On January 7, 1978, Daryush Homayun, the Shah’s Information Minister, published an article in a semiofficial newspaper in which he described Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as “an adventurer, without faith, and tied to the centers of colonialism … a man with a dubious past, tied to the more superficial and reactionary colonialists.” Writing under a pseudonym that in no way disguised the regime’s authorship, Homayun accused Khomeini of accepting money from the British in return for his public attacks on the Shah’s reform program. Rioting broke out the following day in the holy city of Qom after the regime’s security forces attempted to suppress protests by theological students. Some seventy people were killed in the next two days. Thus began the Iranian Revolution.1