by Jay Solomon
In fact, Khamenei and the IRGC initially supported the U.S. mission to topple the Taliban, according to Iranian officials. The Supreme National Security Council allegedly gave the green light. Even the commander of the Qods Force, the powerful Major General Qasem Soleimani, joined in. The officer controlled all of the Iranians’ paramilitary and intelligence operations in Afghanistan. He vocally supported the idea of cooperating with the United States in the months after 9/11, according to the Iranians. “Qasem is a very pragmatic commander. He’s willing to cooperate with the West if it serves Iran’s interest,” said Hossein Mousavian, the former member of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who said he attended the meeting.
By November 2001, Jawbreaker, in cooperation with the Pentagon, succeeded in driving the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Kabul to sanctuaries along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It was a win for Iran as well.
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AS THE TALIBAN’S GOVERNMENT fell in November 2001, the Bush administration accelerated its efforts to put a new Afghan government in place. The White House and the Pentagon initially argued in late 2001 that they didn’t foresee a long-term American military presence in the impoverished country, or a substantial exercise in nation-building. Instead, American diplomats were instructed to quickly cobble together an interim government made up of the Northern Alliance and other rebel factions, and set up a clear and steady process that would lead Afghanistan toward holding national elections. Meanwhile, U.S. Special Forces and the CIA were to continue to focus on the hunt for senior Taliban and al Qaeda members, including, of course, Osama bin Laden, who had fled to the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The American official given the job of delivering a new Afghan government was James Dobbins, a career State Department diplomat with a history of rehabilitating strife-torn countries. Dobbins, now seventy-three, had worked extensively in the Balkans in the 1990s to end ethnic conflict and establish stable regimes in Kosovo and Bosnia. He had served in Somalia as well as Haiti, following U.S. military operations that uprooted local despots and militia commanders there.
Dobbins didn’t bring any ideological baggage to his new job as the special U.S. envoy to the Afghan opposition, colleagues say. He had a reputation as a straight shooter, independent and capable of working with unsavory diplomats and bureaucrats in Third World countries often hostile to the United States. Dobbins was a contemporary of high-flying American diplomatic stars such as Richard Holbrooke, Christopher Hill, and Strobe Talbott, who had also made their names during the Clinton administration by ending the Balkan war and navigating post–Cold War Russia, though Dobbins kept a lower profile.
When Dobbins assumed his job, just two weeks after 9/11, he had a sense of urgency. The Taliban and its al Qaeda allies were weakening militarily at a pace much faster than many in the Pentagon or CIA had anticipated. Afghanistan, as a perpetual battleground for competing regional powers, would soon need the support of its neighbors, principally Russia, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, in order to create a new government in Kabul. The State Department envoy needed to bring them all on board, or risk outsiders undermining the political transition.
Dobbins’s job turned to shuttle diplomacy—some meetings secretive, some not. He traveled from New York to Rome and from Pakistan to Germany in the final two months of 2001. He met often with the Afghan tribal leaders and royals who would eventually play key roles in bringing Hamid Karzai to power. Karzai was a Pashtun leader, with strong ties to the West, who sought the Taliban’s overthrow from sanctuary outside Afghanistan. In Islamabad and New Delhi, Dobbins worked to assuage Pakistani and Indian diplomats, whose decades-old enmity at times risked sparking a nuclear conflict in South Asia and who threatened to derail Dobbins’s mission of forming a new Kabul regime. The Indians didn’t want to see the Taliban or any political group tied to Pakistan in power in Kabul. The Pakistanis armed and funded the Taliban in a bid to guarantee as much Pashtun representation in Afghanistan as possible.
To the surprise of Dobbins and his team, a trump card for their diplomatic mission emerged in the relationship they formed with Iran’s Foreign Ministry, and in particular the U.S.-educated envoy Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif was Iran’s deputy foreign minister under the government of the moderate President Mohammad Khatami, and the most effective Iranian diplomat at engaging with the West.
