Tudeh Dismantled (1953—71)

After the 1953 coup, the secret police—first the Second Bureau and then the newly created SAVAK—selectively used torture on Tudeh activists suspected of withholding information on safe houses, arms caches, printing presses, and contacts in the armed forces. Years later, Kianuri reminisced that after the 1953 coup "torture had been used mostly in the initial interrogation and then only to obtain organizational information. . . . After that prisoners were left alone."^[23] Another Tudeh leader writes that the "barbaric practices" introduced in 1953 were rarely used by the end of the 1950s.^[24] Likewise, a Khomeini supporter admits that he and his friends, arrested in 1956 for plotting to assassinate the prime minister, were not subjected to physical torture. "Such methods," he remarked in passing, "came in later years."^[25]

The forms of torture practiced in this period were crude. They involved indiscriminate beatings, whippings of backs and limbs (but rarely of the feet), smashing of chairs on heads,

breaking of fingers, and slapping of eardrums. A few were subjected to the dreaded qapani or suspended from books—but for no more than fifteen minutes.^[26] In a revealing passage, a senior member of the Tudeh military network writes that his organization had over the years taken elaborate security precautions, even developing a complicated cryptographic code, but had failed to take into account the effectiveness of primitive brute force. "Torture did not figure in our calculations simply because we had never expected to be dealing with fascism."^[27] For those who had grown up in the 1930s and 1940s, torture was a distant abstraction found in fascist Europe or in the bad old Qajar days. They were to receive a rude awakening.

A Tudeh book of martyrs documents eleven torture deaths in the period between 1953 and 1958.^[28] The victims—most of whom succumbed from brain hemorrhages—included Farhi, the central committee member who had been in Qasr during the 1930s; Lieutenant Mohammad Monzavi, the son of the religious scholar Ayatollah Bozorg Tehrani (his killers were executed after the Islamic Revolution); Galoust Zakharian, an Armenian intellectual described by Kianuri as the party's "ablest theoretician";^[29] and Vartan Salakhanian, another Armenian intellectual, whom Ahmad Shamlu, the country's preeminent poet, eulogized as a heroic martyr who preferred to die rather than betray his comrades. Leftists, including Tudeh opponents, were reciting Shamlu's ode to Vartan even as late as the 1980s.^[30]

Despite the likes of Vartan, brute force, together with the breaking of the cryptographic code—probably with CIA know-how—unearthed the whole Tudeh underground. Between 1953 and 1957, the security forces tracked down 4,121 party members—477 of them in the armed forces. This constituted more than half the party membership and almost the entire military network—only 37 officers escaped abroad. General Zibayi, the chief interrogator, named the 4,121 arrested members in his book, Communism in Iran . This book was commissioned by SAVAK in the late 1950s but was not readily available until the 1980s.^[31] The occupations of 2,419 are known. Of these, 1,276

(53%) were from the intelligentsia, including 386 civil servants, 201 college students, and 165 teachers; and 860 (36%) were from the working class, including 125 skilled workers, 80 textile workers, and 60 cobblers. Most of the remaining 11 percent were shopkeepers, with a sprinkling of peasants and housewives—mostly from middle-class homes.^[32]

British and American authorities felt the crackdown had not gone far enough. The British Foreign Office complained that "family influence and graft were playing a large part in securing the release of people arrested."^[33] The American Embassy insisted that only massive "suppression" could destroy the Tudeh as the prospects of economic development would have no effect on a membership that was entirely "employed," "literate," and relatively well off: "The notion that communism feeds on suppression is a communist-inspired notion."^[34] Not surprisingly, many felt that the main drive for the brutal crackdown came from the West—especially the CIA.

