What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

Everyone Thought They Were Using Khomeini

by Iran Prism 11 min read

The Hands Under the Table

On April 30, 1983, Nureddin Kianouri appeared on Iranian national television. He was the First Secretary of the Tudeh Party — Iran’s oldest Marxist organization, founded in 1941. He was the grandson of a prominent constitutional-era cleric. He had studied architecture in Munich. He had taught at the Bauakademie in East Berlin. He was sixty-seven years old.1

He confessed to six betrayals: sharing military intelligence with the Soviet Union, building clandestine networks among military officers, organizing escapes for party members. Throughout the broadcast, he kept his hands hidden under the table. They had been broken during interrogation.

Years later, he told a UN Special Commissioner that he and his wife, Maryam Firouz, had been tortured into giving false confessions. He held up a badly set broken arm as evidence. His wife had difficulty hearing, swallowing, and sitting because of the beatings she had received.2

The Tudeh had supported every step that led to this moment. They had supported the hostage crisis. They had supported the Cultural Revolution that closed every university. They had supported the military campaign against the Kurds. They had supported the removal of President Banisadr. They had denounced Amnesty International’s calls to end summary executions as “blatant interference in Iranian affairs.” They had systematically informed on other leftist organizations — eliminating every potential ally, every buffer between themselves and the regime.3

Now it was their turn.

How did a coalition of liberals, Marxists, feminists, and clerics all end up in the same prison? The answer is not that revolutions devour their children — the standard framing that treats the outcome as inevitable chaos. Before you accept that framing, look at the sequence. What happened in Iran between 1979 and 1982 was not chaos. It was a planned elimination, carried out in precise order, and it was faster than the Bolsheviks.

The Sequence

The Islamic Republic eliminated its revolutionary allies in a specific order. Each faction was destroyed in turn, and each elimination required the acquiescence of those not yet targeted.

Liberals fell first. Mehdi Bazargan, the provisional prime minister, had no paramilitary forces, no media apparatus, no mass mobilization capacity. The National Democratic Front — which had organized a conference of Iranian nationalities more representative than the Assembly of Experts — was banned in August 1979 after Hezbollahi attacked its demonstration with rocks, clubs, chains, and iron bars. Ayandegan, Iran’s largest morning daily with 400,000 circulation, was permanently closed the same month. On November 4, 1979, students seized the American embassy. Three days later, the photograph of Bazargan shaking hands with Brzezinski at an Algiers conference was broadcast nationwide. Bazargan resigned on November 6. Khomeini boasted: “We reaped all the fruit of our undertaking — we defeated attempts by the liberals to take control of the machinery of state.”4

Kurds were second. Their demands were moderate: elected local councils, Kurdish-language education, economic development. They explicitly rejected separatism. Ghassemlou stated: “What the Kurdish people want is the provision and guarantee of their national rights in Iran, and not a separate Kurdistan.” On August 17, 1979, Khomeini declared jihad. Defense Minister Chamran led the assault with heavy artillery and F-4 fighter jets. Khalkhali personally sentenced eleven Kurdish prisoners to death after a thirty-minute trial in Sanandaj — the scene photographed by Jahangir Razmi in what became a Pulitzer Prize-winning image. Amnesty International estimated approximately 10,000 Kurds killed and 200,000 displaced. Ghassemlou was assassinated in 1989 — by Iranian negotiators during peace talks in Vienna.5

Banisadr was third. Elected in January 1980 with 75 percent of the vote, the Islamic Republic’s first president lasted seventeen months. The IRP-controlled parliament blocked his cabinet choices. The IRGC ignored his military orders. Khomeini banned both sides from public speeches — silencing Banisadr’s only weapon while leaving the IRP’s institutional power intact. The Majles impeached him on June 21, 1981: 177 to 1. One legislator — Salaheddin Bayani — spoke in his defense. On July 29, Banisadr was smuggled out of Iran aboard an Air Force Boeing 707 piloted by a sympathetic colonel.6

