The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran

by David Crist

  The United States tried repeatedly to negotiate with the Iranians, but to no avail. A State Department report summed up the challenges of negotiating with the Islamic Republic:

  It is clear that we are dealing with an outlook that differs fundamentally from our own, and a chaotic internal situation. Our character, our society are based on optimism—a long history of strength and success, the possibility of equality, the protection of institutions, enshrined in a constitution, the belief in our ability to control our own destiny. Iran, on the other hand, has a long and painful history of foreign invasions, occupations, and domination. Their outlook is a function of this history and the solace most Iranians have found in Shi’a Islam. They place a premium on survival. They are manipulative, fatalistic, suspicious, and xenophobic.

  The U.S. military developed a series of plans, including imposing a naval blockade of Iran. A combative naval officer in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations named James “Ace” Lyons, who was destined to play a significant role regarding Iran over the coming decade, formulated a plan to use marines backed by carrier air to seize the key Iranian island of Kharg, through which 95 percent of all Iranian oil flowed to awaiting tankers. The island was unguarded and relatively easily accessible by American amphibious forces. “You take Kharg,” Lyons said, “and Iran can’t export a single drop of oil.”61

  On March 20, 1980, following a meeting with Carter’s principal foreign policy advisers at the White House, Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron and Joint Chiefs chairman David Jones cleared the room of everyone but the small handful of individuals involved with military strategy. Aaron then asked about the blockade plan: “Would you just halt oil exports, or would you need to blockade all their ports as well? If the U.S. took such action, what would be Iran’s response?”62

  CIA Director Stansfield Turner answered Aaron’s question. “To be effective, it would have to be a complete cutoff of all imports, including food. It would have a significant impact on Iran’s economy within two weeks.” But Japan would be hit hard, because that nation imported 10 percent of all its fuel from Iran. Turner added that the loss of oil on the world market and the ensuing crisis would drive oil prices up 15 to 30 percent.

  In response to Aaron’s second question, State Department representative David Newsom cautioned that a blockade would lead to a strong reaction in both Iran and the Islamic world, “which, in the worst case,” he warned, “could lead the militants to start killing the hostages.”

  Turner rejected that dire prediction, however, believing that such action could strengthen the hand of the Iranian moderates. The meeting ended with no decision. In the end, President Carter rejected the blockade option unless the hostages were put on trial.

  The only military plan Carter ever seriously considered was the rescue mission code-named Eagle Claw, using the newly formed elite Delta Force. General David Jones formed a new, compartmented planning cell within the Joint Staff’s J-3 directorate to be known as Special Operations Directorate. Months of planning and training in the United States, Egypt, and Oman followed. In spring 1980 Carter authorized the operation.

  On April 24, 1980, U.S. helicopters took off from the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier with a cargo of elite U.S. forces intent on an eventual rendezvous with a network of supporters near Tehran, organized by the CIA, who would truck them into Tehran. Upon the rescue of the hostages, the entire group would gather at a stadium near the embassy, where helicopters would arrive and fly them all to freedom.

  Following a series of helicopter mechanical failures, however, U.S. forces decided to abort the risky rescue mission. One helicopter had crashed into a four-engine C-130 during a refueling operation at a remote Iranian desert airstrip known as Desert One. Eight Americans died. After the failed hostage rescue mission, eleven CIA officers who had infiltrated Iran fled, escaping via Tehran’s airport disguised as businessmen or through the rugged province of Baluchistan, on Iran’s eastern border, with the help of friendly Iranians. With them went Carter’s presidency and any realistic hopes for rapprochement with Iran.

  Two

  A NEW GRAND STRATEGY

  On a cold, crisp January evening in 1980, a caravan of black limousines and their police escorts pulled out of the south grounds of the White House. Following a six-minute drive down Pennsylvania Avenue, the presidential motorcade arrived at the U.S. Capitol, its brilliant white dome illuminated in the night sky. Within the hour, President Jimmy Carter would give his last State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress and a worldwide television audience.

  Carter knew this would be an important speech. The day before, his close confidant and youthful chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, had echoed this sentiment in a lengthy “eyes only” memo for the president: “In the next several months, you will shape, define, and execute a new American foreign policy that will not only set the tone for U.S.-Soviet relations for the next twenty years, but will largely determine whether or not our country will play an effective role as the leader of the Free World.”1

  Jordan’s intent was to outline a strategy to salvage the president’s political fortunes. American presidential elections occur every four years, regardless of national or international crises, and the calendar is not always convenient for the incumbent. This was an election year, and on that night, January 23, 1980, Carter faced mounting political problems. Iran still held captive fifty-two American hostages, and the U.S. economy was in recession. The preceding month, still another foreign policy imbroglio had landed on Carter’s desk: the Soviet Union had rolled three mechanized divisions into the remote Central Asian country of Afghanistan to prop up the mountainous nation’s fledgling communist government. This new crisis portended a grave Cold War confrontation between the superpowers. Domestically too Carter found himself challenged not only within his own party, by Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, but also by the likelihood of an even more formidable Republican opponent: either the former governor of California Ronald Reagan or the seasoned foreign policy hand George H.W. Bush.

