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Back then, many groups of Iranians opposed to the shah — communists, secularists, Islamists — got behind Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution.

Alimouri’s “bleeding heart” came from his father, who fled Iran after opposing both the shah and the country’s Islamic regime, finding work in the United States as a chauffeur.

Those groups were fueled by donations or assets seized after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, particularly those previously associated with Iran’s shah or those in his government.

It was a tense period in Iran: A revolution to overthrow the shah was escalating.

The shah, terminally and secretly ill with cancer, fled the country in January 1979.