Zarif was living in the United States at the time of the Iranian revolution. He had earned his undergraduate degree in San Francisco and then moved to the University of Denver to earn his Ph.D. in political science. After the shah’s fall, however, he quickly moved to New York to help run Iran’s UN mission and sustain the revolution while Tehran’s new Islamist government found its feet. Zarif spent so much time in the United States that his children were born in New York, making them U.S. citizens.
American academics and journalists grew to know the Iranian diplomat from the European conference circuit he frequented during the 1990s. He preached Khatami’s line about the need to build bridges with the West and wooed interlocutors with his American English. “Zarif was the face the regime liked to put forward to show the warmer side of Iran,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian American scholar who regularly met with Zarif while Khatami was in power. “It was never clear, though, if he truly spoke for the regime. It was like that with many officials in that government.” Indeed, the status of Zarif’s relationship with Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard proved to be a mystery to U.S. officials.
Dobbins quickly came to believe that Zarif and the Iranian government, more than any other regional power, was the key to making or breaking Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban government. Tehran had tremendous leverage over the Northern Alliance, and Zarif seemed committed to a deal. It was through Zarif’s mediation, Dobbins thought, that Iran could build cooperation within the international community for all regional actors to help combat the terrorism and narcotics smuggling that emanated from Afghanistan. Iranian officials regularly reminded Western governments that its population bore the brunt of Afghanistan’s instability, as evidenced by the high number of heroin addicts inside Iran who got their drugs from Afghan smugglers. “They were pretty specific that they were willing to work with us on a range of issues,” Dobbins told me in multiple interviews after leaving government. “We had a crucial opportunity.”
The Bush administration was initially noncommittal on whether Dobbins was authorized to directly engage Tehran on the Afghan issue. Some of the more hawkish officials in the White House and Pentagon viewed any contacts with the Iranians as a sign of weakness, which would only encourage Tehran to spread its influence into the region’s hot spots. Successive U.S. administrations had formally barred any direct contacts with Iranian officials that weren’t first cleared by the State Department (colloquially known as Foggy Bottom, after its neighborhood in Washington).
But eventually Secretary of State Colin Powell gave Dobbins the green light. The retired general had himself sought to forge common ground with Tehran in the weeks after 9/11. Attending the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York in November 2001, Powell had gone out of his way to shake hands with his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi, who had told the assembly that Iran stood with the United States in the fight against terrorism. “Powell thought that our interests in Afghanistan were parallel with Iran’s,” Dobbins said. “And we saw this as an avenue for rapprochement with Iran.”
Weeks of globetrotting by Dobbins and the American diplomatic team culminated in the UN negotiations on Afghanistan transferring from the UN General Assembly in New York to a December conference in the former West German capital, Bonn. A large state guesthouse, called the Petersberg, housed the mishmash of UN bureaucrats, high-powered diplomats, and Afghan warlords who showed up for the meetings. Between talks about the shape of a new Afghan constitution and government, the envoys peered down on the Rhine River and the vineyards that dotted the German landscape.
Dobbins met with Zarif and
his staff every morning at ten o’clock in a large banquet area at the Petersberg. Italian and German representatives also attended the get-togethers, as did the Afghan-born U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, who would become President Bush’s ambassador to both Kabul and Baghdad in the years to come. Zal, as he was called, spoke Dari, closely related to the Persian language Farsi, which made him a useful tool in eavesdropping on the Iranian team’s thinking. “The Iranians would sometimes beat down my door with their ideas,” Khalilzad told me about his time in Bonn.
As the conference gathered steam, Dobbins and Zarif saw Washington’s and Tehran’s views on the Afghan constitution converge. Surprising both Dobbins and Khalilzad, Zarif was even more progressive than the Bush administration on certain political issues in Afghanistan, both men recounted. In particular, Zarif advocated enshrining a specific time frame for democratic elections in the Afghan constitution and wanted Kabul to overtly pledge itself to combating terrorism.
