Dreyfuss’s Report on US Arranging the Ayatollah’s 1979 “Coup” — and a Mention of the Sydney Siege

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

Robert Dreyfuss is a journalist, writing nowadays for The American Prospect, who wrote a book 40 years ago entitled Hostage to Khomeni. It contains an astonishing theory, yet he hasn’t referred to it again in subsequent years. The book says we got it all wrong about the “hostage crisis.”

For those too young to remember, here’s the official story. The Shah of Iran, Reva Pahlavi, had, in 1953, replaced Dr Mossadegh who had been elected as leader of Iran. Presumably, it was the Anglo-American oil interests that sponsored this takeover by the Shah. He ruled with an iron fist using his torture-happy police, the SAVAK.

Then along came a fundamentalist preacher, Ayatollah Khomeni, who had been hanging out in Paris, and staged an Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. We were told that he got his followers by using cassette tapes of his theology lectures.

Robert Dreyfuss tells a different tale (page ix):

“Khomeni, a turbaned magician who enchanted too many of Iran’s unfortunate peasant population … was installed, like a light bulb, by a carefully orchestrated British Military Intelligence operation.”

Dreyfuss promises a book “intended to serve as an indictment of a highly placed fifth column in the United States who provided aid to the ayatollahs … and the Muslim Brotherhood…. Not until Jimmy Carter, Brezinsky, Kissinger, [US Attorney General] Ramsey Clark, and [Secretary of State] Cyrus Vance are in prison will this volume have served its purpose.”

Lyndon Larouche

Robert Dreyfuss does not shrink from indicting all those men. He does it with what appears to me to be reliable evidence. At the time, he worked for Lyndon Larouche (1922-2019), so a word about Larouche is in order here.

Wikipedia has a huge article on Larouche, made up of oodles of hearsay. I don’t know the man or his writings well and can’t say if he is wonderful, terrible, or somewhere in between.  But I do know one of the books produced by a member of LaRouche’s team — Treason in America: from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman — by Anton Chaitkin. It is superb.

So also is the study of Tavistock involvement in the Port Arthur massacre in Australia of 1996. This appeared in the Larouche-run journal Executive Intelligence Review. It’s a  mystery to me as to how the authors in that journal glean their information. But it is often very impressive.

My negative on Larouche is that his young followers give every indication of being in a cult, like Mormons. When I was a law student in Germany (on exchange) in 2002, I saw them at public gatherings. You could not involve them in debate — they had the perfect shining answer to everything.

One more thing to mention is that Larouche, who was born in New Hampshire, filed as a candidate for president of the United States in six consecutive elections and at one point got 750,000 votes.

The Shah Got Cancer

Shah Reva Pahlavi sat on the peacock throne. His son the Crown Prince was set to inherit the monarchy. The shah had modernized the country and allowed secularism and Westernism to come in. The Islamic revolution of the Ayatollah went against that. The Shah abdicated the throne in 1979 and died in July 1980 of lymphatic cancer.

The cancer caused a major international issue. Friends of the Shah in America, notably the Rockefellers, wanted him to come to the US for medical care. The American people were “taught” to oppose this, and indeed President Carter prevented it from happening. Looking back on it now, I don’t see why we were all so stirred up.

In any case, that was part of the backstory to the taking of 52 American hostages by Khomeni’s “revolutionary guards.” I shall now present an excerpt from Dreyfuss’s book, written with Thierry LeMarc. They have much to say about the organizing of the attack on the US embassy, and much to say about the players. But here I will use only their description of Pentagon activity.  You will be amazed.

“A Day at the Pentagon,” 1979

This is an abridged quote from pages 71-77 of Hostage to Khomeni, published remarkably quickly in 1980. I won’t use quote marks. The bolding is mine:

Until late December 1979, almost one year after the Khomeini revolution and more than seven weeks after the seizure of the American embassy, Captain Siavash Setoudeh, the defense attache of the Iranian embassy in Washington, conducted his daily business inside the offices of the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Setoudeh, representing a government with whom the United States was theoretically at the verge of war, worked under the direct supervision of the Office of Naval Intelligence and ONR, assisted by a sixteen-man team of Iranian terrorists and gun-runners. Within this highly sensitive facility at 800 North Quincy Street in Arlington, Virginia, accessible only to individuals with top security clearance, Captain Setoudeh, Captain Mansour, a recently arrived Iranian admiral, and a dozen other military agents of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran worked with U.S. naval intelligence and with the approval of Zbignew Brzezinski’s National Security Council.

The Carter administration’s alliance with the Khomeini regime had gone way beyond the negotiating stage.

At the end of December 1979, Setoudeh was expelled from his American offices, following widespread exposure of his presence and activities there by New Solidarity International Press Service and the Executive Intelligence Review. Despite Setoudeh’s expulsion, the Pentagon and the State Department refused to make any comment on his activities or why he was allowed to use offices virtually inside the Pentagon itself.

