Iran Meantime Back in Tehran

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As he presented his government's 1987 budget to the Iranian parliament last week, Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi interrupted his discussion of financial matters to address himself to a more emotional topic. Declared Mousavi: "There will be no reconciliation on our side with the U.S." His speech, which included a ringing attack on the Soviet Union, was the latest volley in the continuing power struggle among Iran's ruling mullahs.

The issue at hand was the succession to the country's aging leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who is now 86 and reportedly in perilous health. Indeed, there is ample evidence that fervently anti-U.S. radicals like Mousavi are sharply at odds with pragmatists like Parliamentary Speaker Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 52, over the leadership of the Iranian revolution in the post-Khomeini era.

Prime Minister Mousavi's remarks in parliament seemed directed, at least in part, at the festering issue of the $506 million in blocked Iranian funds that is still held by the U.S. Now that secret talks between Washington and Tehran have been aborted by the Iranscam scandal, negotiations on the blocked funds are the only known contact between the two countries. The U.S. has acknowledged that the money belongs to Iran, but the two sides remain divided over a welter of technical details. At midweek the latest round of talks ended inconclusively.

The Reagan Administration has insisted that the talks have nothing to do with the five U.S. hostages still held in Lebanon.* But an Iranian official told reporters in the Netherlands last week, "If the Americans show their good faith toward our revolution, it is possible that people in Lebanon who are sympathetic to us will show their goodwill toward the Americans." That sounded like Rafsanjani-style pragmatism at work. On the other hand, it clashed directly with the hard-liners' refusal to grant concessions in order to regain the funds. Meanwhile, the U.S. is caught up in its own dilemma: while Washington is ready to release the money, it apparently does not want to yield one of its few remaining aces to the Iranians without at the same time assuring the return of the hostages.

The struggle for succession in Iran first surfaced when the U.S. arms-for- hostages scandal was revealed last November. It reached a peak last month during an extraordinary televised confession by Mehdi Hashemi, a leading radical politician and a close associate of the Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, 64, Khomeini's officially designated successor. Hashemi and a number of henchmen were arrested on charges of murder, kidnaping and sedition. According to reports from Tehran, the state's evidence includes such exotic weapons as vials of cyanide, booby-trapped shoes, exploding ink pens and remote-control model airplanes equipped with explosives. In early December, Khomeini ordered the government to "fully prosecute" the case.