by David Crist
“The Gulf Security Dialogue mainly existed in the U.S. minds and in our memos,” said one midlevel official in the NSC. While the Gulf states feared Iran, they still would not operate as a collective. They refused to share their air defense radar data with each other and only grudgingly agreed to train together at a new U.S. air-to-air combat center in the United Arab Emirates. Qatar and Oman had close economic ties to Iran and did not want to unduly antagonize leaders in Tehran. “The U.S. could never even mention Iran as the adversary,” recalled one military officer. One Qatari official accused the United States of hyping the Iranian threat simply to sell more weapons. “Getting the Gulf states to do anything in consort is like herding cats,” recalled one Defense official.
Hillen and Rodman tried to counter this trend by going back to an earlier policy playbook to get a multilateral impact through a series of bilateral agreements. “The idea was to forge a series of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and the Gulf Arabs that ended up being a de facto coalition, with the U.S. as the linchpin on which everything depended,” recalled one Bush official. It was not ideal, but allowed the United States to lay the groundwork for more integration and cooperation in the future. It remained a work in progress, and over the coming years cooperation and coordination did improve, with hotlines installed between the militaries and some sharing of information. The United States increased its own missile defense system to provide a backbone to protect the Gulf states, with Abizaid approving sending three battalions of Patriot missiles to the Gulf.
Selling weapons to the Gulf Arabs has always drawn close scrutiny from Congress. Hillen and Abizaid worried about the political fight in improving the weapons of the Gulf Arabs. But President Bush had a better understanding of Congress. During a December 2006 meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Hillen mentioned that some of the systems they wanted to sell to the Arabs might be controversial. The president snapped, “Not if it’s against Iran.”
Iran had a dual-track policy regarding Iraq. In the long-term, Tehran wanted a stable but politically weak Iraq dominated by Shia coalitions. While the Bush administration continued issuing policy papers confidently proclaiming that Iran feared the emergence of a democratic Iraq, Tehran’s diplomats actively supported the American democratic process, realizing it would guarantee a Shia majority in the government. In the short-term, however, the Iranians wanted a level of instability. Seeing the American military on their border as a grave threat, they wanted to bleed the Americans, make the cost of the occupation too high, and cause a chastened American government’s ignominious withdrawal. They encouraged Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and others to participate in the political process, and before the 2005 elections provided pictures and posters supporting the Shia United Iraqi Alliance party. Iran provided al-Hakim’s ISCI and Badr Corps more than $50 million a year and backed the American electoral process. Through their ambassador to the Court of St. James, Iran relayed its desire to work with Washington in free and fair elections in Iraq.5 The Bush administration ignored the offer, continuing to assert that the specter of Shias voting in Iraq would undermine the totalitarian neighbor. However, a November 27, 2005, State Department report, leaked by WikiLeaks, warned, “Iran is gaining control of Iraq at many levels of government.”6
Iran simultaneously increased its assistance to Shia militias opposed to the United States. The United States helped Iran in this when a U.S.-concocted plan to disarm militias integrated many of the Iranian-backed Badr Corps soldiers into the new Iraqi security forces.7 In the spring of 2004 a young firebrand cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, openly challenged the United States. The son of a prominent cleric killed by Saddam, al-Sadr possessed a family pedigree that appealed to many of the poor Shia, who flocked to his side. His militia force, the Mahdi Army or Jaysh al-Mahdi, grew in size and power with Iran’s support. Although al-Sadr shared Ayatollah Khomeini’s views of a pan-Shia movement, he remained independent and wary about Iranian meddling in his country. Iran supported him due to his widespread support from the populace. The head of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, despised him. Suleimani viewed al-Sadr as too reckless and thought his uncoordinated and independent actions only undermined Iran’s goals in Iraq. But in April, as the crisis erupted, the Quds Force still provided al-Sadr’s militia with medical supplies and three hundred rocket-propelled grenades. When the U.S. military crushed al-Sadr’s uprising in August, Iran dispatched both diplomats and Quds Force officers to mediate the crisis and cajole al-Sadr back to supporting the American-established interim Iraqi governing body.
