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

by David Crist

  ISA was less successful in cultivating the disparate ethnic and separatist groups within Iran, especially the Kurds in the northwestern regions. Odom believed they would be a natural ally for the United States and might even provide an alternative safe haven for U.S. Special Operations Forces. “We had access to the Kurds,” one U.S. Army intelligence officer later said, “but neither the Turks nor the Iraqis wanted the U.S. to stir up any separatist movements with the Kurds—unless they controlled it—for fear it might spread to their own countries.”

  Odom’s staff dusted off an old defense plan, code-named Armish-Maag, that the 10th Special Forces Group had developed for the shah to defend Iran from a Soviet invasion. It contained detailed targeting data on the tunnels and the mountain passes leading into northern Iran from Soviet Azerbaijan. The shah’s army had used this information to pre-position materials to destroy bridges and tunnels. One of the Iranians now working for ISA confirmed that the explosives had been removed, but the predrilled holes along bridge pilings and tunnel entrances remained. Armed with this information, Army Special Forces would only have to replace the explosives so as to quickly close many of the important roads needed by the Soviet Union to invade Iran. It saved years in research, an army analyst later acknowledged.

  However, ISA drew the ire of the CIA. The CIA had legal responsibility for all recruitment of agents during peacetime and viewed the ISA officers as amateurs. Howard Hart, an experienced CIA operative who’d organized the initial effort to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan and later ran the CIA’s Special Activities Division, which controlled all the paramilitary forces, believed that the military lacked the subtlety for sensitive operations. “The military men are patriots, but in general when it comes to paramilitary operations and spying, they are well-intentioned amateurs. When the military sends someone undercover into Iran disguised as a Middle East businessman, they seem to look like a guy pretending to be a businessman. When CIA sends one in, he is a Middle Eastern businessman.”32 At the time, the U.S. military’s view of the CIA was just as jaded. A senior U.S. military officer who spent two decades working with the CIA used a common military acronym related to commanders or headquarters, C2, which stands for “command and control,” when he noted that in the CIA, C2 stands for “control and credit.”

  Even though ISA had to coordinate all its operations with Langley, the CIA viewed the military unit as a liability that was intruding on its turf. Odom knew that Langley wanted ISA shut down, and some of his officers accused CIA of distorting ISA’s problems and of leaking the damaging information to Congress in 1982 that had nearly led to the organization’s disbandment. According to Odom, the CIA undermined the Pentagon’s Iranian operation. The CIA station chief in Pakistan invited the ISA army officer in charge of Iranian operations to a diplomatic cocktail party in Islamabad. He made a point of staying close to the officer and loudly proclaimed that the two men worked together. As the station chief operated out in the open, the officer’s public association with him destroyed his cover and forced him to leave the country. His departure halted the army’s recruitment in Pakistan. This petty move by the CIA infuriated senior officials within the Pentagon, Weinberger included.33

  The Reagan administration came to office convinced that the machinations of Soviet adventurism caused most of America’s national security problems.34 The Arab-Israeli confrontation was seen largely through the prism of the Cold War: the American-backed Israelis were pitted against the Soviet client states of Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Kingston and ISA had developed a clandestine spy organization in Iran whose mission focused solely on confronting the Soviet Union and not the Islamic Republic. This unitarian view downplayed both historical and regional causes behind the steady stream of conflicts that had dominated the region since the Second World War. The Iranian Revolution did not fit neatly into ISA’s worldview, to put it mildly. Only slowly did Washington replace this myopic view and begin to realize that Iran itself, and not the Soviet Union, represented the real challenge to American control over the Persian Gulf.

