by Jay Solomon
“There are two futures. One future will be greater conflict, greater tension, greater mistrust—basically, more of the same as we had in the past. But more of the same may not be easily manageable,” Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told The New Yorker as the diplomacy with the United States gained momentum in 2014. “And it may even get worse, and more dangerous. So that’s one option, which I hope will not be before us.”
CHAPTER 2
The Missed Chance
In the weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the people of Iran expressed more sympathy for the United States and American victims than did the citizens of any other Middle East or Muslim county. Iranians held candlelight vigils at universities and public squares to honor the dead. President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist cleric, restated his call for a “dialogue among civilizations.” Ayatollahs from the holy city of Qom decried the attacks on the United States as a corruption of Islam.
Even Supreme Leader Khamenei voiced alarm about the global terrorist threat, though in a speech that managed to counter empathy with blame. “In the final analysis, we doubt the sincerity of the American government’s intention to combat terrorism,” the ayatollah said in a speech on September 27, which directly focused on the attacks on New York and Washington. “It is insincere, and does not tell the truth. It has other aims.”
The cleric’s tone was revealing, betraying both his deep-seated anti-American feelings and his long-standing enmity to radical Sunni groups such as al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which sheltered al Qaeda there. He accused Washington of helping to create them by arming and funding the Afghan militants who fought and expelled the Soviet Union in the 1980s, essentially inviting an attack on the United States itself. Osama bin Laden was among those in the Pakistan-based insurgency that the United States indirectly supported. Though he despised the Sunni extremists, Khamenei discounted the possibility that Iran would formally ally with Washington in a battle against al Qaeda. “Everybody should know that Iran, the Islamic Republic, will not participate in any movement that is led by America,” he told a national audience.
Tehran had been a strident enemy of the Taliban government that had taken power in Kabul following the 1996 end of the Afghan civil war. Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda movement, meanwhile, viewed Iran’s predominantly Shiite faith as a sacrilege that corrupted the world’s Muslim faithful. It’s a belief held by a surprising number of Sunnis and spread by clerics in Persian Gulf countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Some al Qaeda leaders categorized Shiite Muslims as even lower than Jews, for skewing the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. The Taliban, upon coming to power, treated Afghanistan’s Shiite minority, known as the Hazara, as second-class citizens.
The schism between Sunni and Shiite is a profound feature of the Middle East’s conflicts and traces back more than a thousand years to the death of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in AD 632. The two sects believed power should have been passed along different familial lines: the Sunnis arguing that Muhammad’s father-in-law, Abu Bakr, was the new caliph, or leader of the Islamic world, while the Shiites backed Muhammad’s son-in-law, Imam Ali. This battle between the two branches of Islam continues to this day, as Shiite-dominant Iran competes with the leading Sunni states, particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf’s oil-rich monarchies, for the hearts and minds of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
In Afghanistan, enmity between Iran and the Taliban grew so pronounced that the two nations nearly went to war in 1998. During a military offensive on the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif that year, the Taliban laid siege to Iran’s consulate and killed nearly a dozen Iranian “diplomats” who were stationed there. Many of these men were members of Iran’s elite military unit, the Revolutionary Guard. The Taliban was reported to have rounded up and summarily executed hundreds of Hazaras living in the ancient city during the siege. This was an affront to Iran’s theocratic rulers, who view it as their mission to protect the world’s Shiites. Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei, responded by ordering his military to mass seventy thousand troops on Iran’s nearly six-hundred-mile border with Afghanistan. Many countries in the region believed this was the buildup to an invasion. Although tensions eventually subsided after the United Nations intervened to mediate the dispute, the conflict would lead Tehran to become one of the most active supporters of the Northern Alliance, the rebel movement that sprang up in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. Some of its commanders said they might not have survived during that time without Tehran’s largesse.
