Big Brother Moves In

By Patricia Blake

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 2 1/2 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.

The Soviets have purged the central committee of the Tudeh of what they call "bourgeois-minded reformists" and put in their own people. The security agents have set up shop in Saltanatabad, a northern suburb of Tehran, in the former headquarters of SAVAK, the notorious secret police of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Recruits for the new revolutionary secret service include some Islamic Guards, the better members of an inefficient secret service created after the fall of the Shah, and former SAVAK agents who have lost none of their taste for brutality and their skill at torture. Their Soviet teachers, who are evidently members of Central Asian minorities who speak languages related to Farsi, behave like true Muslim believers. "We are Muslim brothers and must help one another," is the KGB line in the Saltanatabad spy school. The Soviet instructors even pray with their students, while ostentatiously riffling through their traditional Muslim prayer beads.

Rivalry between the Islamic Guards, the clergy's military arm, and the regular armed forces gave Moscow another valuable opportunity to exploit Iran's increasingly unstable situation. Fear of a strong opposition and disloyalty in the armed services has led such clergymen as Hojja-toleslam Ashgar Mousavi Khoeiny, the deputy speaker of the Majlis (parliament), to endorse Soviet offers to reinforce the military effectiveness of the Islamic Guards. Thus, for the first time, the Soviet Union has introduced its weapons into revolutionary Iran. Soviet advisers, forming the nucleus of a military mission, have begun teaching Islamic Guards and some strongly pro-Khomeini groups how to use heavy Soviet weaponry, including Katyusha rocket launchers.

Still another team of Soviet advisers is trying to help the Khomeini regime escape economic disaster.

Working with a group of East Germans, the Soviets are hoping to salvage hundreds of factories that are scarcely functioning because of poor maintenance, labor chaos and the flight of manpower abroad. Ironically, the Soviet specialists are striving to improve the distribution of consumer goods, one of the weakest links in the Soviets' own economy. Still, the experts from Moscow have accumulated a great deal of experience in rationing food and other essential goods. Iranians, who are suffering from chronic shortages of meat, eggs, cereals, kerosene and gasoline, recently received detailed questionnaires about their needs that were direct translations of those used in the U.S.S.R.

In what is evidently a coordinated effort to court the Islamic leadership, Cuba has dispatched Foreign Minister Isidore Malmierca Peoli to Iran eight times since the fall of the ' Shah. In addition, more than two dozen visits have been exchanged between Khomeini aides and high-level Cuban officials. An Iranian parliamentary delegation attended a large meeting in Havana in September with top Cuban leaders, including Fidel Castro. One delegate later told the Iranian parliament how Castro had praised Khomeini and his "anti-imperialist struggle." The Cubans reportedly urged Iran to open an embassy in Havana.

Of all the problems plaguing Iran, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, Khomeini's former foreign minister, worries most about the "Red threat" to his country. Ghotbzadeh, who is living in seclusion in Iran, says of the Soviet Union: "God knows, it is up to no good." --By Patricia Blake. Reported by Raji Samghabadi/New York

With reporting by Raji Samghabadi

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