The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (35 page)

Jenco carried with him a videotape from another hostage, David Jacobsen, criticizing Reagan for not doing enough to free the hostages. Reagan took this personally; he anguished over the hostages’ plight and bristled at the accusation that he or his administration was not doing enough to secure their release. On July 29, Reagan called Father Jenco to convey his regards, extending him an invitation to visit the White House, which he did in what Reagan called “an emotional experience” on August 4. Moved by Father Jenco, Reagan approved sending the remaining twelve pallets of Hawk missile parts to Iran. They arrived from Israel on August 4. The entire operation had now degenerated into purely an arms-for-hostages arrangement.

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oindexter believed the United States needed a new conduit into the Iranian government. Frustrated, he wanted a second channel to cut out Nir, the Israelis, and Ghorbanifar. Poindexter authorized North to seek a new opening shortly after the Tehran meeting. After considerable effort by North’s team, they met with Ali Hashemi Bahramani, a nephew of Hashemi Rafsanjani and a Revolutionary Guard officer with a distinguished combat record against Iraq. Bahramani was smart and well versed in Western politics and Middle Eastern affairs. He advocated better relations with the West and showed his desires by frequently visiting Europe. On August 25, Bahramani met in Brussels with Secord and an Iranian expatriate working with Secord, Albert Hakim. This second channel was not well received in Israel, but the nephew of Rafsanjani promised better access to the Iranian regime, without all the double-talk of Ghorbanifar.

On September 19, Bahramani and two Revolutionary Guard officers, including Feridoun Mehdi-Nejat, whom Cave had met with McFarlane in Tehran, arrived in Washington for an extraordinary meeting with the Americans. The supreme leader had personally approved Bahramani’s visit, and it required considerable effort on the American side, with North coordinating with both the FBI and the CIA to get the Iranian delegation into the United
States. But on that day, the nephew of the Iranian speaker sat in Ollie North’s office in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House.

Two days of talks followed. The two sides found common ground on a number of issues. Bahramani echoed American concerns about the Soviet Union and offered a captured Soviet-built T-72 tank to examine. His government wanted strategic cooperation with the United States, he said, and he proposed forming a joint committee between the two nations to resolve their differences.
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The first task set for the joint committee would be to work out establishing commercial arrangements. After this was in effect, perhaps six months later, the two nations would reestablish diplomatic representation. Bahramani proposed ways the two nations could support the mujahideen in Afghanistan. He offered to establish a base inside Iran to facilitate the flow of American weapons to the mujahideen. One of the senior Revolutionary Guard officers stunned Cave. One day he said he was pleased that the Americans had started to provide advanced Stinger missiles to the mujahideen, since Iran had just acquired ten of them from their own sources in the mujahideen, later determined to be Ismail Khan.

Bahramani brought a laundry list of weapons and parts. This included the ever popular Hawk missile parts and ten thousand rounds of advanced, extended-range artillery ammunition for their U.S.-manufactured howitzers. North reassured Bahramani that they could ship much of this as soon as the hostage issue was resolved. While the Iranian demurred on achieving their release, both sides generally agreed to the premise of a tit-for-tat exchange of hostages and weapons.

North provided the Iranians with a CIA-prepared annotated map, replete with talking points discussing the general location of Iraqi forces behind the front lines, as well as some additional information on Soviet forces. But rather than give them anything based upon imagery, the units were placed on a commercially available, fifteen-year-old map of Iraq.

George Cave and the younger Bahramani developed a friendly rapport. During one meeting with Cave, Bahramani laid three letters on the table in front of Cave, each a copy of one of the letters signed by Reagan urging better relations. “Did you really send these letters?”

“Yes,” Cave answered, surprised that the Iranians apparently did not realize their authenticity.

Bahramani then asked Cave for American assistance in bringing about a
cease-fire with Iraq, before adding that they wanted to launch one last offensive to take Basra.

“Well, what are you going to do if you take Basra?” Cave asked.

“Of course we will declare an independent Shia state for Iraq with Basra as the capital!” he answered without hesitation. “He was too young and naive to realize he was saying too much,” Cave later chuckled.

After the first day of talks, North gave the Iranians a private tour of the West Wing. The group wandered across the street from the Old Executive Office Building and into the side entrance to the White House proper. They walked past the hallway leading down to the White House Situation Room and up to the next floor, past the Cabinet Room and the Roosevelt Room. There Bahramani and his two Revolutionary Guard companions gazed into the Oval Office, prevented from entering this American sanctum only by a felt rope.

Both North and Cave thought the meetings had gone well. North wrote to Poindexter, “We appear to be in contact with the highest levels of the Iranian government.” North exuberantly compared Reagan with Theodore Roosevelt, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. “Anybody for RR [Ronald Reagan] getting the same prize?”
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When the Iranians left, Cave went to Poindexter’s office. The CIA veteran believed Bahramani to be earnest in his desire for better relations. “I think we will get two or three hostages out,” he reported. Cave thought that this channel might just lead to the diplomatic breakthrough the president craved.

