It was a typical hot and humid July day just outside Washington, D.C. By 11 a.m., it was already 87 degrees but felt nearly 100. Ali Akbar Tabatabaei was at home in Bethesda, Maryland. The doorbell rang. Tabatabaei answered, and a man dressed as a postman shot Tabatabaei several times in the abdomen. Within an hour, the charismatic former press attache at the Iranian Embassy under the shah was dead.
The assassin, a Muslim convert named David Belfield, fled to Iran, where he continues to live today. (Decades later, he would play a role in the kidnapping and murder of another American, former FBI agent Robert Levinson.) Belfield’s controllers worked just a couple of miles away in the Iranian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Even though Iranian revolutionaries had already been holding 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for eight months, President Jimmy Carter refused to sever relations. Tabatabaei’s murder changed that. While revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini encouraged the fiction that Iranian terrorism and its rejection of diplomatic norms were just the actions of mobs motivated by righteous anger against America, the evidence of the Iranian Embassy and Khomeini’s asylum for the murderer was too much even for Carter to ignore.
Tabatabaei’s was not the new Islamic Republic’s first assassination. On Dec. 7, 1979, the regime’s hit men gunned down Shahriar Shafiq, the shah’s cousin, just a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris. Seven months later, Iranian assassins sought to murder Shapour Bakhtiar, the shah’s last prime minister, in a hail of gunfire in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. They missed their target but killed a French police officer and Bakhtiar’s neighbor. French authorities captured a five-member hit squad but later released them as French President Francois Mitterrand sought to trade the imprisoned Iranians for economic favors.
This, too, would become a pattern, and cynical Western greed would soon factor into Iranian decision-making as Iranian authorities concluded that penalties were transitory and Tehran quite literally could get away with murder. Assassins succeeded in killing Bakhtiar when, 11 years later, they stabbed him repeatedly after invading his house in a different Paris suburb. (Because Iranian assassins struck more than a dozen times inside France, the French security services today are among Europe’s most hard-line opponents of the Iranian regime, even as French politicians take a soft line.)
Soon, Iranian assassinations would become commonplace. Regime hit men and their Lebanese Hezbollah proxies targeted shah-era officials, dissidents, and protesters the world over. In 1982, Iranian assassins struck in the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Soon, they returned to France, and quickly after, they struck in Turkey, Austria, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. While the Islamic Republic mostly remained silent or denied culpability unless its assassins were captured, after an Iranian hit squad murdered a father and son in a London suburb on Oct. 3, 1987, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility. Simply put, Khomeini was so self-assured that he no longer cared.
Khomeini’s cockiness manifested itself in other ways. Prior to 1989, Tehran’s assassination squads targeted only Iranians, even as Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacked Americans and Israelis. In 1989, however, Khomeini grew bolder. The Iran-Iraq War was over, and while much of the world saw a chance to reengage Tehran, Khomeini saw an opportunity to export his revolution not only politically but also intellectually beyond the Middle East. To Khomeini, Western liberalism was anathema. His 1970 treatise on Islamic government repeatedly cast the United States as the enemy. A decade later, in his first Persian New Year’s speech after seizing power, he declared his fight to be “against the Western world — devourers led by America, Israel, and Zionism,” and promised “to export our revolution to the world.”
It was in this context that he issued his Feb. 14, 1989, fatwa against British Indian author Salman Rushdie and anyone who dared to publish or translate his works. “I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth,” he wrote. His supporters listened. Assassins killed the Japanese translator and critically injured both the Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. Frankly, he succeeded in finding Western leaders who would self-censor and accept new redlines. In a New York Times essay, for example, former President Jimmy Carter, chided those who simply condemned Khomeini. “To sever diplomatic relations with Iran over this altercation is an overreaction. … We must remember that Iranian and other fundamentalists are not the only Moslems involved,” he wrote.
