by Robin Wright
Ahmadinejad dismissed the West’s incentives package as “walnuts for gold.” The threat of United Nations sanctions did not make Iran back down either.
In the heat of the showdown in September 2006, Ahmadinejad flew to New York to deliver a combative speech at the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. He took on the outside world, particularly the United States, with a cocky certainty and an evangelical zeal.
“The Almighty,” he said, standing at the green marble podium in the Security Council chamber,
has not created human beings so that they could transgress against others and oppress them…. Some seek to rule the world relying on weapons and threats, while others live in perpetual insecurity and danger. Some occupy the homeland of others thousands of kilometers away from their borders, interfere in their affairs, and control their oil and other resources and strategic routes, while others are bombarded daily in their homes, their children murdered in the streets and alleys of their own country, and their homes reduced to rubble. Such behavior is not worthy of human beings, and runs counter to the truth, justice, and human dignity.
The defiant tone was a stark contrast to Khatami’s appeal for dialogue among civilizations.
Ahmadinejad reflected the most reactionary element to emerge from three tumultuous decades of an Islamic republic. His rants were often far more inflammatory than militant clerics’ rhetoric. In two particularly stunning pronouncements, he questioned whether the Holocaust really happened and then said Israel should be “wiped off” the map.
I met Ahmadinejad the evening after his UN speech at a small and controversial supper with the Council on Foreign Relations. He strode into the chandeliered ballroom of a New York hotel surrounded by aides and security, including his American Secret Service detail. He was the smallest among them, but he set the pace.
Over an open-necked shirt, he was wearing a drab suit coat that looked big on his small frame. The shah had relied heavily on an elite Westernized class called the kravatis—after cravat, meaning “tie-wearers”—who symbolized the modernization mandated by the Pahlavi dynasty. Ahmadinejad deliberately went tieless, keeping with revolutionary attire. During his campaign, he had insisted that his clothing be indistinguishable from a street sweeper’s.37 Tehran stores soon began carrying the “Ahmadinejad jacket.”
The diminutive president waved briefly, sat down quickly, and was intent on business.
Islamists often preface remarks at public appearances with “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” But as he did in his United Nations speech, Ahmadinejad added an additional line.
“O Mighty Lord,” he intoned, “I pray to you to hasten the emergence of the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with peace and justice.”
The Promised One is the missing Mahdi, the twelfth and last of the original Shiite imams descended from the Prophet Mohammed. He disappeared in the eighth century. Shiites pray for his return the same way that Jews await the Messiah and Christians await the Second Coming. Shiites believe the Mahdi is in a state of “occultation”—or hidden by God—and will return to cleanse a corrupt world on Judgment Day. After the revolution, the main Tehran boulevard that cuts across the entire capital was renamed Vali-e Asr, or “the expected one.”
Ahmadinejad had a deep devotion to the Shiite messiah. “Our revolution’s main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the twelfth imam, the Mahdi,” he told a meeting of clerics four months after taking office.
“Today,” he said, “we should define our economic, cultural, and political polices based on the policy of Imam Mahdi’s return.”38
Ahmadinejad’s meeting with thirty members of the Council on Foreign Relations was supposed to be a civil and informal conversation. But it quickly became politely hostile. The disconnect was often scary.
Pressed on his comments denying the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad noted that a total of sixty million people had been killed during World War II. “Why was such prominence given to such a small portion?” he asked.
Maurice Greenberg, who headed the world’s largest insurance and financial services corporation, told the Iranian president that he had seen Dachau concentration camp as Germany fell.
“How old are you?” Ahmadinejad asked.
“Eighty-one,” Greenberg replied.
“You were there, and you survived. Congratulations,” Ahmadinejad said coldly, and then smiled, as if that was enough proof to dispel the enormous body of evidence that six million Jews had been murdered during World War II.
