The Palestinian Network Behind the “Revolution” of 1979

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Gorbeh kay

Oct 08, 2026

The Network Behind the “Revolution” of 1979

A young Sadegh Zibakalam went to a meeting in Germany looking for answers to a practical question: how should Iranian revolutionaries fight the Shah? In his later account, the men who helped answer him were Arabs whom he says they subsequently understood to be connected to Palestinian militant groups.

The advice was concrete. Sabotage. Assassination. Urban guerrilla warfare.

That account gives a human face to a relationship often blurred into talk of “international solidarity.” Iranian militants did not simply admire the Palestinian cause from a distance. Some made contact with Palestinian organizations, learned from their methods, and built revolutionary networks across borders. Zibakalam’s own recollection is part of that record.

Andrew Scott Cooper’s The Fall of Heaven fills in the machinery behind those connections: the training camps, weapons, communications equipment, funding, and secret cells. Cooper draws on declassified U.S. records and interviews. His account describes two distinct anti-Shah currents—the Islamist-Marxist Mojahedin-e Khalq and the secular, Maoist Fedai guerrillas—whose paths intersected with Palestinian groups and, at times, with Khomeini’s movement.

Training, infiltration, and weapons

Cooper writes that MEK recruits trained in camps run by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and George Habash’s more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. After training in Lebanon, Libya, and Syria, some returned to Iran disguised as clerics, using aliases and forming underground cells.

The Fedai guerrillas had a separate training network. Cooper places their camps in Oman, South Yemen, and Libya, including bases run by the PFLP. He describes a formidable arsenal: explosives, machine pistols, revolvers, submachine guns, hunting rifles, and armor-piercing ammunition. He attributes weapons and ammunition supplies to communist governments including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany.

A secret U.S. intelligence assessment from September 1977, quoted in Cooper’s book, described the MEK’s weapons as including assault rifles, armor-piercing rifle grenades, and possibly mortars. It also listed radios, handheld walkie-talkies, and electronic equipment such as oscilloscopes, transformers, condensers, and relays. Cooper’s endnotes identify the underlying assessment as a September 30, 1977 report, “The Terrorist Threat Against Americans in Iran,” in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. (iircf.com⁠)

These were not simply students gathering in basements to exchange pamphlets. The picture in Cooper’s account is of trained, armed, funded organizations—with equipment, false identities, and cells inside Iran.

Libya’s money—and Beheshti’s fundraising

Cooper identifies Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya as a major source of money. He writes that the Libyan embassy in Beirut allegedly sent $100,000 to the MEK every three months. He also says Libya kept the Fedai guerrillas on a $400,000 annual retainer.

Libyan support extended beyond the armed left. Citing Hassan Shariatmadari’s recollection, Cooper writes that Khomeini received $16 million from Libya through the son of Ayatollah Montazeri roughly two years before the revolution. Shariatmadari said Khomeini used the money to increase stipends to religious students: one cleric who had been receiving 5,000 tomans from Shariatmadari’s father was reportedly receiving 20,000 from Khomeini.

The revolutionary movement also raised money inside Iran. Cooper cites a CIA assessment that Beheshti was a leading organizer and fundraiser. On a “normal day,” the assessment estimated, sympathetic merchants in the bazaar gave 2 million tomans—then equivalent to about $285,000—to Khomeini’s underground cells. The same assessment said Beheshti served as a conduit for funds to the MEK. Cooper adds that young revolutionaries such as Ali Hossein were not short of money or resources, and describes recruits returning from camps in Lebanon to organize paramilitary groups and store weapons in mosque basements. (iircf.com⁠, iircf.com⁠)

The figures are staggering. They also make the alliance harder to dismiss as a passing sympathy: money from abroad, donations gathered at home, training outside Iran, and underground networks operating inside it.

Terrorist Arafat arrives; the embassy changes hands

Then the revolution triumphed. The Shah was gone, and Iran’s new rulers moved quickly to signal the direction of the new state.

Yasser Arafat arrived in Tehran on February 17, 1979, among the first foreign leaders to visit after the revolution. Two days later, the former Israeli embassy was formally handed over to the PLO as its headquarters. Ebrahim Yazdi, a senior figure in the revolutionary government, stood alongside Arafat at the ceremony. The building that had represented Iran’s strategic relationship with Israel became a public symbol of the new regime’s Palestinian alliance. (ajammc.com⁠, english.aawsat.com⁠, jpost.com⁠)

The reversal was immediate and theatrical: one diplomatic mission closed, another installed in its place; the Shah’s relationship with Israel repudiated; Arafat welcomed as a revolutionary ally. Palestine was not a side issue waiting to be added to the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. It was present at the beginning.