Carter was not alone. Anger soon devolved into appeasement. After Khomeini’s fatwa, the British government suspended relations and declared they would not return an ambassador to Tehran until the Iranian government promised not to harm Rushdie. Iranian diplomats dutifully promised that the Islamic Republic would take no action against the British author. In response, London showered Iran with goodwill. Many other European Union states lifted sanctions imposed when the crisis began. The day after the U.K. and Iran exchanged ambassadors, Iranian security services reaffirmed the death sentence, and Iranian state media labeled Rushdie an apostate subject to death. Western governments simply ignored the deceit.
President George H.W. Bush entered office optimistic about Iran. With a nod to Iran during his inauguration, Bush declared, “Goodwill begets goodwill. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on.” After Khomeini died, Bush issued a classified national security directive instructing the U.S. government to be prepared to resume relations. It was not to be. Instead of accepting Bush’s olive branch, Iran responded by accelerating its assassination campaign from Cyprus to Pakistan. Then, on July 13, 1989, Iranian assassins gunned down Kurdish officials in Vienna, Austria, whom they had asked to meet to negotiate an end to the conflict. The Austrian police inexplicably let the assassination squad go.
In 1992, a similar hit occurred in the heart of Berlin, after which German officials prevented police from interviewing the visiting Iranian intelligence minister for fear that questioning Iran’s role might undercut trade. While German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sought to curry favor with Tehran, he could not quash Germany’s judiciary, which tried the hit men captured fleeing the shooting. On April 10, 1997, after hearing from 176 witnesses, accessing intelligence files, and interviewing the son of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief who was present during the planning, a German court found Iranian intelligence agent Kazem Darabi and a Hezbollah accomplice guilty of murder. The court also concluded that a special affairs committee, headed by the supreme leader and including Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati had signed off on the hit.
After just five years in prison, however, the gunmen were let go by Chancellor Gerhard Schreder in exchange for commercial contracts. When the assassins returned to Tehran, they received a hero’s welcome. While German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel had once promised a “critical dialogue” to address human rights concerns, even the murder of dissidents on German soil was not enough to force Berlin to take a tougher line on Tehran.
Not surprisingly, this simply reinforced Tehran’s belief that the regime would face no real consequence for its behavior. According to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, between 1996 and 1998, Iranian hit squads on average killed a dissident outside Iran’s borders every three weeks. Some were shot, some were stabbed, and others died in bombings. Iranian agents kidnapped one 16-year-old Iraqi Kurdish dissident and forced him to drink acid. Many of these murders occurred after Iranian President Mohammad Khatami offered a “dialogue of civilizations” and while the Western officials, including former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, spoke about the promise of reform in Iran. While it is true that Khatami himself likely bore no responsibility, his impotence in the face of Iranian assassinations should have surprised no one: Elected officials in Iran neither control nor influence security or military policy. To negotiate with Iranian diplomats over security arrangements would be about as effective as sitting down with the librarian of Congress to hash out a deal over U.S. nuclear policy.
Under both former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Iranian assassinations slowed. This was largely because Iranian authorities worried they might suffer consequences for their actions. Bush, after all, invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussein in just a month, a goal the Iranian army had failed to do during eight years of war. They worried that Trump, meanwhile, was just unpredictable.
Under former President Barack Obama and then under President Joe Biden, however, Iranian assassins received a second wind. As Obama pleaded for negotiations in a series of secret letters and cut funding to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei concluded he could get away with murder. In 2010, he plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador in the heart of Washington, D.C. As Biden, too, telegraphed desperation for diplomacy, the Iranian regime launched operations to kidnap and kill journalist Masih Alinejad and murder former officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. The Iranian celebration after Rushdie’s stabbing underscores how redlines established after Tabatabaei’s 1980 murder no longer exist.
Assassination has always been at the heart of Islamic Republic statecraft. If the ayatollahs spared America, it was because they feared it. Inaction, confusion, and an aversion to military force have dissolved that fear. Biden may claim diplomacy is back, but this is fantasy. In reality, the net result of Biden’s policy is to convince Iran that Iranian assassins can declare open season upon Iranians and Americans in a way that not even Carter would tolerate.
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Dancing with the Devil (Encounter, 2014), a history of U.S. diplomacy with rogue regimes.
