According to scholar Daniel Pipes, writing in 1980, the Marxist-leaning leftists and the Islamists shared a common antipathy toward market-based reforms under the late Shah, and both subsumed individualism, including the unique identity of women, under conservative, though contrasting, visions of collectivism. United States in the early months of the Revolution.The Soviets, and possibly their allies Cuba, Libya, and East Germany, were suspected of providing indirect assistance to the participants in the takeover of the U.S. embassy in capital.
The PLO under Yasser Arafat provided personnel, intelligence liaisons, funding, and training for Khomeini’s forces before and after the Revolution, and was suspected of playing a role in the embassy crisis. Fidel Castro reportedly praised Khomeini as a revolutionary anti-imperialist who could find common cause between revolutionary socialists and anti-American Islamists. Both expressed disdain for modern capitalism and a preference for authoritarian collectivism.