Supporting the Iraqi militias became one of the most important missions for the commander of the Quds Force, the secretive arm of the Revolutionary Guard. In his late forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching beardary, Suleimani was an aggressive, hands-on leader. He had distinguished himself during the Iran-Iraq War and quickly rose to be one of the youngest division commanders in the Iranian military. He had a very close, trusting relationship with the supreme leader, who appointed him to head the Quds Force in 1998. Although a part of the guard, the Quds Force reported only to Ayatollah Khamenei. It was organized into regional commands called corps, each controlling operations under its area (for example, Lebanon or the Arabian Peninsula) under Suleimani’s watchful eyes.8 For Iraq, the responsible corps was Department 1000, or the Ramazan Corps, commanded by Colonel Ahmed Foruzandeh, which stood up in the early 1990s to try to subvert the Shia against Saddam Hussein. Foruzandeh had three subordinate headquarters, each close to the border. When inside Iraq, the Quds Force operated from a series of safe houses and front companies, and it had a presence everywhere but the Sunni-dominated western al-Anbar province. Suleimani took an active role in the operations in Iraq. He covertly traveled to Basra to meet with Iraqis and frequently stayed at a forward headquarters established in the Iranian border town of Mehran.9
In late 2004 and early 2005, Iran held a series of meetings in Tehran to support newly emerging pro-Iranian surrogate groups opposed to the United States. Lebanese Hezbollah operatives attended several of these, as Iran intended to use them to conduct military training inside Iraq, which would help minimize Iranian fingerprints on their operations. While Iran maintained its support for the Islamic Supreme Council and other large Shia parties involved in the government, Tehran cultivated at least eleven smaller rejectionist groups, several being splinter groups from al-Sadr’s Mahdi movement. This included Abu Sajjal Gharawi, who served as a commander under al-Sadr only to fall out of favor after the cessation of attacks on the coalition. He had close ties with Quds Force officers, and they frequently met in a Basra safe house. Another was Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, who had a network of perhaps three hundred men operating primarily in Baghdad’s Sadr City. A dual Iranian-Iraqi citizen and former Revolutionary Guard officer, he maintained close ties with the Quds Force.10
To aid their surrogates, Quds Force operatives observed American forces and bases, meticulously noting convoy patterns and flight schedules. The large American air base at Balad and the U.S. embassy in the Green Zone were favorite bases for Quds Force surveillance teams. After a raid by U.S. forces in 2008, the Americans uncovered thousands of reports detailing Quds Force operations and attacks by their surrogates against coalition forces, as well as former Baathists, including retribution killings against Sunnis who had a hand in the massacre of the Shia during the 1991 uprising following Desert Storm. To aid them, the Quds Force recruited Iraqis—many of whom had fled to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War—living along the Kuwait border to provide additional information on troop movements. This supplemented information received by MOIS spies operating in Kuwait.
Iran decided to provide a new weapon to its Iraqi insurgents: enhanced formed projectiles, or EFPs. Improvised bombs made from explosives or old Iraqi munitions caused most American casualties in the war in Iraq, but these new weapons increased the lethality dramatically. Using a cylinder fabricated from commonly available metal or PVC pipe, the front end was encased with a concave copper or steel disk. When th
e explosive detonated, the force of the blast shaped the copper disk into a high-velocity molten-shaped slug—the poor man’s sabot round. This slug easily penetrated armored vehicles and proved so accurate that insurgents could target specific seats in a vehicle. They usually aimed for the driver-side window to kill the driver and roll the vehicle, or targeted the front passenger seat where the officers usually sat.
These EFPs first appeared in Lebanon in the late 1990s, employed by Hezbollah against Israeli armored vehicles. Building them required precise manufacturing tools, which did not exist in Iraq but did in Iran, especially at an ammunition plant in northeastern Tehran in an area controlled by the Revolutionary Guard.
In July 2004, Quds Force officers met in a safe house in Basra with Mustafa al-Sheibani. Iran brought Lebanese Hezbollah trainers into both Iraq and Iran to teach al-Sheibani’s men on the use and assembly of the EFPs, which would be manufactured in Iran from explosives produced at a plant in Esfahan, with other parts manufactured in the factory in Tehran. They agreed to ship the EFP components across the border disguised as food products, and with the aid of a Hezbollah agent, who provided the infrared triggers, they would be reassembled in Iraq. In the first nine months of 2005, this group alone conducted thirty-five EFP attacks against coalition forces in Iraq, killing seventeen soldiers and wounding thirty-six more. The EFPs proved especially lethal. Each attack left an average of two dead.
