Location: The Heritage Foundation's Lehrman Auditorium

Khomeini’s Ghost offers the definitive biography of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution and how his fundamentalist legacy has forever influenced the course of Iran's relationship with the West.  Drawing on a wide variety of Iranian sources, including religious figures, who knew and worked with Khomeini both in exile and in power, Con Coughlin, one of Britain’s leading journalists, reflects on how an impoverished young student from a remote area of southern Iran became the leader of one of the most dramatic upheavals of the modern age. 

In February 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran after nearly fifteen years in exile and received a hero's welcome.  Just as the new world order sought to purge the communist ideologies of the Cold War, the religious doctrine of Islamic fundamentalism emerged to pose an even greater threat to post-Iron Curtain stability – and Khomeini would mastermind it into a revolution.  Khomeini's Ghost examines how his radical Islamic philosophy now is at the heart of the current conflict between Iran and the West.

Con Coughlin is the Executive Foreign Editor of The Daily Telegraph and a world-renowned expert on the Middle East.  He is the critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Saddam: His Rise and Fall.  He appears regularly on television and radio in the United States and has been a frequent political commentator on CNN, NBC, and MSNBC.  Coughlin has also written for the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic Monthly.