by Amir Taheri
15 The full text is available on Ahmadinejad’s website.
16 IRNA, October 22, 2005.
Chapter 12: Esther and the King
1 From Khalkhali’s Collected Writings (Tehran, 1999). The ayatollah ignores the fact that Esther and Cyrus were not contemporaries.
2 named after Muhammad Abdul-Wahhab, founder of a radical, puritanical version of Islam in the seventeenth century.
3 The shah put Abbas Aram, a seasoned diplomat and former foreign minister and ambassador to Beijing, in charge of the initial studies for the project. Aram visited twenty-three countries in the Indian Ocean region, only to report that there was little support for the idea.
4 A tribal entity in parts of Afghanistan and the imamate in parts of Yemen were also semi-independent, although not yet constituted as proper states.
5 nasser Khosrow wrote:
Look at today’s scientists of faith,
Their minds closed to reason,
Their mouths open for bribes.
6 The Khomeinist regime regards the defeat of the United States as a priority, and is thus hopeful of using Russia and China as political and diplomatic allies in driving the Americans out of the Middle East.
7 A mere enemy is designated by the word khasm, or in some cases mu’aridh (literally: “opponent”). A “foe,” the equivalent of hostis in Latin, is designated with the Arabic word adou. A khasm today could become a friend tomorrow, something that an adou can never be. The Persian word for “foe” is doshman.
8 Speaking to the author on condition of anonymity in March 2008.
9 Talib Shabib, in conversation with the author in new York, 1998. Shabib served as foreign minister in the first Baathist regime in Baghdad in 1963 and was briefly Iraq’s ambassador to the United nations under Saddam Hussein.
10 In the 1960s, the song was shelved because nasser decided to rename the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf. This ruined the rhymes of the song’s refrain: Min al-Mohit al-Atlasi, Il al-Khalij al-Faresi! (“From the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.”)
Chapter 13: The Great Satan
1 Translated literally, the slogan would read thus: “America is on the slippery slope [leading] to collapse.”
2 Audience at Khomeini’s residence in Jamaran on 19 Aban 1358 (november 1979).
3 In Eqtesad Towhidi [Monotheistic Economics] (Tehran, n.d.), p. 113.
4 From Khomeini’s letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, Kayhan, January 30, 1989. Also in Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1989.
5 In conversation with the author in new York, February 1982.
6 New York Times, January 28, 1979.
7 Peiknet website, February 9, 2007.
8 Abbas Ali Khalatbari, Iran’s foreign minister from 1971 to 1978, explained the symbolic color scheme as “a rainbow of threats” that always loomed on the Iranian horizon. In 1978, the shah added a new color to the “rainbow”: black, which he said was “the color of domestic religious reaction.” Thus, he branded the Khomeinist revolution as “the coalition of red and black,” red representing the Communists, their fellow travelers, and the habitual “useful idiots.”
9 See Amir Taheri, Nest of Spies: America’s Journey to Disaster in Iran (London: Hutchinson, 1988).
10 Editorial in Besuy e Ayandeh [To the Future], organ of the Tudeh Party, 26 Tir 1330 (July 18, 1951).
11 See Taheri, Nest of Spies.
Chapter 14: Five Days in August
1 These included such popular papers as Mardom (People), Shahbaz (Eagle), Razm (The Fight), Zafar ( Victory), Challengar ( Ironsmith), and Besuy e Ayandeh (Towards the Future).
