What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

The Greatest Bait-and-Switch in Modern History

by Iran Prism 13 min read

The Lunch Guest

During Ayatollah Khomeini’s house arrest in Tehran in 1963, General Hassan Pakravan came to lunch every week.

Pakravan was the head of SAVAK, the Shah’s intelligence service. He was also the man who had just saved Khomeini’s life. When Prime Minister Alam and SAVAK hardliners demanded execution for treason, Pakravan argued against it. He told the Shah that executing a cleric would create a martyr — that the population, much of it illiterate, still respected what the mullahs represented, even if they didn’t respect the mullahs themselves. The Shah refused three times. “No. No. No.” Pakravan persisted. The Shah relented: “All right. But how?”1

The solution was elegant. Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari — Iran’s most respected quietist cleric — agreed to declare Khomeini a marja al-taqlid, a source of emulation. This was the highest rank in Shia clerical hierarchy. A marja could not be executed without provoking a crisis that would threaten the regime itself.

So Pakravan saved Khomeini’s life. And then, every week, he came to lunch.

He described the man to his wife Fateme. “Very handsome, someone with extraordinary presence, a power of seduction and great charisma.” They discussed religion, philosophy, history. Pakravan found Khomeini “very, very, very ignorant” in history and philosophy. But something else struck him. “It was his ambition,” he told Fateme. “I couldn’t find out what kind of ambition, because he’s very secretive.” He paused. “It made my hair stand on end. It was frightening.”2

Fifteen years later, Khomeini returned to Iran as the leader of a revolution. Among his first acts was to establish revolutionary tribunals. On April 11, 1979, General Hassan Pakravan was brought before one. He was denied a lawyer. The charges were vague. A fellow inmate recalled that in the days before his execution, Pakravan smiled and said: “It’s funny.”3

132 Interviews, Zero Mentions

In October 1978, Iraq expelled Khomeini under pressure from the Shah. Kuwait refused him entry. Syria declined. An aide, Ebrahim Yazdi — a Houston-trained pharmacologist who had become the revolution’s English-language spokesman — suggested Paris. The communications infrastructure, Yazdi argued, was vastly superior.4

It was the Shah’s most catastrophic miscalculation. From a rented cottage in Neauphle-le-Château, a village of roughly a thousand people thirty kilometers west of Paris, Khomeini conducted the most effective deception campaign of the twentieth century.

Over four months, he gave 132 interviews — more than one per day — to the world’s press. In every one, he promised democracy.

To Reuters, October 26: “The foundation of our Islamic government is based on freedom of dialogue and will fight against any kind of censorship.”

To Der Spiegel, November 7: “Our future society will be a free society, and all elements of oppression, cruelty, and force will be destroyed.”

On women, December 7: “Women are free in the Islamic society and will, under no condition, be barred from universities, offices or Parliament.”

On personal power, November 7: “Neither my age nor my inclination and position would allow me” to occupy a government post. He told The Guardian nine days later: “I don’t want to have the power or the government in my hand.”

On human rights, October 30: “We want to act in accordance with the Declaration of Human Rights.”5

Not once — in 132 interviews, across four months, to dozens of international outlets — did he mention velayat-e faqih.

He had published the blueprint nine years earlier. In January and February 1970, Khomeini delivered nineteen lectures at the Sheikh Morteza Ansari Mosque in Najaf, Iraq, laying out a theory of absolute clerical rule. The lectures were published in 1971 as Hokumat-e Eslami — Islamic Government — and distributed through his underground network. The book’s core claim: a qualified Islamic jurist possesses “the same authority as the Prophet Muhammad in the administration of society.”6

Scholar Mohsen Kadivar documented that Khomeini “did not use the term ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’ in any public statement until the summer of 1979” — months after seizing power. Historian Ervand Abrahamian confirmed: in all of Khomeini’s “interviews, speeches, messages and fatwas” during the revolutionary period, “there is not a single reference to Velayat-e Faqih.”7

This was not carelessness. Khomeini told associates it was “necessary to observe the principles of taqiyya” — permissible dissimulation in Shia doctrine — regarding his governance theory. The concealment was deliberate and religiously justified.8

His own allies later confessed. Abolhassan Banisadr, who would become Iran’s first elected president, admitted in 2019 that he and his associates “fashioned or vetted the messages Khomeini delivered — based on what they were told Iranians wanted to hear.” Banisadr’s wife Ozra translated Velayat-e Faqih into French, later acknowledging she agreed despite knowing “in my heart of hearts” that Khomeini “had not evolved.”9

