One day there was a telephone call to Paris from the Welcome Committee for Imam’s Post-Exile Arrival to the Country in Tehran. I was in charge of the Imam’s Office and secretarial tasks. The caller was none other than the innocent martyr late Ayatollah Beheshti who was saying that we should inform the Imam that all preparations had been made for his arrival including a red carpet welcome at the airport, illumination of the route and that the Imam would journey the route from the airport to the Behesht-e-Zahra Necropolis (where the Imam was to give his opening speech) by helicopter and so forth... when I went to the Imam and informed him of the arrival preparations, after listening very carefully to my words as was his usual style—that he would first listen to the words of the opposite party very carefully and then give his reply—the Imam with the same unique decisiveness and resoluteness that was his trademark, stated: “Go and tell the gentlemen that it seems as if they intend to welcome Cyrus (the great Achaemenid emperor) to Iran! Not at all, these things are unnecessary. A cleric had departed from Iran and the same cleric is returning back to Iran. I want to be among my nation and go along with them even if it means that I am crushed to death.”
Name of the narrator: Hujjat al-Islam wal Muslimeen Ferdosipour, Keyhan daily, dated June 04, 1989
Title of the Book: Impressions and Memoirs about Imam Khomeini's Practical Behaviour, vol. 1, chapter two, page 110