A Government Beheaded

By Henry Muller

Khomeini's opponents strike, killing his President and Prime Minister

The modern mansion in central Tehran that houses Iran's Prime Minister looked like a fortress under siege. Heavily armed Revolutionary Guards and machine gun-equipped Jeeps ringed the building; sharpshooters carrying G-3 automatic rifles were poised behind sandbags on the roof. Inside the compound, on the second story of a modern administrative annex, President Mohammed Ali Raja'i and Prime Minister Mohammed Javad Bahonar were attending a meeting so secret that its time and place had not been made public. The agenda: how to improve security against urban guerrillas, notably the Mujahedine Khalq (People's Crusaders), who had killed some 200 government officials in a concerted assassination campaign over the past two months. A highly trusted security official supposedly delivering classified briefing papers quietly placed a black Samsonite attache case on the table in front of Raja'i and Bahonar and left the room. Moments later, as a conferee opened the case, it exploded.

The blast of the incendiary bomb was so powerful that Raja'i's and Bahonar's charred bodies could be identified only with the help of dental records. Six other men in the room also died, and 14 were injured. The choice of Raja'i and Bahonar was purposeful with a vengeance. Only a week earlier ousted President Abolhassan Banisadr, now living in exile in France, had put the pair at the top of a list of five men whose deaths could bring down the regime of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the man who led the revolution that toppled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi just 31 months ago. Raja'i, 47, and Bahonar, also 47, had been in office for 38 days; their deaths came only two months after a massive explosion that killed about 150 people, including the Ayatullah Seyed Mohammed Beheshti, Iran's second most powerful man, at the headquarters of the ruling Islamic Republic Party.

The bomb blast at the Prime Minister's office was a severe, though not necessarily a mortal, blow to the beleaguered regime of the autocratic, 81-year-old Khomeini. But it was the most convincing evidence yet that as Iran's revolution continues to devour itself, the nation may be moving toward civil war.

Although no group publicly admitted responsibility for the bombing, a Mujahedin leader told TIME last week that it was the work of his organization, the very group Raja'i and Bahonar were discussing as they were killed. Of the dozen factions that oppose Khomeini, the Mujahedin have emerged as the best organized and the most likely to bid for power in the event of the regime's collapse. Their leader, Massoud Rajavi, 34, is hardly known abroad--unlike Banisadr, whose escape to France was engineered by the Mujahedin. But with thousands of armed men at his command inside Iran, Rajavi poses the most serious single threat to Khomeini's Islamic Republic. The attack on the Prime Minister's office confirmed that the Mujahedin have penetrated the highest levels of the governing hierarchy, including its security apparatus. Indeed, late last week another bomb killed Iran's general revolutionary prosecutor, Hojjatoleslam Ali Qoddousi, in his office near Tehran's Qasr Prison. Not even Khomeini is safe. Last month the guerrillas left a powerful bomb in his house at Jamaran, a village on the northern outskirts of Tehran, with the fuse removed to make certain that the device would not explode. In an attached note, the Mujahedin warned Khomeini to surrender.

The Islamic regime moved swiftly to fill the vacuum created by the two earlier deaths. Majlis (parliament) Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Chief Justice Ayatullah Moussavi Ardabeli jointly assumed the presidency until new elections are held, at the latest by Oct. 19, to fill the vacancy. They named another cleric and Khomeini intimate, Interior Minister Ayatullah Mohammed Reza Mahdavi Kani, 50, as Prime Minister; as one of his first tasks Kani pledged to improve security. The three, who complete Banisadr's five-man hit list, also vowed to press on with a purge aimed at eliminating their opposition. The Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement blaming the U.S. and Iraq for the attack, and demonstrators chanted, "Death to America, the Great Satan!" as the two coffins were carried through Tehran's streets to Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery.

Khomeini conceded that the loss of his President and Prime Minister was "difficult to bear," but he insisted that his regime would survive. "Our nation will not be shaken at all," he declared in a sermon delivered at the Hoseiniyeh Jamaran mosque north of Tehran. Though Khomeini asked his followers not to be "hasty and un-Islamic" in their treatment of suspects, his admonitions fell on deaf ears: last week Islamic tribunals sent 138 more opponents, including some teen-age girls, before firing squads, raising the total number of political executions since Banisadr's ouster on June 22 to nearly 900.

Nor did the Mujahedin flinch. On the day of the Raja'i and Bahonar funerals, Mujahedin gunmen assassinated two more ranking Khomeini supporters. One was Hojjatoleslam Seyed Nasser Banijamal, director of internal affairs at Tehran's Court for Combatting Sin. Three days later, Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards fought an eight-hour gun battle with Mujahedin in Tehran's streets. According to the government's own reports, more than 100 similar shootouts with Mujahedin and other leftist guerrillas have erupted in cities as far flung as Bandar Abbas on the gulf and Astara on the Soviet border. As a result, mosques, Islamic Republic Party offices and Revolutionary Guard headquarters throughout the country are heavily fortified. "The reactionary regime has already receded into a bunker mentality," Tehran-based Mousa Khiabani, chief of staff of anti-Khomeini guerrillas, told TIME last week. "We dominate the streets. Khomeini's lackeys cannot even protect themselves, let alone enforce their authority."

