Word: ayatullah
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Tehran's rapprochement with Moscow has enraged many of Iran's right-wing clergymen, who now regard the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini as an opportunist and an apostate. Though the rightists have thus far lost the battle to keep the Islamic revolution uncontaminated by Communist support, they have gathered strength in the power struggle over who will succeed Khomeini. Government leaders have announced that preparations are being made for the selection of a supreme council of experts, which will consist of three to five theologians who will take over when Khomeini dies or he becomes too sick to rule...
...well-organized underground movement founded in 1965, the Mujahedin was active in the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. But it later split with the clergy-dominated regime of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Over the past eight months it has launched a bloody campaign of insurrection that culminated in the assassination of President Mohammed Ali Raja'i and many other top government figures. In the wake of severe government reprisals, Mujahedin activities have tapered off. The Mujahedin say they have merely switched tactics from assassinating political leaders to attacking government security forces. Government sources claim that, in fact, the rebels...
Meanwhile, an explosion and fire last week destroyed the house in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château from which the Ayatullah directed the Iranian revolution. The next morning police found an effigy of Khomeini hanging from a tree in the garden...
...support their charges of U.S. subversion. Yet what emerges from the papers that came from the "nest of spies," as the Iranian annotations put it, is a contradictory and confused attempt by U.S. diplomats to comprehend the Shah's regime, the rebellion and the post-revolution government of Ayatullah Khomeini. Some analyses were chillingly prescient, others dangerously naive...
...sent to Washington by U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan remained optimistic. He wrote on Oct. 19: "The Khomeni star seems to be waning." But by late December, Sullivan was admitting that the "situation is fast approaching anarchy." On Jan. 16, 1979, the Shah left the country, and two weeks later Ayatullah Khomeini was in Iran...