The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (87 page)

The State Department and Elizabeth Cheney led other efforts to support the freedom agenda. Elizabeth Cheney shepherded one of the important American efforts called the Democracy Project. It promoted American values with a strong dose of propaganda. One of its initial efforts was a media project that included a video teleconference with Iranian students and a speaker program to appeal to the Iranian diaspora, both of which highlighted the ills of the Islamic Republic. In 2005, the State Department spent $10 million to promote democracy and access to “unbiased” information.
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This included $4 million in six different grants for Iran, the first such grants to promote democracy since 1979.
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The following year the amount increased nearly twentyfold, to a whopping $75 million.

Deciding who would get this money fell to an affable man with a bearlike stature named David Denehy. He had served in the State Department before being detailed to the Defense Department, serving briefly in Iraq working for Paul Bremer.
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He returned to the State Department and served
as Liz Cheney’s deputy, running the day-to-day meetings and the operations of the Iran-Syria Working Group. With so much money available, Iranian groups deluged Denehy with proposals, more than one hundred the first year. Some advocated parachuting arms to supposed resistance fighters and rehashed old schemes from the early 1980s to overthrow the regime. The old royalist exiles were the worst, and Denehy steered clear of them. These aging supporters of the shah amassed in Los Angeles and all wanted the State Department’s largesse. None, however, really endorsed democracy, but favored a return to the monarch. As Denehy recalled, all wanted to be in charge of the effort and none wanted to cooperate with the others.
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Instead, the State Department concentrated on supporting groups inside Iran that advocated labor and human rights, freedom of speech, and more open and free participation in the political process. Denehy linked with private groups, especially in Europe, with established ties and lines of communication into civil society and the reform movements inside Iran. He developed relationships with nongovernmental organizations that could potentially partner or coordinate on reform efforts outside official U.S. government channels.
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Some of these had standing ties with the U.S. State Department, including the conservative U.S. Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The U.S. government provided grants to help start up such organizations as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center at Yale University, which received $1.6 million to promote freedom, build alternative political organizations inside Iran, and campaign for human rights. As a supporting effort, Liz Cheney greatly expanded the State Department’s International Information Program. U.S. consulates and embassies distributed e-journals, webcasts, CDs, and books in hopes of reaching Iranian citizens traveling to other Gulf countries.

Another effort centered on expanding the broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Farsi station, Radio Farda, into Iran. Officials worked with academics and Iranians in Los Angeles to develop better messages that would resonate with Iranians.
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Despite the Voice of America charter’s mandate to provide “accurate” and “objective” news, Liz Cheney and others within the administration wanted it to be more of a propaganda instrument, and took offense when the broadcasts seemed too sympathetic to Iran.

A low-level appointee and former student of Wolfowitz’s working in Mark Kimmitt’s Middle East office at the Defense Department wrote a report that was subsequently leaked. It was highly critical of Voice of America,
saying that it “often invites guests who defend the Islamic Republic (of Iran)’s version of issues, [and] it consistently fails to maintain a balance by inviting informed guests who represent another perspective on the same issue.”
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As a counterweight, the shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, began appearing frequently. While certainly touting the proper anticlerical views, he remained popular only in the small circle of hard-core critics of the Islamic government around Washington, D.C. Inside Iran, the shah’s son had no standing or support among the Iranian population. His appearances only undermined the American message.

The Iran freedom initiative did not sit well with everyone at the Department of State. Denehy steered the program between the two departmental organizations with a claim to the program: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Each had its own view about how to run the programs. The fallout from the Iraq War left bitter feelings by some diplomats against the neocons, and Denehy fell into that category. Other Foreign Service officers believed the effort would have little impact on the Iranian populace, who by and large still supported the Islamic Republic. Others agreed with former Bush official and now administration critic Hillary Mann: the Bush administration still wanted regime change, only now it was trying to achieve it through the guise of promoting democracy.

Iran correctly viewed all this as an attempt to overthrow the regime using “soft power.” Iranian newspapers referred to this American scheme as a “spider’s nest,” a large web of subversion bankrolled by the United States that extended to anyone from the West who seemed intent on spreading liberal ideas. The government responded by clamping down and revamping its internal security plans. The Basij developed new military plans to deal with internal opposition and threw four Iranian Americans into prison, accusing them of spying. One, Haleh Esfandiari, a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother with dual citizenship and a scholar at Rand’s Wilson Center for Middle East Public Policy, was arrested at the Tehran airport when she arrived for a family funeral. She spent 110 days in Evin Prison before posting over $300,000 in bail.
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In the end, whether any of this influenced the regime remained unclear. Nearly three-quarters of the Iranian population obtained their news on state-run media, and outside of the cities, few had Internet access. Both the BBC and Radio Farda remained popular, especially with students under thirty, but
Iran regularly jammed both broadcasts. The State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs had success with its Persian-language website. Launched under Powell in May 2003, it became a widely quoted source for information inside Iran, frequently used by the Iranian media.
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The State Department continued to expand on its success during the second term. In 2004–2005, the Iranian government shut down more than fifty Internet service providers for not complying with orders to install Internet filters as it tried to block these foreign sources of disinformation. But Iranian censors showed an inattentiveness, and the U.S. efforts to circumvent their firewalls and the remarkable creativity of prodemocrats in circumventing government controls allowed for an exchange of information and ideas, at least among those few Iranians with regular access to computers.