More proof was still needed, he added, proposing that an “impartial” group investigate. Three months later, Ahmadinejad convened a conference in Tehran on the Holocaust. Among those who attended was David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ahmadinejad also rebuffed attempts to discuss conditions in his own country. Questioned on the regime’s growing arrest of dissidents, newspaper closures, and clampdown on human rights groups, he launched a small tirade about the comparative freedoms in the United States and Iran.
“Please don’t allow yourself to be involved in the domestic politics of other countries, or there is much more we can all say. If you think you can affect our people with your statements, you are wrong,” he said sternly, scolding us to “correct our mentality” about Iran.
“We had free elections—I spoke with people, and they chose me. This is a unique, pure democracy, which is impossible in your country. Which country is freer and more democratic? I would like to ask you whether anyone outside the two ruling parties has reached the American presidency…. The whole U.S. administration is in the hands of two groups.”
On the two issues that most divide Americans and Iranians, Ahmadinejad was chilling.
On Iraq, Ahmadinejad warned that the United States had lost its way, alienating the entire Muslim world in the process. “U.S. policy in the Middle East has brought only the rage, hatred, and hostility of over one billion people,” he told the group.
And on Iran’s nuclear program, Ahmadinejad was dismissive. “The age of the nuclear bomb has ended, and anyone investing in it has made a mistake,” he said. “Today, nuclear weapons don’t bring superiority.”
As the discussion ended, the Iranian president reprimanded the council. “In the beginning of the session, you said you are an independent group, and I accepted that,” he told us. “But everything you said seems to come from the government perspective.”
He got up and walked as briskly out of the room as he had come in.
The ground rules for the session barred recording devices and cameras. After he arrived home, however, Ahmadinejad put an incomplete and poorly translated copy of the meeting up on his Web site. He held many events and interviews in New York, but the evening with the council was the only one he wrote about. He ended the entry with his own analysis, expressing disappointment in the session.
“It was again proven to me that the actual reason for the failure of U.S. policy in politics and foreign relations is their lack of information regarding the world’s realities. Decision-makers are caught up in their own fabricated and false political propaganda.” Many at the council meeting felt the same way about him.
In his rhetoric and actions, Ahmadinejad was increasingly a throw-back to the angry militancy and misadventures of the revolution’s early years. The Revolutionary Guards were increasingly the instrument of mischief—not only in securing the country’s borders. They became a pivot around which central parts of the system turned.
Their rise mirrored Ahmadinejad’s evolution into the presidency, as the young men who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war grew into middle age. Politically, Revolutionary Guards officers moved from the battlefield into mayoralties, governates, and management of ministries.39 Economically, an old-boys’ network of current and former commanders staked claims in the oil and gas sectors, won bids on major government construction contracts, and even gained lucrative franchises, such
as Mercedes-Benz dealerships.
Within the military, the Revolutionary Guards also evolved from the days when they had served mainly as human minesweepers and cannon fodder in the war with Iraq. By 2007, they controlled Iran’s deadliest arms, including missiles with ranges of up to 1,200 miles and programs for both chemical and biological weapons. They were also widely reported to be involved in attempts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability.40
The Revolutionary Guards became a critical arm of Iran’s foreign policy, too. As tensions with the outside world increased, its elite and secretive wing, the Quds Force, became increasingly active in dozens of countries. Quds is Arabic for Jerusalem, a name symbolic of its mission.
The Quds Force was tasked with exporting the revolution. It had at least eight separate directorates, charged with activities from Afghanistan and the Arabian Peninsula to Iraq, from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories into North Africa, and including a unit for Europe and North America. It had operatives in most embassies abroad, and ran Iran’s camps to train foreign militias in unconventional warfare.41
Little is reliably known about the force. Its roots lie in Iran’s first campaign in Lebanon in the 1980s, when 2,000 Revolutionary Guards deployed after the 1982 Israeli invasion and spawned Hezbollah. It was reportedly called the Lebanon Corps at the time. Its most entrenched operation is still in Lebanon. It supplied Hezbollah with missiles and trained its militia before the 2006 Hezbollah war with Israel, the longest conflict the Arabs ever fought with Israel.