The magnitude of the dragnet forced the regime to overcrowd Qasr and the Central Jail as well as the main provincial prisons; the jail in Rasht became so overcrowded that it erupted into a bloody uprising in which three prisoners were killed. The regime also improvised. It converted Qezel Qal'eh (Red Fort)—a Qajar armory in western Tehran—into a prison for some two hundred inmates. It used the nearby Zarhi barracks as a temporary detention center; most of the casualties from torture occurred in its bathrooms. It packed Maleki supporters as well as Tudeh militants into the old Falak al-Falak fortress in Khorramabad. Clearly, the disparate groups were put together for malevolent reasons. What is more, it dispatched some one hundred twenty prisoners to the godforsaken island of Khark in the Persian Gulf. In the past, Khark had been reserved for highly dangerous common criminals.

Karim Keshavarz has detailed this place in his Fourteen Months on Khark .^[35] A survivor of Qasr from the 1930s, Keshavarz depicts Khark less as a regular prison than as place of unhealthy and inhospitable banishment. The guards, living in a separate compound, provided the prisoners with bare neces-

sities and periodically counted heads but otherwise let them have free range of the island. The prisoners formed a komun that had its own joint banks and elected officials. They cooked and baked bread, cleaned house, herded goats, washed clothes, collected rainwater for drinking, swam in the salty water (always on the lookout for sharks), brewed vodka, and visited the ancient ruins. They sang, performed folk dances, and put on plays—one was staged for the local population. They celebrated Nowruz, January 1, May Day, Constitution Day, and the Autumn Equinox—an old Persian festival revived by the Tudeh. They listened to a homemade radio as well as to classical music on an old gramophone. They played volleyball and incessant games of chess—the best players competed in tournaments. They gave illiteracy and language classes—mostly Persian, Azeri, English, French, and Russian. They read the few books available and the periodicals that sporadically arrived from Tehran—the older prisoners tried to shield the younger ones from temptation by removing from these magazines all pictures of scantily clothed women. When finances permitted, they bought fresh fruits and vegetables from local smugglers and the small Arab-speaking community. They had cordial relations both with the Arab kadkhuda (headman) and with the prison warden—who happened to be a childhood friend of one of the prisoners.

In addition to their large komun, the Khark prisoners had a number of smaller social dowrehs (circles). One was composed of intellectuals who favored an alliance with Mossadeq; one, of intellectuals who opposed such an alliance; one, of workers and "simple folk" who insisted on addressing the intellectuals as "engineers" and "doctors"; one, of veterans from the Azerbaijan revolt; and one, of Armenians, almost all from the same slum in Tehran. Khark also contained a few individuals from the National Front and the Fedayan-e Islam. The komun exempted the oldest inmates from physical chores. This gave Keshavarz the opportunity to study the local dialects and archaeological sites. According to him, their worst ordeals were summer heat and humidity; disease and tooth infections; and lack of

vitamins, medicines, and sanitary facilities—the sea was their toilet. The group contained four doctors and four medical students, but they lacked penicillin and basic medicines.

The 1953–58 dragnet caught most of the remaining top leaders, including Bahrami, Yazdi, and Olavi. It also caught 22 colonels, 69 majors, 100 captains, 193 lieutenants, 19 noncommissioned officers, and 63 military cadets. This military network was so extensive that some National Front supporters complained that the Tudeh could have saved Mossadeq. But in actual fact, few Tudeh officers held field commands—especially in the crucial tank divisions around Tehran. The officers came mostly from the military academies, the gendarmerie, the police, and the medical corps. Coups are carried out—as well as forestalled—by tanks and motorized brigades, not by cadets and academy lecturers. The Shah's screening of the tank division had paid off. Ironically, a Tudeh colonel had been in charge of the Shah's personal security—as well as that of Vice President Richard Nixon when he visited Iran. The Tudeh had the opportunity to assassinate the Shah and the U.S. vice president but not to launch a coup. Incidentally, many of these officers came from the lower middle class—even from religious bazaar families. Lacking political clout, their families rushed to Qom in search of clerics willing to lobby on their behalf.

