The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (86 page)

However, the supreme leader never allowed the nuclear program to be publicly debated. Average Iranians cared more about jobs and improving
their economic lot. If the nuclear program helped, they supported it. But if the cost imposed for pursuing nuclear enrichment through sanctions and isolation exceeded the benefit, there was far less certainty in Tehran of popular backing. Newspapers were quietly told the subject should be treated as a national security issue, with the press supporting the government’s view that the West only wanted to keep Iran backward and dependent, depriving the country of its rights to the benefits of nuclear products.
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No one in the Bush administration had any doubt about the nature of Iran’s program. U.S. intelligence concluded that Iran intended to have at least the technical expertise to produce nuclear weapons. The heavy-water reactor being built at Arak was similar to those used by other countries in their nuclear programs, and Iran’s refusal to consider a European proposal for a light-water research reactor for medical and industrial material alarmed many. In mid-2004, a longtime CIA source passed along a laptop computer obtained from an Iranian; it contained reams of information from a team of Iranian engineers on designs for a compact nuclear warhead for an Iranian Shahab long-range missile. This included a compact sphere and detonators designed to trigger at two thousand feet above a target, viewed as a perfect altitude for a nuclear detonation.
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Another intelligence report on Iran’s long-range missile program indicated that Iran seemed bent on having the means to deploy such a nuclear warhead. But there remained differing views within the intelligence community about whether the supreme leader would actually decide to build the weapon or be content with the capability.

Events in Iran added to the heightened concerns in Washington. In February 2004, conservative candidates swept to power in Iranian parliamentary elections, chiefly due to the Guardian Council’s disqualifying twenty-five hundred reformist candidates, including eighty sitting members. The supreme leader used his clerical influence with the vetting process to rule out the suitability of many liberal candidates. Khatami had only a year to go before term limits ushered in a new president, and the conservatives were determined not to repeat the mistake of 1997. This ended what little debate existed within the administration about Khatami’s ability to make the real changes desired by Washington and provided further justification for those who had always opposed talking to Iran.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tasked his deputy, Jack Dyer “J. D.” Crouch, to supervise the new Iran strategy across the government. The balding longtime defense policy expert on nuclear weapons came over to the
White House as the number two man at the National Security Council, having served since 2001 in the Defense Department and as ambassador to Romania. On May 31, 2005, the NSC deputy’s committee, chaired by Crouch, summed up the importance Iran now took in the administration: “The implementation of a robust Iran strategy should be a core foreign policy objective.”

Putting flesh on the bones of President Bush’s new vision inside the U.S. government fell to Elliott Abrams. Implicated in the Contra portion of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, Abrams remained unassuming, polite, and secretive. Politically, he came from the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. A hawk, especially on Syria, he operated behind the scenes, where his experience in the White House made him a skilled operator in moving decisions through the labyrinth of government agencies. Hadley expanded Abrams’s portfolio beyond just the Middle East, creating a new position for him as the deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy. This entailed, according to the White House press statement, assisting “Mr. Hadley in work on the promotion of democracy and human rights, and will provide oversight to the NSC’s directorate of Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organization Affairs.” Now under Abrams’s purview, the Middle East and the new democracy program were formally fused into a cohesive plan.

Before heading across the Potomac River to his new job at the White House, one of William Luti’s last tasks was to oversee the drafting of a strategy paper designed to begin shaping the debate for the second term on Iran. A strident, occasionally fictional document, it accused Iran of cooperating with al-Qaeda in twenty separate acts of terrorism.
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Although Luti never believed in talking to the Iranians, the first step, he argued, was to recognize that rapprochement had failed and negotiations with Iran served no purpose other than to provide Iran a method to talk and delay the will of the international community. The United States needed to highlight Tehran’s ties to al-Qaeda and forcefully counter Iranian intelligence operations. Luti suggested repeating the Iraqi schemes by bringing together Iranian exiles into a collective opposition movement: an Iranian National Congress.

Abrams liked the paper. He massaged the ideas into an interagency plan to force Iran to end its support for terrorism as well as its ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction programs. Abrams agreed that the United States should also move forcefully against the Quds Force in the region. The
United States should declare it a terrorist organization and close down its operations in Iraq. He proposed more robust economic sanctions, combined with aggressive psychological operations to support opposition groups in Iran and to discredit the regime in the eyes of the world: “The failure and discrediting of this regime—a fount of modern Islamism—would help deflate and discredit extremist Islamist ideology and operational capability more broadly in the region. This should be one of the core objectives of the GWOT [global war on terrorism],” Abrams wrote.

Much of the rhetoric looked remarkably like the hawkish stands from earlier in the administration. “Recent Iranian elections have shown that Iran’s leaders do not represent the Iranian people, and thus the regime has lost its legitimacy,” one interagency paper from February 2005 stated. The United States intended to publicly discredit both Khatami and the clerical rule as being illegitimate, despite previous American statements and the worldwide recognition of the Islamic Republic as the rightful government of Iran.

Crouch shared both Abrams’s and Luti’s views that the government of Iran lacked legitimacy due to its support for terrorism and its failure to satisfy the desires of the Iranian people. Any official contact with the Islamic Republic only strengthened its claim to legitimacy and undercut the morale of dissidents and democrats within Iran. Within Crouch’s staff, some argued that the Iranian government had become so unpopular that it appeared ripe for overthrow.