  Four

  A DEN OF SPIES

  William Casey was sixty-eight when Ronald Reagan appointed him to run America’s principal spy organization. The new director of central intelligence did not radiate a James Bond aura; in fact, he resembled a superannuated college professor. He shuffled more than walked; bald, with pronounced jowls, the once tall New Yorker was now stooped with age. He mumbled, at times to the point of incoherence, a trait that seemed to worsen when he testified before Congress, an institution he generally disdained. His clothes were rumpled and flecks of food stained his jacket and tie, complementing a heavy coat of white dandruff. Eating across from William Casey, contemporaries noted, was not for the fainthearted.

  Despite his visible aging, Casey retained a keen mind. A voracious reader and astute student of history, he roamed Washington’s bookstores for material, especially on the Soviet Union, often buying stacks of books in a single outing. During briefings, he often appeared comatose, slumped back in his stuffed chair with only a sliver of his eyes visible through his drooping eyelids. Then, suddenly, Casey would spring to life, firing off a rapid series of probing questions.

  Casey had a distinguished career both in and out of government. He had served as the intelligence chief for Europe with the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) during World War II, as a corporate lawyer after the war, then as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Nixon. A staunch Republican, he was Reagan’s campaign manager for the 1980 election and aspired to become secretary of state. When that post went to Alexander Haig, Casey eagerly accepted the job as CIA director, determined to reinvigorate the clandestine wing of the agency, which he believed had been gutted by congressional investigations and poor leadership during the 1970s.

  Casey, who displayed a gift for organization and planning, seemed an ideal choice to head the CIA. “The man had a natural bent for what the Germans call fingerspitzengefühl, a feel for the clandestine,” recalled Richard Helms, Casey’s roommate in London during the war and later CIA director.1 In 1944, Casey had been sent to Paris to reinvigorate efforts to insert agents into Germany. “The place had gone slack. There was no sense of purpose,” said fellow OSS officer Walter Lord, who worked for Casey and later wrote the acclaimed novel about the Titanic A Night to Remember. Casey soon gained the admiration of Lord and other subordinates. “He was blunt and impatient,” observed Lord, “but he knew exactly what to ask.”2 Casey energized the headquarters and initiated some of the riskiest missions of the war. Disguised as foreign laborers, more than one hundred agents were air-dropped into Germany, both to spy and to determine the location of key industrial sites for Allied bombers. Remarkably, sixty-two of the agents ended up reporting information back to Casey, and only 5 percent were lost.3

  As director, Casey had little interest or inclination in running the CIA bureaucracy. “He was going to run the clandestine service,” said Robert Gates, who ran the Directorate of Intelligence—the analysis wing of the CIA—for nearly four years under Casey and later served as CIA director himself, as well as secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “I don’t think he would have recognized the CIA organization chart in the first several years he was there, if his life depended on it.”4

  Casey viewed the world’s crises through the lens of the Cold War. An avowed anticommunist and unrelenting opponent of the Soviet Union, he became an important advocate within the administration for paramilitary actions in Central America and for the arming of the mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan to fight the Red Army. To the CIA director, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan fit into a long-standing desire of the Russian empire to have a warm-water port, only now this dovetailed into controlling Middle East oil. He cared little about the regional conflicts or their long-term consequences, except in terms of how they affected the balance of power in the East-West rivalry.

  One senior CIA of
ficer who worked the Middle East recalled having dinner with the director in 1986. The conversation turned to the long-term American strategy for Afghanistan after the Soviets had been driven out of the country. “What are we going to do after we win?” the officer asked Casey.

  “We’re not going to do a goddamn thing! Once we get the Russians out, we’re finished,” Casey responded, smacking his hands together to emphasize the point. That focus on the Soviets would blind the United States to other perils.

  Casey did not see Iran as an intrinsic threat. The Iranian Revolution had been significant, he believed, chiefly because it eliminated America’s defender of Persian Gulf oil against Soviet expansion. Casey downplayed the importance of the Islamist movement behind Khomeini. Instead, he worried about Moscow exploiting the shah’s overthrow and turning Iran into another Soviet proxy. He understood the danger posed by Iranian terrorism, and the 1985 seizure of William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, by Iranian surrogates would weigh heavily on him. But Casey believed the long-term solution was to bring Iran back into the anti-Soviet fold. In his mind, the CIA needed to cultivate political moderates and pro-Western reformers in Tehran. Agents were needed inside the Iranian government to favorably influence and counter its anti-American stance.

