IN the run-up to yesterday’s US mid-term elections, it became obvious that, almost four decades after the Cold War ended, the ‘spectre of communism’ Marx and Engels identified in the 19th century still haunts Western consciousness.
Islamophobia might have been the most prominent weapon, but it was accompanied by diatribes against Marxists and communists, invariably directed against people who are neither. For good measure, some of them are simultaneously derided as Islamist jihadists.
The American establishment’s obsession with the communist threat, real or imagined, dates back to the early 20th century, and has served as a guiding principle of its foreign (and domestic) policy since the Truman era.
One of the CIA’s first interventions, against Iranian democracy in the early 1950s, was justified as a blow against communist influence, even though the popular nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh was barely left of centre. Furthermore, the communist party Tudeh had initially misidentified him as a mole for US interests, recognising only belatedly that his oil nationalisation was in Iran’s interest.
The party was decimated in the wake of the CIA-guided coup that re-established the Shah’s reign, under the aegis of Savak, MI6, and Mossad. The survivors fled abroad, mostly ending up in East Germany, although many underground operatives remained in situ, and retained some influence in the military arm of the state.
Thus, when Tudeh resurfaced in the lead-up to the 1979 revolution, it wasn’t starting from scratch. It participated in the mass surge against the tyrannical Shah, but, unlike the militant Mujahideen-i-Khalq and others on the left, acknowledged the Khomeini phenomenon as a legitimate expression of the popular will.
That helps to explain why Tudeh briefly became the main opposition in a milieu dominated by the Islamic Republican Party. It’s unlikely this arrangement would anyhow have lasted long, but things came to a head in 1982-83.
The US today faces its own Great Game fallout.
The saga is laid out in entertaining detail in espionage specialist author Ben Macintyre’s recently published Redwood — a fascinating, albeit somewhat breathless, account of the defection in Tehran of a senior KGB officer, Vladimir Kuzichkin, the Soviet point man for contacts with Tudeh and a network of spies.
In Macintyre’s reading, Kuzichkin was disillusioned with his corrupt colleagues, as well as with the Soviet polity, but above all, it was his impotence that drove him to risk approaching MI6, expecting Western medicine to offer a cure. (Viagra was more than a decade away, but MI6 was able to organise a discreet circumcision.)
More significantly, Kuzichkin passed on to MI6’s Ian McCredie his list of Iranian contacts and details of communications with Moscow. MI6 shared them with the CIA, which was unable to operate in Iran at the time, and the latter insisted on sharing them with Iran’s intelligence agencies.
Iran had only recently released the hostages taken at the US embassy, but while the American cold warriors might not have been fans of the clergy, in their blinkered worldview the communist threat was paramount. MI6 was happy, as always, to play second fiddle. The suspicion was that Moscow’s arms and gold were preparing Tudeh for a coup that could pave the way for a Soviet invasion, as in Afghanistan, and further tilt the Cold War imbalance towards communism.
By 1982, it should have been obvious to Moscow that the Afghan occupation was going awry — thanks largely to the CIA’s covert war via Pakistan. Macintyre does not mention Zbigniew Brzezinski’s role, through the CIA and regional assets, in luring the Red Army into its biggest folly. But, given the state of affairs in the neighbourhood, it’s unlikely Moscow would seriously have contemplated a similar misadventure in Iran.
Nonetheless, it was decided to impart Redwood’s information to the Iranian authorities, and the chosen venue was Islamabad, courtesy of the then ISI chief Gen Abdul Rehman Akhtar.
Even though senior elements of the Iranian leadership — including Ayatollah Khomeini, parliamentary speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi — had their doubts about the imminence of a communist coup attempt and advised restraint, the president Ali Khamenei and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief Mohsen Rezaei favoured haste, leading to thousands of arrests and mass executions, alongside torture and televised ‘confessions’.
As in Afghanistan earlier this century, the US is today confronted, in part, with the consequences of its own Great Game machinations. But ask any surviving cold warrior, and most likely they’ll still contend it was a price worth paying for keeping the world safe from communism.
Many of us, meanwhile, awaiting this week’s election results, look forward to the impending demise of the American empire.
Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2026
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