Iran expels Soviets

Press, 6 May 1983, Page 6

Iran expels Soviets

NZPA-Reuter Teheran

Iran’s Islamic revolutionary leaders have ordered out 18 Soviet diplomats after a crackdown on the local pro-Soviet Communist Party, the Tudeh. The Foreign Ministry announced the expulsion order yesterday, only hours after the country’s revolutionary Prosecutor-General had announced that the Tudeh party was being dissolved for spying for foreign powers and other alleged offences.

The Foreign Ministry statement, reported by the national news agency 1.R.N.A., did not explicitly mention the Tudeh party and the Prosecutor-Gen-eral’s announcement did not refer to the Soviet Union by name.

But the dissolution of the party and the - expulsion order came just days after several Tudeh leaders were shown on television confessing to spying for the Soviet Union, passing information to Moscow through the Soviet embassy in Teheran.

A translation of the confession of the party secre-tary-general,' Noureddin Kianouri, by the Englishlanguage ‘‘Teheran Times” newspaper quoted him as saying: “Our violations mainly consisted of the delivery of top secret military and political documents to our bosses at the Russian embassy.”

The Foreign Ministry statement, as summarised by the national news agency, accused the Soviet diplomats of interfering in Iran’s . internal affairs by making contacts with “treacherous and mercenary agents.” It said that the diplomats had 48 hours to leave. The scale of the Government’s operation against the Tudeh party is still not entirely clear.