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

by David Crist

  “The exiles refused to cooperate with each other,” Cave said with irritation, looking back on the disparate groups trying to overthrow Ayatollah Khomeini. “They all wanted to be in charge.” He used to joke that “every Iranian male is born with a chip in his brain that periodically broadcasts: ‘I am the leader of the Iranian people.’”

  William Casey and the CIA had another Iran-obsessed client: the U.S. Department of Defense. In the summer of 1981, General Kingston revised CENTCOM’s plans to respond to a Soviet invasion of Iran. A key element of General Kingston’s new scheme would involve deployment of clandestine special forces teams to organize a guerrilla army and to conduct sabotage behind the Russian front lines. But the military needed the CIA to develop an indigenous support organization inside Iran. Existing legal mandates authorized only the CIA to conduct covert paramilitary operations in peacetime (i.e., any mission intended to conceal American involvement and permit plausible deniability by Washington). In theory, the CIA would build the foundation of an indigenous paramilitary network in peacetime, which the much larger U.S. Army Special Forces—better known as Green Berets due to their unique headgear—would exploit during wartime.31 But the CIA’s paramilitary operations had to be coordinated with Kingston. The agency’s schemes needed to be synchronized with the military war plans to make sure the two were not working at cross-purposes.

  In the spring of 1982 the CIA and Defense Department began working on a combined plan for Iran. With Kingston’s extensive experience with the CIA, he persuaded the defense secretary to agree to fund a CIA operation to build a covert paramilitary network within Iran. This would serve as the foundation upon which Kingston’s special forces could conduct their insurgency against the Red Army.32 Casey eagerly supported the agreement. It offered one more avenue to develop new contacts in Iran—and with Defense Department money.

  Iran required a major commitment by the CIA. The spy agency had to build a fifth column within Iran designed to undermine any “Vichy-type governments” installed by Moscow, as one Defense Department memo described it. The CIA needed to recruit the Iranians who would greet American parachutists arriving in the middle of the night. The agency had to provide the military information on roads, bridges, and airfields, establish mustering stations for arriving American troops, conduct sabotage, and rescue pilots who were shot down.

  To manage the paramilitary effort in Iran, the CIA created a new organization—given the nonsensical cover name “BQ Tug”—inside the Tehfran cell at Frankfurt. Langley chose a former Army Special Forces officer—described by former CIA officer Reuel Gerecht as “earthy but likable”—to run the their mission. He worked closely with a small cadre of military officers at the Central Command headquarters in Tampa, who identified specific targets for the Iranian agents to destroy and airfields the U.S. military wanted to use to support the Pentagon’s war plan.

  With a few million dollars from the Pentagon, BQ Tug recruited more than half a dozen teams, four to six men each. The teams included Iranian military officers, a smattering of senior enlisted men, and peasants from villages the U.S. military considered strategically positioned. Much of the recruiting was conducted in Iranian Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran and astride the border with the Soviet Union.33 Some of the Iranian agents’ only responsibility was to keep watch on the Soviet forces across the border or to monitor important border towns such as Jolfa, where all imports and exports from Iran to the Soviet Union traveled across a major highway and railway line.34 The CIA tried to bring team leaders out for a polygraph and some training. Several recruits later claimed they were flown to Oman for specialized weapons and explosives training.

  The CIA’s pitch to each recruit downplayed his employment by the United States and emphasized the necessity of defending Iran from atheists and anti-Islamic communists. They were serving their country by helping the United States defend Iran against communism.

  A typical recruit was Muhammad Zanif-Yeganeh, a housing department employee in northern Iran. He later claimed that a friend already on the CIA payroll had enticed him to travel to Turkey on the pretense of buying crystal to sell on the black market. He later described being approached by an American Farsi speaker who asked him about working with the United States to help protect Iran from a Russian attack. With five hundred dollars a month as added incentive, he agreed. He surveyed a remote poultry farm as a potential landing zone for U.S. forces and sent a detailed map of the area back to Frankfurt.35 The farm owner was also recruited and added to Yeganeh’s team, and the two men identified other landing zones for helicopters.

