insurgency. For months, Mohsen had been reading up about guerrilla tactics in Vietnam and elsewhere, but his favorite manual was the 1969 Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla by the Brazilian Marxist revolutionary Carlos Marighella, which the LMI had translated to Persian. In Neauphle-le-Château’s only hotel, away from the crowds swarming around Khomeini, Mohsen had rented a room where he focused on building a people’s army and meeting with Iranian volunteers from around the world to teach them the art of revolution from the chapters in his books: firing groups, sabotage, guerrilla security, war of nerves. The volunteers were then sent to Lebanon for quick military training. Now that Khomeini was coming home, hundreds of Iranians were getting ready to fly back too and fight the remnants of the shah’s regime.
At nine thirty in the morning, Air France flight 4271 landed at Mehrabad airport just outside Tehran, the same airport from which the shah had departed. The ayatollah, wearing a bulletproof vest under his robe, came down the steps with the help of an Air France steward. The welcome committee set up by the secret Islamic Revolutionary Council was there to take charge of him. The clerics on the plane and on the tarmac pushed aside anyone who did not look religious enough, and Khomeini was immersed in a sea of turbans. Yazdi, Ghotbzadeh, Mohsen … the LMI were all left behind. Banisadr, the man who had first identified Khomeini as the conduit to the masses, would later remark, “It seemed that the duty of the intellectuals was to bring Khomeini to Tehran and hand him over to the mollahs.”
Deep inside, the modernist revolutionaries knew the risks of coming back in haste to a country they had themselves left years before, without first consolidating their power. Their initial plan, formulated in Paris, had been to form a government in exile that would get international recognition and force Prime Minister Bakhtiar to resign. Another variation would have had Bakhtiar tender his resignation to Khomeini in France and be commissioned by the ayatollah to form a provisional cabinet and then hold a referendum to determine the form of a new government. But within days of the shah’s departure from Iran, Khomeini decided to reverse the order, and return to Iran as a first step. The LMI tried to discourage such a hasty move. Bazergan was in talks with Bakhtiar, an old colleague, trying to negotiate a way forward. The country was ablaze, the armed forces were still loyal to the shah, the ayatollah’s safety would be at risk. But Khomeini was adamant: “There’s no reason to stay, let’s go to Iran.”
Walking back to the hotel in Neauphle-le-Château with Yazdi one evening, Mohsen had tried to sway his wiser colleague with his youthful enthusiasm. “Ayatollah Khomeini is right, Dr. Yazdi,” Mohsen said. “If he goes back to Iran, the excitement of people, millions of people will sweep away the government of Bakhtiar; Bakhtiar has no power.” Yazdi stopped in the middle of the street. “Mohsen, I understand, you’re right, but here in Neauphle-le-Château, there are only low-ranking clerics around Ayatollah Khomeini. We can control them, we can control the ayatollah. In Iran, there are high-ranking clerics, his friends, and they will take him out of our hands. Whatever we have done so far will be ruined by them.”
Khomeini understood that dynamic too, which is why he wanted to go home. He wanted to seize the moment and seize the revolution. There were others in Iran who were leaders of this movement in their own right; plastered around town were posters of their faces, like that of the more liberal and hugely popular ayatollah Taleghani, of the LMI, who had spent fifteen years in the shah’s jails. They were Khomeini’s allies but also his rivals. Khomeini wanted to land at the peak of the fervor, so that the people’s relief at being saved would pour in his direction only.
And indeed the masses were there to welcome the ayatollah. They lined the streets, packed the roofs, hung from lampposts as the ayatollah’s convoy of eight vehicles and ten motorcycles tried to inch its way along the twenty miles from the airport to the cemetery of Behesht-e Zahra where Khomeini was planning to speak and pay tribute to the martyrs of the revolution. Three million turned out, according to t
he BBC. Other estimates put it at six million—a sea of humanity to greet the savior, as though Khomeini were the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam returned from occultation, the Shia messiah. Khomeini’s long exile, his occultation, during which Iranians had heard his voice on contraband cassette tapes and read his pamphlets passed around in secret, was over. Now he reappeared in the flesh, not in Mecca, as tradition had it, but for a triumphant return in his own land. Millions of supporters hoped he would lead Iran to justice, freedom, and a better future. But Khomeini’s devotion was to the past, to re-creating an Islamic society fashioned after the one in the days of the prophet.
Sitting in the front passenger seat of an armored blue and white Chevrolet Blazer, his son Ahmad in the back, Khomeini was almost in the dark as the masses overwhelmed the car. An Imperial Guard helicopter came to the rescue and flew him to the cemetery, where he paid his respects by blasting the shah as a vile traitor. Wagging his finger, he intoned: “I will decide the government, a government for the people. I will slap this government in the face.” Khomeini’s tone had already started to change. Bakhtiar’s days were numbered.
