BBC Persian’s Ayatollah Khomeini Story Lost in Translation

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lambasted the US, the UK and the Zionist regime as Iran’s main enemies, on Friday, in a speech made at the Imam Khomeini’s shrine on the anniversary of his passing. The remarks came as a response to a series of CIA documents, the Persian service of the BBC claims to have reviewed, that appear to prove clandestine correspondence between the first leader of the Islamic Revolution and the US administration starting some fifty years ago. Other Iranian officials including IRGC generals and Friday prayers leaders have also slammed the BBC’s so-called disclosure as a thermometer of Britain’s animosity towards the Islamic Republic.

Hours before the eve of the anniversary of Imam Khomeini’s death, BBC Persian aired a notice saying it had gained access to declassified CIA documents which reveal Ayatollah Khomeini had contacted the US administrations under Kennedy and Carter. When the report was being aired from the satellite channel widely antagonized in Iran, the grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic appeared on Iranian state TV after several years of absence. Hassan Khomeini, whose disqualification in the election for the Assembly of Experts became a controversy among the country’s political leaders, got the jump on BBC Persian and dismissed such allegations as an expert on his grandfather’s lifetime.

The deputy director of the Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini Works, Hamid Ansari, has told Fars News Agency that one of the individuals involved in the ‘forgery’ has had ties with the Shah’s court and the BBC intended to distort the ‘face of the Revolution’ through someone who had nothing to do with it. He has pledged to document all the issues BBC has brought up. The document the BBC published, he said, included eight ‘gross mistakes and lies’.

In a sarcastic article titled “A New Measure for BBC’s Knowledge of History” published by Fars, contemporary historian Mohammadreza Kaeini questions the authenticity of the document for its lack of a file number, chimerical translation, failure to review previously published documents, and lack of knowledge on the elements discussed. According to Kaeini, the document was published 24 years ago in a history book in Iran. Haj Mirza Khalil Kamarei, through whom Ayatollah Khomeini has allegedly sent a message to the United States administration back in November 1963, has been labeled by BBC Persian as an “apparently non-political” individual. Kaeini, however, writes that he was an old student of the founder of Qom seminary school and somewhat among his trusted insiders. He was arrested while he carried his master’s telegraph that criticized Reza Pahlavi. He was also clearly involved in the events and demonstrations during the National Movement period and was in pretty good offices with Ayatollah Kashani, Mossadegh, and Devotees of Islam. When the Islamic Revolution peaked, he turned up to be a supporter and accompanied the late Ayatollah Taleghani in the historical demonstration held on the Day of Tasu’a in the year that led to the victory of the Revolution. Kaeini, who claims to have researched the life of the ‘learned’ cleric, says he has never heard that he had anything to do with the US embassy to exchange political messages. He further argues that Khomeini’s attitude toward the United States was to move the Revolution forward with the lowest costs possible and to make US authorities understand that they should not be backing a corrupt and dictatorial regime in Iran and change their approach into one of mutual respect in order to have ordinary relations with the country. It puts forward the example of late Ayatollah Motahari’s suggestion of Bazargan as the president of the interim government on the grounds that the latter’s background would reduce the West’s concerns regarding the Revolution, leading to less sabotage on the way ahead of it.

A different article by yet another contemporary historian, Abdollah Shahbazi, published on the official website of the Center for Preserving and Publishing the Works of Ayatollah Khamenei, discusses other examples of distorting history by the US and the UK. The article makes a passing reference to remarks made by Ebrahim Yazdi, Iran’s foreign minister under the interim government, who published a note on Wednesday in which he said it was Jimmy Carter who sent a message and Ayatollah Khomeini replied. “What the BBC report included is a fragmented summary of the fifth and last message exchanged,” the article quotes Yazdi. According to Yazdi, BBC has misquoted Khomeini that his movement had no particular animosity with the US. The original message apparently said we have no particular animosity with Americans. The article however focuses on the message allegedly sent to the Kennedy administration ten days after the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited Iran on November 6, 1963. Here’s what BBC World has to say:

“Khomeini explained he was not opposed to American interests in Iran,” according to a 1980 CIA analysis titled Islam in Iran, partially released to the public in 2008. To the contrary, an American presence was necessary to counter the Soviet and British influence, Khomeini told the US.”

Shahbazi’s article accuses BBC Persian of foisting on its readers what has been released by Jimmy Carter Library as a declassified CIA document. The so-called document is a paragraph taken from an 81-page CIA analytical bulletin dated March 1980, which is void of any reference to the original US embassy report. To support the doubts it sheds on the authenticity of a supposed message delivered by Haj Mirza Khalil Kamarei, the article also notes his “interest in writing letters to the Shah and US presidents, exemplified in his open latter to Richard Nixon in the summer of 1964, titled “A Modest Conquest” in which he congratulated moon travel and the realization of the Quran’s promise.

Iran’s former Culture Minister, Ata’ollah Mohajerani, now in self-exile, was also among some of the first commentators who criticized the BBC. He, too, underlines what he calls BBC Persian’s free reading of the English version of the report.

The Persian service has constantly been blamed for its pathetic shenanigans since its early days in 2009, which coincided with the debated presidential race. The TV has been subject to jamming signals and its stories on Iran are under the government’s magnifying glass. Pretty recently, Iran accused the UK and its media tool as masterminding a campaign to block prominent principlist clerics Ayatollahs Jannati, Yazdi, Mesbah from the Assembly of Experts. Two of the so-called JYM trio were “barred by people” but Jannati became the chairman of the assembly which is in charge of appointing a new Supreme Leader in case need be. The BBC is mainly staffed with former reformist journalists and analysts many of whom fled Iran following the events after the 2009 election.