The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (67 page)

O
n Sunday, February 4, 1990, President George H. W. Bush returned from a weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David in the mountains of western Maryland. After changing into more formal clothes, he attended a concert in the White House and then retired for the evening. Around nine forty p.m., a call came through the White House switchboard. On the other end reportedly was an aide to Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani calling Bush from Tehran. Bush’s close friend and national security adviser General Brent Scowcroft took the call. The man on the other end sounded believable, so Scowcroft agreed to another call the next evening between the two presidents.

For the past year, President Bush had been working to get the remaining hostages in Lebanon released. Bush wanted a rapprochement with Iran. He believed it served as a buffer against Iraq and the Soviet Union, and the hostages remained the major stumbling block between the two countries.
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In his inaugural address the previous January, he extended a major olive branch to the Iranians to try to get them released. “Assistance can be shown here, and will be long remembered. Goodwill begets goodwill. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on.” He continued on, hoping to modify Iranian worries about working with America. “Great nations like great men must
keep their word. When America says something, America means it, whether a treaty or an agreement or a vow made on marble steps.”

A lot had changed in Iran over the past couple of years. The Iran-Iraq War had ended. Ayatollah Khomeini had passed on to the house not made with hands, replaced by Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, a cleric of no particular renown. Rafsanjani now served as the new president. A pragmatist who had supported the arms-for-hostages exchange earlier, Rafsanjani ran construction companies in Iran and had a good head for business. Quick and clever, he appreciated mammon as much as the imam. He understood the importance of the private sector and wanted to limit the size of the government in the economy. Rafsanjani had an open mind regarding relations with other countries, including the United States. He worried that the constant mantra of “Down with America” was both naive and counterproductive. “What does this mean?” he once said mockingly to an adviser. He worried that the Americans would misunderstand the meaning—it meant a rejection of American policies, not the nation, its culture, or its people.
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Rafsanjani sent out feelers to the State Department indicating the Iranian president wanted better relations with the West and to get past the animosity of the last decade.

The next evening, Bush picked up the phone in his second-floor office. While long-serving policy officials Richard Haass and Sandy Charles listened in from the Situation Room, through a State Department interpreter the American president spoke for twenty-nine minutes with a man in Tehran claiming to be Rafsanjani.
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The caller said Iran wanted to improve relations and was prepared to release the American hostages in Lebanon. He supported the effort by United Nations secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to achieve that end. Before hanging up, he added that he, Rafsanjani, wanted to make a public announcement about the release so the world would know that Iran had taken the first step to improve relations.

Unfortunately, President Bush had not spoken to President Rafsanjani. After hanging up, Bush spoke with a CIA officer in Falls Church about the origin of the call, and after a flurry of talks with his advisers and with de Cuéllar in New York, Bush learned he had been duped. The caller had been an Iranian opposed to any rapprochement with the United States. He apparently intended to publicly embarrass Rafsanjani.

The incident served as a disturbing indicator of the state of relations between the United States and Iran. Not only were the two sides not talking,
but they struggled to even figure out how. Both sides preferred to talk through intermediaries, which provided a level of deniability. Despite the rhetoric, neither country wanted to be the first to publicly extend the hand. The United States remained ignorant of Iran, so much so that the president of the United States could not even differentiate between an official call from a head of state and a prank caller.

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he American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon colored the new president’s thinking regarding Iran. The arms-for-hostages fiasco continued to reverberate. The issue had been a major political club used by the Democrats during the 1988 election. It culminated in a testy exchange in January 1988 when CBS News anchor Dan Rather badgered Bush about his support for Reagan’s arms transfers to Iran. “You made us hypocrites before the world,” Rather said.

Bush responded vigorously, citing the details of the capture and torture of the CIA station chief, William Buckley. “If I erred, it was on the side of getting those hostages out!”

Hostage taking remained a lucrative practice in Lebanon. In 1987, ABC reporter Charles Glass had arrived to do research for a book. An Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer who’d learned of his planned visit to Sidon drove to a Hezbollah agent’s house in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The Lebanese moved quickly and snatched Glass near the airport. For once, the CIA had good information, including the license plate of one of the cars to be used, but simply could not get to Glass in time.
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That same year, Marine Colonel Richard Higgins, a member of the UN security mission in Lebanon, was captured while driving along the coast to meet with a Shia Amal leader. His captor, Mustafa Dirani, headed a small group called Believers’ Resistance, which sympathized with Hezbollah.

The following year, Imad Mugniyah orchestrated another effort to get the seventeen Dawa Party members released from Kuwait. This time, Iran showed less enthusiasm for its ally’s actions. On April 5, eight hijackers seized Kuwait Airways Flight 422 as it neared Kuwait City on a flight from Bangkok. They took control of the Boeing 747 and forced the plane down in Iran. An embarrassed Iranian government ordered them to leave and threatened to send in commandos to storm the plane. The jet then headed for Beirut, where Iranian pressure resulted in the denial of landing rights. So the aircraft set
down in Cyprus. When Kuwait refused to release the captives, the hijackers executed two passengers. When the jumbo jet took off for its next destination, Algeria, the hijackers told the tower that they had “donned death shrouds and renamed the jetliner the ‘Plane of the Great Martyrs.’”

On takeoff from Cyprus, when the air traffic controller referred to the jet as “Kuwait 422,” a hijacker snapped back, “No! Plane of Martyrs!” The controller responded, “Sorry, Plane of Martyrs.”
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After sixteen days, with the assistance of the Iranian government, the hijackers surrendered.

