Who Is Governing Iran?

When the shaky government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan collapsed earlier this month, civilian administration in Iran virtually ceased to exist. In its place stood a powerful, 15-member committee composed of six Islamic mullahs and seven secular figures (there are two vacancies at present) and officially called the Islamic Revolutionary Council. Ayatullah Khomeini, the de facto ruler who declined to manage the government himself, gave the Council a mandate to rule Iran during a two-month transition period until the voters could approve a new theocratic constitution and elect a National Assembly and a President. Whether the internally divided Council will quietly retire after those elections, now scheduled for January, is another question. Last week Khomeini Confidant and Council Member Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told TIME's Raji Samghabadi:

"For the time being, the Council is the government."

Originally this was not so. First established by Khomeini as a five-member body in November 1978, the Council was supposed to be a "revolutionary parliament" to prepare for an orderly transfer of power from the Shah's regime to a new revolutionary government.

From the first days of Bazargan's "civilian" rule last February, however, the Council acted more as a rival government, frequently countermanding government directives and intervening in day-to-day administration. The Council directs the revolutionary tribunals that have already put to death by firing squad more than 630 of the Shah's supporters and others. It also controls the Islamic militias and the Islamic Guard, a sort of praetorian security unit for the mullahs.

Before Nov. 6, when the Council assumed full executive authority, members kept their identity secret.

Since the takeover of the U.S. embassy, however, four Council members besides Rafsanjani and Mohammed Javad Bahonar have emerged as the most influential leaders of Iran under Khomeini's supreme authority.

> Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, 51, the "First Secretary" of the Council, is a tall mullah with a heavy beard, hawk nose and a magisterial manner when dealing with both colleagues and subordinates. Fluent in English and German (he served as a mullah to Iranian Muslims in Germany for five years during the 1960s), Beheshti is a skillful debater in public and a cunning manipulator behind the scenes.

> Abol Hassan Banisadr, 47, is Iran's new acting Foreign Minister and Finance Minister. His quiet manner, spectacles and Charlie Chaplin mustache belie a deep-rooted fierce economic radicalism. An economist who studied at the Sorbonne, Banisadr says Iranian foreign policy has "a single objective: freedom from economic, cultural and political dependence on the West." He adds: "There are two things you can do--fight or rot. I prefer to fight."

> Ali Akbar Moinfar, 46, is a Japanese-trained seismologist who is now Iran's acting Oil Minister. Though no zealot, Moinfar shares Bani-sadr's enthusiasm for economic self-sufficiency.

A devout Muslim who was briefly jailed under the Shah's regime, Moinfar works hard but has frail health.

> Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, 45, is acting director of National Iranian Radio and Television and thus a potentially powerful figure. He claims to have been twice expelled from the U.S. during his 20 years abroad as a dissident "student." U.S. officials deny this.

One of his first acts was to purge the Iranian broadcast media of Western-style artists and music. "They all love to talk," one expert says of the Council members, and alliances within the group shift dramatically from issue to issue.

"When debate runs aground," adds an insider, "Khomeini intervenes, at our request."

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