by Jay Solomon
Iran, for its part, unleashed its militias and its elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, against American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing hundreds of U.S. soldiers through the deployment of sophisticated munitions on those battlefields. Tehran intensified support for its military proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen in a broader bid to challenge the influence of the United States and its allies. Iran also honed its own cyber skills, targeting the computer systems of American banks, oil companies, and government offices, including those controlling critical infrastructure such as dams.
Who won the decade-long feud is up for debate, but certain facts are not. Iran was severely crippled by years of extreme sanctions when it first seriously approached the negotiating table. Iran’s leaders, emboldened by the nuclear agreement, have not softened their stance toward the United States—the “Great Satan”—even if the deal amounts to a momentary truce.
The cost to the United States was substantial. The Obama White House needed to cut diplomatic deals with Russia and China to gain their support for increasing sanctions on Tehran. The White House’s decision to secretly engage in direct talks with Iran in 2012 significantly hurt its relations with the United States’ allies in the Mideast—Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the other Persian Gulf states—who view Tehran as a direct threat to their national security. These countries would increasingly follow foreign policies more independent of Washington’s and generate even more instability in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar armed and funded Islamist militias in Syria precisely as a means to challenge Tehran and its Shiite allies, giving rise to the Islamic State terrorist organization.
The Obama administration also touted the Iran deal as a tool to loosen Iran’s notoriously oppressive regime. U.S. officials hope the lifting of sanctions and Tehran’s increased economic engagement with the West will help to open up Iranian society. Supreme Leader Khamenei and other revolutionaries are aging and are expected to exit the scene over time, opening the door, the United States hopes, for leadership more in sync with Iran’s youthful and significantly pro-American population.
In attempting to fix one problem, hoping it would solve many others, the administration appeared blind to new threats mounting in the Middle East. Some U.S. officials believed that the White House’s obsession with the Iran deal handcuffed the administration, preventing it from acting decisively in Syria. President Obama warned he would use military force to end the civil war in Syria but then repeatedly backed down. This hesitancy came with a cost: hundreds of thousands of civilians died in Syria, and the conflict fueled the rise of Sunni extremist groups such as the Islamic State. Because Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was Iran’s closest Arab ally, “there was definitely a fear that strikes in Syria could alienate the Iranians and make them walk away from diplomacy,” said Fred Hof, who oversaw Syria policy in the State Department during Obama’s first term.
Contrary to American hopes, Khamenei dug in, reaffirming his country’s anti-West position, regardless of the White House’s actions. “Whether the deal is approved or disapproved, we will never stop supporting our friends in the region and the people of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon,” Khamenei said in a speech marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, just days after the negotiations in Vienna concluded. “Even after this deal, our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change. We don’t have any negotiations or deal with the U.S. on different issues in the world or the region.”
Obama has wagered that Khamenei and his revolutionary allies won’t outlast the terms of the nuclear agreement. If they do, the United States risks unleashing an even larger nuclear cascade on the Middle East. “The White House bet the farm on reaching an accommodation with the Iranians,” said a senior Israeli official who regularly discussed Iran with U.S. officials. “But they never truly seemed to understand who they were dealing with.”
CHAPTER 1
The Persian Domino
In the northern hills of Tehran lies a tribute to the Islamic Republic’s war dead. The Holy Defense Museum is a multimillion-dollar facility founded in 2004 that chronicles the violent campaign Iran’s Islamist leaders have waged in their region, beginning with the 1979 Islamic revolution. While memorializing the fallen, the monument also looks to Iran’s future goals, documenting Tehran’s obsession with establishing a new world order based on Islamic principles and its opposition to the United States, Zionism, and Western values as a whole.
At the front of the facility, trash cans wrapped in Israeli flags and human skulls line a walkway. Tanks captured during Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq are on display. Exhibits herald the republic’s growing military might, with replicas of Iran’s long-range Shahab missiles pointed to the sky and fighter aircraft that appear poised for takeoff.
Starting with the museum’s main hall, a guide takes visitors through the chaotic final days of the revolution and the overthrow of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. One exhibit tracks the day-by-day story of the Iranian students who held fifty-two American diplomats hostage for 444 days at the U.S. embassy. Galleries vividly recount the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who died fighting Saddam Hussein’s forces during the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War. Three-dimensional holographs of Iran’s martyrs eerily stare down visitors as they pass by. It’s an illustration, says the guide, that the fallen continue to watch and protect the living.
The Holy Defense Museum is a monument to Iranian nationalism, the Islamic revolution, and the country’s historic role as the self-declared greatest historical power in the Middle East. Maps of the original Persian Empire show neighboring countries, such as Bahrain and Azerbaijan, as they are meant to be in the eyes of Tehran—under Iran’s writ. The Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, is honored as one of the world’s greatest theologians. His successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seen in photographs and videos, preaches the ideals of the revolution to supplicants and world leaders.