Over at the Defense Department, Abe Shulsky agreed with the tone. At the worker level, he continued playing his active role in shaping policy toward Iran and the war on terrorism. Shulsky wanted to support the reform movement within Iran and believed a window of opportunity presented itself in July 2004. Iran approached the fifth anniversary of the massive student protests that had rocked Tehran University in 1999. Following a small protest against shutting down a reformist newspaper, the Revolutionary Guard’s thug force, the Basij, ran amok across the campus, dragging students by the hair from their dorm rooms and savagely beating them, killing one. This sparked the largest demonstrations in the country since the 1979 revolution and shook the confidence of the government. Shulsky proposed establishing a covert program to help support the students on the anniversary, anticipating widespread protests as Iranians were wont to do on such occasions. “The regime looked nervous,” he said later. But this had conflicted with Colin Powell’s views that the United States should remain open to working with
the Iranian government of President Khatami and not subvert his position by providing aid to antigovernment forces. At loggerheads, the anniversary passed without protest or American support. Now with Powell gone and with new support in the White House for aiding Middle East democrats, Shulsky actively championed providing aid to Iranian opposition movements.

To support the White House deliberations, the CIA produced several different studies examining Iran’s political strength. None expressed the optimism of those within the administration who advocated delegitimizing the Iranian government. The CIA concluded that the Iranian regime had grown more confident since the nervous days just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The hard-liners appeared ascendant, rolling back freedoms begun under President Khatami. The analysts saw no prodemocracy leader either inside or outside Iran capable of rallying the disaffected. A September 2005 report for Hadley concluded that the United States could sway the elite in Tehran University, but had little chance of influencing the average, largely conservative, citizen. The CIA remained skeptical that the supporters of American democracy—students, intellectuals, and old monarchists—had real influence with the average Iranian. The old shah supporters dominated the exile groups, and they appeared out of touch with current life inside Iran, having little influence with most citizens. Further, any taint of the foreign hand behind opposition groups could actually undercut support for those groups.

Unlike North Korea or the old Soviet Union, however, Iran was not a closed society. Its citizens traveled to the West. The Iranian diaspora, especially in the United States, maintained ties with family and friends inside the country. One State Department study found that many younger, better-educated Iranians had access to the Internet. Iranians loved blogs. A Harvard report found more than 700,000 Farsi blogs, mostly inside Iran, making Farsi the second-most-popular language to English in the “blogosphere.”
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According to one senior Bush official, the CIA did believe that the United States could aid human rights groups and Iranian democrats and help build a viable freedom movement; however, it would have to be carefully done in order to avoid the taint of being seen as interfering inside Iran, a long-standing concern of Iran’s that could provide a rallying cry by the Islamic Republic to unite the populace. Polling of Iranian citizens consistently showed dissatisfaction with the government. Even under the popular reformist president Khatami, some six in ten described the economy as poor. A majority favored better relations with the West, including the United States.
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While the data of the State Department study also showed a nationalistic streak and widespread support for Islam, the disaffection within the younger population seemed ripe to exploit.

But the Bush administration had no appetite for attacking Iran. With the United States bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the president had little interest in embarking on another military adventure. While the president never took the military option to halt Iran’s nuclear program off the table, he never seriously considered it. Condi Rice said as much during a 2007 trip to the Persian Gulf during which she met with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet admiral. But the ambiguity about American intentions helped keep Iran guessing and aided the diplomatic efforts in Geneva, she said. While Newt Gingrich and others close to the administration continued advocating regime change, by force if necessary, Hadley wanted a new approach for Iran. His Middle East team at the NSC included a number of fresh faces, including a newly arrived academic from Princeton University, Michael Doran, as the director for near east and north Africa. “I always understood our goal as giving the president a third option, Doran said. “If the only two were war or a nuclear-armed Iran, then we had failed at our job.
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By mid-2005, Crouch had an outline of the new policy goals for Iran. Iran was critical to central tenets of the president’s new foreign policy. “American security is advanced by the expansion of democracy and by the ending of support, active or passive, for terrorism.” The United States sought “an Iran that does not possess or seek nuclear weapons, is a stable, democratic government, and fosters an environment inhospitable to terrorism.”

Elliott Abrams cochaired a new interagency group with Elizabeth Cheney, the blond firebrand daughter of the vice president who worked as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Cheney had no background on Iran or the Middle East, but that did not stop her from lecturing about the nature of Iranian society and its government to Foreign Service officers, including those few fluent in Farsi and those who had spent years studying the country. The Iran-Syria Working Group, as it was called, coordinated Iranian and Syrian policy across the U.S. government. Abrams wanted the State Department to lead the working group. He had personal experience from Iran-Contra in the pitfalls of running operations from the White House, and to avoid the perception of this as a planned invasion of Iran, the Pentagon willingly took a less overt role. The working group formed five separate subgroups with representatives from various agencies meeting
regularly in a shabby conference room in the Old Executive Office Building or in a better-apportioned one at the State Department.

In late 2005, the president signed off on the Iran Action Plan, developed by the Cheney and Abrams group. It outlined a series of actions across the government to counter Iran and focused on sanctions, diplomacy, and a common message to highlight Iran’s malign activities across the Middle East. A key goal of the Iran Action Plan would be to try to drive a wedge between the Iranian population and its government. On Halloween in 2005, Hadley laid out for the other principal officials a number of these actions to begin immediately. While the Treasury and State Departments moved to limit Iran’s access to money and dual-use technology, the U.S. government would conduct a broad information operation campaign designed to promote freedom in Iran. This included welcoming dissidents to Washington, academic exchanges, supporting Iranian bloggers, and establishing Internet chat rooms to increase exchanges between Iranian and American students. “Expanding our contacts with/inside Iran would (1) enhance our ability to pursue prodemocracy programs in Iran; (2) help prevent misunderstandings and potential conflicts with Iran,” Hadley wrote. President Bush liked the ideas. He hoped it would encourage a more open society and basic freedoms, which would eventually undermine the totalitarian character of the government. Five years into the administration, the Bush administration finally appeared to have a consensus on an Iranian strategy.