My Reading Notes

Human Rights Media Bandwagon

Continuing w/ Dreyfuss' Hostage to Khomeini

The Iranian Revolution was more a project in psychological warfare than a matter of street-fighting; it was directed not from Mosques of rebelling Mullah's but from British Secret Intelligence Service HQ at the Tavistock Institute at Sussex University.

Armed w/ computers and reams of files on previous experiments on mass brainwashing (in Iran), teams of Tavistock social psyhologists began to plan the specifics of the "revolution".. How would they respond to a call from an old mullah to "revolt"? How would peasants respond? Skilled workers? Middle class? Intellectuals? What techniques would best involve the students in the rebellion? What are the vulnerabilities of the police and armed forces?

All this had to be analyzed and taken into account..

Thbe people doing this had experience working w/ British Intelligence back into WWII and the Strategic Bombing Survey; Marvin Zonis (professor at Univ of Chicago) who had written a book called "The Political Elite of Iran", were drawn in to present profiles of how Iranian classes and specific people would react.

The Shah was a perfect victim; the Iranian elite was unrivaled in corruption and venality; The Shah's own family was famous for not caring for the state as much as for shady business deals, gold, international jet set. Royal family was more at home in Acapulco, French Riveria, Switzerland, etc, than in Tehran. The Shah surrounded himself w/ sycophants;

The Shah refused time and again to purge his courtiers; (remembered the bitter dumping of his own father by British intelligence) in 1941; (Reza Shah); (in 1941 his own puppet crowning);
The more visionary leaders in Iran had lost their positions 5-10 years before the start of the Khomeini revolution .. left behind here traitors;

(*) 1976 Amenesty International report put the Shah on defensive; AI is a front for British Intelligence; Some people who know for certain:
- Ramsey Clark;
- Sean McBride;
- Conor Cruise O'Brian;
- Princeton's Richard Falk (wrote the 1980s Project on human rights);
They denounced the Shah, and reports were played up in the London Times and Washington Post (CIA control);

Since 1955, Savak had been under teh control of British and Israeli Intelligence; at times, the Savak was in control of ht eShah, not vice versa; Most of the agency's torturers were trained by Mossad; occasional terrorism allowed it to take more power;

AI found it had powerful friends;w/in a month, the Carter administration launched his own "human rights" campgin; aimed at China and Iran; Vance's old friend, Warren Christopher, directed the HR operation; Christopher had been in the Johnson administration, as the Number 2 man at Ramsey Clark's DoJ;

60 minutes talked about how evil the Shah was; talked about how Savak aimed to kill many people, including current foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh; Into full mobilzation went the Bertrand Russell Foundation; Lelio Basson Foundation in Italy; Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and Transational Institue in Amsterdam, Socialist International machine in Europe; American Friend's Service Committee, Libyan-backed Mediterrean People's Congress, and many other HR organizations;

In Iran, there was only one organization that was of any importance: the Muslim Brotherhood; Through Iran, some 200,000 mullahs, positioned in every town and village, followed the dictates of a few fanatics at the head of the Brotherhood; several dozen of these mullahs and the ayatollahs commanded a huge following;

The other arm (besides the Muslim Brotherhood) was the Western-trained intelligence agents, who are today's secular office holders:
(*) Sadegh Ghotbzadeh,
(*) Ibrahim Yazdi
(*) Abolhassan Bani-Sadr;

Direction from Washington and London came via the professors, men such as Professor Richard Cottam at the Univ of Pittsburgh;
Cottam met Yazi in Iran as early as the 1950s; when Cottam was a field officer for the CIA attached to the US embassy in Tehran; Cottam also med and guided another member of the future leadership of Iranian revolution, Ghotbzadeh; for the next 20 years, the Pitts professor joined Yazdi and G for strategy sessions in the US, Europe and Iran; Yazdi's wife described Cottam as someone who knows more about her husband than she does;

In 1970, Cottam was once again in Iran; In 1977 he made contact w/ Darakhshesh, a radical Iranian who had been a leader many yeras earlier o fa revolt against the Shah's 1963 White Revolution;

In 1977, D traveld to Washington through France; Made contact w/ the opposition to the Shah; he traveled to the US w/ Cottam, and he asked the Pitts professor to intercede on his behalf w/ the new Carter administration; then to Washington to discuss Khomeini w/ the US NSC;

Money came from Libya; Yazdi had constantly been at the Ayatollah's side during his stay outside Paris at Neauphle-le-Chateau along w/ G and Bani-Sadr; the inner circle of Khomeini's "paris advisers"; After Feb 1979, Yazdi was named deputy prime minister for revolutionary affairs; he helped set up the secret police in Iran (under Khomeini), Savama;

Later, became foreign minister; Yazdi first came to the US in 1959; he received a PhD from MIT, and joined the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University; he was implicated in sex crimes, but easily obtained permanent resident status; eventually citizenship through the aid of NJ senator Harrison Williams;
In 1963, Yazdi worked to found the Muslim Brotherhood's US branch, the "Muslim Student Assocation",

posted by Paul Sholtz @ 3:47 PM