The largest Iran opposition movement claims the Revolutionary Guards’ foreign operations were consolidated into the Quds Force in about 1990, when the military regrouped after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.42 It was initially a comparatively small corps. In 2007, it reportedly tripled in size, from 5,000 to 15,000 troops and operatives.43
The special-forces unit reflected the greatest fears elsewhere in the Middle East about Iran. Although it worked with Sunni movements like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, its most threatening operations were mainly in Shiite communities—penetrating west into Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and south along the eastern Arabian Peninsula into Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, a Sunni, told me of his fears that the balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites dating back to the seventh century was on the verge of an upheaval. He was the first Arab leader to call the potential danger “the Shiite crescent.” It was a fear shared among several Sunni regimes, even though the general Arab antipathy toward Persians, even among Shiites, was also a strong counterweight.
But the Quds Force did symbolize a kind of regional Cold War taking shape. It pitted the United States and its Middle East allies against Iran and its proxies. It played out in the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. It was most intense, however, in Iraq.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a shocking jolt to Iran. As much as it loathed Saddam Hussein, the presence of up to 165,000 American troops along its western border alarmed the Tehran regime. With American and NATO forces on its eastern border in Afghanistan since 2001, Iran was suddenly sandwiched between foreign armies. After the quick fall of both Kabul and Baghdad, Tehran initially feared it might be next.
The Quds Force was the unit deployed to challenge the United States presence. It operated throughout Iraq, arming, aiding, and abetting Shiite militias. The three largest Shiite movements in Iraq—the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Dawa, and the personal movement built around renegade cleric Moqtada Sadr—all had close ties to Iran, some dating back decades. During Saddam Hussein’s quarter century in power, Iran was the only reliable ally for Shiite dissidents.
But the Quds Force also worked openly with the Kurds and even secretly armed some of the Sunni insurgents. Many of the roadside explosives that maimed or killed American troops as well as innocent Iraqis, the Pentagon charged, came from Iran.
In 2006, Iran-American tensions inside Iraq spawned a conflict within a conflict. It played out in unconventional ways. American troops countered with their own raids on Quds Force offices in Iraq, detaining its intelligence agents and seizing equipment and computers. During the first raid in December 2006, an American team in Baghdad nabbed two of the highest ranking Quds Force commanders; they were operating in the compound of Iraq’s largest Shiite political party. Under Iraqi pressure, the two were released a week later.
But on January 11, 2007, helicopter-borne American troops swooped down on Iran’s diplomatic liaison office in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil. The goal was to seize two of Iran’s highest-ranking security officials—General Minojahar Frouzanda, chief of Revolutionary Guards intelligence, and Mohammed Jafari, the deputy of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. The two men’s frequent visits to Iraq predated the U.S. invasion. They came to Iraq with the full knowledge of Iraqi officials. They had just met with the two Kurdish leaders, Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Talabani was also Iraq’s president.
The two Iranians eluded capture. But U.S. troops netted five junior officers of the Quds Force. Iran clamored for their release, initially to no avail.
After ten weeks and intense pressure on allies in the Iraqi government, Iran announced that it expected the five to be freed for the Iranian New Year of Nowruz, a celebration on the spring equinox, March 21, dating back more than 3,000 years. It is the most important Iranian holiday of the year; Persian in its origins, it is shared by all faiths and ethnicities. It lasts two weeks and includes bonfires to celebrate the light winning over darkness, visits to neighbors, and feasts of special foods with friends.
But the Iranians—who became known as the Irbil Five—were not released on Nowruz.
Three days later, a British naval team conducted a routine inspection of a ship in the Persian Gulf to ensure it was not smuggling goods. The British were the closest American allies and the second-largest force in Iraq. They operated in Shiite strongholds in southern Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The navy team, fourteen men and one woman on two small motorboats, were headed back to the HMS Cornwall when they were overtaken by six vessels of the Revolutionary Guards. The fifteen British sailors were taken hostage.