An Iranian memoirist captured the information asymmetry: “If only everyone had read his book, Islamic Government… perhaps we would have been alerted to his ideas. No one really paid attention. Who really cared about the teachings of an old man sitting in Najaf.”10

By late 1978, Khomeini had acquired a messianic aura. Millions of Iranians claimed to see his face in the full moon. He became the first and only Iranian cleric addressed as “Imam” — a title Shia Islam reserves for its twelve infallible leaders. The three Western-educated men managing his media operation — Banisadr from the Sorbonne, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh from Georgetown, Yazdi from Houston — presented to the world a democratic revolutionary. Behind them sat a man with a published blueprint for theocracy that none of his interviewers had read.11

The Draft That Disappeared

Here is where the deception becomes structural.

While still in Paris, Khomeini tasked Hassan Habibi — a French-educated jurist with a doctorate in law and sociology — with drafting a constitution. Habibi produced what scholars later recognized as a conventional democratic document: a strong Gaullist presidency modeled on the French Fifth Republic, an elected parliament, an independent judiciary, and a Guardian Council where Islamic jurists held a minority of seats. It contained no Supreme Leader. No velayat-e faqih. No special political role for the clergy. Apart from substituting a president for the Shah and inserting Islamic compatibility language, it “did not differ markedly from Iran’s 1906 constitution.”12

Khomeini approved it. He “actually approved the government’s draft constitution,” scholar Said Saffari documented, “and even suggested bypassing the Constituent Assembly and placing the draft before the people for an immediate vote.” The Revolutionary Council endorsed it unanimously.13

Then the draft was published for public comment. Over 3,250 critiques and alternative proposals poured in. And Khomeini changed course.

Secular nationalists, liberal democrats, and even Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari had insisted on a popularly elected constituent assembly rather than a direct referendum — wanting the democratic legitimacy of a full process. They got their wish. It destroyed them.

The clerical members of the Revolutionary Council, without consulting Prime Minister Bazargan, reduced the proposed assembly from roughly three hundred members to seventy-three. Khomeini poisoned the field, characterizing opposition candidates as “Westernized intellectuals, Marxists, and morally corrupt secular groups who did not believe in Islam.” The Islamic Republican Party — founded just two weeks after the revolution — exploited its mosque and seminary networks.14

The result: of seventy-three Assembly members, fifty-five were Shia clerics. Fifty of seventy-three were Khomeini loyalists. Turnout was just 51.7 percent. Twenty political groups and ethnic minority organizations boycotted entirely. The one Kurdish representative elected had his credentials rejected; his seat was left permanently vacant.15

Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti — the revolution’s organizational architect — chaired the Goals of the Constitution Committee, packed it with loyalists, and personally drafted Article 5, which enshrined the rule of a single faqih. The committee passed it in less than two weeks. The full Assembly vote: 53 in favor, 8 against, 5 abstentions.16

Ezzatollah Sahabi, a mechanical engineer and Freedom Movement member, mounted the most articulate opposition. His religious argument drew on the 1906 Constitutional Revolution: “Absolute rule belongs only to God and the infallible Imams; human beings cannot be under the absolute rule and subjection of anyone except them.” His practical argument was simpler: “The faqih has certain qualities which are needed, but not enough for a political leader in today’s society.”17

Khomeini ended the debate with a proclamation: “Velayat-e Faqih is not something created by the Assembly of Experts. It is something that God has ordained.”18

The Green Ballot

The constitution went to a referendum on December 2-3, 1979. The timing was not accidental.

Twenty-eight days earlier, militant students had seized the American embassy. Bazargan’s provisional government had resigned two days after the seizure. The Revolutionary Council — Khomeini’s loyalists — now managed the referendum. Militant students accused constitution opponents of “betraying the Revolution and collaborating with the U.S.” When Shariatmadari issued a fatwa against the constitution, students claimed embassy documents proved he “had received lavish support from the U.S.”19

Khomeini made the strategic utility of the hostage crisis explicit: “This action has many benefits… this has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty.”20

The ballots were color-coded: green for yes, red for no. There were no voting booths. Your vote was visible to everyone watching. On the eve of the referendum, Khomeini declared: “Those who will not vote tomorrow will help Americans and desecrate the martyrs.”21

The result: 99.5 percent approval. Imagine voting on your country’s constitution with no booth, your choice visible to every observer in the room, during a national hostage crisis — and being told that a “no” vote means you support the enemy. That was the December 1979 referendum.