Setoudeh was allowed to remain within the United States, returning to his original office in the Iranian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue — despite a presidential order one month earlier expelling all Iranian diplomats in retaliation for the seizure of the U.S. embassy.

Reportedly, the Iranian unit headed by Setoudeh was involved in coordinating the activities of Iranian students in at least forty American colleges and universities with which the Iranian military attache had liaison. These activities included arms smuggling, gun-running, and conduiting weapons to terrorist units sent from Iran into the United States.

In November 1979, just before the Setoudeh affair broke into the press, Ayatollah Khalkhali of the Vedayeen-e Islam (the Iranian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood) declared that he had sent killer squads into the United States to assassinate leading U.S. political figures and “enemies of the revolution,” including a specified list of Iranians of the former regime.

According to Iranian sources, in the period after the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, at least 300 armed and well-trained Iranian terrorist personnel entered the United States on false passports with phony visas that were obtained from a visa stamp stolen from the occupied U.S. embassy. In an interview with the  Paris-based Liberation magazine, Khalkhali boasted that  his teams have been trained “in the Middle East and in  the United States itself.”

The Setoudeh story broke in the following way.

On December 19, 1979, the New York offices of  NSIPS news agency picked up rumors of direct collaboration between the Iranian embassy and the Pentagon.  According to Iranian sources opposed to the Khomeini regime, Captain Setoudeh — who was described as a “naval liaison officer who is the defense attache of the Iranian embassy”— could be found located at 800 North Quincy Street.

The next day, the NSIPS Washington bureau confirmed that the building in question was wholly owned and operated by the Office of Naval Research. An ONR spokesman, who refused to identify himself, said that the building was entirely occupied by offices containing U.S. military personnel, “except for a few foreigners who have reason for being there.” He refused to elaborate.

That same day, an NSIPS investigative reporter called the offices of Captain Setoudeh, identifying herself as a representative of “a Hong Kong arms dealer.”  Setoudeh immediately came to the phone. When the caller said that her employer had instructed her to get in touch with Setoudeh to arrange a meeting for him “when he arrives in the country next week,” the Iranian readily agreed.

Setoudeh was told that a “massive” arms shipment was coming into the United States “but outside normal channels.” He replied: “That would be a good suggestion, to have a meeting together and discuss these things and then if we can do any help to this problem [sic], by all means. Otherwise, then we’ll ship it to someone else in the country, or maybe in the embassy.”

Setoudeh confirmed, twice, that he is the “proper person” to handle such matters. He asked only, “Could you tell me only which force is your company dealing with? Is it the air force? The navy? Which one?” He also  said that he would be glad to clear his entire schedule for the next week — “even Christmas Day” — to meet the “arms dealer.”

Queried about his status in the United States because of President Carter s expulsion order issued on December 12, Setoudeh laughed and replied, “That doesn’t apply to me,” (In fact, at this time, more than two weeks after the order was given, not a single one of the 183 Iranian diplomats ordered to leave had gone, and Iran’s embassy and consulates were functioning normally. Not one official did leave, until Washington broke relations with Iran four months later.)

At the Iranian embassy, a spokesman for Charge d’ Affaires Ali Agha confirmed that Setoudeh was the embassy’s military attache.

That afternoon, two reporters from NSIPS paid an unannounced visit to Captain Setoudeh’s office to see what they might discover. At the entrance to the imposing building, the only identification sign read: “Office of Naval Research.” Inside, a sleepy, Christmas-minded guard waved the reporters on.

Upstairs, they found a bustling office filled with Iranians. The walls were covered with portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini, revolutionary slogans, and other signs and symbols confirming that the office was indeed loyal to the Khomeini regime.

When the reporters began questioning several of those present and taking photographs of the office and its decor, pandemonium broke loose, “You can’t do that!” shouted an Iranian officer, who later identified himself as Captain Mansour.

Amid the ensuing chaos,  the office did admit that it was occupying U.S. government space. For a period of fifteen minutes, the two Americans were physically detained by Khomeini’s military representatives; they were threatened and their film confiscated by force.

Immediately afterward, the NSIPS correspondents went to the press briefing by Jody Powell, the spokesman for President Carter, at the White House. The NSIPS reporter put before the press and Mr. Powell the preliminary results of the investigation. But Powell — like the State Department earlier — had no explanation for the presence of Setoudeh in the secret offices of Naval Research.

Nor would the White House or the State  Department comment on why the Iranian diplomats had not left the country in the face of the order from the President that they be ousted.

At the State Department briefing, Hodding Carter III was equally uncommunicative, promising to answer the questions after checking with Secretary of State Vance. After the briefing, however, State’s Near East Affairs public information chief George Sherman told one of the NSIPS correspondents that “I might be able to help you a little more if you will tell me why you are asking that question.”