Beneath this patriotism, however, the visitor confronts the repeated mantra that Iran has been wronged and persecuted throughout its history, particularly by its Arab neighbors in collusion with the West. A section dedicated to Saddam Hussein characterizes the Iraqi leader as the tyrannical face of the Arabs who were committed to destroying Iran’s revolution from its earliest days. A photo of Saddam in his olive-green fatigues shaking hands with former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 1983 is a reminder of their collaboration, the guide says. (During the height of the Iran-Iraq War the Reagan administration supplied intelligence to Baghdad that Saddam then used to launch chemical weapons attacks against Iranian targets.)
“How could you have worked with Saddam?” a guide named Mehdi asks me, an American, as we stare up at a photograph of the Iraqi dictator. The picture has been altered so that half his face is bathed in a satanic red. “You then had to fight him yourselves!”
Outside, on a concrete strip overlooking Tehran, sits the most chilling exhibit, the ghostly remains of four sedans once owned by Iranian nuclear scientists who were blown up or shot by hooded assassins. The cars are wrapped in white shrouds with red dye seeping through the fabric. Red tulips, an Iranian symbol of martyrs, stick out through the windows. Photos of the scientists peer out at visitors.
Massoud Alimohammadi was murdered when a remote-controlled bomb detonated near his car on January 12, 2010, in Tehran. The fifty-one-year-old, according to the gold-plated plaque displayed near his photo and car, was working as a university professor when agents from Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, killed him. The scientist was devout and never took actions in life “without deep understanding and complete study,” reads the inscription.
Darioush Rezaienejad was shot six times in his car in 2011 by two alleged Mossad assassins, says the plaque. The thirty-four-year-old was a research director in nuclear physics at a Tehran university who was clever and kind and who respected his parents. He died “i
n the presence of his wife and little daughter.”
Here, Iran’s defiance against its enemies through its commitment to its nuclear program is on full display. The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, a U.S.-educated scientist named Ali Akbar Salehi, inaugurated the grisly exhibit when it opened in 2012. A former foreign minister, Salehi was seen as a relative moderate in Iran’s theocratic system by American and European diplomats. But the scientist’s words underscored his commitment to Iran’s revolution and global struggle. “The memorial to the innocent nuclear martyrs is an image of honorable victors and chivalric offspring of science and technology…against the cruelty of global arrogance headed by the U.S. and Zionism,” he said.
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THE DIPLOMACY BARACK OBAMA and John Kerry were pursuing in 2013 was challenged not just by Iran and words such as Salehi’s, and not just by opposition from U.S. allies including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, but by history itself. Thirty-five years of frozen relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution have created a generation of Americans and Iranians who have known only conflict. In that time, the bureaucracies in both countries have become entrenched and invested in containing the other side.
The Iranian revolution in 1979 altered U.S. foreign policy in a way that few other events in our time have. Gone almost overnight was the shah, Washington’s closest Mideast ally outside Israel, who helped safeguard the nearly 40 percent of the world’s oil supply that moved through the Persian Gulf. In his place emerged a theocratic government that was fundamentally opposed to Western capitalism, democracy, and foreign policy and was committed by its ideology to fomenting revolutions in Muslim countries across the Middle East as well as Central and South Asia. There were parallels in the Iranian threat to that posed by Soviet communism. Both relied on heavy promotion and investment in a radical ideology and support for militant proxies internationally.
U.S. animosity toward Iran was seared into the American collective conscious from the early days of the revolution because of the attacks on American military advisors and the capture of the U.S. hostages. The embassy seizure in Tehran is widely viewed as having put an end to President Jimmy Carter’s reelection hopes in 1980. And it fed into a sense of despondency and hopelessness in the United States following the Vietnam War—a time also marked by economic malaise, sky-high oil prices, and the Soviet Union’s territorial advances.
The Iranian regime is driven by an Islamist ideology that sees the United States as its principal rival for dominance in the Middle East. Furthermore, while a president is elected every four years in Tehran, the country’s power rests almost solely in the hands of its supreme leader. This cleric directly controls the country’s most powerful military force, the Revolutionary Guard, and oversees clerical bodies that manage the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. The president may be the public face of the regime, but that’s about it.
During the shah’s rule, the United States built Iran into its staunchest ally in the Persian Gulf and a policeman of the region’s oil traffic. Washington sent billions of dollars in arms to the Iranian monarchy and showered the country with U.S. loans and development experts from American universities, the State Department, and the World Bank. President Obama’s closest political advisor, Valerie Jarrett, lived in Iran in the 1950s when her father ran a children’s hospital in the city of Shiraz. The United States, ironically, lent support to a nuclear program the shah pursued in partnership with the German conglomerate Siemens AG. The ruler touted the economic benefits of nuclear power, though he also hinted at its military application. Tehran’s Islamist government inherited the nuclear sites, but it appeared initially uncertain about using them.
The shah’s demise immediately placed the world’s oil supply in jeopardy and resulted in a clerical regime overtly hostile to the United States and its allies. The capture of the American hostages traumatized the American public, and Tehran moved quickly to attempt to spread its revolution into Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, and the wider Mideast region, though with only limited success. It also sent military advisors to support Palestinian and Lebanese militias fighting Israel.
