40th Humiliation on Day of Allah Nov.4

1979 was a turbulent year for establishment of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.  An Iranian delegation, led by the then Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and accompanied by Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi and martyr Mostafa Chamran, in the late October of 1979, had a meeting with the U.S. President’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in Algeria. The meeting was to be secret one but the late Sadeq Tabatabaei who was the insider of Ahmad Khomeini in the interim government revealed it and its details that the U.S. was after restoring ties with Iran, reiterating that the U.S. even had promised to return the ex-Shah’s assets without extraditing him to Iran because the Shah was ill and he was to undergo treatment in the U.S.; the U.S. government had also asked Iran to return F14 fighter jets ,  and the U.S. government, in return, would return their money.

IRAN NEWS POLITICAL DESK

When Mr. Ahmad Khomeini found out the U.S. suggestion, he consulted it with Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha and they planned the takeover of the U.S. Embassy. Ebrahim Asgharzadeh and Mirdamadi who were the close allies and friends of Mousavi Khoeiniha got the green light to seize the U.S. Embassy on November 13 in order to block any possible channel for ties with the U.S.

This decision and details of talks in Algeria were handed over to the late Imam Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Revolution, and he censured the performance of Mr. Bazargan and his entourage and praised the performance of Muslim student followers of the Imam’s line who took over the embassy and termed their act a revolution greater than the first revolution and actually endorsed the decision and act of Mr. Ahmad Khomeini and Mr. Khoeiniha.

On the seizure of the Den of Espionage (the U.S. Embassy), the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei says, “Their embassy, which was later named the Den of Espionage and actually it was right, was the center for organizing and directing opponents and enemies of the revolution where they used to get their orders to act against the revolution and Islamic establishment … Americans accepted the Shah who fled the country and gave him a shelter as a guest. They did not return the assets of Mohammad Reza Shah and his investments in the U.S. worth billions of dollars. Takeover of the Den of Espionage was aimed at showing the U.S. that no one can kid with therevolution. The revolution of this nation and country is not of that kind of revolution to tolerate any plot.”

During 444 days that the U.S. Embassy’s staff, who were the guests of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and behind the scene, some political intermediaries were busy with political cooking. Some of these cookings, which were in form of mischiefs, were reported to the late Imam. After Mr. Bazargan returned to the country and learned that the U.S. Embassy had been seized by the students, he resigned and in the wake of his resignation, the late Imam asked Mr. Ahmad Khomeini and Revolution Council to run the country and ordered to put an end to the U.S. Embassy issue.

The leftist members of Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organization (MISO) were in charge of the most complicated cookings and they were preparing to deal with Britain which had earlier reached a deal with the U.S. Republicans over inflicting a blow at the Democrat Party. So the MISO members resorted to different pretexts for delay in releasing the American hostages. The leader of this current was nobody but Behzad Nabavi.

I later heard that Nabavi had said, “I, as a member of the organization, opposed the release of the American hostages and believed in putting them on trial even as symbolic.”

This was totally a contradiction to his later remarks. Nabavi later claimed that he and his organization did their best to release the hostages during the U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s era but they failed. But the parliament with support of Martyr Rajaee summoned Nabavi and questioned him over the delay in release of the hostages because lawmakers had realized that something was fishy about it and they did not follow Nabavi.

I also informed the late Imam about sham bureaucracy of Mr. Nabavi and the foreign ministry for delaying the release of the Americans but this complicated current in coordination with Ahmad Khomeini delayed the process of the release of Americans and postponed it to President Ronald Reagan’s era due to behind-the-scene deal.

Years after the release of the Americans, the U.S. government set up a 21-man committee to probe about the behind-the-scene deal and they also interviewed me. The committee prepared a 5-volume report and sent it to the Congress and the case was closed.

Of course during the takeover of the Den of Espionage and later the release of the confiscated documents and release of hostages, if we look at the event from any aspect and angle, we see that the U.S. has actually been fully humiliated and this humiliation has become  bigger and bigger during the past four decades, and every year a ceremony is held in front of the former U.S. Embassy building, which is now under control of Basij forces, to mark 13 Aban (November 4). In all these forty years, the U.S. has remained silent against this humiliation and it censors the result of this ceremony and contempt in the media.

This has made Saudi Arabia and Israel to magnify this event bigger and bigger in order to discourage the U.S. from thinking to penitence for those disasters which had led to such a reaction.