The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (30 page)

But the marine knew that in the event of a general war against the Soviets, CENTCOM would become a backwater theater. CENTCOM would never send any ground troops into Iran. In the event of a major war with Moscow, forces allocated to his command to deploy to Iran, such as the 82nd Airborne Division, were also slated to go to the main front in Europe. “The plans were unrealistic,” Crist said later, “but you had to keep them for defense funding as all the resources were tied to Soviet war plans and the reason for CENTCOM’s being.”
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But it would be the expanding Iran-Iraq War that soon eclipsed Cold War worries as the CENTCOM commander’s chief anxiety. In February 1986, Iran amassed over one hundred thousand men in what both U.S. and Iraqi intelligence officials meeting in Baghdad believed would be another major frontal assault on Basra. Instead, on the night of February 10, amid a pouring rainstorm, Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen loaded up in small boats and rafts and crossed the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab and easily captured the al-Faw Peninsula, a muddy finger of land that served as Iraq’s oil terminus for all its crude exports from the Persian Gulf. The Iranians quickly reinforced their foothold, and some thirty thousand soldiers pushed up the two small roads running north to Iraq’s only port, Umm Qasr, and the city of Basra. A humiliated Saddam Hussein immediately ordered the peninsula recaptured. The Iraqi army threw three of its best divisions into an inept, piecemeal attack that the dogged Iranian defenders easily drove back, inflicting some eight thousand casualties.
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Iran’s lack of trucks or tanks for its foot soldiers, as well as poor logistics, prevented its victory at al-Faw from becoming the southern gateway to Basra, and this front bogged down into another war of the trenches. But the Iranian gains rattled every Arab state in the Middle East, none more so than Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

T
he tanker war took another dangerous turn. Iran announced an expanded blockade of Iraq. The Iranian navy would confiscate any military cargo destined for Iraq, including cargo transferred through a third country like Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. The Iranian navy began enforcing this decree by challenging ships entering the Strait of Hormuz, asking for their nationality and last and next ports of call. Any vessel destined for Kuwait was stopped, and a boarding party of Iranian sailors would come aboard to check the ship’s manifest and open any suspicious containers. Any ship found carrying suspicious cargo was diverted to Bandar Abbas, where Iranian authorities would conduct a detailed search of the cargo holds, seizing any military hardware.
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In the first eight months, sixty-six ships were stopped and searched by the Iranian navy—a small fraction of the ships that entered the Gulf, but enough to make everyone, especially those assisting Iraq, very nervous.
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Around eleven a.m. on January 12, 1986, the six-hundred-foot-long American Lines ship
President Taylor
steamed twenty-four miles off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Bound for the port of Fujairah with a small load of cotton, the ship was intended to pick up a load of bagged food for CARE and Catholic Relief Services before heading off for India. A small Iranian patrol boat came alongside the U.S.-flagged ship and, over the radio, demanded, “Heave to.”

The
President Taylor
’s captain, Robert Reimann, tried to protest. “We are in international waters. You have no right to stop us,” he replied.

The Iranian boat trained its main gun on the defenseless merchant, and an Iranian voice over the radio politely insisted that the ship “stop her engines.” Reimann had little choice but to comply.

The Iranians dropped a small rubber Zodiac boat into the undulating seas and, in short order, seven Iranians, including two officers, boarded the
President Taylor
, taking control of the ship’s radio and its forty-three crewmen. They asked Captain Reimann to produce his manifest. He did so, and after examining it and looking into a couple of containers, the Iranians expressed their satisfaction, telling the American master they only wanted to verify that the ship was not carrying contraband bound for Iraq. In less than an hour, the seven Iranians had departed, leaving the
President Taylor
to make her way on to Fujairah.
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The problem for the United States, as a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged the day after the incident, was that Iran had every right under international law to search ships suspected of carrying war matériel to Iraq. The United States faced the age-old problem of a neutral’s ability to engage in commerce and the right of a belligerent to maintain a naval blockade. But with Weinberger’s utter disdain for Iran and this incident occurring only three months after the Palestinian hijacking of the Italian cruise ship
Achille Lauro
, in which an elderly American, Leon Klinghoffer, had been shot in his wheelchair and dumped over the side, the Reagan administration was in no mood to risk another such hostage crisis from a country with a track record of taking Americans hostage.

On February 1, the State Department sent a tersely worded cautionary message to the Iranian government through the Swiss embassy in Tehran: “Irrespective of the legal issues involved, the visit and search of U.S. flag vessels by armed Iranian forces during a period of heightened tension and regional conflict could lead to a confrontation between U.S. and Iranian military units, which neither nation desires.”
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“If this continues,” wrote General Vessey to Secretary Weinberger, “escalation of the current conflict appears inevitable.”
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Weinberger ordered the navy to prevent any further boardings of an American merchant.
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U.S. warships would now position themselves within visual range of any U.S.-flagged merchant ship transiting the Gulf, poised to interdict any approaching Iranian vessel. Should an Iranian warship try to stop a U.S. merchant, an American naval officer would go over to the merchant and check for any military equipment for Iraq. Assuming the ship carried no contraband, the U.S. naval officer would inform the Iranian captain of this fact. Since the United States did not provide Iraq directly with arms, it was inconceivable that any ship flying the Stars and Stripes would be guilty of carrying war matériel, but if they were, the U.S. Navy on-scene commander would divert the merchant to a neutral port and then allow the Iranians on board to remove any prohibited items under the supervision of the U.S. Navy.
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Under no circumstances, however, would any U.S. merchant be diverted to an Iranian port.
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If the Iranians persisted in trying to board after the U.S. Navy had certified the absence of contraband, Poindexter wrote to Weinberger, the “on-scene commander will use whatever means may be appropriate, including measured military force, to forestall any such attempt.”