The months after 9/11 were a period of growing optimism that America’s feud with Iran could be extinguished, or at least placed on hold. “A huge opportunity appeared after 9/11 for the U.S. and Iran to cooperate against al Qaeda and the Taliban,” said Hossein Mousavian, an Iranian diplomat and academic who served as a member of Tehran’s most important strategic body, the Supreme National Security Council, in the months after the al Qaeda attack. “It [the threat] made clear that Tehran and Washington, despite all of the acrimony, actually shared many vital interests,” such as combating Sunni extremism.
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ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE al Qaeda attacks, President Bush ordered the CIA to insert a small team of operatives, code-named “Jawbreaker,” into Afghanistan. Jawbreaker’s mission was to link up with the insurgent Northern Alliance, headquartered in the Panjshir Valley, and to plan a joint military operation against the Taliban. The six-man team was specifically tasked with mapping out the battlefield in Afghanistan and guiding U.S. allies in the fight there.
Located just forty-five miles northeast of Kabul at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountain range, the Panjshir Valley links the capital to northern Afghanistan and Central Asia. Foreign forces have used the Panjshir to insert their armies into Afghanistan dating back to the time of Alexander the Great. It had been a rebel stronghold for the mujahedeen fighters who had successfully driven the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Its minerals, including diamonds and emeralds, have lured outsiders for centuries. And it was where the Jawbreaker team came face-to-face with the Qods Force, Iran’s most feared military organization.
Tehran’s theocratic rulers established the Qods Force in 1990 as the overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guard, and charged it with exporting Iran’s Islamic revolution to bordering countries and other Muslim lands. Qods commanders instigated instability in a range of Muslim countries across the Middle East by arming and training proxy groups, either to undermine strategic rivals such as Saudi Arabia and Israel or to promote the cause of fellow Shiites.
Revolutionary Guard operatives in the early 1980s created the Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah as a powerful military threat to Israel on its northern border. The Qods Force also serves as a major supplier of arms to the Syrian army and the Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Closer to Iran’s borders, the Qods Force supported the Shiite ethnic group in Yemen, called the Houthis, in their fight against the government in San’a, and has for decades backed Iraqi Shiite militias. U.S. officials believe the Qods Force is one of Iran’s most powerful organizations, combining an intelligence and paramilitary arm with diplomatic and economic responsibilities. It’s a CIA, Pentagon, and State Department all rolled into one.
A tough-talking southerner named Henry “Hank” Crumpton headed the Jawbreaker team from the CIA’s offices in Langley, where he oversaw the covert operations of the Agency’s recently created Counterterrorism Center. Two of the CIA’s most experienced overseas operatives, Gary Schroen and Gary Berntsen, were stationed on the ground, with Crumpton monitoring from Virginia. Each man had experience dealing with both the Afghans and the Qods Force and Iranian intelligence. Schroen had tracked the Iranian movement of arms and cash into the Balkans in the 1990s in their bid to bolster Muslim communities in Bosnia and Kosovo. Berntsen helped U.S. allies in Arab countries fend off efforts by the Qods Force to destabilize their political sy
stems and incite their Shiite populations. Crumpton had been based in Africa, where Hezbollah was active among the expatriate Lebanese Shiite populations there.
Jawbreaker’s mission was complicated by the fact that the ally they sought, the Northern Alliance, was partially a creation of the Qods Force itself. Throughout the late 1990s, as the Taliban gathered strength in the Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan, Tehran had transferred weapons, funds, and trainers to the Northern Alliance. Although militias from Afghanistan’s minority Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara populations dominated the rebels’ ranks, it was India and Russia, two countries that also feared the rise of a radical Sunni movement in their region, that joined Iran in backing the Northern Alliance. The Iranians, as well as the Russians and the Indians, hoped their Afghan ally could serve as a bulwark against the Taliban spreading their radical ideology outside Afghanistan’s borders.