Military tribunals meted out varied sentences in camera. Those in the military organization—whether uniformed or civilians assigned to them—were treated harshly. But others—even party leaders—were treated fairly leniently so long as they did not withhold information on safe houses and hidden printing presses. The 31 executed in 1953–58 were all either military personnel or their close civilian associates. They included 7 colonels, 6 majors, 8 captains, 5 lieutenants, 2 sailors, and 3 civilians—one of them being Olavi, the central committee's main liaison with the military organization. Tabari—one of the Fifty-three—later claimed that Olavi, in contrast to Yazdi and Bahrami, had been executed because he lacked their "social connections."^[36] Although to some extent true, this overlooks the

military factor. Of the other military officers, 144 got life, 119 got fifteen years, and 79 got ten years.

The condemned were executed in four batches. A Reuter's correspondent who observed the first batch filed a confidential report to the U.S. government describing how the condemned had gone to their death singing patriotic songs, hailing the Tudeh, denouncing the Shah, and refusing Muslim rites.^[37] He warned that leaked reports of this "bravado" were "impressing large segments of the public." He added that they had to be dispatched with pistol shots because the firing squads had missed either "through nervousness or deliberate avoidance." The regime dispatched the others in total secrecy and circulated the false rumor that the condemned had to be drugged to fortify their failing courage. It also encouraged the rumor that the Americans had overruled the Shah's desire to grant clemency.^[38] A Foreign Office expert commented that these "necessary executions" aroused strong protests inside and outside the country, with prominent figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus signing letters urging clemency.^[39] He added that the executed officers had "a reputation for honesty and efficiency" and that the Shah had promised to educate their children at his personal expense.^[40] It is not clear if the promise was kept. The British ambassador noted that many were "impressed" by the officers' refusal to seek clemency and their willingness to "face torture and execution."^[41]

The regime portrayed the trial of the officers as one of treason and espionage. Denouncing the Tudeh as a "fifth column," General Timour Bakhtiyar, the military governor of Tehran, issued two works—The Black Book and the Evolution of Communism in Iran —claiming that the officers had confessed to passing on secret information to the communist bloc. But, in fact, the Zibayi book—the documentary basis for Bakhtiyar's books—has next to nothing on gathering information and absolutely nothing on the passing of such information to the Soviet Union. One of the condemned confessed that every morning he had to pass information to a foreign official—his American superior. Likewise, memoirs published by SAVAK

officials after 1979 provide much information on Tudeh "subversion"—but not on foreign espionage.

Instead of proving espionage, the Zibayi book provides reams of documentation on how the organization read and distributed Marxist books, wrote in secret codes, kept tabs on right-wing officers, made hand grenades, stored arms, smuggled people out of the country, embezzled money from state banks, provided firearms to party members and the Fedayan-e Islam, and, most serious of all, helped a pro-Mossadeq revolt among the Qashqayis by disabling some planes and sending arms and ammunition to the tribesmen. The published trial transcripts show that the real charges were not "espionage" but "sedition" and "communism." In fact, it turned out that the Soviets did have an agent in the Iranian armed forces, but he was neither in the Tudeh nor in its military organization. He escaped detection until 1977, by which time he was a full field marshal in charge of intelligence agencies in all three branches of the armed forces. A SAVAK officer writes that this field marshal had been giving information to the Soviets since his days in the Military Academy in the 1940s.^[42] It seems the Soviets continued to keep their espionage and their communist contacts strictly separate.

Rouzbeh—the military organization's de facto head—was one of the last to be apprehended. Wounded after a shootout in July 1957, he was interrogated—we do not know under what conditions—tried in camera, and executed secretly in Qezel Qal'eh in May 1958. Zibayi reveals that Rouzbeh confessed to having assassinated Mohammad Massoud, a maverick newspaper editor, in 1948 as well as four party members suspected of selling information to the police after the 1953 coup. One of the four was Hesham Lankrani, a member of a prominent clerical family from Azerbaijan. Rouzbeh, however, emphasized that he had carried out the Massoud assassination without the party's knowledge.^[43] In fact, the party had dissolved its military network in 1946 and had not re-created it until 1950-51. Contemptuous of the party for being too "moderate," Rouzbeh had resigned in 1946 and not rejoined until the early 1950s. He

confessed he had thought the assassination of such a popular anticourt journalist as Massoud would polarize Iran and thus radicalize the Tudeh. Rouzbeh was a radical in the tradition of Bakhunin—not of Marx and Engels.