Iran expanded its distribution of EFPs. In May 2005, a Quds Force lieutenant colonel arrived in Basra to provide money and EFPs to several insurgent groups. In May, he met in al-Kut and paid one Shia leader 1.5 million Iraqi dinars to attack U.S. forces. The Iranians developed elaborate smuggling routes to get the EFPs into Iraq. One of the main routes was at a large border crossing near the Iranian city of Mehran, where Suleimani had his headquarters. The Iranian Quds Force built the EFP components in a clandestine lab, smuggling them across every month to Revolutionary Guard safe houses in An Numaniyah and Basra hidden in oil drums, cement bags, television sets, and food containers. There they could be reassembled by Iraqi insurgents. A U.S. intelligence report in the fall of 2006 noted that EFPs inflicted coalition casualties at a rate nearly six times higher than those inflicted by standard IEDs.
Iranian supporters in the army and police force aided the effort. For example, in late 2006 the former Badr Corps members in the security forces drove a truckload of EFPs to Baghdad, having been transported across the Iranian border and through Basra. They stored them in safe houses around the city and even in a Baghdad police station. Ever the entrepreneurs, some of these Shia sold the EFPs to their Sunni rivals, making handsome profits on this side business. When the U.S. military uncovered the network, analysts surmised that there may have been ninety EFPs prestaged in Baghdad.
Al-Sadr supporters traveled to Iran from Sadr City to receive training on the new EFP technology. Iran and the Jaysh al-Mahdi built a solid working relationship with both EFPs and weapons and explosives smuggled in from Syria on refrigerated trucks. As one American report noted: “The use of JAM [Jaysh al-Mahdi] operatives affords Iran plausible deniability as it continues to expand its influence in Shia populated areas of Iran.” On January 16 and 18, 2006, Jaysh al-Mahdi fighters ambushed two British waterborne patrols on the Shatt al-Arab with antipersonnel mines and small-arms fire. They then shelled British positions with 240-mm rockets—some of the largest in the Iranian inventory.
Iran adopted a similar strategy to that used with Hezbollah in the early 1980s—provide training and equipment, but do not actually participate in attacks. While the more basic military training could be accomplished in Iraq, more advanced training designed to train the trainers—as the U.S. Special Forces described it—required traveling to Iran. Captured documents and Iraqi prisoners exposed an organized transportation network where buses and taxis took the select recruits and experienced militia members to the border. There, as one Iraqi described it, they were picked up in a variety of civilian vehicles and taken to safe houses in Mehran, being provided chocolate and biscuits along the way. After breakfast the next morning, the group headed to an airport, where tickets awaited them for a flight to Tehran.11 The Lebanese group formed the new Unit 3800 to help the Iranians run their training camps.12 At its height in 2008, it had between forty and sixty Lebanese running regular classes on EFPs and small-unit tactics in four small training camps scattered about Iran: in Tehran, Ahvaz, Elam, and Qom.
The United States was slow to address the Iranian EFP threat. Initially, so many intelligence personnel were tied up in the Iraqi Survey Group hunting for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that they lacked the people to devote to Iranian weapons smuggling.13 The U.S. forces in Iraq had their first breakthrough in unraveling the Iranian network in December 2004, when an Iraqi walked into one of the bases and provided details of the training he’d received in Iran and how the Quds Force smuggled the EFPs into Iraq. As the months passed, more information poured in and U.S. intelligence refined its knowledge of the Iranian hand behind the attacks. U.S. intelligence even identified two border crossings that the Iranians were using to smuggle in the lethal weapons.
