by Jay Solomon
Directly after the meeting, Harold Rhode sent a classified cable back to the Pentagon via the telex room at the American embassy in Rome. The defense official reported that his team had “made contact with [active] Iranian intelligence officers who anticipate possible regime change in Iran and want to establish contact with the United States government,” according to parts of the cable obtained by the Knight Ridder news agency (now the McClatchy Tribune news service). “A sizable financial interest is required.”
Details of the meetings outlined in the cables unnerved the State Department and CIA. The fact that two Pentagon officials seemed to be discussing a regime change operation with disaffected Iranian officers and a man formally burned by Langley raised fears of another scandal of Iran-Contra proportions. Also, given Ghorbanifar’s past, Agency officials worried he could be concocting a financial scam. The Iranians, if aware of the Rome encounter, would view it as a hostile act on the part of the United States.
The CIA’s station chief in Rome quickly wrote a memo back to Langley raising the prospect that an “unauthorized covert action” had taken place at the SISMI office. Colin Powell, Jim Dobbins, and other State Department officials, meanwhile, raised concerns with the White House that any such activities could undercut Washington’s efforts to stand up the Karzai government in Kabul and stabilize Afghanistan.
Ledeen, in interviews, denied that the Rome meeting was unauthorized and stressed that it had been cleared beforehand by Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, an old friend from the Reagan administration. (Hadley has never refuted this claim.) Still, the White House made sure that Ledeen’s Rome channel didn’t move forward. A Senate committee began probing the possibility that elements inside the Pentagon and the neoconservative movement had been secretly hatching a regime change plan.
Manucher Ghorbanifar, meanwhile, continued to offer Washington his intelligence information—for a price, some believed. Beginning in 2003, his longtime assistant in Paris, a former Iranian minister named Fereidoun Mahdavi, began sharing information on alleged Iranian terrorist activities with Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, then the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. This correspondence ended up forming a major portion of a book Weldon wrote in 2005, called Countdown to Terror. Among the explosive accusations was a claim that the Iranians had tried to blow up the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. Langley tasked Bill Murray, then the CIA’s station chief in Paris, to check out the veracity of Mahdavi’s claims. “None of the information bore any ties to reality,” Murray said.
—
THE ROME EPISODE UNDERSCORED the divisions between the White House, parts of the Pentagon, the State Department, and intelligence agencies over Iran policy as the Afghanistan war gathered strength and the buildup to the Iraq invasion began. Some saw Tehran as a potential ally, others as a clear adversary. Strategists inside the Bush administration understood that Tehran could sabotage American efforts to stabilize and democratize both Afghanistan and Iraq. Still, given the history of Washington’s secret wars with the Islamic Republic, many in the White House and Pentagon didn’t trust Tehran’s intelligence services and believed 9/11 offered a unique opportunity to punish the country they viewed as the Middle East’s worst actor.
Contacts between American and Iranian officials continued nonetheless. In March 2002, just weeks before he left the State Department, James Dobbins met in Geneva with an Iranian delegation that he said included a senior Qods Force general. The conference was focused on developing Afghanistan’s security forces. The Iranian military officer, according to Dobbins, offered to build barracks for and train twenty thousand Afghan troops, as part of a larger U.S.-led program to help stabilize Afghanistan—this despite the fact that President Bush had just named Iran as a member of an “axis of evil,” with North Korea and Iraq.
Dobbins said his response to the Iranian general was that the United States and Iran might have difficulty conducting joint training exercises because of competing military doctrines. But the American diplomat said he still believed the outreach was a potential watershed moment in U.S.-Iranian relations. Dobbins raised the Iranian overture during a meeting at the White House a few weeks later, which included Secretary Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But he received no formal response, and said that Rumsfeld was particularly suspicious of Tehran’s intentions.
“This was a remarkable moment that we failed to seize,” Dobbins said. “We should have at least accepted their offer in principle, and seen what we could make of it.” No cooperation with Iran in Afghanistan ensued.
—
WHITE HOUSE ENVOY ZALMAY Khalilzad also continued to meet with Javad Zarif and other Iranian diplomats through 2002 and 2003, on both Afghanistan and Iraq. The irony wasn’t lost on Khalilzad that many of the Iraqi politicians and leaders whom the United States was cultivating for a post-Saddam regime were also close allies of Iran’s—some even living in Tehran.
In December 2002 Khalilzad led the American delegation to a conference in London that was aimed at unifying the Iraqi opposition behind the war in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The event was formally convened by the State Department. But many of the Iraqi delegates had close ties to Iranian intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard. Among them were leaders of the Badr Corps, an Iraqi Shiite militia that had served as a veritable intelligence arm of the IRGC in its operations against Saddam Hussein during the 1980s.
Javad Zarif headed the Iranian delegation at the London meeting. In ways reminiscent of the diplomacy on Afghanistan, he supported the U.S. plan to quickly assemble a government to replace Saddam, Khalilzad said. Iraq’s population was more than 60 percent Shiite and hostile to the Sunni elites who had run their country for decades. The Iranians believed any free election in Iraq would naturally bring to power a Shiite government committed to strong ties with Tehran. “The Iranians were very supportive in London,” Khalilzad said. “They wanted to move as quickly as possible toward a government formation in Baghdad.”
