Word: tehran
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ordinary business, Manucher Ghorbanifar would cut an implausibly mysterious figure. Officially, he has been a shipping executive in Tehran and a commodities trader in France. By his own account he was a refugee from the revolutionary government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, which confiscated his businesses in Iran, yet he later became a trusted friend and kitchen adviser to Mir Hussein Mousavi, Prime Minister in the Khomeini government. Some U.S. officials who have dealt with Ghorbanifar praise him highly. Says Michael Ledeen, adviser to the Pentagon on counterterrorism: "He is one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever...
Prime Minister Mousavi's remarks in parliament seemed directed, at least in part, at the festering issue of the $506 million in blocked Iranian funds that is still held by the U.S. Now that secret talks between Washington and Tehran have been aborted by the Iranscam scandal, negotiations on the blocked funds are the only known contact between the two countries. The U.S. has acknowledged that the money belongs to Iran, but the two sides remain divided over a welter of technical details. At midweek the latest round of talks ended inconclusively...
...last month during an extraordinary televised confession by Mehdi Hashemi, a leading radical politician and a close associate of the Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, 64, Khomeini's officially designated successor. Hashemi and a number of henchmen were arrested on charges of murder, kidnaping and sedition. According to reports from Tehran, the state's evidence includes such exotic weapons as vials of cyanide, booby-trapped shoes, exploding ink pens and remote-control model airplanes equipped with explosives. In early December, Khomeini ordered the government to "fully prosecute" the case...
While Hashemi, former chief of the Tehran bureau responsible for exporting Islamic-style revolution, is an expendable power broker, the case against him has wider political significance. The Iranscam affair became public knowledge after radical supporters of Hashemi reportedly leaked the story of Iran's covert diplomatic and military dealings with the U.S. to ash-Shiraa, the Lebanese magazine that Ronald Reagan subsequently described as "that rag in Beirut." Moreover, Khomeini's public support for punishing Hashemi has been interpreted by some observers as evidence that the radicals in the Iranian leadership are losing ground to the pragmatists...
...crisis began in early November, when a Lebanese magazine disclosed that the U.S. had sent military spare parts to Iran after a secret visit to Tehran by Robert McFarlane, the former National Security Adviser. Reports then started to proliferate that President Reagan, who repeatedly declared that he would never negotiate with terrorists and who condemned Iran as a member of a new, international "Murder Inc.," had authorized clandestine shipments of weapons to Tehran in an effort to gain the release of American hostages in Lebanon. Two days before Thanksgiving, the President went on national television to announce that Vice Admiral...