IRAN: Inside All’s Suitcase

One day last month. Colonel Hashem Sepahpur of the Teheran military governor’s office ran into an old acquaintance, an ex-army captain named Ali Abbasi. “Salaam,” cried out the colonel in greeting. Ali, a frail, limping man of about 40, responded with a cordial “Salaam,” but hurried on, nervously clutching a worn leather suitcase. “I’m going to the doctor now,” he called back.

Ali’s behavior interested the colonel; ten years before. Ali had resigned his commission, saying that “the army is rotten through and through”; since then he had held influential, behind-the-scenes jobs in the Red Tudeh Party. In 1946, Ali was liaison man in Teheran for the short-lived Azerbaijan Soviet republic. Knowing all this, Colonel Sepahpur was suddenly curious to know the contents of Ali’s worn suitcase. The colonel grabbed and hefted it. “This suitcase seems very heavy for a sick man to carry,” the colonel grunted.

Code No. 3. At headquarters, officers found inside Ali’s suitcase a detailed plan of Saadabad Palace, the Shah’s summer home, and a complete schedule of the guards’ movements. There were other papers, mostly in three codes. Ali, a dedicated Communist, was questioned for eight days before he broke. At last, on the night of Aug. 24, he admitted that the Tudeh had an organization inside the army officers’ corps. On Aug. 30, cryptographers cracked two of the codes, but the third, an elaborate trigonometric cipher, would not give. Two colonels went to work night and day, in twelve-hour shifts, and on Sept. 3. code No. 3 was broken.

The secret yielded by code No. 3 was a Soviet spy ring linked with many a respected name in army and police circles. Premier Fazlollah Zahedi himself ordered the arrest of his chief of bodyguard as a Soviet agent. Another prize catch: Lieut. Colonel Jamsheed Mobasheri, an artillery officer regarded by his fellow officers as something of a mathematical genius. Upon his arrest, Mobasheri ripped a rusty nail from the wall and tried to open an artery. Mobasheri, it seemed, was the Red agent who developed the three codes. Another Red agent was the officer assigned to clear appointees to sensitive posts dealing with U.S. military assistance to Iran. The police security chief who screened would-be cops to uncover Tudeh plants was himself a plant.

400 Arrests. According to Premier Za-hedi’s government, the ring was set up not only to spy but to start a rebellion at the proper moment, with its agents so placed as to be able to assassinate the Shah, the Premier and other key figures. It had an accurate picture of the strength and disposition of the entire Iranian armed force, including an itemization and location of all U.S.-supplied equipment. Tragically enough, some of the ring’s most useful informants were not Reds but pro-Mossadegh officers suckered into what they thought was a simple plot to overthrow Premier Zahedi’s year-old regime.

Last week, with most of the ring in jail, the government lifted censorship slightly, revealing that it had arrested 400 officers for “working in the interests of a foreign power.” “Almost all … have confessed to their crime of treason,” added Teheran grimly.