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Richard Helms, in the White House Cabinet Room. Photo from the White House Photograph Office

Said Ramadan—the late Geneva-based international Islamic lawyer who was, in fact, the secular CEO and theoretician of the worldwide Islamic fundamentalist movement—overlooked the corruption of many of the mullahs who were helping him foment an Islamic revolution. Corruption was nothing new to Ramadan. That was precisely why he was working to rid the Islamic world of Western influences. Ramadan held no hatred for the American people, only amazement at the incompetence of the American intelligence community and its seemingly endless reliance on corruption to get what it wanted.

The mullahs in Iran had a unique view of America. Former CIA Director and U.S. Ambassador to Iran Richard Helms and his colleagues had been paying them for years to allow the Peacock Throne to survive. Now the Shah’s regime had become so detached from the people that the most extreme of the mullahs, a man who had been exiled first to Iraq and then to Paris, had begun organizing cells in Iran that offered the poor and disaffected education and even health care. The Shah’s vacuum of leadership among the poor was being filled with tape recordings of this mullah’s sermons smuggled into Iran. Hopes for a pure Islamic government were pinned on this aging firebrand—the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

But the old Imam’s perspective was not confined to his native Iran. Said Ramadan reported to him that there were many disaffected, able African Americans who longed for a respect and belonging they could not find in American society. Ramadan argued that these young men, many of whom had military training, could be recruited as a secret cadre for the coming Islamic revolutions.

The Imam called for a meeting of the Islamic Council in Paris. Decisions were handed down to spend $5 million to recruit disaffected African Americans to the cause. Ideally, the President of the United States would have been getting intelligence warnings of these activities. But the CIA did not even bother covering the Paris meetings. After all, many of the men around the Ayatollah Khomeini were CIA informants. Right up until Khomeini returned to Tehran from France, Richard Helms was convinced that the men around Khomeini were loyal United States intelligence assets.

Bahram Nahidian, an Iranian-born naturalized American, sold rugs from his store in Georgetown. He was also the nexus of Khomeini’s activities in Washington, D.C. Nahidian operated out of his rug store and the Islamic House, his modest alternative to the Saudi-controlled Islamic Center in the heart of Washington’s diplomatic district. Nahidian and his growing group of followers wanted to wrest control of the Center away from the Saudis, who they believed were in league with the Western infidels.

The Islamic Center was the battleground in a civil war between the two groups of Muslims. Every day for months, the center was surrounded by loud and threatening demonstrators. Sometimes violence erupted. D.C. police detectives, trying to determine who was behind the strife, photographed and tried to identify the demonstrators. That is when they got their first pictures of David Belfield, a.k.a. Dawud Salahuddin. Although a couple of D.C. police detectives tried to interest them, officials of the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence saw no connection between the events at the center and the upheaval in Iran. Frustrated, Detectives Carl Shoffler and Bill Cagney feared the situation was spinning out of control.

Said Ramadan had assigned Bahram Nahidian the task of recruiting disillusioned but intelligent young black men. It did not take him long to find a star.

Dawud Salahuddin was clearly intelligent. Nahidian liked the fact that Salahuddin lacked the overt hostility of many of his recruits. Nahidian realized that this young man yearned for respect and a place in history. Salahuddin did not fit classic police profiles; in fact, his older brother was a New York cop. During this period, Salahuddin taught Islamic classes at the D.C. jail and the nearby Lorton Reformatory. Through one of his relatives, Nahidian arranged for a job for Salahuddin at the Iranian Interest Section of the Algerian Embassy. David Belfield had truly become Dawud Salahuddin. He did not know it in 1978, but his fate was to become one of the ten African Americans recruited as assassins for the Islamic Revolution under orders of Khomeini himself. These men would operate without restrictions on finance or travel. Their role was to use murders to create an atmosphere of total panic in the pro-Shah Iranian communities in the United States and Europe.

At twenty-nine, Salahuddin was becoming a leader in his own right among the various small groups that Nahidian had started. He was deeply involved in a Brooklyn mosque that would become a center, years later, of al Qaeda activity. He earned his reputation with the Iranians in a bizarre and little-publicized incident that took place on November 4, 1979—the same day Iranian “students” took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: he and several Iranians actually took over the Statue of Liberty and unfurled a banner from the crown.

The incident was lost in the publicity surrounding the events in Tehran. But the audacity of the takeover of the Statue of Liberty was not lost on the police detectives in Washington. The incident worried Carl Shoffler, even though it had ended peacefully. Shoffler began reading everything he could about Islam. This was the beginning of his curious relationship with Dawud Salahuddin.

After the Statue of Liberty incident, Nahidian promoted Salahuddin to be his personal bodyguard. The center of Nahidian’s activities was the Islamic House, where he provided room and board to his American recruits. Many of the recruits became members of the Islamic Guerrillas of America. Nahidian also organized nationwide campus activities through the Moslem Student Association. At that time, there were some 50,000 Iranian students in the United States. The D.C. detectives became convinced that Nahidian was up to something big.