  At one point the CIA considered using these agents to conduct covert attacks against the Khomeini regime. One proposal was to use the BQ Tug agents to bomb sensitive Iranian military sites such as command and control centers in Tehran or the port of Bushehr—“the bomb in the Hitler bunker,” as one retired CIA officer described it. At the Pentagon’s request, the CIA looked into using them to attack launch sites for the new Chinese antiship missiles around the Strait of Hormuz in 1987. However, none of these proposals materialized.

  “Agents are funny people,” observed Howard Hart, a longtime CIA officer. “Few are willing to make that leap of actually putting bombs or attacking their own country. They will give you chapter and verse and GPS coordinates for sensitive sites, but it’s a huge leap to actually blow it up themselves.”36

  Despite Casey’s support, many inside the CIA viewed BQ Tug as a waste of time. The operations directorate did not always assign the best officers to BQ Tug. Its liaison in the headquarters at Langley was a CIA officer who had recently filed a disability lawsuit against the agency over his supposed chronic back pain, which he eventually won, forcing the CIA to buy him a special chair to sit in until his retirement.

  On one occasion, the deputy chief of Tehfran, a former military officer, flew into Turkey with eight fake Iranian passports for operatives who were scheduled to go back into Iran on a collection mission. “He was a klutz,” Philip Giraldi recalled. “He could screw anything up.” After issuing the phony documents, the Tehfran deputy collected the real passports of the Iranian agents, stuffed them in his coat, and headed to the airport to fly back to Frankfurt. When he went through the metal detector, two pens in his shirt pocket set off the metal detector, and he was ordered to empty out his pockets. The Turkish security guards found the bundle of passports and arrested him. When the Tehfran deputy chief did not arrive back in Frankfurt, Giraldi was sent out looking for him. When Giraldi arrived at the deputy’s hotel, Turkish police arrested him too. As Giraldi was an embassy employee with a diplomatic passport, the Turks released him. But it required considerable effort, involving some favors with Turkish intelligence, to get Tehfran’s deputy released.

  “Its mission was a joke; no one took it seriously,” said one CIA officer. “The Soviets were not likely to invade Iran. If they did, these half dozen teams would have the effect of a gnat hitting a truck.” More important, the Iranian regime was decidedly hostile to the United States and no one could say what Ayatollah Khomeini’s reaction would be to the arrival of U.S. Special Forces inside Iran. As another CIA officer observed: “We now had a plan to defend those who don’t want to be defended against those who are not going to attack.”

  While the United States recruited spies and paid exile groups, the agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) did not remain idle. From the days of the shah and Savak, the Iranians excelled at counterintelligence. The new Iranian intelligence service was formed in August 1984 by combining several smaller intelligence groups that sprang up after the revolution. Surprisingly, considering the hatred Khomeini’s backers had for the shah’s secret police, MOIS employed a large number of former Savak officers—perhaps one-third of those working for MOIS had worked for the shah. They proved equally as formidable in addressing security threats for the Islamic Republic as they had for the royal regime.

  Iran received some assistance from other spy services eager to undermine
the CIA. Despite the Islamic Republic’s disdain for communism, common purpose overcame ideology when the MOIS developed cooperative relationships with both East German and Romanian intelligence services.37 The Romanians provided new technology and trained the Iranians on spy craft. The East Germans conducted surveillance of Tehfran’s activities in Frankfurt, providing important pieces to fill in the American spy puzzle.

  The MOIS external security directorate tracked dissident groups. It created small hit teams, blending in with Iranians traveling to Turkey, to assassinate critics of the Islamic regime. Moving from Istanbul to Western Europe, the teams carried out dozens of beatings, stabbings, bombings, and other acts of intimidation and murder. In August 1991, for example, three Iranian men talked their way past a French guard and into the house of the shah’s last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar. They then killed him and his secretary with a kitchen knife. U.S. intelligence attributed more than eighty killings to MOIS agents between 1980 and 1995, the date of the last known Iranian assassination. Few MOIS officers were apprehended; they typically left only a body, say, on a Paris sidewalk, with a bullet in the back of the head as testimony to their handiwork.

