The Shah
Page 54
The other person who had benefited from Saberi’s largesse was Hussein Fardust, the Shah’s close friend and confidante. He too had been exiled to France during the Mossadeq era and was indeed in a desperate financial situation. He borrowed money from Saberi, and this debt adds a new layer of enigma to his already storied life. In 1954, not long after the Shah’s return to power, he received a report from General Zahedi, then the prime minister, suggesting that Fardust might be working for a foreign intelligence agency. Ardeshir Zahedi was the messenger and witnessed how the Shah grew visibly angry and threw away the report, saying in anger, “can’t they see me even have one friend.” No more reports were sent to the Shah about the matter and soon Fardust continued to be one of the Shah’s most trusted aides. After the 1979 revolution, allegations about Fardust’s ties to intelligence agencies surfaced again.15 In 1953, he was in Paris, contemplating a new career in medicine, and it was then that he borrowed money from Abbas Saberi. By the time SAVAK discovered Saberi’s role in recruiting spies for the KGB, the French authorities had also raided his house and concluded that he had been one of the key KGB operatives in Europe.
For the Shah, compounding the anxieties caused by the Saberi case was his suspicion that an Iraqi mole had penetrated the ranks of the Iranian army.16 He ordered SAVAK to look for the spy. By the early seventies, Iraq was developing closer ties with the Soviet Union, and the Shah’s worst nightmare was about to become reality. Soviet actions in Iraq, he confided to Kermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt, who was visiting Iran as a businessman on April 26, 1972, were part of Soviet aspirations in the Persian Gulf.17
As early as November 1971, SAVAK had informed the Shah and the United States that, should the Soviets succeed in bringing about the coalition they had planned in Iraq between the Ba’ath Party, the Communist Party of Iraq, and the Iraqi Kurds, they would in effect give the country “a status similar to that of Eastern Europe.”18
The Soviets, for their part, went out of their way to convince the Shah “that the Soviet rapprochement with Iraq is not aimed against Iran.” They informed him that in spite of demands by Iraq, they had refused to “protest Iran’s seizure of Islands in the Persian Gulf.”19 But the Shah was neither convinced nor comforted. In a May 7, 1972, meeting with President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the Shah reiterated his position that, as the Soviet Union had closer ties with Iraq, they might soon succeed in establishing a “coalition of the Kurds, the Ba’athists, and the [Iraqi] Communists,” and as a result, “the Kurdish problem, instead of being a thorn in the side, could become an asset to communists.”20 And when Kissinger asked what the Shah thought “should be done” to divert this danger, the Shah said, “Iran can help with the Kurds.”21 Both the State Department and the CIA “were inclined to continue to avoid involvement in Iraq.” They were both worried that the Soviets would construe any help to the Kurds of Iraq as “a move against them.”22 On June 23, 1972, the National Security Council concluded that the “major view in town is that the US should stay out of direct support for the Kurds.”23 But the Shah continued to insist on his own vision of dangers in Iraq, and eventually Nixon reluctantly agreed with him and with the idea of funneling funds to Kurdish insurgents in Iraq. Israel too came on board with little resistance. Of course, for the United States and Israel, support for Iraqi Kurds was nothing new. For example, unbeknownst to the Shah, as early as August 1969, U.S. agents had flown to the Kurdish regions of Iraq and given one of the Kurdish leaders, Mullah Mustafa Barazani, $14 million in aid.24 Moreover, Israel had had close ties to Iraqi Kurds for some time.
Beginning on August 1, 1972, a covert tripartite operation by Iran, Israel, and the United States was launched to destabilize the increasingly belligerent and unabashedly pro-Soviet Iraqi government. The idea was to help Iraqi Kurds in their struggle against the central government. The Shah initially agreed to contribute $30 million (which he soon boosted to $75 million) per year to the project.25 It was in this period that the Shah’s fear and frustration over Iraq led him to order SAVAK to organize a coup to topple the Ba’ath regime.