“Should we not insist that the new Afghan regime be committed to cooperate with the international community to combat terrorism?” Zarif said with a smile during one morning meeting, as Dobbins recounted in a book he wrote. The Americans saw this in part as a jab at the United States, which regularly accused Tehran of being the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism because of its support of Hezbollah and Hamas. The Iranians claimed these organizations were legitimate liberation movements seeking to end the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. But at the same time, the United States believed Zarif was serious about getting the world behind the fight against the Taliban.
By the tenth day of the conference, the diplomats had agreed on the terms of the new Afghan constitution and that Hamid Karzai should be leader of an interim government. But the Northern Alliance and the other Afghan factions were still battling over how to apportion seats in a new cabinet. The Alliance’s envoy to the talks, Yunus Qanooni, was demanding that his faction get three-fourths of the seats. His position threatened to collapse the Bonn meeting.
The conference was close to a stalemate when Javad Zarif pulled Qanooni into a corner of the breakfast room for a quick talk, according to Dobbins and Khalilzad. Minutes later, the Afghan diplomat conceded to lessening the Northern Alliance’s chokehold on the cabinet, which allowed a comprehensive agreement to be formalized at Bonn. U.S. officials said Zarif reminded the Afghan warlord how reliant economically the new government in Kabul would be on Tehran—another indication, Dobbins and others believed, of Iran’s ability to aid or undermine U.S. plans for Afghanistan.
Dobbins said he believed the Iranian government probably had a more coordinated approach to Afghanistan than the Bush administration, which was fractured by rivalries between individuals and offices. The American said he didn’t see any split in approach between Iran’s diplomats and its military apparatus, including the IRGC. They were a united front, Dobbins told me.
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EVEN AS THE UNITED STATES and Iran appeared to reach common ground while creating a new Kabul government, powerful figures inside the Bush administration were already positioning themselves for what they believed was an inevitable clash with Tehran in the post-9/11 world. Among them were a couple of Iran experts at the Pentagon, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, both vocal internal critics of engaging Tehran. These officials believed the Islamic Republic was ideologically incapable of making any accommodation with the United States and that the Revolutionary Guard was setting traps to ensnare the United States in Afghanistan, just as they had done in Lebanon during the 1980s. Only regime change in Tehran could bring real stability to the broader Middle East, they argued.
Rhode, a native New Yorker, studied Farsi in the Iranian city of Mashhad a year before the Islamic Revolution and received his Ph.D. in Islamic history from Columbia University. He worked at the Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank, where he focused on Middle East issues and specifically Iran. Even though Rhode dealt in military matters, his analysis of Tehran was deeply informed by his study of both Persian culture and the ideology that infused the Islamic Republic. “Iranians do not consider their own weaknesses as a reason to engage an adversary in a compromise, but rather an opportunity to destroy them,” Rhode said. “It is for this reason that goodwill and confidence-building measures should be avoided at all costs.”
Franklin, a reserve Air Force colonel, acquired his knowledge of Iran through work and self-study, rather than higher education. He taught himself Farsi at night while working as a Middle East analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, all while supporting five children and a wife who was wheelchair-bound due to spinal disease. His service as the U.S. defense attaché in Tel Aviv during the 1990s, meanwhile, exposed him to Iran’s ability to project power internationally through its use of proxies, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. As soon as the Bush administration began preparing to topple the Taliban, Franklin was immediately concerned about the IRGC’s abilities to target American and coalition forces inside Afghanistan.
The incoherence of the U.S. strategy toward Iran became dangerously apparent and threatened the Afghanistan diplomacy. In late December, just as Dobbins was forging the Bonn agreement, Rhode and Franklin secretly traveled to Rome with White House approval to meet with a group of Iranian opponents of the regime, at least one purportedly a high-ranking Iranian intelligence official. The gathering was held in a nondescript residential building near the city’s tourist-heavy Piazza di Spagna, famous for the Spanish Steps and high-end boutiques. The office apartment belonged to Italy’s main overseas intelligence agency, the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, or SISMI. No State Department or CIA officials were invited, which raised alarm bells at State—though participants in the meeting told me that the U.S. ambassador to Rome at the time, Mel Sembler, was informed.
