How Ayatollah Khomeini changed Iran

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Hi, I'm not Matt Bevan.

He'll be here in a sec.

I'm Erin Park, and I just wanted to tell you about my brand new podcast called Expanse, Nowhere Man.

In 1999, a young American with everything to live for walked out alone into one of the deadliest deserts in Australia.

Why did he do it, and why do some people have to lose themselves in the wilderness in in order to feel found?

Subscribe to Expanse, Nowhere Man, on the ABC Listen app and all the usual places.

This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabkal, Darug and Yora people.

Iran's current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 86 years old.

And that is a significant age because it's the same age his predecessor was when he died.

The man who created the Islamic Republic of Iran, who led the Iranian Revolution and overthrew the last Shah or king of Iran.

Rahula Khomeini ruled as the supreme leader for ten years from 1979 to 1989.

Rahula Khomeini was ruthless in his vision, repressing Iranian citizens and executing tens of thousands of political prisoners.

He called for the death of the British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie and met the West and the US particularly with hostility.

With Iran still dominating the news, we thought we would revisit the man that created the regime that so many in the Israeli and American political establishments would love to topple.

This episode first aired in March 2024.

In June 1989, something incredible and extremely memorable happened in Iran.

But it barely made news headlines because it happened on the same day as the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.

But once you hear about it, you are never going to forget it.

On the 6th of June 1989, a helicopter was approaching the Paradise of Zahra Cemetery in the southern suburbs of the Iranian capital, Tehran.

On board was the body of the supreme leader of Iran.

We have lost a great leader and we are all mourning for such a great man.

An estimated 10 million Iranians in black funeral dress clamoured to catch a glimpse of the body of their supreme leader, Ayatollah Rahula Khomeini.

Several people were crushed to death in the hysterical crowd, which was standing outside in 40 degree heat.

The helicopter seemed safer than going by road, but then it landed almost on top of the crowd.

The mob swapped the helicopter after touchdown.

Hysterical mourners mourners pulled the coffin from the helicopter and began parading it around the site.

The crowd was in a frenzy.

The body fell out of the coffin.

In the melee, the body of the spiritual leader of Iran was mauled and appeared to drop to the ground.

The burial shroud he was wrapped in was torn off and came apart as mourners tried to grab bits of it for themselves.

In the chaos, some people fell into the empty grave.

Officials fired warning shots to get the crowd to move back.

They stuffed the body back into the helicopter and announced that the burial was cancelled.

The helicopter took off, with people hanging onto the bottom of it and trying to pull the Supreme Leader back out.

As the helicopter flew away, the body was partially hanging out the door.

Many hours later, the helicopter returned.

The funeral casket was enveloped by soldiers.

But finally, Ayatollah Khomeini was found his resting place.

To stop people digging up the body, the guards used a crane to build a pyramid of shipping containers on top of the grave.

It was one of the largest gatherings of human beings in history and probably the most chaotic funeral ever caught on film.

His son Ahmed says Ayatollah Khomeini is on his way to heaven.

It's been a rough trip so far.

This funeral was for a man who had led his country for just 10 years, not long for an Iranian leader.

10 years in which hundreds of thousands of young Iranian men had been killed in a war.

10 years which had seen a 60% drop in GDP per person.

10 years which had seen Iran become a global pariah, virtually friendless in the international community.

And yet millions were hysterically grieving his death.

Such is the power of a revolutionary leader, or more specifically, a revolutionary idea.

This is our third episode about the history of the escalating conflict between the US and Iran.

You can go back if you want to hear more.

But today, the story of Rohollah Khomeini and how his revolutionary idea changed the course of Middle Eastern history and is still affecting us today.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is if you're listening.

1960s Iran was a place that was changing very quickly thanks to the policies of the Shah, Iran's king of kings.

He has tried to reshape Iran virtually overnight into a modern industrial capitalist state, while at the same time preserving the unquestioned authority of the ancient Persian kings.

The Shah, a man installed by the British and kept in power by a CIA-led coup in 1953, was rapidly westernizing his country with American help.

Even so, most Iranians were devout followers of a subset of Islam called Twelver Shiism.

They believe that the 12th Imam, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, has been in hiding for 1200 years, waiting to return at the end of time and create an Islamic caliphate on earth.

For 1200 years, most Twelvers believed they should just sit tight, wait for the 12th Imam to return, and follow the five pillars of Islam that all Muslims learn as children.

To be a good Muslim, you have to believe in Allah and believe that Muhammad was the last prophet and you have to fast in the Ramadah and then you have to pray five times a day and you have to give charity to the poor and sometimes you have to go to Hajj, to Mecca.

So sit back, follow the pillars of Islam, enjoy a modern westernized Iran and wait for the Imam's return.

But a man named Rohollah Khomeini had other ideas.

Khomeini was a religious leader, a teacher and a scholar who had gained a big enough following to be given the title of Grand Ayatollah.

By 1964, he was well known across Iran as the instigator of a number of big political protests.

Tehran, Shiraz, and the holy city of Qom

were the scenes of the most violent disturbances, street battling in which 20 were killed and hundreds injured.