When in 2005 Iran’s hand behind the attacks became obvious, a debate ensued inside the Pentagon over whether the supreme leader had sanctioned the attacks or if they were being carried out by rogue elements within the Revolutionary Guard. In the aftermath of the intelligence failure on Iraq, relations soured between the civilians in the Defense Department and senior intelligence officials. A deep mistrust developed, with intelligence officials concerned that the neocons now wanted to start another war, using Iranian support for the Shia as a pretext. Intelligence officers downplayed the Iranian actions despite overwhelming evidence of Iran’s government sanctioning the proxy war. In one meeting at the Pentagon in early 2005, a heated argument occurred after an intelligence analyst took pride in speaking “truth to power” by telling an incredulous civilian political appointee that the DIA had no proof that the Iranian government had sanctioned the attacks on the coalition forces.
The chairman, Peter Pace, agreed with the DIA analysis and offered a tepid response to the increase in Iranian-provided EFPs. In April 2005, he publicly said that the United States could not trace the EFP attacks to Iran. It was not true, but reflected, according to Abe Shulsky, the uncertainty at the Pentagon. Pace clung to this belief even as evidence mounted to Iran’s involvement. In February 2007, he modified his views that while the EFPs came from Iran, there was no evidence that the supreme leader had authorized the attacks.14
Abe Shulsky completely rejected this view. On one occasion, he discussed the Iranian arms influx with a senior DIA analyst who echoed Pace, saying, “We don’t have any evidence that the supreme leader is behind the attacks.”
“What is it about this dog that doesn’t bark?” Shulsky retorted, dumbfounded. “Are you telling me that these guys are out taking very risky operations with serious consequences and the supreme leader does not know about it? They work for him!”
When Pace uttered the words in 2007, the prevailing view within the intelligence community accorded with Shulsky’s. Even senior analysts who distrusted the neocons found it incredible that the Quds Force would have orchestrated such a large campaign against the United States without the supreme leader’s endorsement. But as more Americans died and the intelligence reports pointing to Iran piled up, the military leadership at the Pentagon remained lethargic. In one memo, a senior general in the Pentagon approved the convoluted logic that the Iranians were not making as much mischief as they could, so why stir things up by striking back, which might lead to a violent escalation. As long as Iran kept its support to a low level, some senior officers wanted to look the other way.
In early 2006, pro-Iranian militias ramped up their attacks. In February, army intelligence uncovered plans for a large-scale attack on an American base, Camp Bucca. Three Iranian Quds Force officers conducted surveillance of the base and met with Jaysh al-Mahdi fighters to plan the attack. W
ith heavy weapons smuggled in from Iran just for the occasion, 120 Shia fighters would conduct a coordinated attack on the U.S. base. It would have been a major attack had it been executed. Additionally, Iran sent pallets of mortars and other munitions to Shia fighters. In March 2006 alone, U.S. forces estimated that Iran shipped 216 EFPs, half the number provided in all of 2005. Casualties correspondingly increased. In the first six months of 2006, sixty-seven soldiers died due to Iranian-supplied EFPs.
While the Joint Chiefs dawdled, pressure came from the military and civilian leaders in Iraq to do something about the Iranians. Leaks began appearing in American newspapers from officers in Iraq pointing to the growing danger of the EFP threat. The senior commander in Iraq, George Casey, and CENTCOM commander John Abizaid both raised this issue with Pace and Secretary Rumsfeld. The CENTCOM intelligence section in Tampa issued numerous reports about the growing influence of Iran among the Shia and about Quds Force operatives crossing the border.
Abizaid wanted to pressure the Iranians, but Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki always had a “red card that held sway. You could go after the Sunnis and al-Qaeda, but when it came to the Shia and the Iranians, the Iraqi government was much more reluctant, and Washington echoed that reluctance,” he said.
On May 8, 2006, Abizaid sent Rumsfeld a three-page memo outlining his concerns about Iran. “Mr. Secretary, Iran, specifically the Islamic Guard Corps–Quds Force, is providing lethal support to Shia militants conducting attacks against coalition forces in Iraq. While there is no evidence Quds Force provides specific targeting guidance, I believe Iran is fully aware of EFP use against coalition targets.” Abizaid proposed that a strongly worded démarche be sent to Iran, putting Tehran on notice that the United States would take action if these attacks did not cease. Alarmed, Rumsfeld forwarded Abizaid’s letter and a draft démarche to Hadley and Rice.