While both Rafsanjani and Bush wanted to end the hostage quandary, without diplomatic relations the two sides were forced like schoolchildren to pass messages back and forth via intermediaries. The State Department’s assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, John Kelly, regularly received messages from Tehran, or those reporting to speak for its government. The Iranians wanted to meet with an American emissary anywhere in Europe, as long as the meeting remained a secret. His standard reply to these feelers: “We would be happy to, but not in the shadows.”
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Iran consistently refused. Having been burned by the Iranian arms sales, Rafsanjani wanted to retain plausible deniability for domestic reasons. He did not want to be viewed as the one needing to talk with the Great Satan.

Washington continued to reach out to Iran. One of the Iranian president’s close aides was an American-educated engineer who served as the editor for the
Tehran Times
, Hossein Mousavian. As he heard visiting dignitaries reciting a similar message from the Americans, he started keeping a log of each communication. He noted over forty messages to the Iranian president via foreign ministers and heads of state, all asking for Iran’s assistance in releasing those held in Lebanon. In every case they came with the same refrain: it’s time the two countries move forward; “goodwill leads to goodwill.”
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The Bush administration approached the United Nations to broker the release of the hostages in Lebanon. President Bush called Secretary General de Cuéllar and asked if he could meet with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. De Cuéllar agreed, and the two men met at a home in the Hamptons on Long Island. Scowcroft passed along a message from Bush: the president was prepared to take a series of reciprocal actions to ease tensions and free the hostages. The basis of this was the president’s inaugural address and the notion of goodwill meeting with goodwill. Scowcroft asked de Cuéllar to deliver the message directly to Rafsanjani.

The UN secretary general tasked a trusted aide to work the discussions
between the Americans and the Iranians. Italian diplomat Giandomenico Picco served as a special envoy to de Cuéllar and was no stranger in Tehran. He’d first arrived there in 1983, and over the years the tall, sophisticated public servant had earned the respect of Iranian leaders, especially Rafsanjani. He played a key role in negotiating the final agreement on the cease-fire that finally ended the slaughter of the Iran-Iraq War. He had also had some experience in working the hostage issue, as two UN employees were among those held in Beirut.

On August 17, 1989, Rafsanjani met with the Pakistani foreign minister. In response to the American mantra, Rafsanjani agreed to work to obtain the release of the hostages in exchange for some demonstration by the United States that it accepted the Islamic Republic. Rafsanjani was keen to put the war behind him. Iran needed Western investment to rebuild its shattered economy. The Lebanese hostages had outlived their utility.

On August 25, Picco arrived in Tehran for his first meeting with President Rafsanjani. Javad Zarif, a young Iranian diplomat destined to play a larger role in talks with the Americans, drove him to the presidential palace. Picco met the Iranian president in his office, a room Picco described as one of “overpowering whiteness, accentuated by the afternoon light flooding the room through huge windows.”
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As Zarif translated, the UN envoy described the sincerity of President Bush’s offer of “goodwill begets goodwill.” However, in light of Iran-Contra, Bush could participate only in a tit-for-tat exchange. If Rafsanjani secured the hostages’ release, the American president would reciprocate in kind.

Rafsanjani flashed with anger. He wanted action, not words, from the Americans. Regarding those holding the hostages, the Iranian president replied, “These people are not easy to find. They do not have an address.” Israel had just seized a prominent sheik in Lebanon, and Hezbollah wanted him back before releasing any Westerners.
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It would be a long and difficult task, Picco thought.

In November 1989, President Bush took a few steps to demonstrate his sincerity. The president disposed of an escrow account held by the Bank of England from the 1981 Algiers Accords to settle claims stemming from the hostage crisis. This returned $567 million to Iran. President Bush allowed an Iranian interests section in the Pakistani embassy in Washington. While the U.S. government limited its size to a staff of only forty-five and its function to travel services, it marked a major milestone. Thousands of Iranians living in
the United States could now apply for a visa to travel back to the homeland. Last, following the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, Bush refused to act against Iran when early press reports and members of Congress such as Benjamin Gilman raised suspicions of Iranian culpability. Evidence would later point to Moammar Gaddafi as the culprit.
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However, Bush continued intelligence sharing with Iraq. As emerged during the 1991 confirmation hearing for Robert Gates as CIA director, the president had authorized limited intelligence passed to Iraq relating to Iranian military dispositions. Just three months before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, with CENTCOM commander General Schwarzkopf already planning for a possible conflict with Iraq, the CIA gave Iraq information out of concern that ending the intelligence exchange might close off access to the Iraqi military.
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Iran knew of this continued intelligence sharing through a double agent in the Iraqi intelligence service. It only fueled suspicion among hard-liners in Iran over America’s true intentions with respect to the Islamic Republic.

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ran soon became a sideshow for the United States in the Persian Gulf. At two a.m. on August 2, 1990, Captain (later vice admiral) Kevin Cosgriff’s frigate had just dropped off a Kuwaiti tanker as part of the Earnest Will convoy missions that continued out of inertia more than necessity. Thin, intelligent, and businesslike, he had several deployments in the Gulf under his belt. But that night would be like no other. His radar and radio lit up with images of war. Waves of Iraqi aircraft bombed Kuwait. Helicopters landed Iraqi special forces along the coast, while columns of Iraqi tanks poured into the tiny emirate. As the Kuwaiti air force and navy scrambled to get out of the way, Cosgriff radioed back to the Middle East Force asking for instructions. “Wait out,” came the reply.

“That was not what I wanted to hear when a war is breaking out all around me,” Cosgriff said. The American ship made its way south away from Kuwait, with a trail of tankers following in Cosgriff’s wake looking for protection. It would be the last convoy operation of Earnest Will.
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Operations Desert Shield and, soon thereafter, Desert Storm were about to begin.