The MEK were fourth — and their armed revolt provided exactly the pretext the regime needed. On June 20, 1981, approximately 500,000 people demonstrated in Tehran against Banisadr’s removal. The IRGC fired into the crowds. The MEK responded with an escalating campaign of bombings and assassinations. On June 28, a bomb at IRP headquarters killed 74 senior officials — including Ayatollah Beheshti, four cabinet ministers, and 27 members of parliament. On August 30, a briefcase bomb killed President Rajai and Prime Minister Bahonar. The regime’s response was overwhelming: 2,665 documented executions in four months.7

The Tudeh were destroyed last — kept alive the longest because they were useful. They had actively informed on other leftist organizations. They had endorsed every purge. When intelligence from a KGB defector arrived via MI6 and CIA, the regime arrested the entire Tudeh leadership in February 1983. Over 10,000 members were detained. Fourteen Central Committee members died during interrogation.8

Each faction believed until the end that it was using Khomeini. The liberals believed they were channeling revolutionary energy into democratic institutions. The Left believed clerical rule was a transitional phase. The Kurds believed their moderate demands would be honored. Banisadr believed his electoral mandate was sovereign. Each discovered too late that it had been an instrument of someone else’s agenda.

The Numbers

It is important to separate what follows from the stories above, because statistics suppress the emotional reality rather than amplifying it. But the numbers must be stated.

Between 1979 and June 1981, Abrahamian documented 757 executions — mostly the Shah’s associates and early opposition. Then the MEK’s armed revolt began and the regime unleashed mass killing: 2,665 executions in August through November 1981 alone. The Rastyad Collective verified over 3,500 victims from June 1981 through March 1982, across 85 cities. By June 1985, the total reached 8,000 to 11,000.9

The youngest documented victim was Amrollah Kordi-Loo, age eleven. Ten percent of identified Tehran victims were minors. Tehran’s prosecutor, Asadollah Lajevardi — a former bazaar draper who became known as “the Butcher of Evin” — declared: “Even if a twelve-year-old child is found participating in armed demonstrations, he will be shot.” Ayatollah Gilani added: “By the Islamic canon, a nine-year-old girl is mature. So there is no difference for us between a nine-year-old girl and a forty-year-old man.”10

Evin Prison was designed for 320 inmates. It held 15,000.

The poet Saeed Soltanpour was arrested at his wedding ceremony and executed the following day.11

Sadegh Khalkhali, the revolutionary judge who oversaw mobile tribunals across the country, later stated: “I killed over 500 criminals close to the royal family… I feel no regret or guilt.”12

9,015 Mosques vs. 150 Offices

The honest assessment — and it costs something to state, given the courage of the people who fought for a different Iran — is that the secular opposition never had a structural chance.

The Left’s decision to ally with Khomeini was not pure naivety. SAVAK had killed hundreds of their members. The Shah’s intelligence apparatus had spent decades destroying every secular organization it could find. What it could not destroy was the mosque network — 9,015 mosques reaching every neighborhood and village, embedded in Shia religious practice, functionally impossible to shut down without shutting down religion itself.13

The Fedayin established 150 offices across Iran after the revolution. Their first rally drew 500,000 people. Their newspaper reached a circulation of 300,000. These were not negligible numbers. But set against 9,015 mosques, 1,500 revolutionary committees in Tehran alone, a cassette tape network that could distribute Khomeini’s speeches to the entire country within nine hours, and a bazaar that could fund the movement from its $3 billion in foreign exchange — the Left was outmatched sixty to one in organizational infrastructure.14

Think of the last time you joined a coalition — a political campaign, a community effort, a workplace initiative. Now imagine that the partner with sixty times your organizational reach had been planning to consume you from the beginning, and every step you took to prove your loyalty simply removed the last barriers protecting you.