But the number that matters is a different one. The March 1979 referendum — the vague “Islamic Republic, yes or no” vote — had drawn roughly twenty million voters. The December referendum drew almost five million fewer. A quarter of the electorate had quietly disappeared. Historian Ervand Abrahamian estimated nearly seventeen percent of the population opposed the constitution — a figure that could not express itself under conditions of color-coded, boothless voting during a hostage crisis.22

The devastating irony: Khomeini had originally offered to skip the Assembly entirely and put the secular Habibi draft directly to a referendum. The liberals had insisted on the full constituent process, believing it would produce a more democratic outcome. They demanded the process that destroyed them.

The People He Used

Revolutionary coalitions always involve strategic ambiguity. Different factions read different meanings into the same slogans — “Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic” meant something distinct to each group that chanted it. Some of Khomeini’s supporters genuinely shared his vision. The Persian Left’s decision to ally with him was a calculated bet, not naivety; they believed they could outmaneuver the clerics once the Shah was gone. And some of Khomeini’s early reforms — land redistribution to the rural poor, literacy campaigns — were genuine.23

But a pattern emerges from the revolution’s first years that is difficult to explain as anything other than systematic betrayal.

Pakravan saved Khomeini’s life in 1963 by arguing against his execution. Executed April 11, 1979. Denied a lawyer.

Shariatmadari elevated Khomeini to marja status — the act that made him politically untouchable and ultimately enabled his rise. After the revolution, Shariatmadari opposed velayat-e faqih, calling it incompatible with popular sovereignty. His house was attacked; a volunteer guard was shot dead. He was placed under house arrest. In 1982, using a confession extracted from the tortured Ghotbzadeh, the regime accused Shariatmadari of plotting a coup — an accusation Montazeri later confirmed in his memoirs was “untrue and concocted.” Shariatmadari was stripped of his Grand Ayatollah title — an act virtually unprecedented in Shia history. He died under house arrest in 1986. He was buried secretly, at night. A Grand Ayatollah who held a mourning ceremony for him was arrested and imprisoned for two and a half years.24

Ghotbzadeh managed the Paris media operation that made the revolution internationally legible. He had a “father-and-son” relationship with Khomeini. He translated Khomeini’s famous one-word response — “Hichi,” Nothing — when Peter Jennings asked how he felt returning to Iran. Ghotbzadeh “realized Khomeini’s true nature only after becoming foreign minister.” He began plotting against the regime. He was arrested, and his tortured confession was used to destroy Shariatmadari. He was executed by firing squad at Evin Prison on September 15, 1982. He was forty-six years old.25

Bazargan served as Prime Minister — the democratic face of the transition. Khomeini’s parallel structures rendered him powerless. He described his government as “a knife without blade.” He resigned after the embassy seizure. Khomeini later called the appointment “a mistake.”26

Banisadr was elected president with 75.7 percent of the vote. Within eighteen months, he was impeached. He fled France disguised as a woman.27

Scholar Gilles Kepel identified the pattern: “first exposing them to power, then sapping it away.” Each faction served its purpose — providing legitimacy, international credibility, organizational capacity — and was discarded once the clerical apparatus no longer needed it.

The Lunch Guest

In the days before his execution, Pakravan told a fellow prisoner: “It’s funny.”

The man who knew Khomeini’s ambition before anyone else — who saw it across a lunch table and felt his hair stand on end — could not bring himself to act on what he knew. He saved Khomeini’s life because he believed in restraint. He was killed because Khomeini did not.

Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, the supreme Shia authority who had enforced clerical quietism until his death in 1961, reportedly saw it too. According to accounts recalled by his followers, his deathbed warning was: “Follow anyone you like, except Khomeini. Following Khomeini shall lead you knee-deep in blood.”28

Today, the system Khomeini built through deception governs a country where only 19.5 percent of the population supports it. Eighty percent of Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic. Seventy-three percent want separation of religion and state. During the 2022 protests, university students tore down portraits of both Khomeini and Khamenei — the founder and his successor — and Iranians who remember the pre-revolutionary era showed the lowest support of any demographic.29

The people of Iran voted 98.2 percent for an “Islamic Republic” in March 1979. They almost certainly did not know what they were voting for. This is not speculation — it is documented, deliberate, systematic information asymmetry. The man who built the system published his blueprint and hid it. The men who made his deception possible were among his first victims.

