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]]]]]]]]]]]] Iran Shows Its Soviet Sympathies [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
By Kenneth R. Timmerman (3/12/1989)
From The Wall Street Journal, 10 March 1989, p. A16:4
(Mr. Timmerman is editor of Mednews, a Paris newsletter devoted
to Middle East Defense issues.)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze was right when he
called his recent visit to Tehran ``a turning point'' in
Soviet-Iranian affairs. He might have added: and a strong
challenge for the Bush administration in a country of vital
strategic importance for the West, where successive U.S.
administrations have blundered for so long.
It was the first official visit to the Islamic Republic of
Iran by a Soviet foreign minister, and it was crowned by a
meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini on Feb. 26. After years of
including the Soviet Union on the short list of foreign devils
that Iran's revolutionaries should regularly denounce, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, in an about-face, urged greater cooperation
between the two countries to combat the ``devilish acts of the
West.''
Mr. Shevardnadze also managed to sign a gas agreement with
Iran -- the first one to be made public since the 1979 revolution
-- and to secure Iranian approval of a long-standing Soviet plan
to build a transborder railway. This latter should be sounding
alarm bells in Washington, reminiscent as it is of a similar
agreement with Afghanistan in the late 1970s that eased the way
for the invading Red Army in 1979.
The success of the Shevardnadze trip has been long in the
making. Soviet Middle East experts have been laying the
groundwork for these advances for many years through careful
diplomacy and shrewd intelligence work. Over the past eight
months, Soviet bloc delegations to Tehran have been tripping over
one another in signing new cooperation agreements, bit by bit
blocking off trade opportunities for the West.
The tale of Soviet-Iranian relations over the past decade is
one worthy of more attention than it generally receives. In late
1978, for instance, as General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was
publicly confirming his support for the shah, the Soviet-backed
National Voice of Iran radio, broadcasting from Baku, capital of
Azerbaijan, Soviet Union, was issuing rabid calls for the shah's
overthrow and the installation of an Islamic government.
In the weeks preceding the Nov. 4, 1979, takeover of the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran, the Soviet ambassador to Iran, Vladimir
Vinogradov, was meeting regularly with the ``students'' who
masterminded the embassy debacle. Their ringleader, a certain
Mohamad Mohsen Khoiniha, today is the Islamic public prosecutor,
after having totally rebuilt Iran's dreaded secret service,
Savama. The extent of how close he was to the Soviets while in
exile with Ayatollah Khomeni [sic] in Iraq, and later as Savama
chief, aroused the attention of the French secret services, which
warned about the extent of Soviet penetrations in Iran in a
series of leaks from 1982 on, in the government-sponsored review,
Defense Nationale, and elsewhere.
The warm relations between the Soviet Union and revolutionary
Iran left numerous public traces -- conveniently forgotten in the
U.S. -- during this time. Speaking before the 26th Congress of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1981, Leonid
Brezhnev heralded the Iranian revolution as ``profoundly
anti-imperialist,'' and reiterated the Soviet desire to develop
good relations with Iran ``based on reciprocity.'' He then went
on to claim that ``a liberation struggle can be waged under the
banner of Islam'' -- an astonishing statement when one considers
all the troubles the Soviet Union is having today with its own 50
million Moslems. In July 1981, the two countries signed a series
of commercial and military treaties, which included indirect
Soviet arms sales and the dispatch of Soviet advisers to Iran.
In 1983, Iran publicly turned against the Soviet Union,
outlawing the Soviet-backed Iranian Communist Party, Tudeh, and
in May expelling 18 Soviet diplomats on espionage charges. Many
commentators took these moves as hard proof of the anti-Communist
nature of the Islamic regime. But subsequent events have shown
this up as a dangerously complacent attitude.
For one thing, the expulsions did little to slow the pace of
Iranian-Soviet cooperation. Soviet engineers continued to
supervise the building of the Isfahan steel complex until Iraqi
missiles (supplied by the Soviet Union) made their lives
uncomfortable in March 1985. And Soviet-manned listening bases
in Baluchistan, among the Afghan and Pakistani borders, continued
to operate with the full consent of the Iranian government,
tracking the movements of Afghan guerrillas and squashing any
attempts to organize a ``second front'' for the Afghan resistance
in Iranian territory.
The outlawing of the Tudeh party did little to destroy other
Soviet assets inside Iran. Unlike other political opponents who
got the rope, Tudeh's historical leaders were cake-walked through
their televised ``confessions'' and then shepherded to gilded
cages on the outskirts of Tehran -- from which most were freed in
the yearly amnesty in March 1986.
Since then, many Soviet sympathizers have simply donned
turbans and grown beards, Iranian sources say, infiltrating
government ministries and national bureaucracies. Today they can
be found in top positions in the prime minister's office, the
Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Security Ministry
and of course, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. (The
latter was structured from the start along Soviet lines with the
help of an estimated 100 KGB advisers, and received an impressive
arsenal of Soviet weapons.) Even a personal secretary of
Ayatollah Khomeini, Mahmoud Doai, was once on the Soviet payroll,
as a broadcaster for the National Voice of Iran radio station in
Baku.
The Soviets began to shed their low profile in Iran more than
a year ago, when a senior Foreign Ministry official, Vladimir
Petrovsky, attended the ninth anniversary celebrations of the
Islamic revolution in February 1988 and discussed the renewal of
widespread economic cooperation with Iranian Prime Minister Mir
Hussein Mussavi, a leading member of Iran's pro-Soviet faction.
Since then, economic cooperation agreements have been signed with
the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary. According to
Iranian government figures, three of Iran's top five trading
partners in 1987-'88 were East bloc countries.
Soviet diplomats contend that their relations with Iran are
based on ``long-term goals and interests, not technical
considerations.'' They are right. Without the drama of the
aging ayatollah's condemnation of the Salman Rushdie novel, ``The
Satanic Verses,'' Mr. Shevardnadze's trip would have been a
success. In the present context, however, it appears as a
resounding victory. Mr. Shevardnadze managed to win Iranian
respect by ignoring the Rushdie issue, and Western gratitude by
promising to use his influence with the Iranians to temper the
ayatollah's wrath. In this arena of high geopolitical stakes,
the Soviets have played with such consummate skill they have made
their Western colleagues look like a gaggle of bumbling amateurs.
They have played the long game, and they are winning.
* * *
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