You see, Khomeini had a very big, very revolutionary idea.

What if, instead of just following the five pillars of Islam and waiting for the Imam's return to create the new caliphate, we just start creating the caliphate now?

Prioritize political activism even over the traditional five pillars.

Don't separate church and state.

Let the church run the state by the rules set out in the Quran.

Islam is not only a religion, but a total system, derived from the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet.

Westernizing the country was not his idea of how to build a caliphate.

The Shiite leaders, known as the Mullahs, believe that the Shah's great plan for a modern Western-style nation built on the oil wealth is not only a waste of time, but it's also morally wrong.

The protests continued.

The Shah sent in the the army.

Khomeini was arrested, briefly jailed and then put under house arrest.

Ayatullah Khomeini has become a symbol of political opposition in a nation where political opposition has for many years been brutally suppressed.

Now the Prime Minister, Hassan Ali Mansoor, who was in charge of running the government for the Shah, called Khomeini in to ask him politely to stop.

He asked Khomeini to stay out of politics and go back to being like every other cleric.

Focus on the five pillars, wait for the 12th Imam's return.

Khomeini refused, repeatedly.

The Prime Minister flew into a fit of rage, shouting and yelling, and finally he marched up to Khomeini and smacked him across the face.

Khomeini was taken to the Tehran airport and put on a plane to Turkey.

He had been exiled.

Two months later, the Prime Minister was assassinated by supporters of Khomeini.

Don't slap a guy with hundreds of thousands of fanatical followers.

Now, the old saying of out of sight, out of mind, really doesn't apply to revolutionaries.

Plenty of revolutions have been orchestrated by people in exile.

Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian Tsars in a revolution and did it all from Switzerland.

In fact, it can be an advantage.

When someone's in your country, you have some kind of control over them.

You can silence them.

But if they're outside your country, it's much harder.

So Ayatollah Khomeini shouted as loud as he could.

From his bases in Turkey, Iraq, and France, the Ayatollah Khomeini recorded anti-Shah sermons onto cassette tapes, which were smuggled into Iran and played in mosques.

Kids, cassette tapes are like Spotify, but it sounds awful, and you also have to flip it over every hour, and it sometimes breaks and turns into an ungodly tangle.

He did interviews with international TV and radio stations, which were then broadcast into Iran.

In his surprisingly calm tone of voice, he railed against the Shah of Iran, the king of Saudi Arabia, the dictator of Iraq, and of course, the Zionist state of Israel.

As we discussed in the last episode, the Shah thought that he had a special connection with his people and that just about everyone loved him.

The Shah has conceded that perhaps 1% of the people might oppose him.

Turns out it was a little bit more than that.

Some recent reports have labelled the Shah's opponents as conservative religious fanatics.

Others have described them as revolutionary extremists.

The Shah himself has called them Islamic Marxists.

Communists, revolutionaries, religious conservatives, throw-in workers, students, business owners.

Their ultimate aims may be dissimilar, but for the moment they have one catch cry.

The Shah must go.

But they all agreed they wanted the Shah gone.

When the demonstrators shout death to the Shah, their next cry is usually, long live Khomeini.

In October 1977, Khomeini's oldest son Mustafa died in an Iraqi jail.

Khomeini blamed the death on the SAVAC secret police, saying that they had murdered his son.

Now the Shah has a military government, a seriously disrupted economy, and a nation at the brink of revolution.

Memorial services to Mustafa Khomeini turned into deadly protests.

The Iranian revolution had begun.

It was really only a matter of time before the Shah was forced out.

Soldiers firing indiscriminately into crowds of demonstrators, leaving hundreds dead and many more wounded.

The priests have armed the mobs.

Pistols and petrol bombs are the new symbols of power in Iran.

In February 1979, the Shah fled and a plane arrived in Tehran carrying the country's new leader.

Home from 16 years in exile, the holiest of men, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The alliance of Democrats, communists, and clerics who got together to oppose the Shah disintegrated, and the clerics took charge.

Now, Khomeini and the Koran rule where once the Shah claimed to be united with his people.

Iran's 2,500-year-old monarchy was swept away in favor of a theocracy.

Under the eye of the clerics, a unique hybrid constitutional model was created.

The country would have regular elections, a parliament and a president, like most democracies around the world.

But atop that would sit a supreme leader.

An Islamic cleric who gets to decide who can run for office, which of the government's policies can be implemented, and how to use the country's resources.

Under Islam, oil, like all natural resources, is God-given and God-controlled.

The supreme leader is appointed for life by a council of clerics, is in charge of the armed forces and cannot be disputed.

The constitution of the new Islamic Republic of Iran was more liberal than many expected.

Women and some religious minorities had far more rights in Iran than they did in Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies.

But despite the appearance of modernity, the regime was just as brutal as the Shahs.

Islamic justice, as interpreted by Khomeini, will cut off the hands of those who disobey.

The reported savagery of the secret police has not died with the secret policemen.

Khomeini ordered a purge of the top levels of the military, justice system, and secret police, with thousands publicly executed to make way for the new incoming clerical elite.

