The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (11 page)

The defense secretary’s decision only added to the polemical discussions by the five gray-haired gentlemen in the Tank. They wrangled over what units to assign to the command and which countries should be included (Egypt and Israel being the major bones of contention). Even the name of the new four-star headquarters occupied a staggering amount of mental energy on the part of the Pentagon’s leadership. One suggestion was Crescent Command. Someone else proposed Commander in Chief, Middle East, Africa, Southwest Asia, shorted to the acronym CINCMEAFSWA. Kelley’s replacement at the rapid deployment force, Lieutenant General Robert Kingston, recommended the name United States Central Command, as it had a ring of significance. However, the Joint Chiefs did not like this name, as it was unclear to them what the command was central in relation to. They countered with Southwest Asia Command. But others within the bureaucracy objected to this on the grounds that it sounded too much like an interventionist force, which of course was the command’s raison d’être. At one point, one of Weinberger’s military assistants wrote to the secretary, “I did hear
someone mention WEINLUCCICOM but I don’t understand what the letters stand for.”
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And so it continued, month after month.

Gentle prodding by the president finally broke the gridlock. Ronald Reagan understood the havoc Iran wreaked upon his predecessor, and the president took an unusually keen interest in the formation of a military command for the Middle East. “I endorse it with enthusiasm,” Reagan wrote to Weinberger upon hearing of his decision to form a four-star Middle East headquarters: “I have long felt that the importance of this region is such that we need the optimal command arrangements possible, and this means a separate command. I approve your decision and I look forward to the specifics of your implementation plan.” When a year had passed with no new command established, the president sent a polite yet firm reminder to Weinberger to update him on the specifics of the new command. The president put the Pentagon on notice to get on with business.
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It worked.

The Pentagon quickly finalized the details of the new Middle East command in spite of a last-minute effort by the navy to kill the initiative backed by the head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Alaska senator Ted Stevens.
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Weinberger approved standing up U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, as the military abbreviated it. CENTCOM’s area of responsibility spanned nineteen countries, from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the east to Kenya in the south. Most of the forces assigned came from those already under the rapid deployment force, with both the army and air force establishing subordinate headquarters to support CENTCOM. The army reactivated the famed Third Army to command its divisions for the Middle East, which General George Patton had commanded in Western Europe as the spearhead of American armored forces in Europe during the Second World War.
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In order to smooth the concerns by General Barrow over control of CENTCOM, General Vessey implemented a tacit agreement that CENTCOM’s commander would alternate between the army and the marines. The understanding held for the next twenty years, until 2003, when pressures related to the troubled U.S. occupation in Iraq led to successive army commanders.

Weinberger’s decision ended General Volney Warner’s career. He turned down another major command in Europe and wrote to Weinberger that since “I no longer enjoy the support and confidence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, request that I be relieved of my duties.” Weinberger concurred. An embittered Volney Warner penned a five-page letter to President Reagan blasting Weinberger’s decision and the parochial and ineffectual Joint Chiefs.
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Warner
refused a retirement parade. Instead, he and some close comrades parachuted from a plane at Fort Bragg, where a keg of beer awaited the skydivers in the landing zone. “It was the way I wanted to go, with a few friends and a few beers.”
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T
he decision to form CENTCOM received a warm reception from the pro-Western Arabs. Just after sunset on the afternoon of December 16, 1982, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the affable and shrewd Saudi ambassador to Washington, arrived in Weinberger’s office to relay a message from the Saudi monarch. “King Fahd was one hundred percent in support of the newly created U.S. Central Command and saw it as a good move, one that sent the right signal to the Soviets,” the prince said. CENTCOM made Moscow very uneasy, Bandar added, mentioning that the Soviets had tried to convince Saudi Arabia that this was merely an American vehicle to take over the region. The king rejected this argument and stood firmly behind American goals in the Persian Gulf, Bandar told the secretary.

In typical Saudi style, however, Bandar ended the meeting with a straightforward pronouncement that his government would have to makepublic statements distancing itself from CENTCOM, but Weinberger should not pay any attention to those statements. Weinberger understood and nodded in agreement, and the meeting adjourned with a hearty laugh as the two men reflected on the duplicity that permeated the Middle East.
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The one notable Middle East country unhappy with America’s new defense scheme was Washington’s most stalwart ally in the region, Israel. The Jewish state worried about the ramifications of an American military command dedicated solely to the support of the Arabs, and hoped that closer military ties would strengthen the relationship between the two countries. Israel pushed forcefully for inclusion in the American defense plans for the Middle East. Knowing full well the hawkish Cold War views of the new civilian leaders in Washington, the Israeli government emphasized the Soviet hand in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Just a month after the inauguration, the Israeli foreign minister showed up in a Pentagon conference room to meet with Secretary Weinberger. Yitzhak Shamir repeatedly stressed to Weinberger that the Soviet Union created most of the region’s instability. “The PLO is a terrorist organization that works directly for the Soviet Union,”
Shamir said forcefully, if not entirely truthfully, to Weinberger during one of their first meetings. Prime Minister Menachem Begin would repeat this mantra in his first meeting with Reagan in the Oval Office. He saw little difference between Soviet client states in the Middle East and those of the Warsaw Pact in Europe. He offered the use of Israeli air bases and ports, even going so far as to commit the Israeli air force to fly for the U.S. military over the Persian Gulf. In return, he wanted the United States to essentially scrap its recent agreements with Arabs supporting the rapid deployment force. Begin singled out Iraq as the key enemy for Israel, and by inference the United States, due to its large conventional military and budding nuclear program. That Israel’s anxiety over the military might of Iraq had little to do with the Cold War was omitted from the talking points, but the prime minister’s forceful advocacy for Israel as a Cold War asset to Washington affected American officials.
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Alexander Haig, now secretary of state in the Reagan administration, never needed convincing; he already viewed the Middle East through a Cold War lens and was an ardent supporter of Israel. Both he and Reagan believed that Israel should be included in CENTCOM, an opinion initially shared by Weinberger too.