A dozen offices of the Pentagon all refused to comment.

By the following day, December 21, reporters in Washington, including the White House correspondents for several major national networks and leading Washington dailies, were now looking into the story. That same day NSIPS called Captain Setoudeh for a telephone interview. He was asked about his function.

“This is the office dealing with students in American universities,” he said, after some hesitation. “I deal with  both military students and civilians, especially those in  engineering courses.” According to Setoudeh, at each university in the country where Iranian students are present — and he claimed over forty— there is a military liaison officer.”

Setoudeh’s admission that he coordinates student activities touched off another important line of investigation. Quickly, NSIPS established that Setoudeh was a close collaborator of Abolfazl Nahidian; he has admitted meeting with Nahidian on several occasions.

Nahidian, who purports to be a Washington rug merchant with offices on Wisconsin Avenue, is a top coordinator of  Savama, Khomeini’s secret police, in the United States. In his business, Nahidian travels back and forth between Washington and Teheran, and he is an outspoken supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Reportedly, aside from rugs, Nahidian has been involved in conduiting millions of dollars since the Iranian revolution to pro-Khomeini terrorist groups in the United States. Many of the 300 Iranian students who reportedly came through U.S. ports of entry bearing phony visas were shuttled into the Nahidian-Setoudeh circles and then into safe houses around the country.

One of Nahidian s bodyguards, David Belfield (a.k.a. Daoud  Salahuddin), is alleged to have been the murderer of Ali Tabatabai, an anti-Khomeini Iranian who headed the Iran Freedom Foundation, assassinated in Maryland on July 22, 1980….

Given the Carter administration’s alliance with the Khomeni regime on every level, the question emerges: Who controls the “students” who hold the hostages? Who are they? When the U.S. embassy was taken over …the leader of the organization was said to be a dentist named  Dr. Habibollah Peyman, who worked closely with Ayatollah Khoini, an obscure mullah.

The students’ organization is officially part of Ayatollah Khalkhali s Fedayeen-e Islam, and works with the so-called Party of God (Hizbollahi) militia. The Hizbolahi is feared in Iran because of its gangster tactics and frequent use of violence, acting as a strike force — or a kind of SS — on behalf of the radical faction of the Islamic Republican Party.

According to Iranian intelligence sources, the students’ leader, Dr. Peyman, spent many years outside of Iran, during the era of the Shah, primarily in Europe.  During this time, Peyman was a paid agent of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

The relationship exposes one of the secrets of Ayatollah Khomeini. The Mossad runs like a thread throughout the command structure of the Islamic fundamentalist regime. For example, while involved with the plasma physics program at Berkeley, in California, Mustafa Chamran, Khomeini’s defense minister, made a connection with an extremist faction of the Mossad via circles associated with Professor Yuval Neeman. …

After he left Berkeley, Chamran went to Lebanon where he became the commander of a violent Shiite extremist group called Al Amal, which maintained ties to both Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and to Shiite radicals in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, In Lebanon, Chamran worked with radical factions of the Palestinian guerrilla movement, especially those believed to be presently under the control of Israeli intelligence.

(The Israelis often use terror by “Palestinian extremists” to bolster Israel’s position both internally and in the West.) … the Al Amal organization has become overtly pro-Israeli and anti-PLO.

In the aftermath of Khomeini’s takeover, Chamran and Yazdi took control of the enormous apparatus of Savak, working closely with General Fardoust. Today [1980], Israel’s Mossad is believed to have a disproportionate influence in the inner councils of the Khomeini regime.

So far, we have found that the “Islamic fundamentalist revolution” that seized power in February 1979 was instigated by British Petroleum, was given crucial assistance by a NATO general, forged a continuing alliance with the “Satan” government of the United States, and is heavily penetrated by the Israeli secret intelligence service. …

— end of long quote from Dreyfuss’s Hostage to Khomeni.

Comment by Mary Maxwell

I am in no position to evaluate the above story, having done no research on the taking of 52 American hostages by Iranians in 1979.

Still, I’m well qualified to talk about an Iranian who took 18 Australian hostages in 2014. You can read the official story of that event in the Coroner’s official report, or in Wikipedia.

Briefly — the Iranian’s name is Man Haron Monis and the hostages were ten customers and eight staff members of the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place Sydney. For 17 hours, beginning at 9:40am on December 15, Monis captured the attention of the world by holding the hostages at gunpoint while demanding an ISIS flag and a chance to talk to the Aussie Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Having written a book about the event, entitled Inquest: Siege in Sydney, I can say with near certainty that the entire event was a staged performance with hostages being “in the loop.” It was theatre aimed at the public, no doubt to ease the arrival of anti-terrorist legislation.

I DO NOT KNOW if Dreyfuss’s story is accurate. I just know it is possible.