Seeking to break Khomeini’s contacts with the opposition, the Shah pressured the Iraqi government to expel him from Najaf. Khomeini left Iraq, instead moving to a house bought by Iranian exiles in Neauphle-le-Château, a village near Paris, France. The Shah wished that Khomeini would be cut off from the mosques of Najaf and the protest movement. Instead, the plan backfired badly. French telephone and postal connections, superior to those of Iraq, let Khomeini’s supporters flood Iran with tapes and recordings of his sermons.Worse for the Shah was that the Western media, especially the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), immediately put Khomeini into the spotlight. Khomeini rapidly became a household name in the West, portraying himself as an “Eastern mystic” who did not seek power, but instead sought to “free” his people from “oppression.” Many Western media outlets, usually critical of such claims, became one of Khomeini’s most powerful tools.
