Soviets are influencing security, military and economic affairs
On a cold, starlit night last month a group of 36 strangers was ushered into the Tehran Hilton with all the security precautions that once attended the transfer of the Iranian crown jewels. While plainclothesmen and a detachment of Islamic Guards armed with machine guns hustled the group through the lobby, hotel staffers were amazed to hear the foreigners address one another, and their Iranian hosts, as baradar (brother), in the best tradition of Islamic revolutionaries, while they chatted in flawless, idiomatic Farsi.
The group was no delegation of politicians from a friendly Muslim country. TIME has learned that it was a team of highly professional, meticulously schooled intelligence agents from the Soviet Union invited to Iran by the ruling Islamic Republic Party (I.R.P.). The agents were the first among several KGB and other Soviet advisory missions that have arrived in Iran since mid-October to help the government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini create an efficient intelligence and security force and strengthen the Islamic Guards, the clergy's private army.
After more than 2½ years of courting Khomeini, often at the cost of snubs and loss of face, the Soviets could be gaining the bridgehead in Iran that they have coveted for decades. The goal of the Soviets is to establish themselves so firmly that they can exercise a decisive influence on Iranian foreign policy or, in the case of a future political explosion in the country, install a puppet regime.
The decision to enlist the Soviets for help was a wrenching turn for the Islamic fundamentalists who run the ruling I.R.P. The party's strict religious orientation requires its leaders to denounce atheist Communism. But the I.R.P. felt forced to act when it was unable to organize an efficient intelligence and security organization to cope with last summer's spectacular wave of assassinations of government leaders. The campaign was conducted by the Mujahe-din-e Khalq (People's Crusaders), urban guerrillas who had penetrated virtually every government institution. The small Tudeh Communist Party in Iran convinced the leaders of the I.R.P. that it should turn to the Kremlin for aid against the Mujahedin, whom it called "CIA-backed leftists."
Moscow was quick to respond with an offer to supply the knowledge that it has acquired in over 60 years of maintaining one of the world's most effective secret police systems. The Soviet agents soon had to use their skills. No sooner had they settled into the Hilton than they routinely set about checking out the rooms for electronic listening bugs. They found instead a huge time bomb, planted by persons unknown, which they managed to defuse just before zero hour. After some understandably excited exchanges with their Iranian hosts, the newcomers packed up their gear and departed for presumably safer quarters.