Among the United States’ principal interlocutors in the Northern Alliance prior to 9/11 was its commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik. The French-educated soldier had been an on-and-off ally of the CIA during the 1980s and served as defense minister in Kabul after Afghanistan’s civil war briefly ended in the early 1990s. Massoud returned to his life as a rebel after the Taliban took power in 1996. He was a fierce opponent of the movement’s radical interpretation of Islam and its repressive stance toward Afghanistan’s minorities, though he himself was a conservative Muslim. The Iranians and the Americans both saw Massoud as the one Afghan who could unite the country’s feuding warlords and clans against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Tehran particularly felt an affinity for the commander, as Iran shares strong linguistic and cultural ties to Tajikistan and its ethnic community. The CIA even inserted its officers into Afghanistan to support Massoud’s men in their fight against Taliban and al Qaeda militias prior to the 9/11 attacks. The Agency’s Counterterrorism Center established limited ties with the Northern Alliance in an unsuccessful effort to prevent such a major terrorist strike from happening.
Tehran, Moscow, and New Delhi, as well as the Americans, all sought to push back the tide of Sunni fundamentalism that was spreading across Central and South Asia. Their rivals were the Taliban’s financiers and arms suppliers: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf states, such as the United Arab Emirates. Washington was uncomfortably stuck in the middle: allied with the Saudis, but increasingly concerned about the Afghanistan-based activities of one of the Saudi kingdom’s most famous sons, bin Laden, who had found safe haven there. The Qods Force, meanwhile, with its experience in funding and training proxy armies, helped strengthen the Northern Alliance with arms and monies. By building a compliant ally from within Afghanistan, as Iran had done in Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories with Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran’s ayatollahs and generals sought above all to entrench their influence in the wider Mideast and reconstitute, in some ways, the vanished power of the Persian Empire.
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AS CRUMPTON’S TEAM MADE contacts in the Panjshir Valley in late September, the CIA was immediately caught in a shadowy game for influence with Iran’s spy agencies. The Americans on the ground didn’t trust the Iranians. Many inside the CIA held a deep disdain for the Revolutionary Guard and their proxies, particularly Hezbollah, dating back to Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s. Gary Berntsen began his career at the Agency the same week, U.S. officials believe, Tehran ordered Hezbollah to blow up the American embassy in Beirut in 1983. The attack killed nine of the Agency’s top Middle East hands, including the legendary spy Robert Ames. “My first day at the CIA was the day the bomb went off in Beirut,” Berntsen said. “We really, really hated these people.”
Crumpton, Berntsen, and other Agency staff were fully aware of the presence of Qods Force agents intermixed among the Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara fighters who constituted the Northern Alliance. But Jawbreaker was instructed to steer clear of any dealings with the Iranians. This placed the Afghans in the middle of two rival camps as they geared up to confront the Taliban.
“I told the Afghans: ‘You need to deliver a message to the IRGC. If they approach, or appear anywhere near the battlefield, we will view them as hostile,’ ” Crumpton said in an interview after he retired from the Agency in 2005. “We knew the Iranians were scared shitless of us.” Crumpton claimed the Revolutionary Guard dreaded any direct confrontation with the United States.
Berntsen said he was even more blunt. He penned a letter to the Iranians operating in Afghanistan and asked a Northern Alliance intermediary to deliver it. The New York–born Berntsen, now fifty-eight, declared in his missive that he would kill any Revolutionary Guard he confronted on the battlefield. “[This] horrified the Afghans,” he said. They didn’t want to get caught in the middle of a geopolitical feud.
The Northern Alliance’s leaders made no secret of the fact that the IRGC kept a liaison office in the Panjshir to help coordinate training and battlefield tactics. While wary of the IRGC’s actions, the CIA came to see this as an asset and a means to monitor the activities of the secretive Iranians. U.S. intelligence officials had struggled mightily to gain useful or accurate information on Iran, whether on its nuclear program or on its military activities across the Middle East. “This was a good thing for us,” Crumpton said. “We had information on Iran through our Afghan friends.”