SAVAK never published Rouzbeh's damaging confessions, probably because his defiant death made him an instant revolutionary icon. Further coverage would have given him more publicity. Besides, the Shah preferred to make his adversaries—whether dead or alive—into nonpersons. In begrudging praise, the British Embassy described Rouzbeh as the "Red Pimpernel, who, in a series of disguises walked into and out of innumerable baited police traps with the swashbuckling courage that made him a figure of legendary proportions, both to the Party, the security authorities, and the general public."^[44]

One the eve of his execution, Rouzbeh composed a seventy-page testament denouncing capitalism, praising socialism, and explaining why he was willing to die for the "great revolutionary cause" of the Tudeh party.^[45] The party posthumously elevated him to the central committee and made him into an icon on a par with Arani. It published laudatory articles every year commemorating his martyrdom. It erected a statue in his honor in Italy. Shamlu composed a couplet eulogizing him. And many leftists—including non-Tudeh members—named their newborn sons after him. In short, he became the symbol of uncompromising opposition, heroic resistance, and ultimate self-sacrifice.^[46]

Few of the others remained in jail for long—even Yazdi and Bahrami, whose death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Most were granted amnesty after signing short announcements known as nadamat nameh (letter of regret), tanaffar nameh (letter of disgust), or enzejar nameh (letter of revulsion), expressing loyalty to the Shah, promising to abstain from politics, or declaring their disgust with the "treacherous" Tudeh party. Such letters were signed by 2,844 of the 4,121 arrested between September 1953 and May 1957. In most cases, the main inducement was reduced sentences rather than torture. Some avoided signing by giving bribes or convincing

the police they had never belonged to the Tudeh.^[47] Mahmud Behazin, a prominent intellectual, writes that he got released within two months because relatives pulled strings and he signed a promissory note that he would abstain from politics. He claims that the authorities knew perfectly well he had no intention of keeping his promise.^[48]

The longest letters came from Yazdi and Bahrami. Yazdi sent a full paragraph to the Supreme Court and the Shah seeking repeal of his death sentence "in consideration of the medical contribution he could make to the country and of his past opposition to the dangerous elements in the Tudeh leadership."^[49] At his trial, he refused to work with his court-assigned attorneys but pleaded that while on the central committee he had argued against armed actions and the re-creation of the military network.^[50] He stressed that the party had tried to work within the constitutional laws but that hotheaded individuals had initiated illegal actions without the central committee's approval. Those he named as hotheaded, such as Kianuri, were safely out of the country. A fellow prisoner reports that Yazdi's arm had been broken during his initial interrogation.^[51]

According to the British ambassador, Yazdi's life was saved by the unexpected intercession of Sayyed Ziya Tabatabai, the most pro-British and anticommunist of the old-time politicians. Sayyed Ziya, who happened to be a childhood friend of Yazdi's older brother, advised the Shah that more executions would be counterproductive because the whole concept of "martyrdom" had a "great deal of emotional appeal" for the average Iranian.^[52] According to a cellmate, further clemency pleas came from Yazdi's brother-in-law, a general in the army, and Ibrahim Hakimi, his foster father, who had served the monarch both as a court tutor and as prime minister.^[53] Yazdi was released after serving five year of his life sentence. He spent these five years writing a book on medicine and keeping himself separate from the Tudeh komun. After his release, he opened a clinic that welcomed the indigent and former Tudeh members. He remained friendly with members of the Fifty-three who continued to lead the Tudeh in exile until as late as 1979.