Iran had had a Kurdish problem of its own in the late 1960s, spearheaded by Iranian Maoists inspired by the Chinese revolution. That movement had been easily suppressed by the Shah’s army. Nevertheless, the Shah knew full well that an independent Kurdistan in Iraq was sure to become a magnet for Iranian Kurds. Kissinger, cognizant of the Shah’s concerns, aware of Turkey’s similar Kurdish angst, and keen on destabilizing the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, famously declared that the strategy of the covert operation by the triangle of the United States, Iran, and Israel was to help the Iraqi Kurds enough so that they would become a nuisance for the Ba’athist regime but not so much that they would become an independent state. It is a revealing twist of fate that the man sometimes acting as the intermediary between the Iraqi Kurds and their outside supporters was none other than Ahmed Chalabi.26
The Shah was serious about carrying out this destabilizing policy. In 1973, when it became clear that Iraq’s new offensive might strangle the Kurdish movement in the country, the Shah went so far as to order units of the Iranian army stationed in the Kurdistan province of Iran to enter Iraq disguised as Kurdish fighters, or pishmargah, and join the fight against the Ba’ath regime. The commanders of the Iranian forces were ordered to avoid, at all costs, the possibility of one of their soldiers falling into Iraqi hands.27
The Iraqis were not the only ones kept in the dark about the Iranian army’s covert cross-border operations. Surprisingly, the army’s deployment, the nature of its engagement, and reports of the clashes were strictly confidential and kept not only from the Iranian people, but from much of the cabinet and from all of the parliament, which ostensibly had the power of the purse. Iran’s engagement in Oman, where Iranian Special Forces and the air force were used to suppress and turn back a Communist insurgency, was similarly kept secret from the cabinet, the parliament, and the people of Iran. Even today, four decades after those fateful years, there is little reliable detail and documentation about Iran’s foray into playing the role of the gendarme of the region. But in those days, the Shah’s will was the law of the land, and no one in the government dared question him about the legality or the wisdom of these decisions, or about the size of the Iranian military budget. Every year, one lump sum that included the military, the intelligence agencies, and all the auxiliary expenses was rushed through the parliament. The Prime Minister’s multimillion-dollar “secret discretionary” fund was one of the camouflage funds through which some of these “incidental” costs were defrayed.28
In the meantime, the Iranian army was engaged in its covert activities in Iraq, and tensions between Iran and Iraq over a variety of issues—from navigation rights over the river that separates the two countries to the fate of thousands of Iranian Shiites who had been living in Iraq—were on the rise. More than once, Iraq had forced thousands of these Iranians living in Iraq to leave the country, leaving their homes and wealth behind. Iraq offered safe haven and facilities to a whole range of Iranian opposition groups. Radio Iraq was managed by some of these opponents and was increasingly acerbic in its criticism of the Shah.
As willing as the Shah was to lead the effort to help the Iraqi Kurds, he was no less willing to suddenly end his support when, in 1975, he surprised much of the world by signing an agreement with the Iraqi government. Even the American government was taken aback when, shortly before the agreement, the Shah decided to inform them of his impending decision. According to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy, there were at least five reasons why the Shah decided to reach an “accord with Iraq.” In their view, “Iraqi concessions of Thalweg Principle,* probability of Kurdish defeat in absence of increased Iranian assistance, threat to Iran’s OPEC leadership, internal problems and Government of Iran’s perception of change in the Middle East” contributed to the Shah’s decision.
According to the CIA, the accord between the Shah and Saddam Hussein that was signed in Algiers in 1975 had a secret codicil th
at stipulated that Iran must end its support of Iraqi Kurds and close its borders to fleeing Kurdish activists. While some Kurdish leaders, like Barazani and his family, were flown first to Tehran and then to the United States, the rest of the movement were left at the mercy of Saddam. At the same time, in Tehran SAVAK was looking for the Iraqi mole and in the process learned a surprising piece of intelligence from its own mole in the Soviet Embassy.
