The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (36 page)

Dunbar returned to the States; Cave stayed in Europe to visit his grandchildren. On December 14, Cave received a call in his hotel room. On the
other end was Mehdi-Nejat. He urgently wanted to meet with Cave the next morning. Cave agreed, as the two men had become friendly over the past year.

Mehdi-Nejat said he had talked with his superiors (although Cave suspected he’d spoken to a senior Iranian in Frankfurt). “Tehran is most anxious to push forward and is interested in how fast the State Department can draw up a plan.” The United States had promised TOW missiles, intelligence, and cooperation in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, Mehdi-Nejat argued. He urged Cave to check back with Washington again, since it had reneged on these commitments.

Despite his long-standing objections, Secretary Shultz did not want to end the Iranian channel. Mehdi-Nejat had consulted with Rafsanjani, and there were some indications that the Iranian foreign minister was interested in working through this conduit. Shultz did not want the CIA involved, so he ordered Cave off the detail. Dunbar planned to meet with Mehdi-Nejat again in Geneva on December 27, to again reiterate that the channel remained open to pass messages, but the days of providing arms and intelligence were over.
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On December 19, Odom dutifully brought Weinberger the intercepts related to the meeting and the State Department’s secret contacts. Weinberger was livid. He immediately sent a nasty memo to the White House: “I had assumed that we were finished with that entire Iranian episode and so testified to Congressional Committees during last week. I was astounded, therefore, to learn after my testimony, that the United States ‘negotiators’ were still meeting with the same Iranians.” Angry at Shultz for not telling him about the meetings, he wrote, “I would very much have appreciated an opportunity to present to the President arguments as to why we should not continue dealing with these channels in Iran.”
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Shultz backpedaled and objected to Weinberger’s hostile tone. But the defense secretary had finally succeeded in killing the Iranian weapons-for-hostages baby.

I
n popular lore, the Iranian arms dealings have been portrayed as rogue policy pursued by the national security staff due to an inattentive president. In truth, the arms-to-Iran initiative continued a five-year-long strategy, one deeply rooted in Cold War fears of revolutionary Iran falling under the Soviet sphere. While the U.S. government publicly tried to isolate Iran,
Reagan ordered the CIA to surreptitiously develop contacts within the Iranian government in a quiet attempt to steer Iran back to the West. Its chief architects—Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, and William Casey—viewed providing weapons as just another means to find a pragmatic faction to work with inside the Iranian government. As Poindexter wrote in an op-ed piece in the
Wall Street Journal
at the height of the scandal, he firmly believed that cultivating such a group, over time, would break down the deep mutual suspicion that permeated both sides. Iran again might serve as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. In the process, it would help release the American hostages in Lebanon and curb Iranian terrorism. Reagan agreed, scribbling on a copy for Poindexter, “Great. RR.”
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Instead, it degraded into a swap of weapons for hostages, a political scandal. Public officials in both Washington and Iran had been badly burned by the revelations. The real legacy of the Iranian arms affair was to scuttle any hope of rapprochement for the next two decades.

I
t was the nadir of the nadir,” commented Richard Armitage about Christmas 1986. The Iran-Contra revelations threatened to unravel the Reagan presidency.

The other shoe had dropped on the Iranian arms dealings. Beginning with the very first shipment of TOW missiles, both the Israelis and Americans had overcharged the Iranians. A bill charged to Iran called for $10,000 per missile, when the actual cost to the Defense Department was closer to $3,500. This quickly accumulated into millions of dollars of surplus of nonappropriated funds, Iranian money. Rather than turn it over to the U.S. Treasury, Oliver North funneled it with General Secord into buying arms to support the U.S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua, a scheme he later termed, “a neat idea.” This treaded on illegality, and Congress was revving up for hearings that spring, dragging senior officials, including John Poindexter and Oliver North, before the cameras in hearings that promised to be as electrifying as the Watergate hearings a decade earlier.

A presidential commission looking into the matter, headed by Republican stalwart former Tennessee senator John Tower, mildly criticized Reagan for his detached leadership style and for allowing the National Security
Council to conduct operations and not just coordinate policy. The Tower report concluded that the president had traded arms for hostages. Reagan, like Claude Rains in
Casablanca
, professed “shock” to the affair even though he had been instrumental in the policy from the outset.

The strain of the scandal caused backbiting and open hostility within the administration. Secretary George Shultz took the rare action of going on television and publicly criticizing the president for trading arms to the ayatollah. This angered the First Lady, Nancy Reagan. She confided to the affable Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, that Shultz should go for being “disloyal to the president.”
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Reagan refused to take his wife’s advice and fire his secretary of state, although the two continued to verbally spar during following meetings in the White House Situation Room over the wisdom of the entire enterprise. Reagan, despite the growing scandal, continued to believe it had been a worthwhile endeavor.
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The scandal caused a major housecleaning in the White House. Poindexter resigned and Frank Carlucci came in as the new national security adviser, with Weinberger’s former military aide, Colin Powell, going over to the White House as his deputy. Robert Oakley joined them, reluctantly accepting the Middle East portfolio. Over at the CIA, William Casey suffered a massive stroke in December and remained in his hospital deathbed, and after a failed effort to confirm Robert Gates as his replacement, FBI director William Webster accepted the assignment heading the spy agency.

