The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (78 page)

Rice’s attitude immediately set off alarms within the Pentagon. The tenor of the draft seemed to “undercut our policy of rejection of the Iranian regime’s legitimacy,” wrote Peter Rodman on a draft of the talking points. “We don’t want stories in the press about reconciliation.”
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Rodman believed
that there might be some merit in learning what Iran knew about Iraq’s WMD program, but this intelligence should not come at the expense of minimizing the Iranian threat in any post Iraq War plans. His deputy, Bill Luti, agreed. Iran viewed a free Iraq as a threat, he wrote. While recognizing Iran’s own experience on the receiving end of Iraq’s chemical weapons, the United States viewed Iran’s nuclear and chemical programs as equally dangerous. The United States should not consider the Iranians in any postwar role, and the only communications with their government should be to tell them not to interfere in Iraq after the U.S. invasion and to keep such terrorist surrogates as Hezbollah in check, or else.

On this issue, Secretary Rumsfeld shared his views only with the vice president. On January 9, Peter Rodman forwarded a memo with Rumsfeld’s views to Cheney’s office in order to synchronize the two offices as part of a coordinated effort to steer the Geneva talks with Iran from a dialogue to an ultimatum against Iran. In a principals meeting in late January, both the vice president and Rumsfeld echoed the same refrains: the United States should not duplicate the Afghan model with Iraq, and any attempt by the Iranian military or intelligence service to “penetrate Iraq” or “exploit pro-Iranian assets inside Iraq” should be construed as a hostile act toward the United States.

The civilians surrounding the secretary of defense and the vice president remained convinced that the Iranian regime was ripe for overthrow. Most advocated supporting domestic opponents to foment civilian unrest. It was a hard-line policy designed to spark a revolt that would overthrow the regime. In a January 2002 NSC briefing led by Donald Rumsfeld entitled “Global War on Terrorism: The Way Ahead,” the secretary stridently recommended against any rapprochement with the regime. Instead, he recommended supporting internal democratic opposition movements, the argument being that the clerical regime was teetering—it was corrupt and despised by the Iranian youth. With the right amount of support, Iranian opposition groups inside and outside would bring the government down. “Collapse of the Iranian clerical regime would deflate Islamist militancy worldwide,” Rumsfeld argued, without offering any substantial proof, before adding that this would help defeat al-Qaeda—even though the terrorist organization had nothing to do with Iran and was not even Shia.

Within both the CIA and the State Department many Iran analysts objected to the Defense Department’s characterization of Iran’s government.
“It was ridiculous,” said one senior State Department official. “There was dissatisfaction, as reflected by Khatami’s victories, but this did not translate into support behind an American-led revolt.”

Over the next few months, Rice tried to shepherd the national security planning document through the government and get it in front of the president. On May 21, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Myers met to go over an NSC paper and address the vice president’s and defense secretary’s concerns. All present agreed on the broad goals: get Iran to stop its nuclear and missile weapons programs, cut ties with Hezbollah, become a Western democracy, and generally acquiesce to American desires in the Middle East. But they remained split on how to move forward in a strategy to achieve these goals. The main “land mine,” as an air force lieutenant colonel described it, in pursuing any constructive dialogue was the civilian hawks in the Defense Department. “OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] takes a strong position on regime change and sees very little value in continuing any engagement with Iran,” a Pentagon memo bluntly stated.

Paul Wolfowitz, who rarely came to White House meetings, took an active role in steering Rice’s document away from reconciliation to antagonism. With the backing of the vice president, the document’s verbiage became more strident with each successive draft. Passages praising President Khatami for restraining extremist elements disappeared, replaced with a rejection of the reform movement as not bringing about “meaningful democratic changes or moderation in policies inimical to U.S. interests.” Recent Iranian arrests and turnover of al-Qaeda suspects or support for the Bonn agreement were not enough. Nothing short of Iran’s capitulation to American demands would satisfy the hawks. Iran even needed to support the recent Arab League’s peace proposal for Israel and Palestine, which not even the right-wing Likud Party in Israel embraced. But lacking this, Iran could not reenter the community of nations.

Rather than engagement, Rumsfeld’s office pressed for overthrowing the Islamic Republic by supporting internal and external opposition groups and proposed forming an Iranian National Congress to organize the opposition groups.
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The United States would install a secular, democratic government. Iran was a terrorist organization, Feith and Wolfowitz argued during meetings. It was intent on undermining American interests and destroying Israel. They placed no confidence in Khatami or his reform movement to bring about any meaningful change in Iranian behavior. The Pentagon’s civilians
pressed that any references to constructive cooperation on Iran’s interests in Afghanistan be struck from memos. “Clear possibility,” one officer working in the Pentagon wrote in February 2002, “that OSD would propose Iran as the next target in the war on terrorism.”

Donald Rumsfeld wanted language stating that overthrowing the regime would be American policy. On August 19, 2002, in a letter to Bush, he proposed dealing with two thorns in the American side: “I believe that the situations in Iran and North Korea are sufficiently interesting and unsettled that fashioning a major U.S. government effort, for the most part confidential, to undermine the current regimes and encourage regime change from within is worth consideration.”

Powell, who along with Myers had been deliberately left off Rumsfeld’s memo to the president, learned of Rumsfeld’s end run. Both he and Myers went to Rice to voice their rejection of arming any opposition groups within Iran. Powell had no confidence that any opposition group had the strength to challenge the current oligarchy. But more important, a scheme to overthrow the Iranian government violated the two-decades-old Algiers Accords, signed in 1981 as a precondition for release of the American hostages, in which the United States pledged “that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.”
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Condi Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft agreed with Powell’s view. The final draft included this line: “The United States should not at this time provide overt or covert support to opposition groups or call for regime change.”

