Cigarette-Paper Manuscripts

The Cigarette Papers

Inside Evin Prison, Bijan Jazani wrote. He had been arrested in 1968 — three years before the guerrilla movement he helped create launched its first operation. The intellectual father of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, he composed his most important theoretical works in a cell, including Armed Struggle: The Road to the Mobilization of the Masses and Thirty-Year History of Iran.¹

The manuscripts were written on cigarette papers, sealed with candle wax, and passed to visiting family members or carried by transferring prisoners. From inside the Shah’s most secure political prison, Jazani was conducting a debate about the future of Iran with comrades he could not see, using a writing surface smaller than a playing card.²

His argument was prescient — and ignored. Armed action, he insisted, was an initial tactic subordinate to the primary task of building mass political organizations. The objective conditions for revolution were not yet ripe. His warning was specific: “When the total burden of fighting the enemy falls upon groups of vanguards, there is a danger” of permanent isolation from the masses.³

The more dramatic thesis won. Masoud Ahmadzadeh — whose manifesto Armed Struggle: Both Strategy and Tactic argued that guerrilla action would itself create revolutionary conditions — set the movement’s course. Ahmadzadeh had adopted Debray’s metaphor of the “little motor” (guerrilla force) setting the “big motor” (popular revolution) in motion. By 1976, catastrophic losses had forced the survivors to adopt Jazani’s approach. By then, Jazani was dead.⁴

On April 19, 1975, SAVAK agents took Jazani and eight other political prisoners — seven Fedayin, two MEK members — from Evin. They were driven to the hills above the prison. Blindfolded and handcuffed, they were machine-gunned. The regime announced they had been shot trying to escape. The doctor who examined the corpses noted that the bullets had entered through the chest, not the back.⁵

The Profile

Of the 341 guerrillas who died between February 1971 and October 1977, occupational data exists for 306. The demographic profile is extraordinary.

One hundred and thirty-nine were college students. Thirty-six were engineers. Twenty-seven were teachers. Twenty were office employees. Twenty were other professionals. Fourteen were housewives married to university graduates. Eight were high school students. Six were doctors. Total intelligentsia: 91.5 percent.⁶

Only 22 were factory workers. Three were shopkeepers. One was a clergyman.

Only ten of 306 were over age thirty-five at the time of death. Thirty-nine were women.⁷

Ervand Abrahamian, who compiled these figures, noted: “The growth of the guerrilla movement in no way correlated with any decline in the economy. On the contrary, the movement developed at a time of middle-class prosperity.” They acted, he wrote, from “social, moral and political indignation, rather than economic deprivation.”⁸

These were not the wretched of the earth. They were the educated, the privileged, the people with the most to lose. They chose to fight because they believed that a country where SAVAK tortured students and the Shah’s court drained the treasury was intolerable — even if their own lives within that system were comfortable.

Five Years, One Rooftop

Hamid Ashraf co-founded the Jazani-Zarifi group at Tehran University around 1963. He served as the liaison between the mountain and city cells during the preparations for Siahkal — the February 1971 gendarmerie attack that launched the guerrilla movement. After the destruction of the Ahmadzadeh-Pouyan group in 1971-73, Ashraf became SAVAK’s most wanted target.⁹

He eluded them for five years. The Shah took it personally.

Ashraf’s own explanation of the guerrilla path carried a clarity that his movement’s theorists sometimes lacked: “After much deliberation we reached the conclusion that it was impossible to work among the masses and create large organizations since the police had penetrated all sectors of society.”¹⁰

On June 29, 1976, hundreds of SAVAK agents backed by helicopters surrounded a safe house in south Tehran. A four-hour gun battle ended with Ashraf shot dead on the roof. Neither he nor any of his comrades were captured alive.¹¹

After his death, the Fedayin “only managed to survive with minimal activities until the 1978-1979 revolution.” A Fedayin leader later admitted: “It is true that in 1976 most of our cadres were killed, and it took two years to build up our organization again.”¹²

The Woman Who Showed No Reaction

Ashraf Dehghani — from the Tabriz group, connected to the literary circle of Samad Behrangi, the only woman on the Fedayin Central Committee — was arrested in May 1971. SAVAK subjected her to electric shock and placed a snake on her body. She showed no reaction.¹³

In March 1973, she escaped from Qasr Prison disguised in a chador, coordinating with a fellow prisoner under the pretext of Nowruz holiday customs, and blended into the crowd of visitors at the main gate. She rejoined the guerrillas and published Torture and Resistance in Iran, a memoir that documented how SAVAK’s treatment of women prisoners varied by social class.¹⁴

Consider what it means that a student in her twenties endured interrogation techniques designed to break professional subjects — and then walked out of a maximum-security prison on a holiday.