Bahrami's letter was longer. He began with his "fall into communism" in prewar Germany, his friendship with Arani, his membership in the Fifty-three, and his role in the creation and leadership of the Tudeh. He continued with a litany of reasons for being "disgusted" with the Tudeh—the Soviet oil demand, the Azerbaijan revolt, the refusal of hotheaded adventurers to listen to the leadership, and the "conspiracies" to subvert the armed forces and the "constitutional monarchy." He exhorted party members still at large to turn themselves in and concluded with, "Long Life to the Promising Young Shah. Death to the Foreign-worshipping Tudeh."^[54] A fellow prisoner writes that Bahrami signed the letter only after his wrists had been placed inside red-hot handcuffs. Forty years later, the fellow prisoner noted that he had screamed exactly the same phrase as Galileo: "What do you want from me?"^[55] Bahrami was released in 1957—just before succumbing to diabetes from which he had suffered even when incarcerated with the Fifty-three in the 1930s. Rouzbeh became the symbol of bravery, heroism, and resistance; Bahrami, the epitome of the exact opposite. Neither deserved their reputations.

Most of the 2,844 letters, however, were not taken seriously—by either the public or the signers or even the authorities themselves. They were one-shot deals appearing in the daily Ettela'at . They were short—often less than a paragraph and sometimes less than two sentences. They were perfunctory, giving only name, identification number, profession, and vague reason for resignation. The wardens often pleaded with them to sign and get on with their lives; some even reminded them that "promises made to governments were not morally binding."^[56] The letters were clearly pro forma: The authorities composed them, and the petitioners merely added their signatures. They sounded ironic in the wake of the CIA coup as they hailed the Shah as a "constitutional monarch" and denounced the Tudeh as "foreign-worshiping." They even became the butt of public humor when some Armenians signed letters stating that they were "disgusted" with the Tudeh because it had "failed to show proper respect for Islam." Karim Keshavarz narrates how

"shocked" Armenians in Khark beseeched their Muslim comrades to be considerate of their Christian sensibilities and take more care performing their daily Muslim prayers.^[57]

It was rumored that the authorities took bribes and turned a blind eye when concerned relatives forged signatures. It was also rumored that the leadership permitted and even encouraged some to sign. Mehdi Kaymaram, a party organizer, writes that leaders ordered—through smuggled notes and Morse code messages—specific members to get out of prison by signing these letters.^[58] Mehdi Khanbaba-Tehrani, a militant student who left the Tudeh with the complaint that the party was not revolutionary enough, writes that these letters were not really "testimonials of disgust but merely expressions of desire to return to private life." Besides, he adds, the Tudeh leaders had been bound more by "legalism" than radicalism.^[59] He could have added that some leaders were physically exhausted, having been in hiding since 1949. It is significant that the Tudeh did not ostracize the signers but, on the contrary, invited most of them back into the fold as soon as conditions permitted in 1979.^[60]

The Tudeh reserved its venom for those who actively collaborated with the regime either by becoming paid informants or by contributing to the short-lived SAVAK journal 'Ebrat (Example). This journal specialized in critiquing Marxism, translating works from the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom, and denouncing the past record of the Tudeh party—especially its support for the Soviet oil concession and the Azerbaijan rebellion. The Tudeh drew a sharp line between signing "letters of regret" and collaborating actively with the regime. Years later Kianuri confided that contributors to 'Ebrat remained barred from the Tudeh—even after the 1979 revolution.^[61]

It is surprising that the regime did not demand more of its prisoners—especially since the 1953 coup coincided with the height of McCarthyism in United States and the Slansky trials in Eastern Europe. The regime in Iran preferred that the public forget the immediate past as soon as possible. It also preferred

that opponents withdraw from politics rather than remain on the scene—even if active on behalf of the regime. Public shows in the style of the House Un-American Activities Committee would have drawn more attention to the opposition and would have kept alive the memory of the days when the Tudeh had been a mass movement. Besides television had not yet come to Iran.

