Fadaeen People's guerrillas Organization
The founder of the idea of Urban Guerrilla warfare was a brilliant graduate of Tehran University named Mr. Jazani. He was a classmate of one of my closest friends, who told me a lot of stories about Mr. Jazani, his personality and IQ. Mr. Jazani symbolized a perfect person. His personal behaviors and mannerisms were polite, subdued, and political. Our mutual friend who is quite intelligent himself, swore that he had never run into another person so intelligent in his life. He told me that whenever the professors of graduate classes of philosophy would present a question and there was no person to answer the difficult question, they would ask Mr. Jazani, and he would give an articulate and complete response.
Mr. Jazani mentioned through his writings that the barrier of silence needed to be broken, and since the people faced overwhelming military superiority, the only method of dealing with this oppressive regime was utilization of urban guerrilla warfare. The idea was similar to Castro's and Che Guevara's. Mr. Jazani was quickly arrested and later on killed with 7 of his comrades. At this stage, which was around 1969, a second group of the Iranian communist guerrillas began to work and expand. They had two leaders - Mr. Pouian and Mr. Ahmadzadeh.
Mr. Ahmadzadeh's argument was that urban guerrilla warfare wasn't only a tactic it was a strategy as well. He believed that by using Urban Guerrilla warfare, you can actually win a war. The next theoretician, Mr. Pouian believed that keeping your assets intact for the proper time was a waste and that it was time to break the barrier of silence with armed struggle. Through a mutual friend I found out more about Mr. Pouian. However, that was after he had been killed in street battles. One of the first moves of Mr. Pouian and his comrades made was to attack a police station in Tehran and take an Uzi machine gun from the guard. They used that machine gun to assassinate the main judge of the military court, who had ordered the killing of communists in the past.
Such a daring move caused the mobilization of the Iranian secret service. It also was the beginning of the movement, which became known as the Iranian people's Fadaeen organization. Their first Guerrilla attack in the mountains was in the forests of northern Iran. Although they had reasonable training and guns, they had little battle experience. The organization was able to assassinate a few people and blow up a couple of places. However, the secret police came up with a new counter-measure which was the creation of a brutal organization called "integrated force of SAVAK and police against terrorism." This force consisted of the best of the secret service and police, and had unlimited authority to hunt down the guerrillas. The Fadaeen put up a glorious fight, but because of the fact that they were a communist organization, they did not have much popular support - most of its cells were eradicated and their organization was reduced to less than a hundred people.
However, the brutality of sequestering the guerrilla group was simply repulsive. It antagonized all the intellectuals of the country, causing the police to become even harsher. By 1979, the oppression was simply unbearable, which resulted in the 1979 revolution of Iran. In the aftermath of the revolution, the communist groups gained a lot of power and at least a hundred thousand new followers. The sympathizers of the the communist groups who mostly lived outside the Iranian borders went back to Iran to join the guerrillas who were still alive in political prisons. Ayatollah Khomeini, who was the leader of the revolution did not have any tolerance for such organizations or western style democracy. He was a rigid Muslim with one way of doing things, and that was his interpretation of Islam. He used the hostage crisis as a cover, and while everyone's attention was on that problem he drew all secular groups into a fight. And since he had more followers with total control of the weapons and the oil money, he was able to destroy all these groups.
By 1988, there were about 8,000 political prisoners left alive in Iran. They were remnants of guerrilla groups and approximately 2,000 of them were the remainder of the Fadaeen group. Khomeini, noticing that his heart wasn't good and his death imminent, simply ordered killing all of them in one of the darkest stories of our recent history. The prisoners were totally helpless captives, they were massacred. With that massacre all communist movements were finished off.
The final move of Soviets in Iran
The USSR government was delighted by the Iranian revolution . The political arm of Soviet Union in Iran was the Tudeh party again. The leftovers of the party from 1950's started the new foundation of the party which had the support of the Soviet Union. And this time they did not go against the Iranian government. Actually they were very helpful to Khomeini because the Soviet Union liked the Iranian government. In 1982, there was a defection that changed everything. A Russian KGB agent with the name of Vladimir Kuzichkin, who was mid-level Soviet embassy personnel, defected to the Tehran's MI6 station. He disappeared for about one year. It has been reported that his disappearance was kept so well hidden by MI6 that the Russians did not have a clue about his defection. Mr. Nureldin Kianuri, the secretary general of the Tudeh party, mentioned in his memoirs that he was asked by Russian embassy personnel to look for Kuzichkin and that Russians were more concerned about Kuzichkin having been kidnapped rather than the possibility of defection.
Meanwhile, Kuzichkin provided MI6 and the CIA with extremely valuable information about the Iranian communist party. That information was relayed to Khomeini's secret service. The main revelation was that Admiral Afzali, who was commander of Iranian Navy and the chief of the staff of Iranian armed forces, was an ardent communist and a member of the Tudeh party. The admiral had given the entire catalogs of the American F-14 fighter planes to the Russians. F-14s were the backbone of American naval air force. It took the U.S. close to 20 years and billions of dollars to retire all F-14s and replace them with F-18s.
In a sweeping move, the admiral and his comrades were arrested and executed. The entire leadership of the Tudeh party as well thousands of its members were arrested. However, because of some kind of a deal between Khomeini and Gorbachov, the Tudeh party did not receive the same treatment that other communist organizations had endured. There were a lot of public apologies and short-term prison sentences, while the Maoist and Castroist groups were almost entirely eliminated. Later on, with the collapse of Soviet Union, socialism as a potent force, disintegrated around the world. And consequently, even the remnants of those small groups in Iran gave up fighting. At this time, many of those urban guerrilla groups who used to have tens of thousands of followers do not even have a website on the internet outside of Iran. And as a political force they are simply irrelevant.
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