Chapter Sixteen

The Defector

A Khomeini heir’s stunning call for democracy and reform

On September 26, 2003, the grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini—a highly respected Shia cleric in his own right—calmly stood up before an audience in Washington, D.C. He looked out over the crowd, took a deep breath, and then, speaking through an interpreter, denounced the Islamic Revolution, said it was time to usher in a new era of freedom and democracy in his country, and urged the Bush administration to mobilize the American people to overthrow the Iranian regime much as Winston Churchill had mobilized the British to destroy Adolf Hitler.

“As you know, the history of Iran in the nineteenth century was the history of a country under dictatorship,” Hossein Khomeini, then forty-four, told the gathering at the American Enterprise Institute, just blocks from the White House. “But the Revolution and Mr. Khomeini promised to change the Iranian situation and bring democracy to Iran. But, unfortunately, as things turned out, Iran again became . . . [an] even worse dictatorship after the Revolution.”407

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 the 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

The Despondent

Nearly 70 million people live in Iran today. Seven in ten are young—under the age of thirty. Nearly one in four Iranians are under fifteen.420 They do not remember the heady days of the Revolution in 1979. They never experienced the thrill of overthrowing the shah. All they know are the broken promises. The ayatollahs pledged to their parents a society filled with hope, growth, and opportunity. Today, what they have instead is despair, unemployment, inflation, and chronic poverty. The vast majority of Iranians cannot defect, of course. Instead, they find themselves trapped and despondent.

Three decades after the Revolution, and despite the fact that Iran is sitting on a sea of oil and natural gas which should make for a robust export-driven economy, roughly a quarter of Iran’s eligible workforce—about 6.5 million people—cannot find a job, though the government officially acknowledges an unemployment rate of only about 10 percent.421 Inflation in 2008, meanwhile, hovered around 30 percent, making it difficult even for those with a job to keep up with the cost of essential goods and services.422 At least one in five Iranians live below the poverty level, and 5 million Iranians survive on less than two dollars a day, according to the CIA and the U.N.423

Some Iranians, however, say that the situation is far worse. “Ninety percent of the population are living under the poverty level, and only ten percent of the people have access to social services provided by the government,” said Mohammad Abbaspour, a member of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) who serves on the Social Affairs Committee, in 2005.424425

As the Revolution failed to deliver on its promises, drug use—particularly among young people—skyrocketed year after year. Despite the fact that every Iranian government beginning with Khomeini’s has cracked down on illegal drugs, today there are more than 4 million drug addicts in Iran, 11 million drug users, and half a million drug dealers. According to one top Iranian drug enforcement official, “every three minutes, one person in society becomes addicted to drugs.”426

According to the U.N.’s 2007 World Drug Report, Iran has the highest proportion of opium and heroin addicts on the entire planet—2.8 percent of the population. No other country is even close; Afghanistan comes in second at 1.4 percent.427 The director of the Iranian National Center for Addiction Studies told the Washington Post in 2005 that 20 percent of Iran’s adult population is “somehow involved in drug abuse,” while an Iranian doctor who treats drug abuse told the Post that 68 percent of his patients started using drugs before age twenty and said bluntly, “We have despair.”428

Worst of all, experts say Iran has not reached the peak of the drug addiction epidemic.429 Said Reza Sarami, a top Iranian antinarcotics official: “If nothing is done to reduce this increase in drug users, we will have some nine million addicts in less than twenty years,” more than double the 4 million addicts Iran has now.430

The Disgusted

Despair is one response for those who cannot defect.

Another is sheer anger and disgust. Tens of millions of Iranians are furious at the Radicals. Individually, they have no political power. But they are increasingly repulsed by the jihadists and particularly by the Muslim-on-Muslim violence they see being perpetrated in Iran, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Sudan, and in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks from Casablanca to Istanbul to Riyadh. As a result, they are listening carefully to whatever Reformers they can find on the radio, on satellite television, and on the Internet, and they are moving steadily into the Reformer camp.

While I was researching this book, I interviewed a senior official working for a Western intelligence agency. This man spent many years in Iran and was once his agency’s station chief in Tehran. The facts he shared with me about the magnitude of the Iranian leadership’s cruelty against their own people floored me. But such statistics are certainly no secret to Iranians trapped inside the country or to the estimated 5 million Iranians who live in exile. Consider the following:

• Iran has executed more than 120,000 of its citizens on political grounds since 1979, including pregnant women, elderly women, and schoolchildren.

• Iran massacred 30,000 political prisoners in 1988 alone.

• Iran’s secret police employ 170 forms of physical and psychological torture.

• The regime sends some 800,000 Iranians to prison every year.

• The regime employs stoning; public hangings; eye gouging; amputation of fingers, hands, and legs; beheading; and flogging in public as “punishment” for disobedience.