Shortly after the
President Taylor
incident, Crist formulated a plan to
attack Iran should the country try to interfere with neutral shipping. CENTCOM planners drew up a top secret operation called Invoke Resolve that entailed massive air strikes on Iranian naval forces at Bandar Abbas. On February 7, 1986, Crist provided an overview of it in the Tank before the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. U.S. Navy aircraft from the carrier in the Gulf of Oman would strike an important air defense headquarters outside the Persian Gulf near the small port town of Jask just before dawn, before flying at a low level to the Persian Gulf to destroy the Iranian surface-to-air Hawk missiles that ringed Bandar Abbas, as well as the Bandar Abbas International Airport, which, in addition to being a commercial airport, was the main southern airfield for the Iranian air force. Simultaneously, fourteen B-52s from Guam, supported by nearly fifty air-refueling tankers and an array of sophisticated reconnaissance planes and electronic warfare aircraft, would launch precision-guided cruise missiles that would lead, knocking out hard-to-reach targets such as the 1st Naval District headquarters building, which sat uncomfortably close to a hospital. Then nine of the massive four-engine aircraft—each capable of carrying sixty thousand pounds of bombs—would pummel the Bandar Abbas Naval Base. Operating in groups of three, each could saturate an area one and a half miles long by a mile wide with hot shrapnel and raw explosive power.
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Should Iran try to retaliate and escalate the conflict, the United States was prepared to conduct further air strikes and drop air-delivered mines in Bandar Abbas Harbor, which would effectively close it down for all military or civilian vessels.
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Over the long term, General Crist thought that the only way for his Sleepy Hollow headquarters to counter either the Russians or the Iranians lay in building military ties with the Gulf Arabs. In the spring of 1986, just four months into command, General Crist wrote a lengthy letter to Secretary Weinberger laying out his thinking: “A premium has to be placed on coalition warfare. Our friends and allies have to assume a share of the responsibility for the defense of the region.”
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With Egypt, this already existed, but the Persian Gulf remained the key shortfall and the Gulf Cooperation Council was hardly a credible military alliance.

Crist proposed developing separate bilateral military-to-military defense arrangements with each of the Gulf countries, with Crist’s staff synchronizing them into one combined force that could augment the U.S. military. “At a minimum,” he wrote to Chairman Crowe, “it offers the opportunity to open doors in countries that have largely been off-limits to the U.S. military.”

Crist and Penzler flew to Washington to brief Weinberger on the idea, intending to concentrate on the three countries that offered the most promise: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait. The Pentagon leadership liked the idea and authorized Crist to go forward. Crist then ran it by Richard Murphy, who headed the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. He too thought it had merit, and with Secretary Shultz’s concurrence, instructions went out to the embassies in the Gulf to assist in the CENTCOM planning effort.

At first glance, Jeremiah Pearson belied the appearance of a warrior-diplomat. With a large round head and dowdy appearance, “he looked like a big sack,” one senior officer remarked. A pilot, he took on the persona of dumb fighter jock. But his bright blue eyes revealed a considerable intellect. With a degree in aeronautical engineering, he joined the marine corps in 1960, earning his wings as a marine corps pilot and distinguishing himself in Vietnam. Later he became a test pilot and was selected for the astronaut program. Four months after being promoted to brigadier general, in April 1986 he and his wife drove down in the stifling summer heat to Tampa, Florida, where Pearson assumed the job of CENTCOM’s forward headquarters commander and inspector general. Pearson arrived somewhat unsure of his duties and of his new boss, the CENTCOM commander. He had never served in a joint billet, and General Crist had a reputation within the marine corps for not liking aviators. But the marine corps commandant, General Paul Kelley, had called to give Pearson a strong recommendation, and after meeting with Pearson in his office at MacDill Air Force Base, Crist liked what he saw in the quiet, self-confident young brigadier general enough to give him the chance to test his mettle.

Pearson spearheaded CENTCOM’s bilateral military planning with the Gulf Arabs, code-named New Splendor. He established a small planning cell within the headquarters that reported directly to General Crist. By both coincidence and design it was largely composed of marines. Pearson flew out nearly every week to the Gulf, traveling to each country, building trust through hours of sitting around talking and sipping cups of hypersweet tea. To pass the time on the nineteen-hour flights from Tampa to the Gulf, Pearson checked out Arab-language tapes from the Defense Language Institute and discovered he had an aptitude for the difficult language. Pearson soon commanded a conversational knowledge of Arabic—a novelty for military officers at CENTCOM—which greatly enhanced his standing with his Arab
counterparts. “At least,” Pearson chuckled, “it kept me from getting ripped off in the souk.”
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The Gulf Arabs had a healthy distrust of the United States. All questioned Washington’s ability to keep their cooperation confidential and out of the
New York Times
. Some leaders viewed CENTCOM as an American interventionist force, whose mission was only to advance U.S. goals in the area.
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All repeatedly asked Pearson, “Can we rely on Washington if Iran attacks us?”

To help Pearson, Crist shared classified intelligence briefings about the Iran-Iraq War with the Gulf states. “It was one of the tools we used to build trust and cooperation and to get them thinking about their security,” said the CENTCOM intelligence director, Brigadier General Cloyd Pfister of the army.
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Not surprisingly, this proved very popular with regional leaders, and military intelligence officers, and the CIA traveled with Pearson to provide regular sanitized updates on Iran based upon sources that only a superpower had access to.