OUR FRIEND IRAN?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000706940055-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 13, 2012
• Sequence Number: 55
• Publication Date: May 11, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/11/13: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706940055-9
WASHINGTON POST
11 May 1986
Jack Anderson
And hale Thin Attar
Our Friend
Iran: A t jay ,986
^ S..?leq Khalkali, who was Rafsanjani's part-
ner in the battery service center. Khalkali is
now a jurist on Khomeini's Islamic revolution
ary tribunal. Khalkali has sent thousands to die
before the firing squads of the notorious Evi,
prison outside Tehran. By one respo,.'hle c,-
timate, 4,000 Iranians have perishes in Evin
by gunfire and torture.
Khalkali is the man who des. ? ?.,,t the
charred remains of the U.S. a.;:,.
died in the aborted host ,if. mission in
1986.
As the Reagan administration continues its
secret, conciliatory tilt toward Iran, the presi-
dent's advisers should not lose sight of the du-
hious background of the people they're cozy-
ing up to.
There are solid pragmatic grounds for seek-
ing to paper over U.S.-Iranian differences.
One of these, as we've reported, is the admin-
istration's hope that the United States will
have at least some influential friends in Teh-
ran when the Ayatollah Khomeini inevitably
passes from the scene.
But lest the administration get carried
away, we'd like to remind it of an inescapable
fact: Khomeini and his top henchmen are
bloodthirsty, unrepentant terrorists who ha?;c
been rabidly anti-American.
C''nnsider a likely successor to Khomeini,
llashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Iranian
parliament. U.S. officials have pinned a .sub-
stantial part of their hopes on Rafsanjani, and
have presumably inspired sympathetic stories
iu the press, which referred to hini as a "niotl-
erate" and credited him with helping to free
the American hostages five years ago.
Well, our sources inside Iran point out that
before he rose to his present eminence, Raf-
sanjani was co-owner of a battery service shop
in the Street of Cheragh Bargh in Tehran.
That was in the late 1970s under the shah's
regime. It was in Rafsanjani's shop in 1977
that the bodies of two U.S. servicemen were
found hidden beneath two cars. They had been
killed in the anti-shah, anti-American terror-
ism that eventually brought Khomeini and
Rafsanjani to power.
One of the future parliament leader's em-
ployees was arrested and imprisoned for the
murder of the two Americans. But he was
quickly released when Khomeini seized power
in 1979, and has since gone to work for the
Mussavi terrorist family, which has done more
to kill and terrorize Americans than any group
in the Middle East.
There are other high Iranian officials on the
dishonor list:
Oil Minister Mohammed Gharazi. Trained in
Libyan and Palestinian terrorist schools dur-
ing the mid-1970s, Gharazi showed his ruth-
lessness when he was made commander of the
Revolutionary Guards operating against the
Kurd rebels in northwestern [tan.
In 1980, Gharazi ordered his troops to mas-
sacre the entire population of a Kurdish village
named Garena. More than 150 men, women
and children were literally put to the sword.
Gharazi boasted that he personally had be-
headed at least a dozen of the victims.
? Chief prosecutor Musavi Khoiniha. Khomei?
ni's favorite pupil at the theological seminary t
in the holy city of Qom years ago, Khoiniha 'l,
has been called the ayatollah in the embassy" r
for his role in planning and leading the take-
over of the American Embassy in November ,.
1979. For more than a decade, Khoiniha was ,i
an "agent of influence" employed by the KGB.
^ Iran's ambassador to the Vatican, the Ayatollah r
KhosrowShahi. Khomeini's former chauffeur, he
was believed to be second-in-command of the stu-
dents who seized the American Embassy. He is
reliably reported to be running an international
network of terrorist operations out of his head- _
quarters on the Via Nomentana, Rome,
next-door to the Libyan Embassy, KhosrowShahi
directs terrorists in Italy, Spain, France, West'
Germany and Britain.
? All Nawai who, while an attache in the Irani-
an consulate in Bern, Switzerland, bought 300
tons of explosives on the black market in June
1982. Some of it is believed to have been used
to blow up the U.S. Embassy and the Marine
barracks in Beirut the following year. killing
258 Americans.
^ Mahrnoud Nourani, Iranian charge d'affaires
in Beirut. Ife was involved in the hijacking of
TWA Flight 847 last June, in which an Ameri-
can Navy man was beaten and murdered.
There are other high Iranian otficidls. including
Cabinet ministers and top diplomats, who were
intimately involved in the planning, preparation
and execution of terrorist acts against Arnen-
ca,is. the atlmuustration would do well to re-
membe?r whom they're dealing with as they pur-
sue friendly relations with the Khomeini regime.
K1i986, P ,it,-d Feature Syndicate. Inc.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/11/13: CIA-RDP90-00965R000706940055-9