2 Queen Soraya and Princess Ashraf, in conversations with the author in Paris in the 1980s.
3 The main pro-Mossadeq group, known as the national Front (Jebheh Melli), split into two factions, only one of which remained loyal to him right to the end. Among those who broke with Mossadeq was Hussein Makki, the front’s most charismatic leader, and Abol-Hassan Haerizadeh, an elder statesman who published an open letter to the United nations secretary general, Trygve Li, accusing Mossadeq of dictatorship. Other pro-Mossadeq parties that broke with him were niruy-e-Sevvom (Third Force), led by Khalil Maleki; Hezb Zahmatkeshan (Laborers’ Party), led by Mozaffar Baqai; Hezb Pan-Iranist, led by Mohsen Pezeshkpour; and a number of religious groups loyal to Grand Ayatollah Abol-Qassdem Kashani. Hezb Mardom Iran (Party of the People of Iran), led by Dariush Foruhar, also distanced itself from Mossadeq because of the prime minister’s refusal to curb Tudeh activities. Foruhar, however, did not join active opposition to Mossadeq.
4 Some details of the events of those fateful days are drawn from Ghulam-Hussein Sadiqi, Khaterat [Memoirs] (Tehran, 1991).
5 In 1977, Roosevelt received a retainer from the shah’s court to write a biography of the monarch. But when the shah fell in 1979, he switched his project to his fantasy about his heroic mission to Tehran in 1953.
6 Donald n. Wilber, Regime Change in Iran: Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952-August 1953 (Abm Komers, 2000), p. 52.
7 Ibid., p. 86.
8 Ibid., p. 110.
9 Ibid., p. 51.
10 Ibid., pp. 53-54.
11 Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 25-26.
12 Among them were Ali Shayegan, who had been finance minister under Mossadeq, and Karim Sanjabi, who had served as education minister in the same cabinet.
13 In 1978, Dariush Foruhar, a senior Mossadeqist leader, wrote a letter to President Carter seeking U.S. help in forcing the shah to reform his regime. In a private conversation with the author, Foruhar claimed that the United States had always favored “the Mossadeq alternative” but had been misled by the British in siding with the shah in 1953.
14 The Iranian delegation was led by the deputy foreign minister, Jalal Abdoh.
15 The concept of “Finlandization” had some supporters among the shah’s advisors, including Ahmad Mirfenderesky, who served as ambassador to Moscow in the 1970s and foreign minister in 1978.
16 In 1972, the shah allowed the establishment of seventeen American “listening posts” on Iranian territory along the borders with the USSR to monitor Soviet missile tests. This was done at the behest of Moscow and Washington in the context of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). Iran’s ambassador to the United nations at the time, Fereydoun Hoveyda, who chaired the Un’s Disarmament Committee, negotiated the tripartite deal.
17 Iran sent a contingent to Vietnam after the United States and north Vietnam had signed a truce to monitor the ceasefire. In 1968, the Iranian diplomat Fereydoun Hoveyda, using his French left-wing contacts, had helped organize the first contacts between Washington and Hanoi at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
18 Close ties with Beijing enabled Tehran to play intermediary between China and the United States. The contacts led to secret visits to Beijing by President Richard nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, and later to the historic visit by nixon himself.
19 OPEC Fund was set up by the thirteen members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, with initial donations from Iran and Saudi Arabia. Its first director was Muhammad Yeganeh, a former Iranian cabinet minister.
20 This analysis is based on a number of interviews the author had with the shah in the late 1970s.
21 Ibid.
Chapter 15: A Universal Ideology
1 Islamic Republic news Agency (IRNA), January 5, 2005.
2 IRNA, April 9, 2004.
3 Sermon, IRNA, June 1, 2007.
4 Major General Mohsen Rezai, secretary of Expediency Council. IRNA, June 8, 2006.
5 The defectors included one Davoud Muhammad, a former nation of Islam member, wanted in the United States for the murder of Ali-Akbar Tabatabai, a pro-Shah Iranian diplomat in Washington in 1980, and Lynda Santiago, a black convert to Islam briefly married to Ayatollah Ehsan Bakhsh.