  President Carter took the podium shortly after nine p.m. It was one of the most truculent speeches ever given by the Georgian. “The 1980s have been born in turmoil, strife, and change,” he began. “The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil…. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position; therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.”2

  In the most important line of his terse thirty-minute speech, the president drew a line in the sand in the Persian Gulf: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An assault by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”3

  After months of vacillation and indecision in dealing with the Iranian hostage crisis, the American public and the press welcomed presidential resolve.4 A Time magazine headline declared, “Carter Takes Charge.” In Carter’s first address on energy in the spring of 1977, he’d never mentioned the Persian Gulf. Now he was committing the United States to go to war to protect this foreign source of oil should the need arise. For a president who had come to power in the aftermath of Vietnam and prided himself on the fact that no American servicemen or -women had died in combat on his watch, it was a remarkable transformation. In what would become known as the Carter Doctrine, the president had established for the first time that the United States regarded Persian Gulf oil as vital to the nation’s interests, worth spending American treasure and spilling blood to defend.5

  Since the early days of the Carter administration, ideas for a new military strategy to defend Persian Gulf oil from the Soviet Union had flowed in and out of the minds of the president’s foreign policy team. Shortly after taking office, Carter had called for a major across-the-board re
assessment of American strategy in the Cold War. Noted Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington had headed the review at the National Security Council, and he’d singled out the Persian Gulf as an area ripe for Soviet expansion, due chiefly to the tenuous character of the regimes governing in the region and the difficulty of projecting American power there. As a result of this review, on August 24, 1977, President Carter approved Presidential Directive 18, which directed the formation of a “deployable force of light divisions,” a military organization that could be deployed quickly, on short notice, to any global hot spot, be it Korea or, in the minds of Brzezinski and Huntington, the Middle East.6

  This concept was not new. It had become something of a policy mainstay with the Democratic Party’s defense intelligentsia since the Kennedy administration. Faced with a similar concern and responding to Soviet-“inspired” wars in the third world, in 1961 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had directed the formation of a highly mobile force based within the United States capable of quickly reacting to any global crisis. To command this force, the Pentagon established U.S. Strike Command, headquartered in a new white-and-black-striped square building at MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida.7 However, opposition by the navy and marine corps limited the command’s effectiveness. The marine corps viewed itself as the nation’s rapid reaction force, especially for military adventures short of major war, and parochially guarded this mission. The navy simply did not want any joint non-navy headquarters to control its ships.8 President Nixon scrapped the idea and ordered Strike Command disestablished.9

  Initially, Carter’s idea for a rapid deployment force fared no better. Despite the president’s proclamation, the idea languished in the bureaucratic netherworld, a victim of endless staff studies and overall disinterest within the halls of the Pentagon. Until the shah’s overthrow, Pentagon planners continued to recommend relying on “regional coalitions,” chiefly with Iran and Saudi Arabia, and selling more weapons to both nations to strengthen their military abilities.10 With the nation still suffering from the post-Vietnam hangover, no one in Washington had much stomach for military adventurism in the developing world or for a command solely dedicated to that purpose.

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General David Jones, like Dutch Huyser, came from the strategic bomber community. The now fifty-seven-year-old South Dakota native and former B-29 pilot had once served as an aide to the controversial architect of the firebombing of Japanese cities, Curtis LeMay. As chief of staff of the air force, Jones had impressed President Carter, who’d selected Jones for the top military job in 1978. Jones and Carter shared a similar managerial style—a penchant for micromanagement.

  Jones believed it was a mistake to divert military forces from the main Cold War game in Europe to the Middle East. “Unless Moscow invaded Iran,” Jones told Defense Secretary Harold Brown after a formal briefing on the Middle East in September 1978, “the U.S. military combatant forces should not become involved in the minor contingencies.”11 In the absence of a crisis, there was no urgency to create the rapid deployment force, and the military dawdled. “It took a crisis to get a good idea the needed attention,” Secretary Brown dryly observed. “The takeover by Khomeini had that effect.”12

  On December 2, 1978, Brzezinski sent a classified memo to President Carter laying out his concern that the Middle East was rapidly becoming an “arch of crisis.” “There is no question in my mind that we are confronting the beginning of a major crisis, in some ways similar to the one in Europe in the later 40s,” he wrote. If so, this would open up the region for the Soviets to exploit and posed a grave challenge to American security.13

  Brzezinski’s strategic view was clear and crisp. He excelled at distilling meetings down to the salient points, cutting off extraneous discussions, and moving recommendations quickly up to President Carter.14 The national security adviser believed that the Middle East was now inexorably linked to the larger Cold War. He argued that fixating on Europe missed the real dynamic: Persian Gulf oil had become the Achilles’ heel of the West. The Soviet Union could bring Europe to its knees simply by cutting off Middle East oil and turning off the tap that drove the economic engines of Western Europe and Japan. With the United States perched on the precipice of political calamity as the Iranian Revolution unfolded on the streets of Tehran, Brzezinski proposed that the United States forge a new security framework for the Persian Gulf.

