In Mashhad, a city of one million in the east near the Afghanistan border, the outraged population was able to drive the shah’s army out of the city in bloody clashes. In the Kurdish city of Sanandaj in the west, defense guards were created as the army was pushed out.  
 
‘Only thing shah controls is military’
Before the year was over, people in a number of provinces, particularly in Azerbaijan and two provinces on the Caspian Sea, Gilan, and Mazandaran, had taken over some of the towns. Popular organs called shoras (councils) started blossoming. In Sari and Amol on the Caspian, a solidarity council was formed that was composed of representatives of 27 industrial groups and crafts, as well as teachers, traders, and civil servants.

Washington secretly placed inside Iran U.S. general Robert E. Huyser, supreme NATO commander in Europe, to organize a military coup to keep the monarchy in power, as the imperialists had done in 1953. "As best I could make out, the only thing the government had control of was the military and its installations," Huyser wrote in his memoirs, Mission to Tehran, assessing the situation two days after he arrived.

By the end of 1978, the shah had exhausted all possibilities for breaking the strikes and crushing the mass movement. He had shuffled his cabinets going back and forth between hard and soft lackeys, freeing some political prisoners, and imprisoning some of his most trusted henchmen, ex-prime ministers, and heads of SAVAK to appease the masses. At other times he acted tough and unleashed his generals to intensify the violence against the masses. None of this worked.

Finally, under the pressure of events and the strong urging of Washington, he was forced to reach out to the liberal bourgeois opposition. He appointed Shahpur Bakhtiar, a former member of the National Front, a political grouping founded by Dr. Mohammad Mossa-degh in 1949, as prime minister and prepared to flee from the country.

Bakhtiar was immediately denounced by Khomeini, who was then living in exile in Paris.

The Islamic clerical hierarchy, and especially those forces around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were looked to by the masses as a new leadership. As a result of the Stalinist betrayals and defeats suffered by the working class during the second Iranian revolution (see first article in this series), and due to the intensity of political repression under the shah, especially against toilers, there were no working-class organizations that could take the lead in this third revolution.

On January 3, the rubber stamp majles (parliament) formally approved Bakhtiar’s appointment as prime minister. General Huyser arrived in Tehran a day later. Huyser immediately got to work with a number of the shah’s top generals to convince them to work with Bakhtiar, a former opposition figure, in order to save the army, and to even contemplate what up to then was the "unthinkable": to start negotiations with representatives of Khomeini and the "mullahs," whom the shah and his generals in the military had always looked down upon.  
 
‘Everything but the fuel’
Washington’s immediate goal was to break the strikes militarily. "We had the ammunition, the transport, the tanks--everything we needed, except fuel," Huyser wrote. The oil workers were not allowing fuel deliveries to the army. Huyser tried to use the class divisions within the revolutionary movement as a lever to push for his goals. He kept impressing upon the generals "that if we could contact the religious leaders we might enlist their support on this issue."

As the shah’s generals procrastinated, on January 11 Huyser asked Washington to direct a fuel tanker, which was in nearby waters at the time, to be unloaded for the army’s use. The response was slow. "We had already started on the propaganda, with leaflets on the streets," Huyser said in frustration. "But if we were going to take actions on any of the [coup] plans which required tanks and vehicles, then we would need a new source of diesel fuel and motor gasoline."

The propaganda and the leaflets that Huyser mentions refer to their efforts to organize a political base for the counterrevolution, and gain support among layers of the middle class who directly benefited from the shah’s rule. They wanted to start a "pro-Constitution" movement, which could operate in the streets--as the CIA-organized thugs had done during the 1953 coup--with a facade of democracy. For decades the monarchy and its imperialist paymasters had trampled upon the constitution that the first Iranian revolution had brought into being. Now they were invoking it to masquerade a counterrevolution.

During those days, one would come across armed thugs riding in open trucks around cities beating up isolated protesters and attacking universities. The "Pro-Constitution" movement succeeded in holding a pro-Bakhtiar demonstration of 50,000 in Tehran January 25. It was their first and last action.

Finally, when the oil tanker chartered by the U.S. Department of Defense arrived in Iranian waters at the end of January, the oil workers refused to turn it over to the army. Huyser reported to U.S. secretary of defense Harold Brown that the oil workers had demanded that it be a "gift from the Iranian military to the people of Iran, and of course we couldn’t [do that]." General Huyser left the country shortly after--mission failed.