Khomeini put it most clearly himself: “I have said something does not mean that I should be bound by my word.”30

The story of how the constitution was hijacked is told in The Constitution That Was Swapped. For the cassette tape network that gave the Islamists their insurmountable advantage, see The Tape Network. For the three men who saved Khomeini and were destroyed by him, see The Men Who Saved Khomeini.

Footnotes

  1. Fateme Pakravan, memoirs, Harvard Iranian Oral History Project, 1998. Pakravan’s arguments and the Shah’s response are corroborated by multiple Iranian officials. ↩

  2. Ibid. ↩

  3. Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (Thomas Dunne Books, 2000). Pakravan was executed on April 11, 1979. ↩

  4. Ebrahim Yazdi recommended Paris for its communications infrastructure. The Shah’s expulsion of Khomeini from Iraq to Paris was intended to isolate him further but instead gave him access to the world’s press. ↩

  5. Dated quotes from Khomeini’s Paris interviews: Reuters (Oct 26, 1978); Der Spiegel (Nov 7, 1978); Associated Press (Nov 7, 1978); The Guardian (Nov 16, 1978). Compiled from Baqer Moin’s biography and Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism (University of California Press, 1993). ↩

  6. Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih lectures were delivered January 21 to February 8, 1970, at the Sheikh Morteza Ansari Mosque in Najaf. Published as Hokumat-e Eslami (1971). Translation by Hamid Algar. ↩

  7. Mohsen Kadivar’s analysis of Khomeini’s five-stage political evolution; Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism. ↩

  8. The taqiyya justification is documented in multiple scholarly analyses of Khomeini’s rhetorical strategy during the Paris period. ↩

  9. Abolhassan Banisadr, Associated Press interview, 2019; Ozra Banisadr’s acknowledgment from biographical accounts. ↩

  10. Iranian memoirist quoted in Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah. ↩

  11. The messianic moon narrative is documented in multiple accounts of the revolutionary period. Charles Hirschkind’s anthropological research analyzes the emotional authority of Khomeini’s recorded voice. ↩

  12. NYU Globalex analysis of the Habibi draft; Encyclopaedia Iranica. ↩

  13. Said Saffari’s scholarly assessment; Encyclopaedia Iranica. The Revolutionary Council’s unanimous endorsement is documented in Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs (Basic Books, 1984). ↩

  14. The Islamic Republican Party was founded by Beheshti, Bahonar, Rafsanjani, Khamenei, and Mousavi-Ardabili approximately two weeks after the revolution. ↩

  15. Assembly composition from Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs; voter turnout from official Iranian electoral records; Kurdish representative (Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou) credentials rejection documented in constitutional scholarship. ↩

  16. Beheshti’s role and Article 5 drafting documented in Asghar Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran (I.B. Tauris, 1997); vote count from Assembly records. ↩

  17. Ezzatollah Sahabi’s arguments preserved in Assembly proceedings. ↩

  18. Khomeini’s statement to the Assembly of Experts. ↩

  19. Post-embassy seizure dynamics documented in David Farber, Taken Hostage (Princeton University Press, 2005); Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs. ↩

  20. Khomeini’s statement on the hostage crisis’s utility for the constitutional referendum. ↩

  21. Color-coded ballots and voting conditions documented in multiple scholarly accounts including Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982). ↩

  22. March 1979 referendum: ~20 million voters, 98.2% yes. December 1979: ~15.6 million voters, 99.5% yes. Abrahamian’s 17% opposition estimate. ↩

  23. Coalition dynamics analyzed in Misagh Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution (Rutgers University Press, 1989). ↩

  24. Shariatmadari’s persecution documented in Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs; Montazeri’s confirmation that the coup plot was fabricated from his published memoirs; Grand Ayatollah Ya’sub al-Din Rastgari’s imprisonment documented in clerical resistance records. ↩

  25. Ghotbzadeh’s execution and role documented in Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah; journalistic accounts of the Air France return flight. ↩

  26. Bazargan’s “knife without blade” self-description widely attributed; resignation November 6, 1979. ↩

  27. Banisadr elected January 1980 with 75.7% of the vote; impeached June 1981; fled July 1981. ↩

  28. Borujerdi’s deathbed warning documented in Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah, and corroborated by multiple seminary sources. ↩

  29. GAMAAN 2024-2025 surveys; convergent findings from Stasis Research Institute. ↩

  30. Khomeini’s statement documented in multiple scholarly analyses of his rhetorical evolution. ↩