The mole was a man called Aliov, and he worked in the Soviet Embassy as a cultural attaché. He reported that KGB agents in Iran had been regularly meeting someone in the Iranian army on Naft (Oil) Avenue in Tehran. When SAVAK finally established the identity of the spy on Oil Avenue, it scored its biggest coup against Soviet espionage in postwar Iran. At the same time, the mystery of the Iraqi mole that had been of concern to the Shah was solved. The case also underscores the extent of the Shah’s involvement with SAVAK’s sensitive counterespionage operation. In the effort to find the Iraqi mole and the Soviet spy, the Shah was not only informed at every step but was the one who made all the crucial decisions.
With the hint they had received from their embassy mole in 1975, SAVAK checked the identity of every household on Oil Avenue and its neighboring streets. It turned out that three army officers lived in the area. All three were put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Their phones were tapped. A lieutenant colonel was the first who came under suspicion. He was arrested and after some “rough interrogation,” SAVAK authorities were convinced that he was not the spy they sought.
After a while, SAVAK agents assigned to the case saw a man with a dog pass by a known KGB agent who worked at the Soviet Embassy; neither man slowed their pace as they discreetly exchanged a small envelope. It did not take long to figure out that the man with the dog was General Ahmad Mogharebi. The Shah was immediately informed of this surprising development and was asked for permission to arrest the General. The army had its own intelligence and counterespionage division, and SAVAK asked the Shah to decide whether the army unit should be brought into the investigation. The Shah’s response was categorical—and characteristic of his style of managing the military and intelligence forces. Keeping the military, SAVAK, the city police, and other security organizations in a state of constant competition and contention was part of his “divide and rule” strategy. In fact, by the late 1960s, when the regime was first faced with a rising tide of urban guerrilla activities, these tensions were bad enough that they hampered the ability of the government to fight the foes, leading to the creation of the “Committee to Fight Terrorism” that brought together all these different agencies under a unified command and immediately developed an infamous reputation.
It was no surprise then, that in the Mogharebi case, the Shah did not want the army involved or even informed about the ongoing investigation. More importantly, he emphasized that he did not want Mogharebi arrested yet. Instead, he wanted him, “caught in the act, with no room for denial or guesswork.”29
By then, the KGB had a new man in Iran. His name was Vladimir Kuzichkin, and his candid, albeit long-winded, memoir, Inside the KGB, provides a fascinating account of the workings of the much-feared Soviet Embassy in Tehran.30 Embassies often reflect the societies they represent. In the mid-seventies, the Soviet Embassy in Iran, according to Kuzichkin, was a den of corruption and inertia. He describes an embassy gripped by a culture of gossip, backbiting, dangerous leaks of sensitive information, and petty jealousies. Amongst the staff, he says, there was “an air of permanent holiday.”31 The embassy personnel despised the Ambassador for having a mistress and for lining his pockets. In his turn, the Ambassador was wary of rocking the boat lest he be recalled from his plum posting. In the consular office, where Kuzichkin worked, four of the five alleged diplomats were in fact KGB agents.32 They were there not just to spy on Iranians, but to keep a close watch on the 8,000 Soviet citizens working in Iran.
The two expansive compounds of the embassy were as much about espionage as about diplomacy. One was located in the center of the city, and the other in Golhak, an affluent suburb of Tehran in the early part of the twentieth century, and traditionally used as the embassy’s summer residence. The intelligence heart of the embassy consisted of two rooms, located on the sixth floor, and forbidden to all except a handful of KGB agents. The rooms housed all the electronic equipment used for surveillance and eavesdropping. In one room they “intercepted and recorded the radio conversations of SAVAK’s external surveillance teams, and . . . Iran’s military counter-intelligence. . . . ‘Mars’ was located in a separate room . . . intercepting encoded Iranian communications involving such targets as various ministries, the SAVAK headquarters and the American embassy.”33