The Shah, Israel, and a shared enemy

The Shah’s strategic ties with Israel became a major weapon in the opposition’s campaign against him. Iran and Israel had an informal alliance shaped by security interests, although the Shah also tried to manage the relationship because of Iran’s place among Arab and Muslim countries. (iranicaonline.org⁠)

For the revolutionary left, that relationship fit neatly into its larger story: the Shah was a client of the West, Israel was an outpost of imperialism, and armed struggle was the answer. Islamist revolutionaries used Palestine too, though their ideology was different. Their shared hatred of the Shah helped forge tactical alliances between religious hard-liners and secular leftists. Cooper describes Beheshti as a key figure in building those alliances among Iranian student groups in Europe. (iircf.com⁠)

This rhetoric often crossed from opposition to Israeli policy into antisemitism—collective blame of Jews and conspiracy claims about Jewish power. That distinction matters: defending Palestinian rights is not antisemitism, but turning Jews into a collective enemy is.

Bakhtiar: a bridge to a transfer of power

Bakhtiar came to office in a country already being remade by revolutionary forces. His government presented itself as a constitutional alternative, but it operated amid a fast-moving collapse of royal authority, growing militant organization, and negotiations involving Khomeini, the military, and foreign powers. In effect, it became the final bridge between the monarchy and the rule of the ayatollahs.

Javad Khadem, Bakhtiar’s close associate and cabinet minister, later described Bakhtiar’s hope that the Shah’s departure might create room for negotiations and perhaps separate national and leftist forces from Khomeini’s Islamists. Khadem also wrote that this hope proved illusory: after Bakhtiar’s failed attempt to meet Khomeini in Paris, he understood that his chance of controlling events had nearly vanished. (isdmovement.com⁠)

The declassified record shows that Washington was also working through backchannels as the monarchy fell. In early January, Carter’s advisers debated whether the Shah should leave and whether that would improve Bakhtiar’s chances. Khomeini sent messages seeking U.S. assurances and urging Washington to tell the Iranian military not to support Bakhtiar. The administration pursued contact and accommodation while publicly urging Khomeini to give Bakhtiar’s government a chance. These records reveal a hidden diplomacy that helped shape the transition; they do not document a signed agreement to install Khomeini, but they expose how much was being negotiated behind the scenes. (nsarchive.gwu.edu⁠)

Bakhtiar’s government also moved against the institution most associated with the monarchy’s security apparatus. On 4 Bahman 1357, he submitted the bill to dissolve SAVAK; the Majles approved it on 17 Bahman, with Senate approval following later. As militant organizations already had foreign training, weapons, funds, and underground cells, the dissolution further weakened the state’s capacity to respond during the decisive final weeks. (ir.voanews.com⁠, nezamat.ir⁠)

The result was not the constitutional future he Bakhtiar pretending to want to preserve. It was a transfer of power to the revolutionary forces whose networks had been built over years—and whose most effective allies did not share his secular, constitutional vision. You’re right. I made Bakhtiar’s awareness sound like a later interpretation. Khadem’s account should be stated directly: Bakhtiar knew his government was transitional. The point is that this transition, whatever Bakhtiar hoped it might achieve, ended with power in the ayatollahs’ hands.

Bakhtiar knew he was leading a transitional government. As Javad Khadem recounts, Bakhtiar understood that he was operating in the narrow interval between the Shah’s departure and the revolutionaries’ seizure of power. He hoped negotiations might still preserve a constitutional path and prevent Khomeini’s clerics from monopolizing the state. But the transition he led dismantled SAVAK, allowed Khomeini’s return, and unfolded while the United States was communicating with Khomeini and seeking an accommodation with the military. In practice, it became the bridge through which Iran passed into the hands of the ayatollahs.

https://abdimedia.net/en/conversation/javad-khadem/javadkhadem-6

From revolutionary alliance to state project

After 1979, the Islamic Republic made “resistance” a central part of state identity and devoted Iranian resources to armed groups across the region, including organizations designated as terrorist groups by the United States. U.S. government estimates have placed Iran’s support for such groups in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, with totals varying by year and organization. (state.gov⁠, wilsoncenter.org⁠)

The cost is not only financial. Iran’s wealth, territory, and strategic position have been drawn into a regional project that deepens isolation and risks conflict, while people inside Iran face repression and economic hardship. Many Iranians reject the regime’s claim to speak for Palestine. They can care about Palestinian civilians and support their rights while rejecting the PFLP’s violence, Hamas’s terrorism, and the Islamic Republic’s proxy strategy.

The Iranian left’s continuing attachment to Palestine is also an attempt to revive an ideology that has failed. Its revolutionary project lost credibility, but the Palestinian cause retains moral and emotional force. So the left clings to that cause like a parasite to a host, borrowing its urgency to reanimate a discredited worldview and avoid confronting its own part in Iran’s destruction.

The historical chain is not mysterious: Palestinian militant organizations influenced and trained Iranian revolutionaries; leftist and Islamist forces found common ground against the Shah; the revolutionary government welcomed Arafat and handed the PLO Israel’s former embassy; and the Islamic Republic made Palestine a foundation of its regional policy. Iran has paid for that project with its resources, its security, and the futures of its people.

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