The room was filled with over a hundred seasoned political professionals. They may have thought they had heard it all. But they had not heard this. Indeed, they could hardly believe it. This was no right-wing pundit speaking. This was no neoconservative policy wonk. This was a member of the ayatollah’s own family. This was the son of the ayatollah’s own firstborn son, Mostafa. And he had just become the Revolution’s most outspoken opponent.
The AEI speech was not the first time Hossein Khomeini had spoken out publicly against his family and the Revolution. He had actually been speaking out for years, and at the time was living not in Iran but in exile in Iraq. Just before coming to the States, he had given an interview on an Arabic television network in which he called the current Iranian regime “the world’s worst dictatorship” and argued that the mullahs in Iran were exploiting Islam “to continue their tyrannical rule.” What’s more, he called for “a democratic regime that does not make use of religion as a means of oppressing the people and strangling society” and insisted it was time “to separate the religion from the state.”408
But this was the first time the Defector in Chief had spoken out against the Iranian regime on American soil. “At the beginning, the first few years of the Revolution, I was involved in that process,” Khomeini, who was in his early twenties in 1979, explained. “However, about two years after the Revolution, I started questioning and doubting the practices and behavior of the Islamic Republic, especially in terms of the executions and pressures on the public. . . . At that time I still believed in the legitimacy of a theocratic regime. Yet my criticism was reflected in the papers, in the newspapers of the time, and I was somehow forced to retire from politics and devoted all my time to religious studies. . . . [In] the last few years, I’ve come to the belief that a theocratic regime, a religious government, is not compatible with Islamic tenets, because that should be established only after the reappearance of the absent [Twelfth] Imam.”409
This last sentence was a fascinating point, and one whose significance, I must admit, I did not understand properly at the time. I had not spent time studying the coming of the Twelfth Imam. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after all, had not yet emerged as the president of Iran, and no Shia Muslim leaders that I was aware of were talking openly about the “imminent” arrival of the Mahdi, much less about the apocalyptic implications of such a development. Like many in Washington, in the fall of 2003 I was focused mostly on the exciting liberation of Iraq and what this meant for the rest of the region.
But Hossein Khomeini was ahead of the curve. He had been thinking long and hard about Shia theology and trying to come to logical conclusions about what his beliefs meant for his own life and the lives of his countrymen.
In the process, he had come to two conclusions: (1) the Islamic Revolution had been an unmitigated disaster, crushing the lives and dreams of millions of Iranians; and (2) as he noted to the AEI crowd, “religion cannot mix with government in the absence of the Messiah.” That is, Khomeini believes that until the Mahdi comes and sets up his global caliphate, there is no place on earth for an Islamic government predicated on Sharia law.
Such a conclusion could have led him into Ahmadinejad’s camp. Hossein Khomeini could have become a Radical, convinced it was his God-given mission in life to “hasten” the coming of the Mahdi by launching a genocidal jihad against the West. Instead, he concluded—as Thomas Jefferson did—that in the absence of a “perfect” government, a representational government with a built-in system of checks and balances was better than a violent dictatorship by far.
“The Iranian People Want Democracy”
“The Iranian people have become tired, fatigued, after . . . years of deprivation and suppression,” Khomeini noted. “They have been deprived of the basic means of life. . . . They are not very hopeful. They’re frustrated. They cannot come to the streets and fight the regime. . . . [But] we cannot remain silent and watch the further destruction of Iran and Iranian people. We cannot simply watch the young generation that is under tremendous pressure. . . . They have lost hope. They’re all saddened. They are all melancholic, and in a sense, it’s a . . . depressed generation.”410
It was time, he insisted, for a new Iranian Revolution, one led by Reformers rather than Radicals. “Today, [the] Iranian people again want democracy; they want freedom,” Khomeini explained. “Democracy is compatible with all the basic values of Shiism and Islamic law. . . . [The] establishment of freedom and democracy in Islamic countries is the guarantee of the international peace. It is the guarantee of security of the world. It’s the guarantee that Americans and the Europeans—especially Americans—could live in peace and security in their own countries.”
The big question, he said, was who would lead this new Revolution. “At the present time, the question is how we can get to democracy and freedom in our communities in the Middle East. Our nation is ready, but it cannot have any kind of activity because there is no leadership.”
The event at which Khomeini was speaking had been organized by Michael Ledeen, then a resident scholar on Iranian issues at AEI and coauthor (with William Lewis) of Debacle: The American Failure in Iran and later The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction. When I met with Ledeen in September 2008, I asked him how he had persuaded Khomeini to deliver such a landmark address just blocks from the White House.