No urban guerrilla movement of this era — not the Red Army Faction, not the Red Brigades, not the Tupamaros — achieved its revolutionary objectives through armed struggle alone. The Left’s real error was not tactical but conceptual: it believed clerical rule was a transitional phase, not an end state. Khomeini’s 1970 lectures, published as Islamic Government, had stated plainly: “If a worthy individual possessing knowledge of the law and justice arises and establishes a government, he will possess the same authority as the Prophet Muhammad in the administration of society.” The Left read this and concluded he didn’t mean it.15

The Bazaar’s Bill

The Tehran Grand Bazaar — more than ten kilometers of covered passages, 82 market sections, roughly three-quarters of Iran’s wholesale trade — bankrolled the revolution. The bazaaris chartered Khomeini’s Air France 747. Mohsen Rafiqdoust joined the Mo’talefeh as a teenager in the vegetable bazaar, drove Khomeini from the airport on February 1, 1979, and became the IRGC’s logistics chief.16

They expected to be the revolution’s beneficiaries. Instead, the bonyads consumed them.

The Foundation of the Oppressed — established by Khomeini’s decree on February 24, 1979 — inherited the Pahlavi Foundation’s approximately $3 billion in assets and expanded through confiscation to over $20 billion. The IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya grew to 812 registered companies and an estimated 800 front companies. Under Ahmadinejad, over $120 billion in state assets were transferred to IRGC-controlled entities. According to Iran’s own IRNA news agency, these foundations plus the IRGC now control 60 percent of Iran’s national wealth. None answers to parliament.17

Real GDP per capita fell 46 percent between 1976 and 1989. When the bazaaris protested, Khomeini offered his assessment: “I do not accept that any prudent individual can believe that the purpose of all these sacrifices was to have less expensive melons.”18

Merchant classes that enter revolutions without their own political ideology exit as subjects of whoever does have one.

”God’s Hidden Gift”

Saddam Hussein’s invasion on September 22, 1980 — expected to topple a weakened revolutionary state in weeks — instead completed Khomeini’s consolidation. Khomeini described the war as “God’s hidden gift.” It provided what no domestic policy could: a permanent justification for emergency measures, media control, economic rationing, IRGC expansion, and the equation of dissent with treason.19

The war transformed the IRGC from a 25,000-strong militia into a parallel military exceeding 350,000 that would never relinquish power. It compressed what might have been a decade of political consolidation into three years. After Iranian forces recaptured Khorramshahr in May 1982, Saddam proposed a ceasefire and full withdrawal. Khomeini refused. The war continued for six more years. Between 188,000 and 300,000 Iranians died.20

The Hands Under the Table

Return now to the television studio.

Fourteen members of the Tudeh Central Committee died during interrogation. Ehsan Tabari — the party’s chief ideologist, Iran’s foremost Marxist intellectual for four decades, fluent in seven or eight languages — suffered a stroke four days after his forced confession. He appeared on television at age sixty-seven, reading from notes because the stroke had impaired his speech, proclaiming that his entire life’s work had been “defective,” “damaging,” and “totally spurious.” When a prison warden asked him to deny the rumor that he had “cast himself into the role of a Galileo” — recanting outwardly while believing inwardly — Tabari gave not a clear denial but a long, convoluted response. He was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted. He died in prison on April 29, 1989. He was never freed.21

The intelligence that destroyed the Tudeh came from an unexpected source. Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB officer in Tehran, defected to MI6 in June 1982. British intelligence shared his debriefing with the CIA, which passed it to Tehran — part of the early Iran-Contra courtship. The Tower Commission confirmed it: “In 1983, the United States helped bring to the attention of Tehran the threat inherent in the extensive infiltration of the government by the communist Tudeh Party.” The authorization was likely made by Margaret Thatcher, Foreign Secretary Francis Pym, and the head of MI6, Colin Figures.22

Cold War enemies collaborated to destroy the Iranian Left.