Khomeini was officially named as the Imam, a title previously reserved in Iran for the 12 descendants of Muhammad.

Khomeini didn't just change the trajectory of Iran's future.

His vision of Islam had a ripple effect across the Middle East.

The incredible success of his revolution triggered copycat actions from people in other countries who wanted to accelerate the rise of a global caliphate.

An uprising began in Saudi Arabia.

An American military base was bombed in Lebanon.

The president of Egypt was assassinated.

And Khomeini started encouraging followers living in neighboring Iraq to overthrow the country's dictator.

Now, the dictator of Iraq was a cool, nice guy with a cool, nice mustache who would never ever dare to cause any problems for the West.

Iraq's President Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein.

It's unclear how much US involvement there was in Saddam's decision to invade Iran, but what is clear is that once he did invade, the US was all in.

The Iraqis began the war eagerly and with confidence that they could rout an enemy already weakened from the revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini and purges within the armed forces.

The United States government had invested a lot of time and effort in keeping the Shah in power.

And now the Shah was gone, and the Ayatollahs had more than 50 American hostages in the US Embassy in Tehran.

They wanted Saddam to topple Khomeini.

It was a war in which most outsiders predicted a quick Iraqi victory, followed by the destabilization or overthrow of Iran's fundamentalist Islamic regime.

It backfired spectacularly.

Far from undermining the Iranian administration, the war with Iraq served to strengthen the regime.

Nothing galvanizes a population like an invasion.

Just ask Ukraine.

Saddam quickly realized that he was fighting an uphill battle and tried to find a way out, but Khomeini wouldn't let him.

Ayatollah Khomeini declared there was no question of compromise.

The fighting would go on until the last Iraqi was driven from Iranian soil.

After eight years and at least a million deaths, Khomeini agreed to end the fighting.

The border was unmoved.

A year later, Khomeini was dead and given what may very well be the most extraordinary funeral in history.

That war is known as the Iran-Iraq War, but it's not a great name for it.

It was really just the first phase of a war against followers of Khomeini's idea of a global Islamic caliphate being established today rather than at some time in the distant future.

And extreme Islamists have taken up that fight.

It's not fought in the Iranian mountains.

It's fought by Iran-backed groups like Hamas in Gaza and Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in the waters of the Red Sea.

Ayatollah Khomeini's legacy is complex.

He overthrew the increasingly despotic Shah when most thought that was impossible, but then he instituted a regime that was just as brutal and corrupt, which has been forced to quash multiple uprisings against it from the people it oppresses.

Now, Iran is isolated, corrupt, economically desperate, and in a permanent Cold War, which is now getting hotter by the day.

This episode of If You're Listening first aired in 2024.

It was written by me, Matt Bevan, and supervising producer was Yasmin Parry.

We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

It's honestly one of the most extraordinary stories of espionage we've ever told on this show: double crosses, mysterious explosions, honey traps, all to keep Israel's greatest secret hidden.

The story of Israel's nuclear weapons program is next on If You're Listening.

Soaring temperatures, a lack of water and sand dunes every 500 meters.

It's one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

It's August 1999 and something strange is happening in the Australian Outback.

When I got there it was just organised chaos.

It's one of the most extensive searches ever mounted in the Great Sandy Desert.

A well-to-do young American has dumped his belongings and walked out into the Great Sandy Desert.

A white guy from America, what hope has he got?

They'll be looking for a body.

He sent a postcard to his parents in America just saying, I'm heading into the desert.

Goodbye.

Triggering a media sensation and one of the biggest searches Australia had had ever seen.

Once the Americans arrived, it became a lot more bizarre.

We really need to be what we call sempra gumby, always flexible.

He insisted that people use his radio handle, gunslinger.

Are you taking the piss?

But there's one problem that no one's got an answer for.

How do you search for someone who doesn't want to be found?

I felt it was his choice to choose not to come out of the desert.

I knew he couldn't be content with living a life unless he did this.

My name is Erin Park, and I've been obsessed with this story for years.

And I'm not the only one.

Why would a fit, intelligent young man with everything to live for plunge into one of the deadliest landscapes in Australia on purpose?

It's very easy to dismiss it as crazy, but I think when you dive deeper into it, you see that it's not crazy.

It's a story spanning three decades, two continents, and some strange encounters.

I really don't know how I started off in the desert in in Northern Australia looking into this and now I'm in bloody Alaska looking for a porcupine.

Every little thread was even more glittery and sparkly and fascinating and quick.

And it polarised opinions the world over.

Were his actions selfish or inspired?

The backlash was pretty fierce.

And it turns out this desert where Robert Baguki went missing is keeping other secrets.

What Robert Berguki did here is just the tip of the iceberg.

We've got a lot of people missing.

It remains a mystery, you know?

At a time when so many of us feel lost, what's the most extreme thing you do to feel found?

The idea of being out here alone scares the hell out of me.

I ain't no Robert Baguki, that's for sure.

And at what cost?

Death will come, and I'll be ready for it.

This is season five of Expanse: Nowhere Man.

Find it on the ABC Listen app and all the usual places.