“He showed up in Baghdad, and somebody in Baghdad with our armed forces told me about it and got me in touch with Khomeini,” Ledeen told me. “It was just after the liberation of Iraq, and Khomeini had apparently told an American military officer, ‘It’s wonderful to be in a free country!’” Ledeen immediately followed up and contacted the Khomeini heir. “He intended to come to the U.S.,” Ledeen recalled. “I told him we’d be delighted to host him if and when he came.”411
After the address, Ledeen moderated a question-and-answer session. Khomeini was asked about the growing desire shared by many Iranians for a U.S.-led liberation of his country and whether he might support such a move. It was a question he might easily have dodged or even vehemently resisted, saying the last thing Iran needed was another “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Instead, he said carefully, deliberately, “One should think how deep the problem and the pressures are in Iran on the Iranian people, that there are so many of them who in fact crave for some sort of foreign intervention to get rid of this calamity.” The response was diplomatic. It was nuanced. But it certainly was not a “no.”
One guest at the event then asked the question more directly. “We don’t have a tradition of four o’clock tea in the U.S., but if you were to be invited to the White House and you had a half-hour chat with the president of the United States, what, specifically, would you ask the president . . . to do to free your country?”
Khomeini considered that for a moment and then replied more directly as well: “I [would] ask the president to take the question of democracy, not only in the Middle East but especially in Iran, very seriously. As Churchill mobilized the laid-back British population against Hitler, the United States also could mobilize American public opinion for the freedom of Iranians.”
It was a striking moment. Here was a member of the Khomeini family diplomatically but pointedly urging President Bush to mobilize the American people to support “regime change” in Tehran much as Prime Minister Winston Churchill once enlisted the British people to support “regime change” in Berlin.
But the Bush administration did not respond. The president occasionally spoke of his solidarity with the people of Iran, but he did little substantively to back up what little he said. Their hands full with the growing insurgency in Iraq, neither the State Department nor the Pentagon pursued any significant strategy to strengthen democratic opposition inside Iran, and they certainly did not launch military operations to overthrow the mullahs or build an international coalition to do so. Indeed, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice essentially turned over the Iran portfolio to the Europeans.412
“Strength Will
Not Be Obtained through the Bomb”
Three years later, after watching the rise of Ahmadinejad and hearing the Iranian president’s murderous, messianic rants—and seeing the U.S. doing nothing to stop him—Hossein Khomeini stepped up his criticisms. He unleashed another major salvo at the regime and the Revolution led by his family. He was no longer being polite or diplomatic. Rather, during an interview from Qom, Iran, with Al Arabiyah, the Dubai-based satellite television network, Khomeini called on the U.S. to overthrow Ahmadinejad’s regime and liberate his country once and for all.
“Freedom must come to Iran in any possible way, whether through internal or external developments,” Khomeini insisted when asked if he supported a U.S. military invasion of Iran. “If you were a prisoner, what would you do? I want someone to break the prison [doors open].”413
Coming from someone who as a teenager used to join millions of fellow Shia Muslims on the streets of Tehran shouting, “Death to America!” at his grandfather’s rallies, these were tough words indeed. But Khomeini made no apologies. For him, becoming a Reformer was an act of moral obligation to his country and especially to the children of Iran.
“My grandfather’s Revolution has devoured its children and has strayed from its course,” Khomeini said. And making it clear how strongly he opposed Ahmadinejad’s feverish efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, he noted, “Iran will gain real power if freedom and democracy develop there. Strength will not be obtained through weapons and the Bomb.”
He described the Iranian regime under the mullahs as “a dictatorship of clerics who control every aspect of life.” He was particularly critical of the treatment of women. “The Iranian regime shackles women by forcing [them to wear] the hijab in its ugliest form—namely a black [veil]. . . . Girls coming out of schools or out of the university [look] depressingly somber.”
Then, underscoring just how completely he had broken with the Radicals, the grandson of the ayatollah revealed for the first time to the people of the Muslim world that when he visited the United States he had had a personal meeting with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran. You could almost feel the air being sucked out of the lungs of Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah Khamenei; both men regard the shah and his entire family as traitors and apostates.
Based in suburban Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., Reza Pahlavi has emerged over the past decade or so as a leading critic of the Radicals in his country and a staunch advocate of ending the mullahs’ reign of terror and ushering in a new era of Jeffersonian democracy in the country of his birth. In 2002, Pahlavi published a manifesto entitled Winds of Change: The Future of Democracy in Iran. He also created a Web site (www.rezapahlavi.org) further explaining his case for democracy. He has traveled all over the U.S. and the world, trying to build a movement of fellow Reformers ready to overthrow the mullahs, though he has opposed U.S. military intervention as forcefully as Hossein Khomeini has advocated it. Not every Iranian Reformer has been convinced that Pahlavi is necessarily the man to lead the next Revolution, but he is certainly a key figure in the movement.
And now the grandson of the ayatollah was publicly describing a trip he had taken halfway around the world to meet the son of the shah, praising the common cause that had brought the two men together despite their histories and political differences.
It was “an ordinary meeting with a man who shares my suffering,” Khomeini told the viewers of Al Arabiyah. “The [cause] of our suffering is one and the same, namely tyranny, though each of us has his own [political] orientation.”414
Nevertheless, the Bush administration—so forceful and effective in bringing regime change to Afghanistan and Iraq—did nothing to help the people of Iran find their freedom.