6 IRNA.
7 IRNA, May 18, 2007.
8 IRNA, november 1, 1999.
Chapter 16: Sunrise Power against Sunset Power
1 FBI director Louis Freeh, in conversation with the author, December 2000, Washington, D.C.
2 See Amir Taheri, “Who Should Apologize to Whom?” Arab News, March 6, 2005.
3 Ibid.
4 IRNA, January 22, 2001.
5 The mullahs provoked the incident after two Christian Georgian ladies who had been kidnapped and sold as concubines managed to flee the homes of their enforced “husbands” and sought refuge at the Russian embassy. The minister plenipotentiary, Griboidev, refused to surrender the refugees, and the mullahs declared “jihad” against the tsar.
Chapter 17: Crazy Eddie and Martyr Hussein
1 Friday prayer sermon at Tehran University campus, January 7, 1989.
2 Khomeini, Kashf al-Asrar [Revelation of Secrets], p. 292.
Chapter 18: West Stricken, Arab Stricken
1 Al-Ahmad was a charming man with a keen sense of humor. I first met him in 1960 in London, where I was a student. In later years, we met on and off, including at his home in north Tehran, mostly to discuss French literature, which he admired.
2 I made Fardid’s acquaintance in 1973 when we appeared together in a series of televised debates. At the time, he was ferociously anticlerical, a position he subsequently concealed thanks to the Shiite practice of taqiyyah (dissimulation).
3 Khomeini, Sahigfat al-Anwar, p. 112.
4 The most popular Arab writer translated into Persian was Georgie Zaydan, a Lebanese Christian who wrote a series of fantasized accounts of Islamic history.
Chapter 19: State or Revolution
1 Hadi Khorsandi, one of Iran’s most popular satirical poets, has published a series of imitation Khomeini speeches that capture the late ayatollah’s style, or lack of it, to much comical effect.
2 nasrallah in televised address in Beirut, May 26, 2008. Account published by Asharq Alawsat, May 27, 2008.
Chapter 20: Six Centers of Power
1 Rafsanjani, interview with Japanese TV, Tokyo, June 11, 1985.
2 Rafsanjani, prayer sermon, Tehran, October 20, 1985.
3 Khamenehi, prayer sermon, Tehran, October 7, 1984.
Chapter 23: The “Nail” of the Imam
1 Khomeini meeting IRGC commanders in Jamaran on 4 Esfand 1360 (March 1981).
2 Interview with the monthly Shahrvand, Tehran, April 2008.
3 Other members were Muhammad-Ali Sayyed-nezhad, Muhammad Mirdamadi, Asghar Zadeh, and Muhammad Bitaraf.
4 Reported by Sayyed-nezhad in interview published by Peiknet website, May 2008.
Chapter 24: We Can!
1 Khamenehi, speaking in Shiraz, May 8, 2008, Iranian Students’ news Agency (ISNA).
Chapter 26: Pre-emptive War or Pre-emptive Surrender?
1 The Islamic Republic’s official Mehr news Agency, report from Rome, June 3, 2008.
2 Interview with the author in Kabul, november 2001.
Chapter 27: Conditions for Regime Change
1 Published on the Fararow website, May 28, 1981. Also published by Iran Press news.
2 The denial policy continues, however, on at least one issue: homosexuality. President Ahmadinejad maintains that there are no gays in Iran, although in the past two decades more than three hundred men have been hanged under Article 110 of the Penal Code of the Islamic Republic, which makes same-sex relations punishable by death.
Chapter 28: Repression and Resistance
1 Interview with the author in Brussels, June 2007.
2 Ibid.
3 Nimrooz Weekly, January 11, 2001.
4 Each year, half a million Iranians living on the coasts of the Persian Gulf are allowed to make visits of up to forty-eight hours to the United Arab Emirates to engage in border trade. This gives them an opportunity to have a look at the outside world.
5 In his splendid travelogue A Persian Odyssey, Ramin Yelda, an Iranian doctor living in Chicago, relates how surprised he was to find that the doors of the church where he had been baptized as a child in Kermanshah, western Iran, were closed to him. He had to find the priest and prove that he was not a Muslim seeking conversion in order to be allowed to enter a church that his family had attended for over a century.
