Moujahedeen Get Some U.S. Backing : Rebels Wage Campaign of War, Words Against Iran

They are the hooded figures on street corners across the United States and Europe, wearing striped prison uniforms and displaying ghastly pictures of torture in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran.

They have stacks of expensively printed brochures describing the terrors of Khomeini’s regime and their heroic efforts to topple “this little Hitler.” And always they have their collection buckets, soliciting a quarter here, a dollar there, to support their armed struggle to “liberate” Iran from Islamic fundamentalism.

Who are these people who call themselves the People’s Moujahedeen of Iran? And are they, as they say, the only viable democratic alternative to the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards?

The U.S. government publicly denounces the members of the Moujahedeen as Marxists and terrorists but privately meets with them and reportedly is providing them $100,000 a month to support their guerrilla campaign. They have the backing of 52 members of Congress who believe that any anti-Khomeini group is worthy of American support.

But Iranians in exile and foreign scholars who know the group’s bloody history of kidnapings and killings say that the Moujahedeen is waging a sophisticated public relations campaign in the West as it makes plans to impose a militant Marxist revolutionary regime on a post-Khomeini Iran.

And, even if the United States continues its back-channel diplomacy with the rebels, there is no guarantee that it will result in any benefits.

“Are we using them?” a State Department official asked rhetorically. “Or are they using us?”

Indeed, as one former Iranian diplomat said: “They look like very nice, clean-shaven, inconspicuous social democrats. I wish they were, but they’re not.”

The Iranian Moujahedeen is not affiliated with the various U.S.-supported Afghan rebel groups known generally by the same name. The Arabic word literally means “holy warriors,” but the Iranian group, with an eye as always to Western public opinion, prefers the translation “freedom fighters.”

The Moujahedeen, formed in the mid-1960s in opposition to the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, is led by Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, a husband-and-wife team described as equal co-leaders of the organization.

Although little known outside Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, the Moujahedeen claimed credit for a number of spectacular bombings, bank robberies, kidnapings and killings, including the assassination of seven American military advisers and businessmen in Iran.

Massoud Rajavi was imprisoned by the shah for anti-government activities in 1971 but was released in time to play a central role in the 1979 revolution. He was an early ally of Khomeini and other post-revolutionary Iranian leaders but the alliance quickly soured. And in a 1981 power struggle, Khomeini moved ruthlessly to suppress the Moujahedeen and other groups that challenged his absolute power.

The Moujahedeen claims that 70,000 of its members were killed and 140,000 imprisoned in the ensuing blood bath. The group’s literature documents hundreds of cases of torture of Moujahedeen prisoners in Khomeini’s jails, and tales of martyrdom are a staple of Moujahedeen fund-raising and recruiting drives.

Massoud Rajavi and his followers left Tehran for Paris in 1981, where they directed a campaign of guerrilla attacks inside Iran and propaganda in Western Europe and the United States. In 1985, he married Maryam Azodanlu, a longtime Iranian revolutionary, in a political alliance designed to consolidate several Moujahedeen factions under a single leadership.

In June, 1986, the French, involved in a delicate diplomatic maneuver to try to free several French hostages controlled by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon, expelled the Moujahedeen, whose members took up residence in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Under the sponsorship and with considerable financial and logistical help from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Moujahedeen has stepped up its attacks on Iranian military garrisons along the Iran-Iraq border and has conducted sabotage and intelligence operations deep inside Iran.

Being Watched Closely

Recently, the Khomeini government has acknowledged Moujahedeen attacks, but the government has characterized them as mere annoyances rather than a significant military threat. However, films of Moujahedeen training exercises indicate that the group can field sizable and well-armed military forces capable of inflicting considerable damage on the Tehran regime.

Last week, the Moujahedeen said that it launched its largest offensive yet, attacking the Piranshahr region in northwest Iran. The rebels claim to have inflicted more than 3,000 casualties on Iranian forces while suffering only 18 deaths.

The accuracy of such figures is open to question, as is the likelihood of the Moujahedeen’s success in toppling the Khomeini regime. But the United States is watching the Moujahedeen closely and, quietly, is hedging its bets in case the group emerges as a significant player in post-Khomeini Iran.

In 1984, the CIA secretly concluded that the Moujahedeen was “well organized, influenced by the Soviets and likely to succeed Khomeini.” The government’s public position at the time was that the Moujahedeen was only one of many Iranian opposition groups inside and outside the country, none of which had much chance of supplanting the Tehran government.

U.S. Position Has Softened

In 1985, Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy, the Administration’s top Middle East expert, characterized the group as a “militantly Islamic, anti-democratic, anti-American and anti-Western collectivist organization which continues to employ terrorism and violence as standard instruments of policy.”

Over the last two years, however, the U.S. position has begun to soften, in part because the Iran-Contra scandal demonstrated how easily Americans could be fooled by Iranians. The United States continues to oppose the Moujahedeen in public because of its use of “terror and violence,” but, in a diplomatic equivalent of the Wall Street technique of portfolio insurance, U.S. officials meet with and listen to Moujahedeen representatives here and abroad.

“We meet, we have met” with the Moujahedeen, Murphy told congressmen last month. “We’re not boycotting them.” It is “a necessary part of our job to listen to them and the views of other (opposition) groups as well,” he said.

In addition, sources on Capitol Hill said that the U.S. government is covertly providing the group with at least $100,000 a month and perhaps as much as $300,000 a month to buy arms and fuel the propaganda machine.

‘We’re Not Helping Them’

U.S. and Moujahedeen officials deny that such payments have been made.

“We’re not helping them in any way,” a State Department official said.

Ali Safavi, Moujahedeen spokesman in Washington, also denied receiving money from Washington. He said that all Moujahedeen funds come from donations from Iranians in Iran and abroad, from sale of publications and from several Moujahedeen-operated import and export businesses in Iran. Safavi also said that the organization stole $20 million from the Khomeini government in 1986 in what he called “an intricate operation.”

Safavi said the group is neither Marxist nor anti-American.

“We are a Muslim, nationalist, democratic movement. We were founded on Muslim principles and have remained such. That is completely incompatible with Marxism.”

Change in Image

Many Iranian scholars doubt that the group has dropped its Marxist leanings and charge that the Moujahedeen is adjusting its image to please Western eyes. More important, however, the group’s image suffers from its current alliance with Iraq, which is engaged in a bloody seven-year-old war with Iran.

“To many Iranians, even those who are completely against Khomeini, this is an act of treason,” said Sepehr Zabih, professor of government at St. Mary’s College in California and an authority on the Iranian left.

“This group could not continue its activity without the protection, support and sanctuary that Iraq offers them. Because of this, the Moujahedeen will not play a significant role after Khomeini is gone. The (U.S.) government should be very cautious,” Zabih said.

Safavi said that the relationship with Iraq is merely a marriage of convenience, a temporary stop before the Moujahedeen marches into Iranian territory.

American officials, for now at least, remain skeptical about the Moujahedeen’s prospects.

“We’re being careful with our language. We want to know more about them before we brand them,” a knowledgeable State Department official said. “But I can’t quite see them being able to control the country or represent the large mass of Iranian people. I can see them killing off government officials, carrying out military operations. But I don’t know if they can translate that into overthrowing the country and taking over.”