While the KGB was busy eavesdropping on the Iranian government, SAVAK and the American and British intelligence agencies were no less busy eavesdropping on the Soviet Union and its embassy in Tehran. In the two suburbs of Noshahr and Babolsar, two small cities in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, the U.S. government operated two highly classified and critical listening stations that monitored crucial parts of the Soviet Union where nuclear test facilities were located. Both U.S. stations had been built underground to avoid detection by Soviet satellites, and both were in areas designated as “Royal Hunting Grounds” and were thus safely off limits to the public. The British operated a series of stations of their own on that border, and they too acted independently of SAVAK.34 Iranians were not allowed to contact the personnel in these stations. Occasionally, a high-ranking British or American intelligence officer would meet with the Shah and brief him on what was going on. The Americans had also built in their own embassy in Tehran, under a structure that was ostensibly a garage, a vast secure room for gathering and transmitting intelligence.35
Throughout his life the Shah had an insatiable appetite for the secret world of espionage. He enjoyed his regular weekly meetings with the CIA and MI6 station chiefs in Tehran as well as the occasional briefings he received from managers of the espionage stations.36 In addition, when the sudden increase of oil revenues allowed the Shah to satisfy his every wish and whim, he was reported to purchase intelligence reports not just from foreign agencies, but also from private security companies.37
Along with the American and British efforts to spy on the Soviet Union, SAVAK was busy monitoring the Soviet Embassy in Tehran. In fact, SAVAK had purchased a four-story apartment building overlooking the entrance to the embassy. While the first floor was ostensibly a doctor’s office, officers of the Eighth Directorate, in charge of anti-Soviet counterespionage, used the top three floors to monitor the traffic in and out of the embassy. SAVAK agents also manned a kiosk that supposedly sold soft drinks, located right across from the embassy entrance.38 At one time, the “surveillance of the Soviet embassy [in Tehran] was so tight” that embassy officials asked Moscow “to retaliate against the Iranian embassy in Moscow.”39
No sooner had SAVAK begun investigating the KGB’s army connection than they realized that every move of their surveillance teams was clearly known to the Soviets.40 Kuzichkin confirms the story of the KGB eavesdropping on the radio frequencies used by SAVAK. He also indicates that the Soviets knew from the outset what was going on in the “doctor’s office.”41
Eventually, using an elaborate scheme that employed a large number of cars that never used their radio transmitters, thus remaining undetected by the Soviet agents, SAVAK learned how the Mogharebi system of espionage operated. They were baffled by what they discovered. Soviet agents would arrive in the vicinity of the General’s house, park their car, wait a few moments, and then leave. On one occasion, the Soviet agent got out of the car carrying something like a briefcase, walked toward an empty lot nearby, waited for three to four minutes, then returned to his car and departed from the scene. The SAVAK agents, a safe distance away, watched every move.
Around May 1977, Mogharebi left for a holiday in the United States, where he owned a house in the state of Arizona and where his children went to school. SAVAK used his absence
to search his house. What they found looked like tools of the spy trade but were unlike anything they had seen before.
The Shah was immediately informed about the potentially incriminating evidence found in Mogharebi’s house and was asked for permission to arrest the General when he returned home from his American holiday. Once again, the Shah demurred, insisting instead that Mogharebi be caught in the commission of his espionage act.42 Mindful of Iran’s important and improving relations with the Soviet Union, the Shah wanted an airtight case. But Mogharebi and his KGB handlers had devised a complicated mode of operation, making it difficult for SAVAK to catch them in the act. Aside from going to work, the General left the house only to walk his dog. He made and received no suspicious phone calls, and he had no unusual visitors.
The break finally came one night late in September 1977. Two agents of the KGB arrived on Oil Avenue. The first was Boris Kabanov, an amiable man, much adored at the embassy, where he worked under the cover of a consular official. The second was his driver, Titkin. They had received a signal from “the man,” the code name for Mogharebi, asking for a rendezvous in the normal place. Seconds after the arrival of the KGB car, Mogharebi emerged from the house, accompanied by his dog. Kabanov got out of the vehicle, and as he passed Mogharebi, quickly handed him an envelope and immediately went back to the car. He had barely settled in his seat when his car was surrounded by agents of SAVAK. Kabanov brandished his diplomatic passport and refused to open the door. The agents, in constant communication with SAVAK headquarters, were ordered to break the window, force the two Russians out of the car, and arrest them. Meanwhile, another team of agents arrested Mogharebi. He tried to resist and cried for help. His son and his orderly rushed out of the house to help, but their efforts were in vain. Mogharebi was arrested with the incriminating envelope in his pocket.43