The meeting had been arranged by Michael Ledeen, a former National Security Council official and historian who studied totalitarian movements at a number of prominent conservative Washington think tanks. Ledeen had been a central player in the early machinations of the Iran-Contra scandal, which rocked the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s. He had written a detailed account of the Iranian revolution, called Debacle. The California native shared Rhode and Franklin’s deep concerns about Iran and agreed with them about the need to overthrow the Islamic Republic. He believed Iran’s Islamist ideology posed a growing threat to the West and its values, not unlike fascism in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Ledeen also believed that the Iranian people were ready to topple the mullahs running the government if they received an assist from the West.
The former academic and journalist had coordinated with the Israeli government of Shimon Peres in efforts during the 1980s to establish a channel to the Islamic Republic, an initiative that led to the White House shipping arms covertly to Tehran to aid that country’s war effort against Iraq. The White House hoped the missile shipments would help secure the release of American hostages kidnapped by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
One of Ledeen’s sidekicks in the deal was a Persian businessman and onetime intelligence agent for the shah, Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ghorbanifar resettled in France after the revolution and did a side business swapping information with the CIA and European intelligence services on developments inside the Islamic Republic. The balding, cigar-smoking exile claimed to have maintained high-level contacts in Iran.
But by 1984 much of the information he had provided proved inaccurate, according to former Agency officials, earning Ghorbanifar a “burn notice” from the CIA. When senior Reagan administration envoys, including Robert “Bud” McFarland and Oliver North, secretly traveled to Tehran in 1986 to attempt to secure the release of American hostages, none of the meetings Ghorbanifar had supposedly arranged for them actually came to pass. “Ghorbanifar, in the end, was only good at taking care of Ghorbanifar,” said George Cave, the CIA’s representative on the trip to Tehran, who noted that the Iranian exile still profited from the arms sales to Iran. Th
e CIA veteran called him “a con artist of the first kind.”
Ledeen, however, maintained his ties to Ghorbanifar throughout the 1990s, believing that his information had often been accurate and that his contacts inside Iran remained strong. The American despised the CIA, viewing the Agency as incompetent and incapable of appreciating the quality of the intelligence the Iranian exile had passed on. Ledeen also believed the CIA had scapegoated Ghorbanifar for the failure of the Iran-Contra operation. In the weeks after 9/11, Ledeen said, he began receiving communications from Iranian sources, via Ghorbanifar, concerning the Qods Force’s deployment of assassination teams inside Afghanistan that were targeting American forces. In an interview, Ledeen said the information was incredibly specific as to which American units could be targeted and where. He said Ghorbanifar’s informants told him the Qods Force and the IRGC were “laying a trap.”
“This was good information, and if we had the opportunity to save American lives, why shouldn’t we try?” Ledeen said to me. “The information passed to U.S. Special Forces was proven accurate, and the assassins were eliminated,” he stressed.
Whether Ghorbanifar’s information was good or not, however, James Dobbins and Colin Powell believed the Rome meetings were an attempt to sabotage cooperation with Tehran at a time when the United States needed Iranian assistance. It was yet another example of how competing factions inside the U.S. government undercut the formation of an Iran policy.
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THE MEETINGS AT THE SISMI office in Rome went on for three days, beginning on December 21. Present were Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, Pentagon representatives, Italian intelligence officials, and the Iranian defectors. The talks, according to Ledeen, focused on the IRGC’s purported activities in Afghanistan and discontent among the Iranian military. But the Iranians and Ghorbanifar also pushed the Americans on a plan to topple the regime, according to former CIA officials and leaked State Department documents.