A survivor from the Rah-e Kargar organization, testifying at the Hamid Nouri trial in Stockholm decades later, recounted what a prison official had told him: “If I’d seen your questionnaire a month ago, you would not be alive to ask for anything now.”23

The Bolsheviks needed five years and a civil war. Mao needed eight years. Castro accomplished it in three but against far weaker opposition. Khomeini accomplished it in thirty-six months — against armed guerrilla organizations, a Kurdish insurgency, a hostile superpower, and an invading neighbor — while maintaining a plausible democratic façade through elections whose outcomes were structurally predetermined.

The result was not a revolution betrayed. It was a revolution fulfilled — but only one man’s revolution, built on the silence of everyone else’s.

For the bait-and-switch that preceded the purge, see The Greatest Bait-and-Switch in Modern History. For the Left’s strategy that led to its own destruction, see The Left’s Fatal Miscalculation. For the merchants who funded the revolution, see The Bazaar’s Bill. For the guerrillas who died before the revolution arrived, see Cigarette-Paper Manuscripts.

Footnotes

  1. Kianouri’s biography from Wilson Center documents and multiple scholarly sources; television confession from broadcast records. ↩

  2. Kianouri’s UN testimony and Maryam Firouz’s condition from post-detention accounts and diplomatic reporting. ↩

  3. Tudeh support for regime actions documented in Abrahamian, Radical Islam; Amnesty International denunciation from Tudeh Party publications. ↩

  4. Liberal elimination sequence from Abrahamian and multiple scholarly sources; Khomeini quote from his speeches. ↩

  5. Kurdish demands and Ghassemlou quote from KDPI records; Khomeini’s jihad fatwa from August 17, 1979; Khalkhali’s Sanandaj trials documented in Razmi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph; Amnesty International casualty estimates. ↩

  6. Banisadr’s presidency from Abrahamian and multiple sources; 177-1 impeachment vote from parliamentary records; Bayani from Assembly transcripts. ↩

  7. MEK demonstrations, Hafte Tir bombing, and execution counts from Abrahamian; Rastyad Collective documentation. ↩

  8. Kuzichkin pipeline and Tudeh destruction from Tower Commission report and Abrahamian. ↩

  9. Execution statistics from Abrahamian, Radical Islam; Rastyad Collective verified documentation across 85 cities. ↩

  10. Kordi-Loo’s age from execution records; Lajevardi and Gilani quotes from published statements documented in Abrahamian. ↩

  11. Soltanpour from multiple documented accounts of post-revolutionary executions. ↩

  12. Khalkhali from his published memoirs. ↩

  13. Mosque count from multiple scholarly analyses; SAVAK’s destruction of secular organizations documented in Abrahamian and Milani. ↩

  14. Fedayin organizational data from party records; cassette network from Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). ↩

  15. Khomeini, Islamic Government (Hokumat-e Eslami), 1970 lectures; guerrilla movement comparisons from scholarly analysis. ↩

  16. Tehran Grand Bazaar statistics from Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Rafiqdoust from Mo’talefeh records. ↩

  17. Bonyad assets from Amuzegar and multiple scholarly sources; IRNA 60 percent figure from September 2019 report; Khatam al-Anbiya from economic analysis. ↩

  18. GDP per capita decline from World Bank data; Khomeini “melons” quote from his speeches. ↩

  19. Khomeini “God’s hidden gift” from documented speeches; war’s domestic utility analyzed in multiple scholarly sources. ↩

  20. IRGC growth from military analysis; Khorramshahr recapture and ceasefire refusal from multiple sources; casualty range from Kurzman’s demographic analysis and official records. ↩

  21. Tabari from Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions; “Galileo” exchange from prison records; death in prison from multiple sources. ↩

  22. Tower Commission quote from official report; Thatcher authorization from scholarly analysis of British intelligence policy. ↩

  23. Rah-e Kargar survivor testimony from Hamid Nouri trial, Stockholm District Court, 2021-2022. ↩