Khalilzad had three more meetings with Zarif and other top Iranian officials in Geneva as the countdown to the Iraq invasion ticked down. Zarif was fixated on purging any new Iraqi government of members of Saddam’s Baath Party. It was a position Khalilzad said he knew could be destabilizing for Iraq and deepen splits between Sunnis and Shiites. But that was the policy the Americans eventually pursued over the objections of many U.S. administration officials. “Zarif was pushing for things we eventually did,” Khalilzad said. “It was ironic.”
Washington’s engagement with Tehran on Iraq, however, like its efforts on Afghanistan and most previous diplomatic encounters, eventually ground to a halt because of mutual suspicions. In the months surrounding Kabul’s fall, American intelligence officials tracked senior al Qaeda leaders fleeing Afghanistan and crossing into Iran. These Arab operatives didn’t seem to be living openly in Iran, but were being closely monitored by Tehran and kept under some form of house arrest. U.S. officials believed Iran’s leaders were holding the men both as insurance against al Qaeda launching attacks on Iran and as future chips in Tehran’s conflict with the United States. The al Qaeda fighters could simply be released to plot new attacks against the West if U.S.-Iranian relations deteriorated.
Among the al Qaeda leaders in Iran were Osama bin Laden’s son Saad and the senior al Qaeda military commander, Saif al-Adel, according to U.S. officials. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would become the commander of al Qaeda’s military operations in Iraq, used Iran as a transit zone through which to enter Iraqi Kurdistan, where he set up training camps for Islamist fighters preparing to fight coalition forces inside Iraq.
The United States pressed Iran to hand over the al Qaeda leaders. Such a move would be seen as concrete evidence of Iran’s interest in working with the United States. And Washington didn’t see that Iran would pay any political price; after all, it had openly announced its support for the campaign against al Qaed
a.
The Iranians, however, were hard bargainers, and wanted something concrete in return: access to the Iraq-based camps of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MeK, an Iranian opposition group from the 1970s that the United States had designated as a terrorist organization. The MeK had aligned with Saddam against Tehran, and the Pentagon planned to control its facilities after deposing Saddam. Iran’s leadership was committed to apprehending and trying (or executing) the movement’s leadership, in particular its Iraq-based chief, Massoud Rajavi, for a string of attacks they had launched against the Iranian government going back to the 1980s. Zarif and others said Tehran viewed the transfer of the MeK members as its own yardstick through which to judge the Bush administration. The United States feared that handing them over would violate international statutes due to the likelihood that some would be executed. Some in the Pentagon also saw the MeK as potentially useful intelligence assets.
As Khalilzad was set to meet Zarif and an Iranian delegation again in Geneva in May 2003, a series of bombs ripped through three compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that were housing American and British military contractors training the Saudi National Guard. The blasts killed more than 30 people, including 9 Americans, and injured 160. American intelligence officials said they traced the attack’s planning back to al Qaeda leaders based in Iran, including the military commander, Saif al-Adel. Though there were disagreements inside the Bush administration over how much advance knowledge the Iranian government had of the attack, it was another example of how little the United States understood of Iran’s relationship with the Sunni terrorist group.
Iran’s government at the time formally denied any knowledge of the attack and reiterated its commitment to fighting al Qaeda. But the diplomatic track between Tehran and Washington, and the possibility for close cooperation in Afghanistan and Iraq, largely ended at this stage. The hopes held by some in Washington and Tehran that 9/11 and shared interests could lead to a rapprochement between the rivals were evaporating, and the two countries were again marching directly into renewed conflict. “We felt like we couldn’t keep this going if they were hosting senior al Qaeda members,” Khalilzad told me, though he said he did keep open some communication lines with Iranian officials while serving in Kabul, Baghdad, and New York. “The trust between the two sides had broken down.”
Many in Washington believed Tehran was willing to cooperate with the United States on security issues, at least on its eastern border. Afghanistan had long been a source for the opium that flooded Iran’s markets and produced the world’s largest population of heroin addicts. Afghanistan was also not technically the Middle East, where Iran sought to lead the Islamic world in its campaign against Israel and its American backers. Still, there remained doubts that Khamenei or the IRGC could ever really form a common front with Washington. These doubts would linger as the United States entered Iraq and risked a confrontation with Iran.
CHAPTER 3
The Shiite Crescent
As the U.S. military began steadily massing its forces in the Persian Gulf in early 2003, Saddam Hussein’s military-intelligence services were warily watching developments on Iraq’s eastern border. With war nearing, Baghdad was in many ways more concerned about the intentions of Iran than the United States.
Going back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Iran’s Islamist government and the Revolutionary Guard had invested heavily in recruiting and training Shiite allies from Iraq, employing them for sabotage operations, intelligence gathering, and propaganda purposes against their sworn enemy in Baghdad. Many of Iraq’s top Shiite politicians and clerics relocated to Tehran in the years after the 1979 revolution to avoid imprisonment or execution. Among them were future Iraqi prime ministers Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki and Shiite religious leaders such as Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiite refugees fled with them into Iran.