The LMI had arranged for Khomeini to stay at the Refah girls’ primary school, transformed into a meeting place for the Revolutionary Council. But by the next day, Yazdi’s worst fears had been borne out: the powerful fundamentalist clerics closest to Khomeini had whisked him away to a school that they owned and controlled. Khomeini’s loyal acolyte Beheshti, the cleric who had stood up Imam Sadr in Libya, was there—he had been waiting in the wings for this moment, and was now acting as a kind of chief of staff. He was working quickly to seize the levers of power and coalesce the forces that were unconditionally loyal to Khomeini under the newly formed Islamic Republican Party. Among them was Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a future president, and Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, once a pupil of Khomeini, who later wrote in his memoirs that moving Khomeini out of the Refah school had indeed been a “coup d’état, which saved the Imam from the clutches of Bazargan’s Freedom Movement and the National Front.” Khalkhali had long been an active Islamic militant member of the Fedayeen-e Islam, the Devotees of Islam.
A clandestine group of marginal radicals, the Fedayeen was founded in 1946 by Navvab Safavi, a theology student, and is often described as one of the first Muslim fundamentalist groups in modern times. Initially, Safavi and his devotees were dismissed as dangerous eccentrics by most of the established clergy. He aspired to the purest application of his understanding of Islamic law, shari’a, including the banning of music, gambling, alcohol; the mandatory veil on women; and the chopping off of limbs as punishment for theft and other misdemeanors. According to his widow, Safavi was a frequent visitor to Khomeini’s home; the two men seemed to influence each other and shared the same ire against what they saw as the corrupting influence of secularism and modernizing intellectuals and politicians. The Fedayeen assassinated a number of them in Iran, including government ministers. When the shah sent Safavi and other Fedayeen to the gallows in 1956, the devotees turned to Khomeini for guidance. In him, they found recognition from an established high-ranking cleric, an ayatollah. When Khomeini was sent into exile, the devotees awaited his return.
Mohsen, for his part, thought Khomeini had been moved against his own will, that the LMI had lost him to the clerics, but the truth was that they’d never really had him. Khomeini was right where he wanted to be, with his closest friends. He had manipulated the secular left and the Islamist modernists, as a vehicle, and he would dispose of them at the moment of his choosing. In time, he would even push back against the Fedayeen. But Khomeini’s first concern was seizing power.
On February 5, Khomeini appointed a provisional civilian government, with Bazergan as his prime minister. This was the first step toward a referendum to decide what form the government would take in the new Iran. The authority to do so, asserted Khomeini, came from his guardianship of the holy law of the prophet in the wilayat, therefore based on the shari’a—therefore any opposition to the government meant opposition to the shari’a. “Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God,” Khomeini said. “Revolt against God is blasphemy.” Not everyone noticed Khomeini’s reference to the wilayat. Few had heard of it or even understood it outside the fundamentalist circle close to Khomeini. Those among the LMI who knew what he meant were probably dismissive, certain that it wouldn’t come to pass or that they would prevail. But Khomeini had set the tone and was ahead of them all. Bakhtiar laughed it off as a joke. But the dictatorship of the shah had been replaced by the autocracy of the holy law.
After a few days of insurgency and street battles, now reinforced by those who had been trained in Lebanon and in Neauphle-le-Château, with mutiny in barracks and tanks on the move in cities across the country, the army declared its neutrality on February 11, 1979. Bakhtiar had nothing left to fight with. He resigned and slipped out of the country. The Pahlavi dynasty had been defeated. The revolution was victorious.
Revenge started almost immediately. Khalkhali was appointed chief of the Revolutionary Courts, which meant he could pick up where Safavi had left off and begin executing the “corrupt.” In the Refah girls’ primary school where Khomeini had spent his first night, a room was converted into a makeshift courtroom. The trials were swift, the sentences were death. Yazdi tried to delay the process but Khalkhali would have none of it. The executions began just before midnight on February 15, on the roof of the school: four leading generals were shot, after a summary trial in which they were accused of treason and mass murder. Khalkhali’s reign of terror had begun; it would continue for a decade, beyond his own tenure. He would become known as the “hanging judge,” and would later write, “I killed over 500 criminals close to the royal family, hundreds of rebels of Kurdistan, Gonbad and Khuzestan regions, and many drug smugglers … I feel no regret or guilt over the executions. Yet I think I killed little. There were many more who deserved to be killed but I could not get my hands on them.” His biggest regret? That the Pahlavis had gotten away.
