Richard Howard and others at PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee, sharing at the same time, with Kay Boyle, the Honorary Chair of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) to release Iranian writers and artists from prison. He published his prose and poetry in the Time Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the American Poetry Review. In 1976, during his exile in the U.S., human rights organizations were led to believe that the Shah’s SAVAK agents had arrived in the U.S. with the intention of assassinating Iranian opposition leaders, among them Baraheni. With the help of the American PEN and the assistance of Ramsey Clark, Baraheni says he was able to expose the Shah’s plot. Baraheni wrote a four-page article in the February 1977 edition of the erotic magazine, Penthouse, claiming how political prisoners in Iran under the Shah were tortured. He alleged how the political prisoners and their family members were raped systematically in Iran under the Shah. His claims however have been disputed by many other Iranians who say he either exaggerated or simply made them up to get the attention of his readers in the West. He was influential in turning the public opinion in the West against the Shah of Iran, and specially amongst the Democratic Party in the US. See : Report by Robert C. de Camara on the Shah's record. Baraheni returned to Iran in the company of more than thirty other intellectuals in 1979, four days after the Shah fled the country. Baraheni tried very hard to win favours with Ayatollah Khomeini. On 30 January 1979, he wrote in the Etell'at newspaper, "Soon [after Khomeini's return] there will be a permanent and deep democracy in Iran, and we will enter an era where poverty, repression, bankruptcy, hopelessness and capitalist greed will end and Iran will be saved from economic chaos and bad governmental planning". Khomeini however ignored Baraheni's flattery and instead he joined his Leftist friends in the Writer's Association. Baraheni’s concentration was on three major themes: 1)the unhampered transmission of thought; 2)equal rights for oppressed nationalities in Iran and; 3)equal rights for women with men. In the wave of the crackdown against the intellectuals, the liberals and the left in Iran in 1981, Baraheni found himself once more in the solitary confinement, this time under the new regime. Upon his release from prison in the winter