Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They were the two most wanted men in Iran, hunted for "high treason" by the vengeful mullahs around Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. When darkness fell on Tehran on July 28, Abolhassan Banisadr, the deposed President, and Massoud Rajavi, his ally and leader of the urban guerrillas known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (People's Crusaders), slipped on stolen military uniforms and sneaked from their hideout into a small army van. They were driven to a military airfield, passing unrecognized through security controls (Banisadr had shaved his familiar mustache), and boarded an Iranian air force Boeing...
McWhirter, who joined TIME after graduating from Princeton University in 1963, is a seasoned observer of social upheavals. He was stationed in Saigon during the last days of the American involvement in Viet Nam and reported on Iran from the overthrow of the Shah until the arrival of Ayatullah Khomeini. Before moving to Miami to take charge of TIME's new Caribbean bureau last fall, he served for 3½ years as bureau chief in Johannesburg, a base from which he covered the painful birth of Zimbabwe as a nation. While he traced the subtle web of oppression...
Today the Mujahedin are by far the best organized opposition to Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Their leader, Massoud Rajavi, 33, commands a force of guerrillas estimated to be as large as 100,000, with several hundred thousand supporters among the intellectuals, workers, farmers and middle class. Says a Western intelligence analyst: "The Mujahedin have the capacity to make life miserable for the ruling clerics. They are a threat to Khomeini's people because to the common man both groups seem to be cut from the same cloth-both proclaim they will create a true Islamic state...
...Ayatullah Mohammed Beheshti was not a king, but he was the emerging strongman of Iranian politics. He was the nation's Chief Justice, the secretary-general of the ruling Islamic Republican Party and the chief strategist of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's theocratic state. At 52, he was the chief hope of continuity for the Islamic revolution, whose terrifying politics have split Iran into bitter and contending factions...
Banisadr's crashing fall from power was a classic example of a revolution's destroying its young. He had been Khomeini's protégé, the man who had offered the Ayatullah hospitality when he sought refuge in Paris in 1978. Khomeini, who called Banisadr "my son," thought that the owl-eyed intellectual could provide a scientific rationale for the Islamic reforms he proposed to put into effect, thus marrying the 20th and 7th centuries. Following Khomeini's triumphant return to Iran in 1979, Banisadr seemed to have the Ayatullah's full confidence. Though...