However, both the Joint Chiefs and the civilians in the Defense Department swayed Weinberger to recommend against it. The Joint Chiefs believed that Israel lay too far from the Persian Gulf and that including Israel would jeopardize the important basing agreements with the Arab nations.
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The senior civilian responsible for military issues apart from the Soviet Union was a marine Vietnam veteran, Bing West. He warned Weinberger that Reagan was under the undue influence of a pro-Israeli staffer on the National Security Council, or NSC, and that this was why he wanted the Jewish state included in CENTCOM.

This insinuation greatly irritated Weinberger. “He’s the president,” the secretary responded to West. “Whose advice he consulted before making a decision is irrelevant.”

After meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on May 25, 1982, however, Weinberger reversed his position and wrote to Reagan recommending excluding Israel, Lebanon, and Syria from the new Middle East command out of deference to Arab sensibilities. “I do not entirely share this view, but we can always change it if need be,” Weinberger wrote.
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T
he replacement for P. X. Kelley and the first commander of CENTCOM was Robert “Barbed-Wire Bob” Kingston. Tall and thin, with a stern demeanor and explosive temper, Kingston was all about the business of war. “He had a gaze that said, ‘Don’t fuck with me,’” remarked Jay Hines, the longtime civilian historian at CENTCOM. He’d earned his moniker when he strung concertina wire around his command post to keep soldiers from walking on the grass. While no great strategic thinker, Kingston was a warrior, gifted with the natural ability to lead men in combat. As a young lieutenant during the Korean War, he’d led a hundred-man force up to the frozen bank of the Yalu River on the Chinese border and had repeatedly distinguished himself during the American army’s chaotic flight south following the Chinese intervention in November 1950.

Kingston had a long association with the CIA. After his first tour in Korea, he moved over to a joint military-CIA paramilitary organization that infiltrated South Korean agents into the north and conducted raids from submarines, blowing up trains and bridges deep behind North Korean lines. Kingston was one of the few Americans to go ashore with the Korean operatives on sabotage missions. “At the time, I thought it was great fun,” Kingston later said.
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After Korea, Kingston became one of the few military officers to be run through the CIA’s case officers’ course, which trained CIA officers to handle foreign agents. In the spring of 1967 Kingston took command of OP-34, a highly sensitive mission that sent teams of South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam to try to organize an insurgency against the communist government. Begun by the CIA in the early 1960s, the military took over responsibility in 1964.

Shortly after his arrival, Kingston suspected the entire operation had been compromised. Of the five hundred agents dropped into the north, all had been killed or turned out to be double agents working for the communists. Kingston gave the bad news to his boss, Colonel John Singlaub—himself a legendary former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent who had parachuted into France before D-Day—in his usual blunt manner: “What do you want to tell Ho Chi Minh? Your teams are double agents and I can send Ho the message through them.”
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Kingston maintained his CIA contacts after arriving in Tampa as the new commander. He became a frequent visitor to its headquarters in Langley,
Virginia.
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Kingston had a knack for obtaining raw CIA intelligence outside of the normal channels. This provided Kingston with unique information not normally available to a four-star general, and it eventually caught the attention of Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates, who ordered this back channel closed. Gates directed that only approved intelligence documents be given to CENTCOM, through the conventional channel of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
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The plan Kingston inherited from Kelley to defend Iran from the Soviets rested on the Zagros Mountains strategy. Now labeled Operations Plan (OPLAN) 1004, this rested on long-standing Cold War fears of a Soviet invasion of Iran that would threaten Western access to Middle East oil. It called for the deployment of four U.S. divisions and three aircraft carriers, first to secure the sea-lanes out of the Persian Gulf, and then to land troops at Bandar Abbas at the Strait of Hormuz as well as at the northern end of the Gulf near Abadan. From there, the Americans would advance northeast into the Persian interior, intent on establishing a defense line along the Zagros, a massive, jagged mountain range with many peaks in excess of ten thousand feet stretching from northeastern Iraq near Kurdistan then southeast and ending near the Strait of Hormuz.

As Kingston looked at revising the Iran plan, the one glaring weakness was how the Islamic Republic would react to a crisis between the superpowers. If the Soviet Union unilaterally invaded Iran, perhaps to support a pro-Soviet coup, Kingston concluded that Khomeini might set aside his hatred for the United States and cooperate with the U.S. military. A cooperative or at least passive Iran would immensely improve the U.S. military’s chances of success. CENTCOM hoped to work with the Iranian military and use it to defend the Khuzestan oil fields in southwestern Iran, which might alleviate Iranian concerns that the United States just wanted to seize the country’s oil.
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