On July 1, 1979, Yosef (Joe) Alon, the Israeli air force attaché to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., was gunned down outside his home. The D.C. detectives believed the Islamic fundamentalists had penetrated the uniformed Secret Service, which was responsible for protecting diplomats like Alon. In 1980, Islamic fundamentalists sprayed the home of Norman Carlson, the Director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, with machine-gun fire. The war was on, and, as far as Detective Shoffler and his colleagues could see, no federal cavalry was on the way.

In Washington, the Shah’s forces were hardly in retreat. While the Shah lay dying of prostate cancer in Egypt—taken in by Anwar Sadat as a favor to Jimmy Carter—his supporters were rallying around his young playboy son, who had settled into a mansion in Great Falls, Virginia, a few miles from CIA headquarters at Langley. Members of the former regime were constantly meeting at the highest levels with CIA and military officials, discussing plans to remove the new religious regime. They planned to make the Shah’s last prime minister, Shahpur Bakhtiar, then exiled in Paris, the new head of Iran. Bakhtiar, a largely ineffectual man, seemed no real threat to the Khomeini regime. But the CIA saw him as an interim step to the reestablishment of the Peacock Throne, and the Ayatollah accordingly made him a target.

The method of financing these activities became very curious. A federal drug investigation revealed that Michael, the son of the late General Teymour Bakhtiar (no close relation to Shahpur Bakhtiar), had actually become involved in a scheme to import heroin into the United States and use that money for the overthrow attempt. When Bakhtiar was arrested in the heroin scheme, a pen register wiretap on his telephone revealed calls to and from Richard Helms. Bakhtiar’s lawyer, Ramsey Clark, never called Helms as a witness to determine if his client was part of a government plot. “His silence got Bakhtiar a light sentence,” said Donald Denesyla, an ex-CIA employee who had befriended young Bakhtiar. Denesyla seemed to move with ease among both sides of the Iranian power struggle.

The spokesman for the pro-Shah forces was the former press attaché for the Iranian Embassy in Washington, Ali Akbar Tabatabai’e. Salahuddin and others from Nahidian’s mosque group, the Majlis-as-Shura, or the Council of Consultation, warned Tabatabai’e that his activities against the Islamic government of Iran would lead to his death. These warnings did not silence him. Tabatabai’e was a rarity among the Shah’s official family, most of whom retired to places like Geneva to live comfortable lives on the gratuities they had received for years from government contractors.

Salahuddin’s resolve on behalf of Iran was hardened when “students” in Tehran released a handful of African-American Marine guards and several women from the American Embassy hostages. Salahuddin saw that action as a sign of respect for his people. On his visits to Washington, Said Ramadan began using Salahuddin as his personal assistant and secretary. Salahuddin kept up communication with him as Ramadan traveled the world. Salahuddin began to see Ramadan as his mentor.

One day in early 1979, General Hosian Fardust, the former head of the dreaded SAVAK, called Richard Helms. Fardust had gone to school with both Helms and the Shah. The revolutionaries were disposed to believe that Fardust might be useful to them because the Shah had targeted him in 1975 as a suspected Soviet agent. After a period of detention, Fardust saw the utility of changing sides and agreed to head SAVAMA, the new Islamic government’s intelligence service. The new Iranian government was desperate to open up weapons deliveries from the United States, and Fardust told his new superiors that he believed an arrangement could be made with President Carter—arms in return for release of the Embassy hostages.

General Hosian Fardust

According to Dawud Salahuddin, Fardust became the go-between in a series of secret negotiations. On the American side, Carter selected Helms to be the liaison with Fardust, his old prep-school classmate. Two months after the initial contact, arrangements were made for an “unofficial visit” for Fardust to the United States. Fardust did not tell Helms that he had a reason for his trip beyond attempts at improved relations with Washington. “He was on a mission to prove his loyalty to the new Iranian Revolutionary regime,” according to a high-level revolutionary Iranian official who became a regional governor in Iran. Fardust had to prove that one of the Shah’s former henchmen would be loyal to Iran’s new Islamic leaders.

In May 1979, Fardust carried the Fatwah—the holy order—for several assassination targets in the United States. First on the list was the Shah’s former spokesman Tabatabai’e. He was to be warned verbally three times to end his collaboration with the United States. If he did not, he would be executed.

For the forty-nine-year-old Tabatabai’e, the threats were very real. He was one of the key plotters in the countercoup being orchestrated with Iraq against the Islamic regime in Iran—the one for which Bakhtiar had raised money through heroin sales.

Tabatabai’e appeared on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour to discuss the threats. His daughter, Tiffany, then a congressional page, received threats against her father in her office.

In the spring of 1980, again on MacNeil-Lehrer, Tabatabai’e publicly discussed the plan to bomb key Iranian targets, including Parliament and Imam Khomeini’s house. The fact that the exiled Iranian was discussing the plot publicly from Washington convinced Iranian officials that the U.S. government had sanctioned it. A secret Islamic court issued Fatwahs and arrest warrants for more than 1,500 plotters of the ill-fated countercoup.