  In the first couple of years after the revolution, Casey had a legitimate reason to worry about a communist takeover in Iran. The pro-Moscow Tudeh Party openly challenged Khomeini’s rule, waging an urban insurgency against the Islamic Republic. In July 1981 it bombed the Iranian parliament, killing the prime minister and seriously injuring future supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who lost partial use of his right arm when a bomb concealed in a tape recorder exploded beside him. Casey saw the hidden hand of Moscow behind Iran’s leftist opposition and believed that if the party succeeded in overthrowing the mullahs’ rule, it could lead to Iran’s becoming a Soviet client state like Cuba.

  In 1983 a Soviet defector presented William Casey the means to strike a fatal blow to the communist movement in Iran. In the fall of 1982, a senior KGB officer who had been stationed in Tehran, Vladimir Kuzichkin, had defected to Great Britain, reportedly carrying with him a treasure trove of documents on Soviet spy operations. London’s overseas intelligence organ, MI6, shared this information with its CIA colleagues, who put together a long list of dozens of Soviet spies and pro-Moscow Tudeh Party members in Iran. Casey ordered this roster surreptitiously passed on to Tehran through Iranian exiles. Iranian security forces promptly rounded up and executed scores of suspected communists and socialists. And so, with a little help from the CIA, the Islamic Republic eviscerated its domestic opposition.5

  Within the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, intelligence officers had differing opinions about their director’s views of Iran and the prospects of influencing the regime. The Soviet analysts at Langley tended to share Casey’s alarmist view, but those in the Near East Division remained skeptical. In August and September 1983, the CIA’s Near East Division produced two intelligence assessments on Soviet-Iranian relations, concluding that the Soviet efforts to court the Islamic Republic had failed, aggravated by Iran’s support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Subsequent CIA reports came to the same conclusion, adding that the Tudeh Party had ceased to exist. But Casey remained unconvinced, grasping at a 1985 draft report that concluded that the Soviets could gain influence through arms sales to an Iran desperate for weapons in its war with Iraq.6

  “No one doubted the importance of Iran,” observed George Cave, one of the agency’s principal experts on Iran. “If you want stability in the Middle East, you need to have some sort of meaningful relationship with Iran.” However, neither Cave nor the other CIA officers working in Langley believed the Islamic regime would be wooed by Moscow. Khomeini’s hatred of the United States was eclipsed only by his contempt for atheism and communism. The Iranian cleric’s vitriolic Friday sermons were aimed as much at Moscow as at Washington.

  “There were reformers in Tehran,” noted retired CIA official Jack Devine, who had worked the Iran desk during the mid-1980s, “but they were all by-products of the revolution. Their arguments were about economic reform and not political.”7

  When Casey assumed the CIA directorship, the American espionage effort in Iran was in shambles. The CIA station in Tehran had been one of the agency’s largest in the world during the shah’s reign. What remained of the CIA’s spy operation had evaporated with the students’ takeover of the American embassy, with the CIA station chief among its hostages. Casey was determined to revive human spying within Iran. It was one of the most strategically important countries in the Middle East, yet the CIA knew next to nothing about what was happening there. Even such mundane matters as annual crop yields eluded U.S. intelligence officials. If the Iranian government was leaning toward Moscow, Casey wanted to know about it and position American agents there in hopes of drawing Iran back to the United States’ side of the Cold War.

  The CIA’s mission in Iran became an early subject of discussion within the Reagan administration. Expanding the number of human spies there was an obvious requirement. Shortly after taking office, Reagan signed a presidential finding—an authorization of a covert operation required by law—approving a renewed effort to build a spy network in Iran.