The Operation That Failed and Changed Everything

On the morning of February 8, 1971, nine guerrillas attacked a gendarmerie post at Siahkal, a small town in southeastern Gilan province. Their commander, Ali Akbar Safai Farahani, had returned from training with Palestinian Fatah in Lebanon, where he had risen to commander of northern fronts and participated in armed operations. The group commandeered a Ford minibus, stormed the station, and confiscated nine rifles and machine guns. The deputy commander of the gendarmerie was killed.¹⁵

The operation failed in its immediate objective — a prisoner they intended to free had already been transferred to another facility twenty kilometers away. Within three weeks, all guerrillas were captured or killed. Ten were executed. Safai Farahani died under torture without revealing information about other cells.¹⁶

The Shah’s response revealed more than the attack itself. General Oveisi personally led the counter-operations. The Shah’s brother Gholamreza Pahlavi headed the expeditionary force. Helicopters, commandos, and army units converged on the forests to hunt nine students with rifles. When newspapers published mugshots — clean-shaven, tie-wearing, educated young men — “a generation saw reflections of itself.”¹⁷

Siahkal became the “Iranian Moncada” — a failed attack that transformed the political landscape. As one former activist recalled: “Before the Siahkal armed uprising, ‘Yes, your majesty!’ was the only answer to the Shah — but they showed it was possible to stand up to the Shah and hit back.”¹⁸

SAVAK’s Success Was SAVAK’s Failure

By 1977, SAVAK had achieved a remarkable operational victory. It had “paralyzed all the organized anti-regime groups, ranging from the left to the right.” The Fedayin’s military commander was dead. Its intellectual founder was dead. Most of its cadres were dead, imprisoned, or in exile. The MEK had been similarly gutted — 90 percent of its cadres swept up in a single coordinated raid in August-September 1971.¹⁹

SAVAK’s counter-guerrilla apparatus — the Third Directorate under Parviz Sabeti, with approximately 5,300 full-time agents and tens of thousands of informers — was designed to destroy secular organizations. What it could not suppress was the mosque network. Eight thousand mosques reaching every neighborhood and village, embedded in Shia religious practice, functionally impossible to shut down. Right-wing Muslim opposition had been “off limits” even to CIA agents in Iran.²⁰

By destroying every secular alternative, SAVAK inadvertently ensured that when the revolution came, the only surviving organizational infrastructure belonged to the clerics.

The guerrilla movements were, in the balanced scholarly assessment, “culturally significant but organizationally irrelevant to the revolution’s outcome.” Not a single urban guerrilla movement of this era — not Germany’s Red Army Faction with its 20 to 30 active members, not Italy’s Red Brigades with 400 to 500 — achieved its stated revolutionary objectives through armed struggle alone.²¹

But the guerrillas accomplished something their theoretical frameworks never predicted. They demonstrated that resistance was possible. They created a mythology of sacrifice that the revolution later appropriated. And by dying — 341 of them, 91.5 percent from the intelligentsia — they ensured that the secular alternative to theocracy had no leaders, no organizations, and no institutional memory when the moment finally arrived.

The revolution that consumed the Shah was built on the ruins of the people who had been fighting him longest.

This article is part of Everyone Thought They Were Using Khomeini. For the Left’s betrayal after the revolution, see The Left’s Fatal Miscalculation. For the bazaar that financed it all, see The Bazaar’s Bill.

Jazani’s background and intellectual role from Abrahamian, “The Guerrilla Movement in Iran, 1963-1977,” MERIP Reports (1980), and OIPFG organizational history. ↩
Cigarette-paper manuscripts from multiple scholarly accounts of Fedayin history. ↩
Jazani’s prescient warning from his prison writings, smuggled and later published. ↩
Ahmadzadeh’s thesis from his 1970 manifesto; Debray’s “little motor” metaphor; shift to Jazani’s approach documented in 1980 MERIP interview. ↩
Jazani’s murder from SAVAK agent testimony at post-revolution trial; forensic evidence from examining doctor’s report. ↩
Demographic data from Abrahamian, “The Guerrilla Movement in Iran, 1963-1977,” MERIP Reports (1980). ↩
Age and gender data from Abrahamian’s analysis. ↩
Abrahamian quotes from his MERIP Reports analysis of guerrilla demographics. ↩
Ashraf’s background from OIPFG organizational history and multiple scholarly sources. ↩
Ashraf quote from guerrilla movement publications. ↩
Ashraf’s death from SAVAK operational records and multiple scholarly accounts. ↩
Fedayin leader admission from 1980 MERIP interview with surviving leadership. ↩
Dehghani’s torture from her memoir Torture and Resistance in Iran and Amnesty International documentation. ↩
Dehghani’s escape from her published account; class analysis from her memoir. ↩
Siahkal attack from multiple scholarly reconstructions; Safai Farahani’s Palestinian training from guerrilla movement history. ↩
Post-attack response and Safai Farahani’s death under torture from military tribunal records. ↩
Shah’s response and newspaper photographs from diplomatic cables and contemporary press accounts. ↩
Ali Ranjbar Yeganeh quote from published interviews. ↩
SAVAK operational success from Mohsen Milani and multiple scholarly assessments; MEK raid from organizational records. ↩
SAVAK limitations and mosque network from Stephen Zunes, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict; CIA restrictions from intelligence analysis. ↩
Comparative guerrilla scales and scholarly assessment from Abrahamian and Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Guerrilla Odyssey (Syracuse University Press, 2010). ↩