  Unfortunately for the CIA, many of MOIS’s victims were prospective American recruits. The MOIS staked out the U.S. embassies that were trying to enlist Iranian citizens and were not shy about killing suspected American collaborators. Philip Giraldi frankly admitted that “the Iranians in particular were very good and often were able to identify and assassinate our agents. These were people who were providing information to the U.S. embassy and CIA station in Ankara.”38

  On a few occasions, the Iranians tried to run double agents to Tehfran. Reuel Gerecht, a large, gregarious Farsi speaker who replaced Giraldi at the consulate in Istanbul, uncovered two MOIS agents during his interviews with visa applicants. Both men seemed too eager to offer their services and information about the Iranian government.

  Iran soon uncovered Casey’s spy ring. According to former Iran minister of intelligence and security Mohammad Reyshahri, in July 1985 the MOIS was alerted when the CIA tried to recruit a midlevel government official in Iranian Azerbaijan for BQ Tug.39 Unfortunately, the United States approached the wrong guy. Rather than cooperate, he immediately alerted MOIS to the CIA recruitment drive. Then the Iranians rolled up two CIA agents working in the Iranian foreign ministry. One had foolishly kept all the coded messages received over the radio from his CIA handler in his house. The MOIS discovered these as well as his codebooks and his radio.

  The MOIS was nothing but patient. For the next few years, its counterintelligence officers painstakingly unraveled the CIA’s spy network. It recruited its own spies within the Iranian military to keep watch on senior officers who might be susceptible to the CIA’s pitch. Junior officers were encouraged to spy on senior officers. For Captain Riahi, the MOIS recruited a first lieutenant and fellow pilot to monitor his movements. Aware of a possible compromise, Reza Kahlili’s case officer instructed him to change his codes. He and the others did, and continued to relay information back to Tehfran as Langley remained ignorant of the calamity that would befall them. Meanwhile the MOIS watched and waited.40

  Five

  A FIG LEAF OF NEUTRALITY

  Heading east toward Iran from the compact squalor of Iraq’s second- largest city, Basra, the specter of an old battlefield fills the barren landscape. Clearly discernable on either side of the bumpy, dusty road choked with trucks, dilapidated taxis, and donkey carts are miles of trenches crisscrossing the desert, stretching off in all directions to the horizon. Endless rows of U-shaped earthen berms and large triangular fighting positions are slowly eroding, the tanks that once occupied them long since removed for other wars or stripped for scrap metal by the local villagers. Craters large and small pockmark the desert moonscape. Rain and wind frequently reveal the bleached bones of hastily buried soldiers, some still wearing boots and pieces of now indistinguishable uniforms, their sculls broken and cracked by bullets and hot metal. Twenty years after the fighting ended, unexploded ordnance littering the desert floor regularly takes the lives of civilians who stray off the roads and beaten paths.

  These scenes testify to one of the bloodiest wars since World War II: the eight-year slaughter of the Iran-Iraq War. When it mercifully ended in August 1988, neither side had achieved very much: the border was unchanged, no territory had been gained, and both Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini remained in power, safely seated in their respective capitals. But well over a million men had given the full measure of devotion, with perhaps four times that number permanently maimed. It was a war of incompetence, two lumbering giants repeatedly hammering each other with the clubs of modern firepower, killing thousands with each swing but achieving little. Institutional constraints hamstrung both countries, preventing any learning curve of more than a gentle glide slope. The Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, a military neophyte, frowned upon commanders who showed either initiative or too much battlefield prowess. Iran’s once mighty military had been gutted by the revolution. Instead of using tanks, infantry, and aircraft in a combined arms doctrine of a modern military, Khomeini and the revolutionary commanders believed élan and revolutionary zeal in the form of human wave assaults could overcome rows of Iraqi tanks and artillery laid hub to hub.

  While the war achieved little militarily, it had a pronounced effect on the region. Iran spent its revolutionary fervor, leaving the country isolated, with a profound sense of grievance and insecurity. The war ushered in Iraq’s military supremacy and two decades of wars between Saddam Hussein and the West. It left the Gulf Arabs deeply suspicious of Iran. For the United States, heightened fear of an Iranian threat to Washington’s control over Middle East oil led to an unlikely alliance with Iraq that Washington would soon regret.