Iran claimed the British sailors had crossed into its waters, which was not unprecedented. It had happened in 2004, when eight British sailors were held for three days. But Britain claimed global satellite tracking proved its patrol boats were almost two miles inside Iraqi waters.
The abduction was interesting in another respect. It came one day before the United Nations voted on a new resolution to impose sanctions on Tehran for failing to suspend uranium enrichment. The sanctions were narrow, targeting banks, institutions, and twenty-eight officials believed to be involved in Iran’s suspected nuclear program. Among the individuals were the top seven Revolutionary Guard commanders of its ground forces, navy, air force, intelligence unit, and Quds Force.
Iran and Britain both insisted there were no connections between the seizure of the Irbil Five, the UN sanctions resolution and the capture of the fifteen Brits. But the common denominator was the Revolutionary Guards. Its Quds Force operatives were being held by the United States. Its top leaders had been sanctioned by the United Nations. And its naval unit had taken the British hostage.
Over the next two weeks, the hostage drama became an international incident. The United Nations Security Council issued a statement of concern. Pope Benedict wrote to appeal for the sailors’ freedom. Leaders from Islamic countries urged Tehran to release them. Even Syria weighed in.
For all the attention generated outside Iran during the drama, the internal reaction was telling. Unlike the 444-day ordeal after the American embassy takeover in 1979, the regime could not generate public fervor about the capture of British soldiers in 2007.
A small rent-a-crowd of less than 200 showed up outside the British Embassy for a noisy but comparatively tepid demonstration. It was a one-day affair. This time, the Iranians were more interested in their holiday. Iranian television showed videos of the British in c
aptivity, and radio covered the diplomacy—but often not as the top story or at great length. Many of the papers were not published during the two-week New Year break, but when they resumed, the editorials focused on other issues and offered no encouragement to prolong the standoff.
The buzz of Tehran was the lack of buzz.
Two weeks later, on April 4, Ahmadinejad held a press conference. With lavish praise, he pinned medals on the Revolutionary Guards naval commanders who had captured the Brits. The Iranian president then rambled on to reporters for thirty-five minutes. He railed at America’s destruction of Iraq, the United Nations failure to protect the Palestinians, the world’s failure to help the Lebanese during Hezbollah’s war with Israel—and Iran’s innocent intentions on its nuclear program.
Near the end, in what almost seemed an afterthought, he announced that the Brits would be freed—in celebration of the upcoming birthday of the Prophet Mohammed and Easter. “This pardon of the British soldiers,” he pronounced, “is a gift.”
The broader confrontation was not over, however. Iran had milked that crisis for all it could get; the costs of holding the British military personnel began to outweigh the benefits. So Tehran shifted its focus. One month later, in May 2007, Iran began imprisoning Americans.
Ali Shakeri, a California businessman who went to college in Texas, was the first one. He had returned to Iran to see his ailing mother before she died; he stayed long enough to bury her. He was detained at Tehran’s International Airport after he had already checked in his bags for the flight to Los Angeles, in the wee hours of May 8. He was taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, a forbidding compound of buildings in the foothills of the Elburz Mountains. Hours later, Haleh Esfandiari, a diminutive grandmother who had been visiting her ninety-three-year-old mother, was ordered to report to the intelligence ministry. The director of Middle East programs at the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, she too was jailed in Evin’s Ward 209, the section where political detainees are held in solitary confinement. Three days later, New York social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh was imprisoned. Tajbakhsh, a consultant for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, had actually been trying to help Iranian government ministries on HIV/AIDS prevention and other health projects. Parnaz Azima, another grandmother and a correspondent for United States-funded Radio Farda, was also visiting an ailing mother. She was not jailed, but was forced to put up the deed to her mother’s home as bail to stay out of prison.