When Peter Rodman saw this, he raised the alarm back with Rumsfeld. This ties our hands in foreign policy, he told the secretary. “The Algiers Accords are not a binding obligation. The U.S. has in any case the right of self-defense. This is a red herring.”
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“Good!” Rumsfeld wrote in response to Rodman. The secretary recommended that they delete any reference to language that opposed regime change or mentioned obligations signed by President Carter.

As for the recent overtures from President Khatami, Vice President Cheney pushed to insert language in the draft national security document that flatly rejected them. “The United States should not at this point respond to overtures from the current regime but will continue to meet with the
Iranian Government representatives in multilateral settings when it serves U.S. interests.”
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Whether regime change should be American policy brought Iran policy to a halt. “We were at loggerheads,” Richard Armitage said, “and the president, who has put himself up as the great decider, would never decide.”
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After months of debate and discussion, Rice shelved the national security document. It would be another five years before the administration tried again to formulate a cohesive strategy to deal with this antagonist.

The Pentagon’s views were heavily influenced by Ahmed Chalabi, the head of a group of Iraqi exiles funded by the U.S. government called the Iraqi National Congress. Founded in 1992, the INC, as it became known, served as an umbrella organization for those opposed to Saddam Hussein, and its contacts within Iraq proved useful for open-source information. Chalabi told the willing listeners in the administration, including an admiring Vice President Cheney, that removal of Saddam Hussein by U.S. forces would put tremendous pressure on the Iranian government. “The U.S. could even build military bases in Iraq to pressure Iran,” said Richard Armitage, recalling a quote by Chalabi.
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The fact that Chalabi lived in Tehran and that a number of his key advisers were known by the CIA to be on the payroll of Iranian intelligence—with suspicions even pointing to Chalabi—should have given his advocates pause to consider his assessment of the situation. Of particular concern was the INC’s chief of intelligence and close confidant to Chalabi, Aras Habib, whom the CIA and British intelligence believed to be an Iranian MOIS agent. The agency warned senior defense officials and Congress about the penetration of the INC by Iranian intelligence. It raised this as well to Rumsfeld’s newly appointed intelligence director, Stephen Cambone, who met several times with Aras Habib. But senior Bush officials discounted much of this, in part due to profound distrust of the CIA and its information on Iraq. A Defense Department inspector general report later concluded that about one-third of the information provided by Chalabi and the INC proved accurate and actionable, and in 2002, the State Department withdrew its funding of the INC. But Chalabi retained supporters in Rumsfeld’s office, and funding continued through the DIA at $340,000 a month.

Chalabi never denied his involvement with Iran. Many Iraqi opposition groups were based in Iran and had been so for more than two decades. When
questioned about his ties to Iran by an American intelligence officer in October 2002, Chalabi dismissed this criticism. “This relationship is normal and necessary,” he said. It did not alarm senior officials in the Pentagon either. Feith, for one, always assumed that the foreign spy services had penetrated the exile groups. So long as Chalabi and the INC supported the goals of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, their manipulation by Iranian intelligence did not matter to those determined to invade Iraq.

The Defense Department expanded its work with the INC in developing the Free Iraqi Forces. Spearheaded by Bill Luti, this idea had captivated the neocons during the Clinton administration, when Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich had proposed using the army of Iraqi exiles to serve as the vanguard for a “liberation” of the country and establishing a safe zone in southern Iraq backed by American airpower. Now in power, the neocons in the Defense Department and Chalabi moved ahead with the plan. The INC provided nearly five thousand names of “volunteers” to serve in the army. The U.S. military built a camp in Hungary to train the exiles. The entire concept proved a canard. DIA quickly ascertained that most of those on the list either did not exist or were duplicate names. At a cost to the American taxpayer of more than $90 million, fewer than one hundred Iraqis ever showed up at the camp, and of these, only seventy completed the training program—more than $1 million per recruit.

The Defense Department also opened an old wound from the Reagan administration. In early November 2001, Michael Ledeen arrived at the White House to meet with an old acquaintance, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Since his fall from grace twenty years earlier as one of the chief instigators behind the Iranian arms sales that led to Iran-Contra, Ledeen had continued his fixation on Iran. In the intervening years, he had switched sides, along with the Israeli government, and now advocated regime change rather than rapprochement. He worked at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute and continued peddling information about Iran to anyone willing to listen; after 2001, he found a number of willing ears among his former think tank colleagues now in senior positions in the new Bush administration. Ledeen told Hadley that he was in contact with Iranians who possessed exceptional information regarding Iran’s links to terrorism. While he did not vouch for its accuracy, Ledeen thought it important enough to bring it to the U.S. government’s attention. The one caveat, however, was that his sources had a deep distrust of the CIA and would not work with Langley. The
better conduit would be through the Defense Department, and Ledeen suggested that Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, both of whom shared a similar view of the Islamic Republic and were fluent in Farsi, meet with the Iranians.
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What Ledeen omitted telling Hadley was that his chief Iranian conduit was none other than Manucher Ghorbanifar, his old partner in Ronald Reagan’s worst political nightmare. The smooth Iranian had undergone the same political metamorphosis as had his friend Michael Ledeen, and he now offered to arrange a meeting between American officials and senior Iranian officials who had information about the political situation in Iran as well as its support to terrorist organizations, including “plans to kill Americans in Afghanistan.” With a twenty-five-year-old reputation as a fabricator and a burn notice by the agency still hanging over Ghorbanifar, it is not surprising he did not want to meet with CIA officers.

Hadley agreed with Ledeen’s proposal. On November 7, he called Wolfowitz and requested that the Defense Department handle the meeting. He emphasized to Wolfowitz that the meeting had to remain “very close hold” due to the Iranians’ distrust of the CIA.