Word: tehran
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last Prime Minister of the former Shah, allegedly figured at the center of the aborted "Zionist-Iraqi-U.S." plot. According to President Abolhassan Banisadr, the conspirators intended to occupy two Iranian airbases and bomb a number of strategic targets. Among them: Khomeini's home north of Tehran, the Tehran International Airport and Faizieh religious school in the holy city of Qum. Tehran spokesmen charged that the plotters hoped to tell Iranians over radio and television that "the patriotic army of Iran has overthrown the rotten government of the mullahs," and then invite Bakhtiar back from his Paris exile...
...Alerted by some timely tipoffs, Islamic guards killed eight officers who were preparing to join another group and take over Nowjeh Air-base in Hamadan, 175 miles southwest of Tehran. The guards then arrested twelve pilots as they sat in their quarters awaiting the "coast-clear" signal from co-conspirators who were to have commandeered U.S.-built Phantom jets. Eleven other rebel groups, en route to the air-base in private cars and buses, somehow learned that the plot had been frustrated and went into hiding. Other insurgents in Tehran were supposed to attack the Central Committee of Islamic Militiamen...
...week's end the roundup had netted more than 500 suspects, including two of Bakhtiar's cousins, Abbas Qoli Bakhtiar and Samsam Bakhtiar, and the Shah's former Health Minister, Anoushiravan Pouyan. The closed-door trial began on Saturday at the Military Revolutionary Tribunal in Tehran. Ayatullah Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, the hard-lining president of the Supreme Court, had previously announced that "the plotters are facing the death penalty." There seemed little doubt that his grim threat would be carried out with the same judicial severity that sent 42 other Iranians to their death last week...
...first, U.S. reaction was guarded, partly because of so many previous promises from Tehran that have not been honored. But barely six hours after the announcement, the Iranians moved Queen from Martyrs' Hospital in north Tehran, where he had been undergoing treatment for four days, to Tehran International Airport. Queen appeared gaunt but smiled broadly as he told reporters that his illness was "something with the brain, some sort of virus, I'm not sure." Exhilarated by the prospect of gaining his freedom, he continued: "I feel a lot better right now, in the last hour...
...Tehran, some Western diplomats interpreted the release of Queen as "a good signal," possibly even a sort of trial balloon by Iranian authorities to determine how the populace would react. Others saw the release of Queen as a convoluted maneuver by Iran's clerical establishment to embarrass the beleaguered Banisadr. Observed a senior civil servant: "If Banisadr's rivals in the clergy were indeed trying to prove who is boss in Iran, they did an excellent job." Most Iranians believed that Khomeini, who chose to release five women and eight black male hostages last November, had simply decided...