The Tip of the Iceberg
By the time Hossein Khomeini made the shocking announcement about his meeting with Reza Pahlavi, the grandson of the ayatollah had become one of the most prominent defectors from the clutch of the Iranian Radicals, and he was becoming more so with each successive speech and interview. And he was not alone. Today, a growing number of Iranians—and Muslims throughout the region—are choosing to risk their lives to oppose the Radicals and pursue an entirely different kind of government and way of life.
There are many reasons for dissent, of course, but if I had to sum those reasons up, I would say—based on interviewing hundreds of Muslim dissidents over the years and reading scores of their books, speeches, and blogs—that such dissidents and defectors feel betrayed. In their eyes, the Radicals made them and their family members and their friends and their countrymen a set of promises, and they have betrayed those promises in the worst possible way. Extremist, fundamentalist Islam did not bring about more freedom, more opportunity, and more hope and joy. Rather, the Radicals unleashed such horrific violence and oppression and psychotic behavior on their people that millions of Muslims were shocked into the realization that if they did not fight for change, they would drown in their own sorrow, if not their own blood.
Consider, for example, the case of Ali Rez Asgari. He was once Iran’s deputy defense minister under President Khatami. He also once commanded the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But sometime in 2002 or 2003, he decided he could not take it any longer. He hated where the Ayatollah Khamenei was taking his country. He felt betrayed by the leaders of the Revolution. He saw no hope for reform and no end to Iran’s support for violence against innocent civilians throughout the region and the world. So he began to spy on his country. He began turning over highly classified documents to Western intelligence agencies. And then, fearful of being found out, he finally defected to the West, most likely to the U.S., in 2007.
Ever since, sources say, he has been spilling his guts, telling intelligence officials everything he knows. Some published reports in the Middle East say Asgari even provided Israel with the key information they needed to attack and destroy a Syrian nuclear facility in the fall of 2007. What was particularly stunning about Asgari’s defection was that Israeli intelligence believes he helped found and build Hezbollah in Lebanon at the direction of the Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s.415
Is Asgari a Jeffersonian democrat? I do not know. But his defection is further evidence of how even the true believers in the Islamic Revolution are turning their backs and searching for change.
Or consider the case of Hamid Reza Zakiri. Born in 1962, Zakiri was just seventeen when the Revolution unfolded but soon became a true believer. He entered the military as the Iran-Iraq War was beginning and quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming the director of intelligence for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and later a senior intelligence official in the Security Ministry under President Khatami.
But in 2003, Zakiri had had enough. Having seen what the Radicals were really about—what they believed and how they behaved—he defected to the West and began spilling his nation’s secrets, including the fact that Iran was working closely with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program and that al Qaeda had asked Iran for help in the 9/11 attacks. “Did you know about the plans to attack the World Trade Center in New York?” Zakiri was asked during an on-the-record interview by Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a London-based Saudi daily, in 2003. “No,” the defector replied, “but we had in our headquarters models of the two towers [of the World Trade Center], the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA building at Langley.”
Zakiri explained that a top Hezbollah operative had come to Iran before September 2001 and delivered a letter to senior Iranian intelligence officials from Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. The letter said, “We need your help to carry out a most important mission in the land of the ‘Great Satan.’” The request was denied, but Zakiri described in detail how Iran assisted al Qaeda and other Sunni jihadist groups in many other ways.416
Consider, too, the case of Ahmad Rezai, an Iranian who escaped to the United States in the summer of 1998, requesting political asylum after becoming horrified by what he had seen in his home country. Rezai, however, was no ordinary defector. He was t
he son of General Mohsen Rezai, the former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and a senior advisor to the Ayatollah Khamenei. Ahmad himself once served in the IRGC, Iran’s elite fighting force, and later told U.S. intelligence officials that Iran was complicit in numerous terrorist attacks around the world, including the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.417
“We don’t believe in the Iranian government,” Rezai, then in his early twenties, said during a 1999 interview on the Voice of America radio network. “We believe that the Islamic Republic is a terrorist regime, the biggest terrorist government in the world. We don’t want to be considered terrorists or to have anything to do with terrorism. We want to be free. We want to have a good life, democracy, freedom, but we have no freedom in Iran. . . . The Islamic Republic has taken our lives and sacrificed us to their goals. . . . They want us to work for them, to carry out their programs, their terrorist jobs around the world. They want to control Israel. They want to control Muslim countries. They want to have power over the world like Hitler.”418
Concluded the young defector: “Islam is not popular in Iran. No young people want to be Muslims today, not when they see what this regime does in the name of Islam.”
Such stories are just the tip of the iceberg. Scores of defectors and political asylum seekers have fled Iran over the past decade. Not all are made public, of course. And not all are Jeffersonian democrats. But all feel betrayed by their government and its tyrannical ideology and criminal behavior. They have all had front-row seats to the nightmare, and the fact that they have risked their lives to find freedom in the West—usually in the United States—is a testament to how desperate they feel about the regime in Iran.419
Inside the Revolution Page 27