Party were arrested and the Party disbanded, leaving Iran effectively a one-party state. The Tudeh arrests revealed that once again the party had managed to find supporters among the armed forces, as a number of officers, prominent among them Admiral Bahram Afzali, commander of the Iranian navy, were arrested. These arrests ended the alliance between the Tudeh Party and the ruling clergy of Iran and it collapsed, even as the Soviets worked with the Iranians to build up their nuclear capabilities. Even with this agreement, the Iranian government saw the Soviets as "atheistic devils" and the Soviets did not like the government because it had suppressed the Tudeh. International media, such as UPI, reported that along with the banning of the Tudeh party, 18 Soviet diplomats were expelled from the country for "blatant interference." At the same time, Tudeh was accused of working on behalf of "foreign powers," with the suppression praised by Khomeini. From 1 May 1983 to May 1984 almost all of the Tudeh leadership appeared in videos, first individually and then jointly in an October 1983 "roundtable discussion," confessing to "treason", "subversion", "horrendous crimes", praising Islam and proclaiming Islamic government's superiority over atheistic Marxism–Leninism. British officials supported Iran's crackdown and joked about the state torture techniques used to extract the confessions. British officials were pleased by the repression not primarily because they were concerned about Soviet influence in the country since they knew that Iran was quite independent of that, but because they wanted to curry favor with the Iranian regime. In May 1984 Ehsan Tabari, appeared on television. A man with "50 years of leftist experiences" told viewers he had read "great Islamic thinkers" such as Ayatollah Motahhari in prison following the 1982 crackdown and had now come to repudiate the works he had written over the past 40 years. He now realized that his entire life's work was 'defective', 'damaging', and 'totally spurious' because it had all been based on unreliable thinkers – Freemasons nourished by the Pahlavis; secularists such as Ahmad Kasravi; Western liberals and Marxists linked to 'imperialism' and 'Zionism' … In his recantation, Tabari made frequent references to religion, the Twelve Imams and Islamic thinkers and "praised Islam for its `great spiritual strength.`" The suspicions of outside observers that the confession was not given freely were reinforced by the absence of Taqi Keymanash and "13 other members" of the Tudeh central committee,