The shah fled the country January 16, supposedly on an "extended vacation." Millions throughout Iran celebrated the victory in jubilation. Then millions from across the country converged on Tehran to welcome Khomeini on February 1. Upon his arrival, Khomeini declared Bakhtiar’s government illegal and said he would appoint a legitimate cabinet.

Shortly afterwards, Khomeini appointed Mehdi Bazargan, who had been one of his representatives in the country, to head up a provisional revolutionary government. Bazargan was a popular bourgeois nationalist figure who had collaborated with Mossadegh and had been the first director of the nationalized oil industry in 1951.

Bazargan along with some other leaders of the bourgeoisie, including clerics, had been at odds with workers because they were opposed to independent political action by the workers and organized to "call off those strikes which jeopardized the work of the main industries involved in the production of peoples’ urgent needs, those threatening the country’s survival." In fact by January 30 they had succeeded in persuading workers in some 118 factories to go back to work. However, in early January when Bazargan went to the oil fields to try to get domestic production resumed, he was booed by the striking workers. "They do not respect religion," he complained. But it had been workers’ intransigence in preventing the military from gaining access to the oil they needed for a coup that had saved the revolution. Huyser, in his account quoted earlier, inadvertently confirms this assessment.

While negotiations for a peaceful transfer of power to the provisional government dragged on at the top, the working class and peasant youth in the army were being won over to the revolution. In the urban areas demonstrators were fraternizing with the soldiers and raising the slogan, "Brother soldier, why kill brothers?" Women participated in mass demonstrations, often leading the fraternization efforts. They threw flowers over to soldiers in army trucks or placed them in their gun barrels and called on them to join the people in revolt.  
 
Airmen mutiny
No one in the Khomeini leadership called for an insurrection. Mounting class tensions, however, burst into the open the evening of Friday, February 9. That’s when the elite Royal Guard of the shah tried to crush a mutiny by pro-Khomeini homafars, air force technicians and cadets, at the Doshan Tappeh Air Force Base in Tehran.

The Militant carried an eyewitness report of what followed by its Iran correspondent, Cindy Jaquith, who was part of a team of revolutionary socialist journalists in the country at the time. "At midnight on February 9, the silence of the curfew in southeast Tehran was suddenly broken by cries of ‘Allah Akbar’," Jaquith wrote, "coming from Doshan Tappeh air base. The airmen were appealing to everyone living in the surrounding area to help repel the Royal Guard invasion.

"The air base had been alerted that guardsmen were rolling down from north of Tehran. The airmen began to organize defense. The ranks elected new officers to lead the battle. Arms were distributed. As the cries of help reached residents of the area, there was a massive display of revolutionary solidarity. Thousands poured out of their homes in defiance of the curfew and rushed to the air base. There they helped the airmen construct barricades."

By the next day, the entire city had begun to organize. Young people who had served as marshals in the recent demonstrations began taking control of the streets, as well as members of some of the underground guerrilla organizations. In a desperate move to get people off the streets and isolate the airmen, the military announced at 2 p.m. on February 9 that a curfew would begin at 4:30 p.m. that day. While some clerical leaders made public statements urging people to heed the curfew, shortly before the 4:30 p.m. deadline Khomeini called on people to defy the curfew set by an "illegal government" and protect the airmen.

The masses immediately poured into the streets. In the working-class district of southern Tehran practically the entire population came out. "That night, people began occupying police stations, taking weapons and files," Jaquith reported. The next day, at 2 p.m., "the radio announced that the army high command stated it would no longer resist people."

Soldiers opened the barracks in the city and the population took up arms. The uprising in Tehran rapidly spread to the entire country. The monarchy was toppled.

While the insurrection was going on, General Huyser was called to a telephone conference and asked by the U.S. under secretary of defense if he would be willing to go back to Tehran and lead a military takeover. Huyser stated in his memoirs that he agreed with some conditions, including Washington sending him 10,000 of its best troops, and providing him with "undivided national support."

"There was a long pause," Huyser wrote, "so I answered the question for them."

The U.S. rulers knew that the Iranian toilers would fight back tenaciously in the event of a U.S. military assault, and will push forth to establish a government of workers and farmers, as toilers in Vietnam had done earlier.

In a January 17 news conference, U.S. president James Carter had stated, "Certainly we have no desire, nor ability, to intrude massive forces into Iran..... We tried this once in Vietnam. It didn’t work well."
 
 
Related articles:
Iran: decades of struggle to topple shah
Iran: 1978 revolt broke hold of the shah  
 
 
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