Exaggerated though such claims may be, the Mujahedin have eclipsed all other groups in Iran's fragmented opposition. Last month's hijacking of a French-built, Iran-bound missile boat off the coast of Spain demonstrated that the small royalist faction led by former General Bahram Aryana remains alive, but it proves little else: the ship was surrendered to France and ultimately sent to the Iranian government, after bobbing around off the port of Cadiz for a week. Shahpour Bahktiar, the French-educated politician who was jailed by the Shah but then served as his last Prime Minister, lives in exile outside Paris; he has no sizable following. Within Iran, most opposition groups now tacitly support the Mujahedin. The pro-Soviet Tudeh (Communist) Party has discredited itself for the moment by supporting Khomeini.

The Ayatullah's single most prominent opponent is Banisadr, forced out as President of Iran because he opposed the mullahs' attempts to impose a theocratic state. Banisadr, however, has never enjoyed a strong personal power base: his 75% landslide in the January 1980 presidential election resulted largely from his strong identification with Khomeini. Having relied on Rajavi to escape from Iran and subsequently forming an alliance with the Mujahedin leader, Banisadr may have compromised his independence, though he rejects that view. "In a struggle everyone is beholden to the others," he told TIME Paris Bureau Chief Jordan Bonfante. "I am beholden to the Mujahedin. They are beholden to me. And all of us are beholden to the martyrs who have been executed. I was elected President by the people, and the people have not retracted their confidence. Thus I am in a position to represent all of the different fronts of the opposition that are in favor of liberty and independence."

By removing Banisadr, Khomeini eliminated the last channel for peaceful opposition to his regime. He certainly invited the violence of the Mujahedin, a tightly structured group that had helped Khomeini come to power by organizing huge street demonstrations on his behalf in the last months of the Shah's rule. The movement dates from the mid-'60s, when it was formed to oppose the Shah. By 1969 some members of the Mujahedin, organized in cells, were receiving military training from Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon and Jordan. From the start, the group integrated Islam into an ideology favoring a classless society--what one French analyst calls "Islamic Marxist sauce." In 1980, when Rajavi tried to run for President--his candidacy was vetoed by Khomeini--the Mujahedin platform focused on anticapitalist, anti-Western slogans. It demanded the nationalization of all foreign businesses run by Iranians and "continuation of the anti-imperialist struggle," especially against the U.S.

From his new base in France, Rajavi is now making statements designed to gain broader acceptance outside Iran. He says that he would govern with a national council including representatives of all the forces "who agree with our line of independence and freedom, except the allies of the Shah and Khomeini." Asked why his promises should be more credible than those of Khomeini, who also pledged free speech and a pluralist society during his exile in France, Rajavi answers: "We are not just a group of intellectuals without any responsibility. We have been a popular movement for 17 years, and that means we are responsible."

The Mujahedin strategy is to keep whittling away at Khomeini's increasingly disjointed government. Only 15% of Iranians support the mullahs, the guerrillas believe, while 20% support the Mujahedin, with the middle ground occupied by a huge silent majority passively opposed to Khomeini but afraid to speak out. The purpose of the current campaign, says one Mujahedin leader, is to "break the barrier of terror" that keeps many Iranians from opposing Khomeini openly. The Mujahedin do not shy away from applying their 3 own brand of terror. Dozens of Iranians heeding Khomeini's call to be "informers for God" by turning in neighbors and relatives who oppose the government have been executed by the guerrillas.

Not everyone is convinced that this tactic will bring down Khomeini or, if it does, that Rajavi will be the beneficiary. Rouhollah K. Ramazani, an Iran watcher at the University of Virginia, suggests that "Khomeini still has a tenacious hold on the people, especially the lower classes." French experts, who were among the first to predict the Shah's demise, contend that the Mujahedin may have suffered more at the Khomeini government's hands than they are willing to admit. Some Western intelligence sources doubt that the Mujahedin, though superbly organized, have as many followers as they claim. "They are not a popular movement," one analyst asserts. "Their ideology is not understood by the masses. They are capable, of carrying out terror operations but not of governing Iran when Khomeini fades away." Rajavi's sudden flight from Iran may, in the end, hurt his cause. "One can't sit in Paris and run a counterrevolution," says Ramazani.

U.S. intelligence sources, similarly, do not believe that the Mujahedin enjoy sufficient popular support to take over. "They can obviously disrupt and terrorize, but whether they have an alternative program and leadership to offer is far from clear," says one expert. Washington, in any event, has no illusions about its ability to influence events in Iran. "We have an interest in Iran as a buffer to Soviet expansion," an Administration official explains. "But at this point, all we can do is sit back and wait to see what happens." Although Moscow has consistently supported Khomeini, the Soviets are in a similar quandary. Pravda reported the Raja'i-Bahonar killings factually and tersely--a sign that the Kremlin is keeping its options open. The Palestine Liberation Organization is caught between its initial attraction to Khomeini, who has steadily supported the Palestinian cause, and the Mujahedin, whose secular views are closer to its own. Hani al-Hassan, a top adviser to P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat, visited Rajavi in France last week.

The current impasse, according to Banisadr, can be broken only if Khomeini makes good on his original promise to support a democratic regime that offers basic liberties to all citizens. "That would at least allow for the possibility of a reconciliation among the different tendencies, and for a government that could govern," says Banisadr. There is little chance, however, of the stubborn octogenarian's backing down, nor is there any individual or group that could unite the divided Iranians. The army is generally considered the most cohesive force in the country, but it is hopelessly bogged down in the border war with Iraq, now a year old, and its ranks are split very much as the country is as a whole. Paradoxically, even the ailing Khomeini's opponents realize that his death might precipitate the very worst scenario. Predicts Banisadr: "It could provoke a terrible civil war."

--By Henry Muller. Reported by Raji Samghabadi/New York and William Stewart/Beirut

With reporting by Raji Samghabadi, William Stewart

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.