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n August 2005, with term limits preventing Khatami from running, the Iranians elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the sixth president of the Islamic Republic. Born in northern Iran as the middle child in a large brood to a sometime blacksmith and grocer, Ahmadinejad passed the demanding entrance exam for university and entered school just in time for the revolution. Like many students, he became an active supporter in overthrowing the shah, and then shared his generation’s experience in war, serving in the Revolutionary Guard during the eight-year slugfest with Iraq. Ahmadinejad maintained his ties with the Revolutionary Guard. With this powerful base, he rose in the political ranks, eventually becoming mayor of Tehran before his elevation to the presidency.

The new president was a political secularist by Islamic Republic standards: his power base rested with conservatives in the guard rather than with the clergy or the supreme leader. Ahmadinejad was a populist. His unpolished rhetoric mixed social justice and revolutionary dogma in a manner that appealed to the poor and arcadian. He could be urbane. He understood the importance of pushing Iran’s message in the West, and frequently traveled to Europe and even the United States, making himself available to the American press corps.

His election immediately added fodder for those calling for a hard line on Iran. Liz Cheney dismissed the entire election process, saying during one meeting that the regime simply picked and chose its presidents. Rumsfeld asked a similar question: had the election been rigged? Peter Rodman responded with
reports about widespread voter fraud, but his examples supporting this looked minor, including a few women who were not allowed to vote based upon their inappropriate dress. More experienced Iran watchers found the process flawed but fair, other than the restrictions placed upon who could run for office by the Guardian Council.
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One of the new Iranian president’s first actions was to restart the uranium enrichment program. While Iran had every right to enrich under the nonproliferation treaty, its track record of sleight of hand with its program caused alarm in Washington and the EU-3 to briefly break off talks with Iran. The new Iranian president’s seemingly inane questioning of the Holocaust and his intentionally provocative statements about wiping Israel off the map worried many, and detractors cast the Iranian government as apocalyptical, intent on bringing about the Hidden Imam or Mahdi as a precursor to the day of judgment and the end of days.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime are genocidal,” former CIA director James Woolsey said during a friendly Senate hearing in November 2005.
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While more sober Iran experts countered that Ahmadinejad’s religious beliefs had no more impact on his policies than Bush’s as a born-again Christian waiting for the Second Coming, the hawkish, self-confident tone coming out of Tehran aroused the passions of those who had long called for overthrowing the regime. Newt Gingrich continued his decadelong mantra of removing the regime, now couched in the specter of Armageddon: “I think anything short of replacing the current government is basically irrelevant, and I think you should expect at some point in your lifetime to see a major war, and probably a nuclear war, if this government is not replaced.” He advocated a mixture of sanctions, open support for Iranian dissidents, and veiled support for aiding Iranian ethnic groups opposed to the central Persian government.
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While the more extreme views of using force for regime change failed to gain ground in an administration bogged down in two land wars, U.S. officials accepted as truth a rumor that the first question asked every morning by Ahmadinejad during his version of the presidential daily briefing was: “Has there been a confirmed sighting of the Mahdi?”

In May 2006, Ahmadinejad sent a long, preachy letter to Bush that read as much as a religious discourse as it did substantive policy. But the letter had been approved by the supreme leader, and Ahmadinejad claimed he’d intended it to start a dialogue with Washington. Apparently, he believed that Bush, as
a devout Christian, would respond positively to the Shia religious discourse that permeated the letter.
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The White House first learned of the letter by reading about it in the newspapers. While the administration remained unclear as to its intention, the last thing Bush’s advisers wanted was to get into a discussion about religion, which would only add legitimacy to the Iranian president. Its public rather than private passage to the president struck Nicholas Burns as a publicity stunt and not a serious overture. “It provided the appearance of reaching out, but not in a meaningful way,” he said, dismissing Ahmadinejad’s overture.
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Once again, the U.S. government refused to respond.

Shortly after the election of President Ahmadinejad, Hadley held a senior-level meeting to discuss its ramifications. The election had confirmed many preconceived views. His election appeared as a victory for hard-liners in a rigged election. It showed the lack of credibility the government had in the eyes of the Iranian population. The CIA representative pulled out a map that showed the variety of ethnic divisions within the country, and the discussion turned to the merits of exploiting these divisions. Non-Persians made up nearly 40 percent of Iran’s seventy million people, and many, such as the Kurds in the northwest and the Baluchis in the southeast, had their own guerrilla movements fighting the central government. While the United States knew of other countries supporting these movements, such as Soldiers of God, or Jundallah, in Baluchistan, the prospect of their success had little appeal in official Washington. “The last thing we wanted was for Iran to break apart,” said one former Bush official. “At the time, we were doing all we could to keep that disaster from happening in Iraq.”
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Rice offered a measured response. “We need to take a longer-term strategy to weaken Iran’s geostrategic position.” She suggested increasing support for Lebanon as a way to undermine Hezbollah or “undercut some of Iran’s terrorist friends,” as Rice phrased it. This led to another set of actions supporting the Iran Action Plan “to strengthen the Lebanese government.” Over the next couple of years, the U.S. government provided $885.5 million in economic and military assistance to Lebanon to undercut Hezbollah and Iran.
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Not all of this assistance proved effective. In an effort to improve the quality of the anemic Lebanese police force, the United States provided dozens of Dodge Chargers to outfit the force with new police cars. Many ended up being sold on the black market and suddenly appeared all over the Lebanese streets, as young men enjoyed their muscle cars courtesy of the American taxpayer.