  The administration had less certainty about the wisdom of actually trying to overthrow the regime. On March 9, 1981, the NSC principals, with no aides or note takers, met in the White House Situation Room for a closely held deliberation on possible covert actions against Iran. The select assemblage agreed to search for a group that “we can support [in] destabilizing Iran,” according to a handwritten note kept by one of the attendees. Exactly which group to throw America’s weight behind, however, eluded the attendees. They contemplated aiding the Kurds, but quickly rejected that out of fear of angering an important NATO ally, Turkey. Casey recommended looking at exile groups headed by former Iranian military officers and other separatist movements, such as the one in Baluchistan.

  On September 30, Reagan’s foreign policy doyens met for another meeting on Iran in the White House Cabinet Room. Chaired by the national security adviser, Richard Allen, they finalized a National Security Decision Directive on Iran for Reagan’s signature. The men agreed on two key policy goals: preventing Soviet domination of Iran, and keeping the Iranian Revolution from spreading across the Middle East. The key, they believed, was pulling Iran back into the American Cold War camp. This would not be easy. The United States’ ability to subvert the Iranian government was negligible; a CIA coup à la 1953 had little chance of success and would only fuel more anti-Americanism, to the advantage of Moscow. Nevertheless, they believed there were actions the U.S. government could take to influence the Islamic Republic: expanding Voice of America broadcasts, working with allies who had more influence within the Iranian government, and seeking out moderates within the Iranian government. The goal would be to cultivate pro-American military personnel and civilians who could steer the Iranian policies away from the Soviet Union and moderate the regime’s anti-American opinions. Casey’s officers would try to reach out to “forces in Iran favoring a more moderate government,” as one memo described it.8

  A day or two later, President Reagan signed an executive order directing the CIA to begin an important wide-ranging operation called the Iranian Covert Action Program. Its objective was to moderate Iranian behavior toward the United States and to undercut the expansion of the Iranian Revolution. Intelligence officers began looking for Iranians inside and outside the country who favored better relations with the United States and who were positioned to influence key government officials. The CIA launched a broad influence campaign. The Voice of America stepped up its Farsi broadcasts to blunt anti-American propaganda in the Iranian media. Working through Pakistan, the CIA promoted greater ties between Iran and the mujahideen fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan, with the goal of highlighting the Soviet threat and the shared objectives between Washington and Tehran in seeing the
Soviets defeated. The CIA began indirectly passing intelligence to Tehran via the Swiss and Algerian governments that highlighted Soviet designs on Iran and stressed Washington’s support for Iran’s territorial integrity.

  The administration remained divided on armed subversion inside Iran. The Iranian Covert Action Program signed by President Reagan prohibited providing weapons for either exiles or internal dissidents. But in 1982, when the program came up for its annual review, the Reagan administration debated the wisdom of this prohibition. “If the United States was really serious about countering the Iranian threat, why not arm the Islamic Republic’s opposition?” said Charles Cogan, the CIA’s chief for Near East and South Asia, during a meeting at the White House in 1982. “The basic issue is whether the present regime in Iran is in U.S. interests.”

  Robert McFarlane, the deputy national security adviser, believed the United States should explore more extreme measures to overthrow the Iranian regime. In a September 10, 1982, memo, he wrote, “It is difficult to come to a judgment on the issue without altering the ‘halfway house’ finding: that is, lift the restriction against providing lethal weapons to the Iranian opposition. This having been done, we could explore with the Iranian opposition and with friendly governments there of possibly creating disturbances within Iran.”

  Caspar Weinberger concurred. The defense secretary frequently voiced the need to look at a more ambitious program to replace, or at least significantly undermine, the Islamic Republic. Arming an opposition movement might not lead to an overthrow of Khomeini, but forcing Iran to battle a fifth column might sap the revolutionary energy that otherwise would be directed outward toward friendly Arab governments.