Le Complot des ayatollahs

Bani Sadr, Iran's first president after the Islamic Revolution, has been living in exile since 1981 in Paris, where he plots revenge against his former allies. His book, The Conspiracy of the Ayatollahs, written with the help of a French journalist, serves as an indictment of the regime in Tehran. But it will do little to enhance Bani Sadr's already low reputation in the West. It shows that his old penchants for childish self-absorption, grandiloquence, and the political shallowness ("I am fighting against Khomeinism and Reaganism") are still very much intact.

Worse, the book is inaccurate and irresponsible. Simple facts get mangled (Michael Ledeen turns up as Michael Leading!) and vast conspiratorial webs get spun around the flimsiest of evidence. By far the most important of these is Bani Sadr's assertion that Candidate Reagan reached a secret agreement with the mullahs for the release of the American hostages held in Iran.

The accord was supposedly reached in Paris on October 19, 1980; participants at the meeting there included no less than George Bush and William Casey. To hide this agreement's existence, the crafty mullahs engaged in mock negotiations with President Carter over the next three months. And what is Bani Sadr's proof for this extraordinary claim? His own experience in Tehran at the time? Some other source of privileged information? Far from it: his evidence comes from the testimony provided by Richard Brenneke, a discredited former CIA agent and arms salesman, at a 1988 trial held in Denver. Bani Sadr's book provides the unvarnished views of one major actor in Iran's period of turmoil, 1978-81, but it offers very little on the actual events of those years.

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