These Iraqi exiles became military assets for Tehran during its eight-year war with Saddam, sharing intelligence and launching cross-border attacks. Iran’s government nurtured pro-Iranian political movements such as Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (SCIRI) to give voice to their country’s Shiites, who made up at least 60 percent of Iraq’s Muslim population. (The Sunnis make up around 20 percent.) Dawa and SCIRI supported Iran’s battle against Saddam, both inside Iraq and in the wider Persian Gulf region. The Revolutionary Guard trained these Iraqi proxies at camps along the Iran-Iraq border. They plotted terrorist attacks against the United States and Arab states in retaliation for their support of Saddam in the war. The most active of these Iran-based militias was the Badr Corps, formed by Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim’s family, one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite dynasties.
The stronghold of the Badr Corps inside Iraq was in Najaf. The city is considered the holiest in Shiite Islam because it is home to the Imam Ali Mosque. Millions of pilgrims from Iran, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf states visit Najaf annually to worship at the grave of the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law. The Badr Corps maintained large networks of informers, charities, and political supporters inside Iraq’s southern Shiite-dominant regions and on Iraq’s eastern border.
Following the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq during the first Gulf War, the militia had played a key role in rallying Iraq’s Shiite majority to try to overthrow Saddam and his Baath Party, with the encouragement of the George H. W. Bush administration. The Iraqi Republican Guard responded with a vicious military crackdown that killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds in the early 1990s.
In 2002, as the calls for war grew louder in the United States, Saddam’s spies detected stepped-up military preparations by the Revolutionary Guard and their Iraqi allies as well. According to Iraqi intelligence files captured by the Pentagon after the invasion, the Iraqis believed that Tehran was preparing for its own invasion of Iraq, or at the very least would seize on the chaos and instability brought by the American attack to send their agents and military allies into the Shiite-dominated regions of Iraq, outmaneuvering the Iraqis and the Americans simultaneously.
“[Military maneuvers in Tehran] are aimed at improving the combat preparation of the Iranian units and preparing the Guard Forces and Basij Forces for the forthcoming American attack that would affect Iran and the Iranian people,” the director of Iraq’s military-intelligence unit wrote Saddam’s office on December 30, 2002, referring to the Revolutionary Guard and its paramilitary force, called the Basij.
The Badr Corps and other groups linked to Iran were indeed increasingly mobilizing their operations inside Iraq. Saddam’s intelligence services caught Iran’s military distributing communications equipment to its Iraqi allies in January 2003. Iraqi border guards captured Badr Corps members moving supplies into its safe houses in eastern Iraq. And Iraqi spies reported that Iranian “agents” looted Iraqi government buses and trucks operating in Maysan province, near the Iranian border.
As the date for the American invasion drew closer, Iraqi intelligence was on high alert. Of particular concern to Baghdad was intelligence showing that leaders of the Badr Corps and SCIRI had been liaising with senior Bush administration officials in Washington, Europe, and the Middle East ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Though U.S. officials knew of SCIRI’s close ties to Tehran, Washington still sought to cultivate its leaders, including its chairman, Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, and his brother, in an effort to forge a unified Iraqi government in Baghdad after Saddam’s fall. According to Baghdad’s spies, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally signed off on Badr’s Washington contacts, suggesting to Baghdad an unprecedented—and secretive—alliance between Washington and Tehran. Bush administration officials, however, publicly spoke of wooing these Iraqis away from Iran in the months before the invasion. These conflicting messages and intelligence only underscored to the United States’ Arab allies the incoherence of U.S. policy. And it heightened their fears that Saddam’s overthrow would strengthen Khamenei.
“During his visit to Kuwait, Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim agreed to
send elements of the Badr Corps there in order to guide the American forces when the aggression against Iraq begins (God forbid),” read another January 2003 dispatch from Iraq’s military-intelligence unit to Saddam Hussein’s office. The U.S. invasion commenced weeks later, and Saddam and his forces were powerless to stop the American onslaught. He quickly ceded Baghdad to the U.S. coalition and retreated to the Sunni-controlled areas in central and western Iraq, where his forces began planning a lethal insurgency. The Iranians began to activate their networks inside Iraq as well.
—
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SOLD war in Iraq as a campaign of necessity—urgently required to stop Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons and to sever his regime’s links to international terrorism, including al Qaeda. President Bush and some of his strategists at the Pentagon, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, talked of the nobility of helping to establish a democratic foothold in the heart of the Middle East, which would then provide the impetus for the spread of progressive values and free markets beyond Iraq’s borders. Some Bush administration veterans would later claim they did in fact achieve this end (admittedly a few years after the invasion) when political rebellions surged across the Arab world from Tunisia to Syria in early 2011. There was evidence to support the idea that Saddam’s demise altered the mindset of the Arab street by uprooting one of the main obstacles for political change in the region. “We certainly sought to shake things up by removing Saddam,” Feith said in an interview in 2012. “History will still judge the greater fallout from the Iraq war.” But the cost of fueling this change would be immense, and Iran was the best positioned to profit from it.