News of Washington’s secret dealings with Iran caused a crisis of confidence in the Middle East. “While we were sending high-level intelligence briefers to see the king of Saudi Arabia and the emir of Kuwait to warn them about the dangers they faced should Iran defeat Iraq, it turns out we were sending weapons to Iran. You can imagine the reaction,” said Peter Burleigh, who headed the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs at the State Department. “They had not expected us to do that!”
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The Organization of Islamic Cooperation held its annual meeting in Kuwait in January 1987. Amid the noise of the artillery rounds of the Iran-Iraq War, members debated the real policy of the United States in the region and American treachery. While Washington had publicly pressured countries not to sell Tehran weapons, it had secretly engaged in precisely that. Saudi officials who’d suspected the U.S. arms transfers had repeatedly been reassured that no such secret actions were under way. News of this duplicitous
policy shook the confidence of moderate Arabs in the good faith of the U.S. government and called into question American reliability against Iran. Few believed the Reagan administration’s excuse that it was a rogue operation from the White House basement.
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“America is a vastly successful conspiratorial power,” remarked veteran Middle East diplomat Richard Murphy about the Arab view of the United States. “The Gulf states are pretty damn cynical, very much wedded to the idea that nations have interests and not affections, and if we saw it in our interest to play with Iran, we’ll play with Iran. But it made them nervous.”
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L
eaders in the area were suspicious of us because of Iran-Contra,” remarked Sandra Charles, who headed Middle East policy in the Pentagon under Armitage. When intelligence reports showed that Iran was positioning Hawk antiaircraft missiles—the same type sold by North and company to Iran—on the disputed island of Abu Musa, the defense minister of the United Arab Emirates responded to Charles during one meeting, “Great to know the missiles that you provided them are now a threat to your own forces. A fine mess you got yourselves into.”
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Carlucci and Powell revamped Operation Staunch. President Reagan formally designated Secretary of State Shultz as the lead for coordinating a new interagency effort to halt weapons flowing to Iran. He assigned the task to the undersecretary for security assistance, former congressman from Illinois Edward Derwinski, who formed an Operation Staunch committee composed of representatives from across the government, including the intelligence agencies. It met every two weeks in the Old Executive Office Building, where it went over the latest open and sensitive intelligence reports about weapons destined for Iran and developed a coordinated government-wide response to cancel any sales. The new Operation Staunch immediately had success, especially in Europe. Munitions sales by Western Europe to Iran dropped dramatically, from $1 billion in 1986 to less than $200 million in the first half of 1987, and only four NATO nations sold arms to Iran, a drop from twenty-three the year before. At the end of that year, the United Kingdom ordered Iran to close its weapons procurement office in London through which Tehran purchased an estimated 70 percent of its weapons.
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W
hile the State Department pursued Operation Staunch, the Pentagon fell back on the ongoing military-to-military contacts to mitigate the political damage. “The military-to-military ties through CENTCOM were a source of comfort to them and showed constancy in the relationship,” remarked Richard Murphy. In one instance, while Richard Armitage was being flailed by Jordan’s King Hussein over the inconsistencies in American policy toward Iran, CENTCOM and Jordanian officers were in the next room planning an exercise as though nothing had happened.”
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The CENTCOM commander noted this too, after a swing through the region. “For the short run, our military cooperation has survived the shock intact and is in a position to provide some cushioning for other elements of our relationships in the region,” General George Crist wrote to Weinberger.
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While scandal consumed the politicians in Washington, the tanker war escalated dramatically. Iraqi aircraft struck sixty-five ships flying flags from various nations transiting to Iranian ports. Saudi Arabia allowed Iraqi Mirages to refuel at their air bases, permitting them to extend their range to the Strait of Hormuz. The Iraqis added long-range bombers newly purchased from Moscow. These lumbering four-engine planes, called Badgers, carried a powerful punch—Chinese-made cruise missiles packing a warhead with three times the explosive power of an Exocet.
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The Gulf Arabs increased their assistance to Iraq. Saudi Arabia paid to improve Iraqi oil pipelines running through Turkey. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia provided Iraq with as much as $1 billion in assistance each month, and Kuwait’s contribution alone amounted to some $13 billion by 1987.
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Kuwait opened the door for military aid flowing to Iraq. In one week alone, in December 1986, an unprecedented seven Soviet arms carriers arrived in Kuwait and delivered more than three battalions of T-72 tanks, plus advanced MiG-29 aircraft.
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After seven years of war and revolution, Iran’s conventional military capabilities to respond had greatly diminished. A combination of spare-parts shortages and combat losses had reduced its air force, according to DIA estimates, to no more than a few dozen operational aircraft, and most of these were committed to the Iraqi front. Following the downing of their F-4 by the Saudis, the Iranians used Italian-made helicopters outfitted with small missiles to attack shipping and shifted operations to the central-southern Gulf,
where they operated from the island of Abu Musa and the Sirri oil platform. They hit eighteen ships in 1986 before the lack of spare parts halted flight operations.
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The burden of waging Iran’s campaign fell to the vestiges of the shah’s once impressive navy. After the revolution, clerics assumed senior positions to monitor the loyalty of the service, leading to an exodus of officers to the National Iranian Tanker Company or into exile. With the outbreak of war with Iraq, the government tried to retain the officers needed to operate aircraft and ships, often successfully appealing to their nationalist sentiments. Others remained driven less by the tug of country than by family or the need for a paycheck. Among these were professional, American-trained officers who rose in rank and took the helm of a depleted navy in its first major war against Saddam Hussein.