Out of the public eye, the covert war brewing between the United States and Iran was even more pronounced and extensive than most Americans understood or realized in the 1980s and 1990s. From the ashes of the shah’s despotic state, Ayatollah Khomeini created an ideologically driven military command, called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), that was wholly focused on maintaining the religious purity of the new Islamic state. The IRGC, in turn, formed an overseas military and intelligence unit, called the Qods Force, which was tasked with exporting the Islamic revolution and aiding Tehran’s allies in the Middle East. Qods is the Arabic name for Jerusalem, symbolizing the Iranian leadership’s commitment to taking back the holy city from Israel for Muslims worldwide. The shah, by contrast, had been one of the Jewish state’s only military allies in the region.
Just three years after the shah’s fall, the IRGC also oversaw the creation of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, or the “Party of God,” which in the 1980s conducted a string of kidnappings and suicide bombings targeting American diplomats, military officers, and academics based in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s largest attacks were the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the attack on the Marine Corps barracks there the same year. The strikes killed more than three hundred Americans—the largest terrorist attacks against U.S. interests before 9/11.
For American security strategists, the Revolutionary Guard and their allies presented an unprecedented security challenge because of their ability to mix radical ideology, military training, and guerilla warfare tactics to threaten U.S. interests. Hezbollah’s use of suicide bombers in Beirut in the early 1980s was among the first times the United States faced a contemporary foe willing to sacrifice its own people to inflict such wide-scale damage. Hezbollah commanders would go on to train al Qaeda in bombing tactics, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
Iran, Hezbollah, and their allies fined-tuned their intelligence capabilities and focused on U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East. The 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut occurred on a day when, as the Revolutionary Guard’s and Hezbollah’s informants had learned beforehand, more than a half dozen of the CIA’s Mideast officers were assembled in the American diplomatic compound there for a liaison meeting. Eight CIA personnel died, including the Agency’s top Middle East analyst and Near East director, Robert Ames, and station chief Kenneth Haas.
This successful attack marked the beginning of a blood feud between the CIA and the IRGC, which continues today. Indeed, some of the staunchest critics of the nuclear negotiations have been American military and intelligence officers. Former American and Mideast officials argue the United States has not done nearly enough to punish Iran for the attacks in Lebanon. Some in the Reagan administration called for the bombing of Tehran after the attack on the Marine Corps barracks, though no such retaliation occurred. Iran was emboldened, they argue, by the lack of reprisal.
“You both respect them, but also realize that the Iranians will go to almost any end to inflict damage,” said Bill Murray, a former CIA operative who was based in both Tehran and Beirut. “You waver on whether they’re rational players or not.”
This profound lack of clarity about Iran’s intentions, Tehran’s decision-making process, and its willingness to take big military risks vexed the United States’ attempts to calculate the regime’s future actions. Did Iran really want to strike Israel, as its leaders claimed? Would they be willing to form some sort of accommodation with the West? Would business and economic engagement temper the Iranian leaders’ revolutionary zeal? The United States just didn’t know.
Operations by the Qods Force and Hezbollah in Lebanon were followed in the 1990s by equally spectacular global strikes on U.S. and Israeli targets. In 1994, Iran’s government employed Hezbollah suicide bombers to blow up the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killi
ng more than 150 Jewish Argentines. Two years later, Iranian-controlled terrorists in Saudi Arabia blew up the United States’ Khobar Towers military compound in Dhahran, killing 19 Americans and injuring 271.
Iran’s belligerence has inspired a schizophrenic U.S. strategy toward Tehran over the past thirty-five years. It has alternated between seeking to woo the regime and trying to overthrow it. Following the onset of the 1980–88 war between Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Reagan administration vacillated about which side to support. The United States supplied intelligence and advanced weaponry to Saddam’s military in an effort to weaken Tehran in the years immediately after the revolution and the hostage crisis. But by the mid-1980s, the White House, with the aid of Israel, concocted a plan to ship missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held in Lebanon. Some officials in Israel and Washington also hoped the deal could support what were believed to be moderate leaders in Iran’s revolutionary government by showing the West’s goodwill. The scheme became known as the Iran-Contra scandal and nearly led to the impeachment of President Reagan. Some involved in the scandal said the United States never identified any moderate Iranian leaders to begin with.
In the months before President George W. Bush’s 2000 election, a little-known Middle East strategist named David Wurmser wrote a treatise for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative Washington think tank. It presaged the U.S. obsession over the coming decade with isolating, weakening, and overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Wurmser’s work, Tyranny’s Ally, championed the cause of toppling the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. But the scholar didn’t make his case based solely on Baghdad’s alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons or its ties to international terrorism. Rather, Wurmser argued, Saddam’s fall would drastically remake the Mideast’s political and religious map and eventually lead to the removal of a much greater threat to the United States, Israel, and the West—Iran’s theocratic government. Iraq had the world’s largest Arab Shiite population and was home to ayatollahs and other religious leaders who directly challenged Tehran’s theocratic system and Supreme Leader Khamenei’s claim to speak for the world’s Shiites. They were suppressed, however, by Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Baathist regime. His fall, Wurmser argued, would free Iraqis to challenge the Iranian state.