  Brown backed Brzezinski’s vision. He ordered Robert Komer, undersecretary of defense for policy and the third most senior civilian in the Pentagon, to conduct a complete review of the military plans for Iran and the Persian Gulf. A seasoned hand in Washington, Komer had nearly four decades of foreign policy experience. During the 1960s, simpatico with President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies, Komer had headed the political side of the South Vietnamese pacification effort. The bespectacled Komer had a booming voice and a personality to match. During the Vietnam War, Komer had earned the apt nickname “Blowtorch Bob,” bestowed by an exasperated Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who said that “arguing with Mr. Komer was like having a flamethrower aimed at the seat of one’s pants.” Komer reported back to the secretary that the Joint Chiefs’ planning was less than satisfactory; in fact, he told Brown privately, “it was very poor.”15

  It was not that the generals and admiral failed to grasp the importance of the Persian Gulf. However, the military was not eager to commit resources to the Middle East, and each service had its own rationale. As far as the army was concerned, the region diverted badly needed reserves from the Cold War’s main game against the Soviets in Central Europe. In the aftermath of Vietnam, the U.S. Army had committed itself intellectually and fiscally to building conventional forces poised for a massive clash of tanks and artillery in Germany. With the large disparity in numbers between the U.S. and Soviet forces in Europe, the army’s leadership deemed it imprudent to pull troops away from the Cold War’s principal front. “U.S. forces engaged in defense of the Persian Gulf area will not be available for Europe, thus adding to the considerable risks entailed,” the Joint Chiefs collectively wrote to Brown.16 While the admirals shared some of their army brethren’s concerns about diverting ships away from the main effort against the Soviets—in their case, in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—the Persian Gulf presented considerable challenges for the U.S. Navy. Although since 1949 the United States had maintained a small show-the-flag flotilla based in Bahrain called Middle East Force, the navy had little experience operating in this remote, torrid region. The Persian Gulf lay three thousand miles from the nearest naval base. The United States had no port facilities or logistical infrastructure to support large-scale naval operations in the area.17 Additionally, and not to be underestimated, the Islamic prohibition on alcohol and its tenet to separate the sexes made most ports of call in the region rather uninviting to American sailors.18

  On January 9, 1979, Secretary Brown met with the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the chairman plus the head of each of the four services—in the “Tank,” their conference room in the Pentagon’s outer E ring. The room was just down the hall from the chairman’s executive suite, along a long corridor lined with offices occupied by senior military leadership and the chairman’s dining room. The name of the room dates back to the early days of the Joint Chiefs during World War II, when the newly formed body met in a basement room of the Public Health Service’s building on Constitution Avenue. Participants entered the Tank by stepping down a set of stairs and then passing through a narrow archway, giving the impression that one was descending into a steel-hulled tank, rather than a government conference room.

  Pressured by their political masters, the Joint Chiefs presented the defense secretary with a plan developed hastily by Alexander Haig’s European Command. The idea was to dispatch U.S. troops to protect Saudi oil fields in the event of a Soviet move toward the Persian Gulf in the aftermath of the upheavals in Iran. Called Operational Plan 4230, it consisted of moving up to seven thousand men from the U
nited States, with the first airborne troops arriving in as little as three days from their base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The plan was rudimentary at best. It required twenty days of preparation before they could even fly the first troops to Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon lacked both the aircraft and the ships to move quickly to the Gulf, and Washington had failed to lay the diplomatic groundwork with Arab countries that would be necessary to deploy American soldiers, even if Washington wanted to send them.

  Brown traveled to the Middle East to assess the situation for himself. He found governments in the region on edge, nervous about the events transpiring in Iran and uncertain about the American commitment to their security. To try to assuage their fears, the Pentagon had recently deployed a squadron of F-15 aircraft to Saudi Arabia, in response to a Saudi request.19 Nevertheless, an anxious Saudi government privately pressed Brown for more concrete defense assurances.20

  Brown ordered the military to take some immediate steps to strengthen the U.S. military in the Gulf.21 The Joint Chiefs answered with an imaginative scheme to conduct fifty-four separate military exercises. While many of these amounted to little more than sending a squadron of aircraft to Saudi Arabia or Oman to fly with their air forces for a week, or training on search and rescue techniques, or increasing routine naval deployments to the Gulf, it represented a significant increase in the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states. When staggered over the course of a year, these exercises were tantamount to a permanent presence of U.S. military forces within the Gulf’s Arab countries, under the guise of exercises.22