6 Right Side news website, June 5, 2008.
Chapter 30: A Heaving Volcano
1 It is strange that some American “scholars” encourage this illusion. In an anti-American conference in Mash’had attended by Baseej soldiers on June 1, 2008, Abdul-Aziz Schedina, who was presented as “a leading American scholar and professor at the University of Virginia,” endorsed Ahmadinejad’s claim that the Hidden Imam was about to reappear. Reported by IRNA, June 2, 2008.
Index
Abasalti, Pari
Abbasi, Hassan
Abbasids
Abdallah
Abdallah, George Ibrahim
Abdi, Abbas
Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz (King)
Abdul-Mutallib
Abdul-Rahman ibn Muljem
Abraham
Abrahamian, Homer
Abu-Bakarah
Abu-Bakr as “evil,” and “Jewish conspiracy,”
Abu-Hamza
Abu-Hanifah
Abu-Hureirah
Abu-Ubaida bin al-Jarrah
Abyssinia
Achaemenids
Acheson, Dean
adultery standard of proof
Afghanistan cooperation in Dari language Hazara Shiites in Hizb Islami in Iranian war with Soviets in Taliban in and Treaty of Paris U.S. in women in
‘afiyah
AFL-CIO
African Union
Agha Muhammad Khan
Aghjari, Hashem
Ahangar (“Ironmonger”)
Ahl e Haqq
Ahmad, Jalal al-
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, xi and American weakness antinationalism apostasy law and Baseej biography and Bush candor of on “clash of civilizations,” at “convergence” conference economic policy education election of and embassy raid and ethnic unrest “exporting revolution,” and fascism and gender apartheid government stipend as governor of Ardebil on “Great Satan,” on Gulf states and Heideggerites and Hidden Imam (Mahdi) and Hojatieh Holocaust denial humble style and Iran-Iraq war and IRGC on Israel & Jews and Jamkaran and Janati and Japan and Kurds on labor unions and Latin America and Marxists as mayor of Tehran military spending missile program and “moral squads,” on mosque building as “nail” of Imam on “no gays,” and non-Aligned Movement and nuclear project and Obama original approach of and patronage jobs “permanent revolution,” as populist as presidential candidate protests against on ruling the world sayyed claim on “self-sufficiency,” and Soviets and student protests and Sunnis and Tahkim university purges as unknown Westernization worries and world mission
Ahrar, Ahmad
Ahvaz Liberation Front
Akhtari, Muhammad Hassan
Akhund of Swat
Ala’i, Abdul-Mun’em Saleh al-
Alawites
Albright, Madeleine
alcohol and jumhur
Alevis
Algeria Front for Islamic Salvation and Morocco national Liberation Army radicals in
Algerian national Liberation Front
Ali-Allahis
Ali ibn Abi-Talib (Caliph).and authentic Koran and Battle of the Camel conspiracy against (usurpation) and “Jewish conspiracies,” as Lion of Allah murder of and sayyeds
Allah-Karam, Reza
Alzahra University
Amir Kabit University
Amoco
Amuzegar, Cyrus
Anas ibn Malek
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
Angola
Ansar Hezballah
Aoun, Michel
apostasy
Aqazadeh, Ghulam-Reza
Arab conquest destructiveness of mercenaries in press-ganged armies resistance to
Arabic language and Arab conquest and calendar disappearance of gender in Iranian codification of in Israel and Khomei
ni and Koran Persian words in political terms restrictions on in schools time in
Arabs: as enemy restrictions on unrest among
Arab Socialist Party
Arafat, Yasser
Aram, Abbas
Araqi, Haji Mahdi
Ardakani, Reza Davari
Ardalan, Pari
Ardebili, Abdul-Karim Mussavi
Argentina Jewish massacre in
Aristotle
armed forces and conscription military budget missile project and Mossadeq regular army of shah and Supreme Guide see also Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; nuclear program