National Front leaders were treated more leniently. Mossadeq and most of his ministers were tried and sentenced but released within four years. Mossadeq was banished to his village, where he died in 1967. Others, such as Shayegan, were encouraged to leave the country. Only two suffered serious repercussions. Lofti, the justice minister, died in a military hospital after being beaten up. Hossein Fatemi, the foreign minister, was executed after being found guilty of plotting to overthrow the "constitutional monarchy." He had advised Mossadeq to declare a republic. He had taken shelter in the Tudeh underground after the coup. Even more serious, before the coup he had openly denounced the Shah as a "venomous serpent."

Once the bulk of the Tudeh prisoners were released, the makeshift jails closed down. Khark returned to its original use. Falak al-Falak shut its doors; it was later turned into a tourist attraction. Provincial jails ceased to house political prisoners. And the military barracks—with the exception of Qezel Qal'eh—lost their inmates once Tudeh officers were pardoned in large batches. Among the early releases was Captain Abbasi, Rouzbeh's right-hand man, who had saved his own neck by cooperating with the authorities. In his Memoirs of a Tudeh Officer , Abbasi describes how the taxi driver taking him home from prison kissed him, refused payment, and praised the communist officers when he discovered Abassi had been one of them. Abbasi preferred to be treated as a Tudeh officer rather than as an informer.^[62]

Two of the officers produced literary masterpieces. Ex-Lieutenant Ali Mohammad Afghani, while serving a life sentence, wrote The Husband of Ahu Khanum —a one-

thousand-page novel that avoided overt politics but explored the sensitive issue of polygamy in traditional families. Published in 1961, it received immediate acclaim—even winning a royal prize. Ahmad Mahmud, a fellow prisoner, wrote a trilogy entitled Neighbors, Tale of a City , and Burnt Land . A fictionalized biography, the trilogy describes the life of a Tudeh officer beginning with his youthful commitments, continuing with his prison experiences, and ending with his social alienation and political disillusionment. Needless to say, Mahmud received literary recognition only after 1979. These four books detail the culture of the traditional middle class. Meanwhile, a third young officer, Abdul-Rahman Qassemlou, after being pardoned, went to Czechoslovakia, where he studied history, wrote Kurdestan and the Kurds , and revived the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran. He remained at its head until his assassination in 1989.

By the late 1960s, the number of Tudeh prisoners had dwindled to less than two dozen. Their nucleus was seven military officers who refused to sign the conventional letters of regret. Remaining incarcerated until the revolution, they became—with Nelson Mandela—the world's longest-serving political prisoners. When in 1970, Behazin, the well-known author, spent three months in Qasr for trying to revive the Writers' Association, he found few long-term political prisoners besides these seven holdouts and a group of religious extremists accused of plotting to assassinate the prime minister.^[63] The others were short-term prisoners—like Behazin himself. Mohammad Ali Amoui, one of the seven holdouts, writes in his unpublished memoirs that the bulk of the Tudeh officers had been released after being persuaded by the party leadership to sign the perfunctory letters of regret.^[64]

The prisoners organized themselves into two komuns divided along generational lines. Significantly, religious extremists were willing to be in the same komun as the Tudeh prisoners. Their daily routine did not differ much from that of their predecessors—except they now had a radio, television set, reading room, Ping-Pong table, and indoor gym equipped with

exercise machines. They spent time playing chess, exchanging language lessons, and reminiscing about their own political experiences. They were even allowed to decorate their cells with pictures of world-famous communists.^[65] Amou writes that they could read Marxist texts such as "The Manifesto," "The Holy Family," "Eighteenth of Brumaire," as well as biographies of Beethoven, Gandhi, Garibaldi, Napoleon, and Peter the Great. He adds that his favorite book was a study of the Decembrists who had tried to "liberate the serfs and bring freedom to Russia."^[66] Behazin spent his short time in prison reading Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and translating Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don . Readers of Behazin's prison memoirs could well conclude that the generation that had eagerly burst into politics in 1941 had by the late 1960s withdrawn from the national scene—either because of defeat, middle age, repression, or disillusionment, or sheer physical and psychological exhaustion.