  Saddam Hussein was both pragmatic and paranoid. The descendant of Sunni shepherds from the town of Tikrit north of Baghdad, the dark-haired, mustached Hussein had risen through the ranks of the socialist Baath Party initially as an enforcer, before he ascended to the presidency in 1979. While he advocated secularism and Western socialist ideals such as universal education and women’s suffrage, his true focus was political survival and personal aggrandizement. Saddam Hussein’s political savvy was combined with ruthless suspicion. Anyone who appeared too capable might find himself imprisoned or executed. “Saddam was always wary of intelligent people,” said Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as “Chemical Ali” for his role in gassing hundreds of Kurdish civilians in 1988 to crush a perceived hazard to Saddam’s rule.1

  The Iraqi leader soon found himself in the crosshairs of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini had not forgotten that Saddam Hussein had ordered his expulsion from Iraq at the behest of the shah. The supreme leader held Saddam and his secular Baathist Party in contempt. Khomeini publicly criticized the Iraqi regime as “corruptors of the true faith” and openly called for Iraq’s majority Shia population to revolt. The ayatollah emphasized the unity of all Muslims, rejecting traditional Western concepts of nation-states and national identity. The umma, or community, was the sole basis for Islamic politics, and the Prophet’s concept of a united Islamic nation drove the Iranian revolutionary vision. “We will export our revolution throughout the world…until the calls ‘There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God’ are echoed all over the world,” said the supreme leader during one of many similar-themed Friday sermons.

  Khomeini’s words were matched by actions. Iran began backing Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq. Iranian agent provocateurs infiltrated Iraq, providing weapons and training to Shia opposition groups. Iran increased support for the Iraqi Shia militant group Islamic Dawa Party, which included a number of future leaders of Iraq, including prime ministers Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki. Shortly after the shah’s overthrow, the Dawa Party moved its headquarters to Tehran and escalated its guerrilla operations against Baathist rule in Iraq. In April 1980 alone, Iranian-backed terrorists assassinated twenty Iraqi official
s and narrowly missed killing Iraq’s deputy prime minister and close confidant of the Iraqi leader, Tariq Aziz.2 In response, spurred privately by Saudi Arabia, which was deeply concerned that the Iranian Revolution would stir up Shia passions in its own eastern provinces, Baghdad clamped down by arresting prominent religious leaders, expelling thousands of Shia, and threatening to support an insurgency in the Arab populace of southern Iran. Tension grew along the border, and military skirmishes became common. In response to one Iranian infiltration, on December 14, 1979, Iraqi troops moved five kilometers into Iran before withdrawing under the umbrella of a massive artillery barrage that rained shells down all along Iran’s southern border. By the summer of 1980 Iran and Iraq seemed poised for war.3

  Saddam Hussein viewed the Iranian Revolution as both an existential threat and an opportunity. To Saddam Hussein, Iran looked weak. The Iranian Revolution had consumed much of the officer corps of the shah’s once vaunted army and unleashed long-standing tensions between the Persian majority and Iran’s ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds in the north and the Baluchis in the south. The Iraqi leader wanted to abrogate the 1975 Algiers Accords with Iran; imposed by the shah, it had established the border between the two nations at the center of the Shatt al-Arab, giving Tehran control of half of Baghdad’s only outlet to the Persian Gulf. Also, Saddam Hussein cast his eye on the Iranian province of Khuzestan, directly across the border near Basra. Under its sands were most of the Iranian oil reserves, and with a majority Arab population, Saddam Hussein calculated they would welcome his “liberation” of them from Persian control. The Iraqi records captured after the American invasion in 2003 are replete with such megalomaniac ideas. Saddam Hussein believed that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel abrogated Egypt’s leadership of the Arab people, and that this mantle now fell on Iraq’s shoulders. He envisioned himself taking up the mantle as the new leader of the Arab people. Saddam Hussein saw himself as the new Saladin, believing it was his destiny to unite the Arab people in a great crusade to retake Jerusalem with the ultimate goal of becoming the new caliphate.