Photographs of the four generals’ bodies in a pool of blood, blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs, were splashed on the front pages of newspapers the next day, making international headlines. There was no more pretending. Those revolutionaries whose stomachs churned tried to dismiss it as the inevitable excesses of pent-up rage let loose—it would pass, they thought. Others wanted to believe this was happening without Khomeini’s direct knowledge or consent. It would take years for some of the early revolutionaries to accept the truth: they had delivered their nation to a theocrat, an irredeemable monster.
One man purely rejoiced, even before the fall of Bakhtiar, boasting he had made the right bet from the very start: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who was close to the Beheshti camp. He felt that this was his revolution as much as it was Khomeini’s, and he was eager to claim credit. After all, Palestinians had helped train the men who had brought an end to 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy. The training had intensified under the guidance of Arafat’s own Fatah party. In PLO offices in Lebanon plastered to the wall were posters titled “A List the People Will Complete.” There were red check marks beside Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Spain: wars won by the people against imperialism in the days of the international left. A red mark had just been added next to Iran. Still on the list were Egypt and Palestine.
* * *
In Beirut, in the early hours of February 17, Arafat got into the passenger seat of a white Peugeot station wagon and traveled an hour and a half east, across the Lebanese mountains and the Beqaa Valley through the Masnaa border checkpoint and into Syria, to Damascus. His friend Hani Fahs, the man who first helped contact Khomeini in 1977, rode with him. There were a few others in the delegation, including Mahmoud Abbas, a member of Fatah and the future Palestinian president, and Elias Khoury, a thirty-year-old leftist activist intellectual in the style of the time, a type reminiscent of pro-revolution writers from an earlier period, à la Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War. Khoury, a Christian Lebanese, ha
d moved to Jordan to join Fatah after the 1967 war. He studied in Paris, then edited a quarterly magazine called Palestinian Affairs. Born in the year Israel was created, he was also a novelist who published acclaimed works about the Lebanese civil war and the dispossession of Palestinian refugees. One day he would be described as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But on this cold February afternoon, he was boarding a plane from Damascus with Arafat and Fahs, en route to Tehran. It wasn’t just any plane: it was a Syrian presidential aircraft, courtesy of the dictator Hafez al-Assad. The two-hour flight was uneventful, though the atmosphere was palpably jubilant. There was no guarantee they would be allowed to land, as the airport was still officially closed and other planes had been turned away. Arafat was confident. He had friends in Tehran, and they were waiting for him.
Fifteen minutes from Tehran, air traffic control requested the identity of the passengers. Arafat, fearful of remnants of the shah’s SAVAK and its ties with Israel, insisted that the pilot state only that he “had an important Palestinian delegation” on board. Traffic control insisted on more details, but none were given. Suddenly, six Phantom jet planes surrounded the Syrian plane. The mood turned tense. There were new instructions from traffic control: “We will let you know in ten minutes if you are cleared to land.” A few minutes later, the pilot of one of the fighter jets waved to Arafat, who was sitting by the window. Arafat’s face had become widely recognizable over the years—he had distinct features, with thick lips, always sporting a stubble and a black-and-white-checkered scarf headdress, the Palestinian keffiyeh. The fighter jet’s nose lifted up in salute. Traffic control cleared the plane for landing.
Mehrabad airport was besieged. Thousands of foreigners and Iranians were trying to leave the country, while the Americans were evacuating their nationals on Hercules C130 military planes. But Arafat was delighted to land in Tehran at six in the evening on that Saturday, the first foreign leader to visit Iran after the revolution. Wearing his trademark revolutionary outfit—a khaki field jacket and the keffiyeh—he walked out of the plane, wiped a tear, and flashed the victory sign to the crowd on the tarmac. There to welcome him was Yazdi, now a deputy prime minister and foreign minister, in a suit and a necktie. (Neckties would soon be banned in Iran as a symbol of Western culture.) Inside the terminal, a raucous welcome greeted Arafat. “Landing in Tehran felt like I was approaching Jerusalem,” said the Palestinian leader. “Iran’s revolution doesn’t belong only to Iranians, it belongs to us too. What you have achieved is an earthquake and your heroism has shaken the world, Israel, and America … Your honorable revolution has lifted the siege on the Palestinian revolution.” What ensued was a five-day lovefest that made headlines around the Arab world. In Beirut, there was celebratory gunfire in parts of the city, and thousands rallied to cheer the achievement. Socialist leftists, pro-Syrian and Palestinian leaders, all said the same: this was a triumph for their cause and for Arab unity over Israel and the United States. THE SHAH IS GONE. TOMORROW SADAT, read one banner.