In the early weeks of the Jawbreaker operation in late 2001, the Afghans took to trying to separate the operations of their two benefactors: the CIA and the IRGC. The Northern Alliance was intimately aware of the tensions between the two spy agencies, but Afghanistan’s long history was riddled with short-lived military alliances and examples of Western powers quickly tiring of the savage fighting in the country. It was beneficial for the Northern Alliance to keep both Washington and Tehran close for as long as possible.
Gary Schroen traveled to the battlefront just a few days after landing in late 2001 to map out the Taliban positions so Pentagon warplanes could target them. The Northern Alliance’s military commander, General Mohammed Fahim, accompanied the American to the war zone. The Tajik officer instructed Schroen and the CIA to keep a very low profile as they neared the front. “It turned out that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had a two-man observer team assigned with the [Northern Alliance] forces on the Kabul front,” Schroen wrote in his account of the Jawbreaker mission. “Fahim was anxious that the Iranians not discover the presence of U.S. personnel, at least not this early in the deployment.”
At the time, Tehran conveyed messages to Washington signaling Iran’s willingness to cooperate in the war effort—though they were greeted with skepticism by the Bush administration. The Iranians said they would help any American fighter pilots shot down near or in Iranian territory. Tehran indicated supply routes that could be opened up through Iran’s borders to bring arms and food to the front. And some American officials said the Iranians had even suggested intelligence sharing, though Crumpton said this never occurred.
The CIA worked to set up a coherent leadership structure within the Northern Alliance from their base in Afghanistan’s north as the war against the Taliban gathered pace. The Taliban and the Pashtun tribes dominated the south. The Agency would have banked on its relationship with Ahmad Shah Massoud to serve as the glue to pull together the rebel factions in the fight. But just two days before the 9/11 strikes on Washington and New York, a pair of al Qaeda assassins killed Massoud at his headquarters in the Panjshir. The operatives posed as journalists and carried a letter forged by Osama bin Laden’s deputy vouching for their credentials. The two men detonated an explosives-laden camera and battery pack recorder when Massoud sat down for the interview; Massoud died just hours later. Al Qaeda viewed it as a critical blow to its Afghan rival. “Massoud was a gentleman,” Berntsen said. “He was a smart political operator, and knew how to work the media. Al Qaeda used that against him.”
Massoud’s deputy, General Fahim, took power after 9/11, and the Northern Alliance was able to pull together many of the same warlords and militia leaders the United
States had armed and funded during the 1980s. Among them were Abdul Rashid Dostum, the head of Afghanistan’s Uzbek community, and Ismail Khan, a Shiite warlord who controlled the western Afghan city of Herat, the principal trade bridge between Iran and Afghanistan. After the Taliban’s fall, Herat would be electrified through a grid on the Iranian side of the border, a cogent symbol of Tehran’s influence in the region.
The U.S. and British militaries stepped up their air strikes on Taliban positions through October and November 2001. And on November 13, the Northern Alliance pushed into Kabul, finding the city largely deserted. The Taliban’s leadership fled to the southern city of Kandahar, its traditional base. And al Qaeda’s leadership crossed the mountainous Afghan border into a sanctuary in Pakistan.
After the capture of Kabul, officials at the White House, CIA, State Department, and Pentagon remained divided over whether Iran and its Revolutionary Guard were a help or a hindrance to the allied war effort. Crumpton and Berntsen said the Qods Force’s men largely disappeared after receiving the Americans’ threats and neither helped nor hindered their operations against the Taliban. “The only reason they even pretended to help was that they were scared out of their minds,” Crumpton said.
Others in the Agency, however, believed the Bush administration piggybacked on the groundwork the IRGC did in creating the Northern Alliance after the United States abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War. These American officials believed the United States never properly acknowledged the work Tehran did against the Taliban. “The Iranians had given much more lethal assistance to the Northern Alliance than we ever did,” said a former CIA officer who worked in Afghanistan after 9/11 and viewed Pakistan as a bigger threat to the United States than Iran because of the Pakistanis’ support for the Taliban. “We were just giving [the Northern Alliance] a hug and maybe some cash.”