For Salahuddin, his induction into the shooting war came gradually. His first assignment was to fire-bomb a pro-Shah newspaper office in Washington. By early June 1979, Salahuddin was a hardened soldier of Islam. To Salahuddin, a Fatwah was the highest-level order he could receive. When Fardust relayed to Salahuddin the Fatwah against Tabatabai’e, Salahuddin understood that he could not turn it down and remain in Islam. He was willing to die for Allah.

Salahuddin remembers thinking at the time that Tabatabai’e, the former embassy spokesman, was too small a target. He suggested former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger instead. He was told simply to follow orders.

Salahuddin’s training took over from his religious fervor. He loved the Robert Redford motion picture Three Days of the Condor. He borrowed his assassination scenario from that film.

At 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday, July 22, 1980, a young medical student named Mortazavi, who worked for Tabatabai’e, answered the doorbell at 9313 Friars Road, an upscale address in Bethesda, Maryland. Mortazavi was understandably suspicious, given the threats that had been issued against Tabatabai’e’s life. But his suspicion waned when he saw a postman’s truck and uniform. The postman said that only Ali Akbar Tabatabai’e could sign for his certified mail. He was holding several thick envelopes. When Tabatabai’e came to the door, the postman did not offer him anything to sign. Instead, he looked Tabatabai’e straight in the eye and pressed the trigger of his gun three times at point-blank range.

The seconds played out in slow motion: the look of surprise on Tabatabai’e’s face as the three 9-mm bullets tore through his shirt into his abdomen, the way the dust from his shirt made a small cloud as each bullet hit. “We locked eyes, and I could tell he was dead before he hit the ground,” Salahuddin said. Tabatabai’e was officially pronounced dead forty minutes later at Suburban Hospital.

The operation was planned perfectly. Salahuddin had gotten his weapon from a group of Muslims who were contemplating financing the takeover of an Army base in Virginia with a series of bank robberies. He had gotten the mail truck by bribing a postal worker. Another man recruited by Salahuddin assisted by wiping his fingerprints off the truck.

Salahuddin returned to Nahidian’s Islamic House to change clothes and begin his life in exile from his family and country. He flew under a phony name and passport first to Montreal, then to Geneva, and finally to his new home in Tehran.

The inability of the authorities to stop Salahuddin’s escape, combined with a series of miscues, left the prosecution of the conspirators in ruins. Only one man, peripheral to the conspiracy, served serious time in connection with the Tabatabai’e case, and that was for threatening prosecutors. When Salahuddin became a suspect, Nahidian told the media that “he was not involved. Islam does not allow you to go ahead and kill someone unless the Islamic court approves it, and he is a good Muslim, a good brother.” Salahuddin said Nahidian never mentioned the fact that an Islamic court had issued the Fatwah for Tabatabai’e.

To Salahuddin’s shock, when he reached the Iranian Embassy in Switzerland, he was not welcomed with open arms as an Islamic hero. In fact, Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh in Tehran refused to issue him an entry visa. Now desperate, Salahuddin contacted Said Ramadan. Ramadan was furious at Salahuddin for carrying out the assassination. “He thought it was foolish and unnecessary. He called Imam Khomeini’s son Ahmed, and then Ghotbzadeh was overruled.” At the Geneva airport, which is divided between Switzerland and France, Salahuddin felt vulnerable. But even though he saw Customs officials reading newspaper stories featuring his picture, they somehow did not connect the picture with him. He boarded a late-night flight to Iran, accompanied by a woman with connections to the highest levels of the revolution.

The Iran Air flight arrived in Tehran at 3 a.m. A security detail of three cars waited for Salahuddin. He was whisked into a powder-blue 1979 Cadillac Seville. In the back seat were two men with Uzi submachine guns. Another Uzi-toting security man sat in the front passenger seat. They went straight to the Foreign Ministry for a one-on-one meeting with Ghotbzadeh at about 4:00 a.m. The thirty minute conversation was strained, but Ghotbzadeh, who had first refused Salahuddin entry, now told him that any and all of his needs would be taken care of. Salahuddin would not learn until much later that Ghotbzadeh was a paid CIA agent. Salahuddin also did not know that he was never supposed to make it to Tehran. What had saved him was his friendship with Said Ramadan.

After the meeting, two of the security men drove Salahuddin around the city for about two hours and then delivered him to a safe house—a lavish guest compound just outside Tehran that SAVAK had used for visiting dignitaries.

On his first morning in the compound, he listened from his bed to a Voice of America broadcast announcing that he had escaped to Tehran. He wondered why he had not been arrested, if the U.S. government knew where he was. The Iranians had made no announcement. When Washington decided to broadcast this information—fed to them by the Iranian Foreign Minister—they were all but signing Ghotbzadeh’s death warrant.

The foreign minister’s initial refusal to allow Salahuddin entry had started a massive investigation into possible U.S. agents among high-level members of the revolution. Fardust and others came under suspicion for being on the CIA payroll. The edge that Richard Helms and the CIA thought they had purchased over the years with payments to Iranian clerics and others disappeared quickly.

More information on this subject can be found in Prelude to Terror: By Joseph Trento