• Iran’s government has engaged in no fewer than 450 terrorist operations around the world, including bombings, hijacking, abductions, and assassinations.

• At least eighty newspapers and periodicals have been closed down by the regime since April 2000, dozens of Iranians journalists are in jail, and some have called Iran “the world’s biggest prison for journalists.”

• Iran has the highest suicide rate in the world (200 fatal suicide attempts for every 100,000 people).

• Some 1,500 Iranians flee the country every day.431

With a burning desire to speak out against such atrocities—but with few means to talk to each other, much less the outside world—“the Disgusted” in Iran have turned to blogging. Today, there are at least eighty thousand Iranian blogs on the World Wide Web, electronic personal journals in which people write daily, and sometimes hourly, entries about their thoughts, feelings, political views, and the issues of the day. Farsi is actually the third most popular language on the Internet, after English and Mandarin Chinese.432

To scan such Farsi blogs is to take the temperature of the molten anger building up pressure underneath the regime in Tehran and threatening to explode like a volcano. Consider a sampling from a half dozen different Iranian bloggers:

“I [expletive deleted] the whole of Hezbollah [party of Allah] . . . and your distorted Islam and its ideology that you use to diminish a human being through torture. . . . This generation [of young people] finally . . . realize[s] what sort of hole it’s in. . . . People put an ayatollah and the clergy on the same level as pimps and thugs.”

“In my life there have been times when, consumed with rage, I have felt infinite helplessness and loss . . . a time when you feel that an injustice is crushing your mind. . . . You want to scream and shout and all you can see is the sneering face of your enemy . . . an opponent who seems only to get turned on even more at the spectre of your wet eyes and red cheeks. . . . [These are] times when you feel that God must feel ashamed to have created man.”

“I have lived for 27 years . . . under revolution, repression, assassinations, hangings, and war. . . . My youth and childhood passed away during bombings . . . gazing at the trembling hands of my elders. . . . Sometimes I think this place is the land cursed by God.”

“If only those Muslim idiots in our neighboring countries knew about our failed experiment with an Islamic government they would come to their senses, too. . . . [The Revolution] is finished . . . and when these mullahs are dethroned . . . it will be like the Berlin Wall coming down. . . . Soon we will be rid of them. . . . A little patience . . . our dawn is near.”

“For me the most shocking aspect of 9/11 was that this was not some lone gunman but a group of people who voluntarily colluded in this evil act. . . . Didn’t any of those involved have moments of sanity and say to themselves: ‘What we are doing is pure evil’? . . . But it’s no longer just 9/11. We are seeing so many acts of pure evil around the world committed by Muslims. . . . I have no doubt about the evil nature of our rulers and their ability to perpetrate acts of pure wickedness. . . . I cannot stop feeling an enormous sense of shame, guilt, and helplessness.”

“I keep a weblog so that I can breathe in this suffocating air. . . . In a society where one is taken to [prison] for the mere crime of thinking, I write so as not to be lost in despair . . . so that I feel that I am somewhere where my calls for justice can be uttered. . . . I write a weblog so that I can shout, cry, and laugh, and do the things that they have taken away from me in Iran today.”433

It is not just millions of Iranians who are despondent and disgusted by the ideas and the acts of the Radicals. Hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world feel similarly.

Consider, for example, an intriguing trend in Pakistan in recent years. A 2004 Pew poll found that Osama bin Laden enjoyed a 65 percent favorable rating among Pakistani men.434 Though profoundly disturbing in a country of 170 million people—and a nation that possesses nuclear weapons—this finding should not really be surprising. Pakistan has long been considered a hotbed of Radical Islam and, as noted earlier in this book, is very possibly the country where Osama bin Laden has been hiding since the liberation of Afghanistan.

But by September of 2007, after three years of highly publicized and at times spectacular al Qaeda violence against Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, bin Laden’s approval rating in Pakistan was down to 46 percent.435

Who was the most popular political leader in Pakistan at the time? Not bin Laden. Not President Musharraf, either, who had an approval rating of only 38 percent.

Rather, the leader of the pack was Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister who was promising to come home from exile and run for president on a bold and sweeping platform of reform. In September 2007, Bhutto had an approval rating of 63 percent.436 Many intelligence and political analysts believe she was well poised to defeat Musharraf in the next elections and emerge as the next president of Pakistan. As noted in the last chapter, however, she was assassinated.

Did bin Laden’s approval rating bounce back as a result? To the contrary, by January 2008, bin Laden’s approval rating among Pakistanis had sunk to just 24 percent, a record low in seven years of polling. Al Qaeda’s approval rating, meanwhile, dropped from 33 percent in August 2007 to just 18 percent in January 2008.437