IRAN: Sabotage

A major, two lieutenants and a sergeant of the Iranian air force climbed into a jeep one velvet evening last week and casually drove eight miles southwest of Teheran to Ghalamorghi air base. The major smartly returned the sentries’ salute, and the jeep rolled to a’large hangar. Inside were 26 F47 (Thunderbolt) fighters and six armed T-6 training planes, U.S. gifts to Iran’s tiny air force. The planes were already gassed up and armed for a reconnaissance sweep over the remote province of Pars, where 150,000 Qashqai tribesmen are revolting against the Shah and his new Premier, Strongman Fazlollah Zahedi.

The major and his men parked their jeep and marched into the hangar. After a while, they reappeared, drove back to the main gate, abandoned the jeep, hailed a taxi and drove off into the night. A few minutes later, a sentry noticed a telltale flame shooting from the hangar. He gave the alarm. Fire fighters found a smoldering wick leading to the fuel tank of one of the trainer planes. The wick had been ignited by a lighted cigarette slowly burning down into a box of matches.* Other makeshift fuses led to three other T-6s. All the fuses were stopped before they reached the planes, but 25 of the F-475 had already been put out of action by the saboteurs, who had cut their communications and wiring equipment.

The saboteurs had disappeared without trace, but there were many more to continue their work; of the 5.600 officers and men in the Iranian air force, some 400 are suspected of being agents of Iran’s violent Tudeh (Communist) party.

Unholy Alliance. In unholy alliance with the Qashqai tribesmen and thousands of other Iranian nationalists, the Tudeh was missing no opportunity to undermine the Shah’s new pro-Western government and, conceivably, throw Iran back into the suicidal grasp of old ex-Premier Mohammed Mossadegh. Artfully the Communists bred rumors that Mossadegh would be rescued from the guarded barracks room where he awaits trial for treason. They scared much of Teheran into believing last week that the Qashqai in the south were preparing to attack the capital.

Before he could begin to solve the urgent domestic and international problems beleaguering Iran, tough-minded Premier Zahedi had to handcuff the Tudeh and their fanatical allies. To quell the Qashqai tribesmen (whom Mossadegh once ruled as Governor General of Fars), Zahedi stationed army tanks and troops at strategic road junctions, mountain passes and in front of the U.S. Point Four mission in the Qashqai territory. In Teheran, his police hacked day & night at the hard core of the Tudeh party, some 7,000 card-carrying Communists. By this week, six weeks after Mossadegh’s fall, the new regime had:

¶ Raided 178 Tudeh cells, jailed 700 “suspects,” exiled 181.

¶ Seized 150,000 Communist books, as well as rifles, ammunition, grenades, bazookas and pistols.

¶ Uncovered lists of doctors, chemists and engineers deemed trustworthy by the Tudeh for such chores as the theft and use of dynamite, starting riots in the mosques and operating Communist radio stations.

The Tudeh, as the affair at Ghala morghi air base proved, was still far from squelched. But in its crackdown, the new regime found it had more public backing than it had dared to hope for. In overthrowing Mossadegh and calling their Shah back from his brief exile, Iranians seemed to have given their own patriotism a bracing shot in the arm. “There is an old Iranian proverb: ‘There’s no room for two kings in a kingdom,’ ” one Iranian explained. “It was either the Shah or Tudeh. And the people chose the Shah.”

-The same crude device employed to sabotage a Nazi munitions train in the Trzcinski and Bevan play and movie Stalag 17.