Talks continued in October. Once again, they broke down into a series of exchanges: five hundred TOW missiles for one hostage. Then the United States would approach the Kuwaitis about releasing at least some of the seventeen Iranian-backed terrorists held in their jail for the bombings in 1983. Then another five hundred TOWs would be sent to Iran, followed by at least one more hostage. Then the United States would consider sending artillery ammunition and provide more intelligence on Iraq, with Iran promising to do its “utmost to secure the release of the remaining hostages.”
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On October 28, 1986, the first batch of five hundred TOW missiles arrived in Iran. Five days later, the Lebanese released hostage David Jacobsen.
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In September and October, three more Americans were kidnapped in rapid succession—likely to replace the ones released—off the streets of Beirut: Frank Reed, Joseph Cicippio, and Edward Tracy. More than a year of
providing weapons to Iran had yielded three hostages released, and three hostages taken—a net gain of zero with the terrorists in Lebanon.

The day after Jacobsen’s release, the Lebanese magazine
al-Shiraa
ran a story about McFarlane’s secret mission to Tehran. While inaccurate in several important details—such as the date of the meeting—it exposed the back-channel meetings between Iran and the United States. Cave suspected Ghorbanifar had leaked it, since he remained friendly with all the political rivals in Tehran. But the clear culprit was Ayatollah Montazeri. In October, authorities had arrested Mehdi Hashemi for kidnapping a Syrian diplomat. In retaliation, his supporters leaked the details of the secret dealings to embarrass Khomeini.

The next day, Rafsanjani admitted the McFarlane visit during a speech marking the seventh anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. He revealed that the Americans brought a “key-shaped cake to be a key to resumed relations,” adding, “but the kids were hungry and ate the cake.”
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As Weinberger had warned over a year earlier, the Iran arms sales had leaked, starting a feeding frenzy in the media.

The Reagan administration initially denied and obfuscated. On November 6, during an immigration reform bill signing in the Roosevelt Room just across the hallway from the Oval Office, a reporter asked, “Mr. President, do we have a deal going with Iran of some sort?” Reagan responded with the first of several misleading statements: “No comment.” Then he cautioned the press about engaging in speculation “on a story that came out of the Middle East, and that to us has no foundation—all of that is making it more difficult for us in our effort to get the other hostages free.”
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On November 10, Reagan met with his senior foreign policy team in the Oval Office to discuss the Iranian arms revelations and what they should tell the public. It would be the first airing of the details of the arms deals and the first senior-level meeting on the topic in nearly a year. Despite the grave looks around the room, President Reagan characteristically tried to keep the mood light; he and Vice President Bush exchanged some reasonably raunchy jokes. The meeting began with Poindexter providing an overview of the last year, the presidential finding signed in January and the arms sales that had ensued. Both Weinberger and Shultz expressed surprise upon hearing of both the presidential finding and the extent of the arms transactions with the Iranians. “I did not know of that,” Shultz pointedly told Poindexter. In the case of the secretary of state, it was a true statement, but Weinberger knew about most
of the details from the NSA intercepts provided by General Odom. Shultz lambasted the entire Iranian overture: “The Israelis sucked us up into their operation so we could not object to their sales to Iran,” he said, then adding, “It is the responsibility of the government to look after its citizens, but once you do a deal for hostages, you expose everyone to future capture.”
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Reagan remained in denial. “We did not do any trading with the enemy for our hostages. The old bastard [Khomeini] will be gone someday, and we want better leverage with the new government. Actually,” Reagan added, “the captors do not benefit at all. We buy the support and the opportunity to persuade the Iranians.”

Neither Reagan nor Poindexter wanted to reveal all the details, as it would only hinder the release of more hostages and endanger those in Iran who had cooperated with the operation. Weinberger cautioned that “we have given the Israelis and the Iranians the opportunity to blackmail us by reporting selectively bits and pieces of the total story.”

At 8:01 p.m. on November 13, President Reagan addressed the nation from the Oval Office in a prime-time speech. “Good evening,” he began. “I know you’ve been reading, seeing, and hearing a lot of stories in the past several days attributed to Danish sailors, unnamed observers…and especially unnamed government officials of my administration. Well, you’re going to hear the facts from a White House source, and you know my name.”

An indignant Reagan continued, “The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, undercut its allies, and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. These charges are utterly false.” He laid out in broad terms the transactions with the Iranians, focusing solely on their role as a strategic initiative with Iran to end the Iran-Iraq War and as part of a larger containment strategy against the Soviets. He had authorized sending McFarlane to Iran when negotiations appeared promising, comparing this trip to Kissinger’s secret trip to China as part of that diplomatic opening. The president bristled at the rumors that the United States had provided “boatloads or planeloads” full of American weapons to Iran to spare the hostages. Reagan admitted, though, that the United States had provided a small amount of “defensive” weapons, but these modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane.

At best, Reagan told the American public half-truths. An underpinning of the entire overture with Iran centered on hostages, most especially with the
president. While Casey and McFarlane saw it through the lens of a strategic influence in Tehran, Reagan’s private discussions and personal diary myopically viewed the negotiations as an effort to free the hostages, with the by-product being better relations with the mullahs. In the last six months of the North-led effort, it had degenerated into a purely arms-for-hostages deal, personally approved by President Reagan. Whether the president deliberately lied or was merely self-delusional remains debatable, but the United States had not only negotiated with a declared terrorist regime, but sold senior officers of the military arm of the Islamic Revolution—the Revolutionary Guard—planeloads of advanced weapons that could easily be used for offensive action. They had even provided them a tour of the White House.

The ramifications of the arms-for-hostages affair were not confined to Washington. The supreme leader’s handpicked successor, Ayatollah Montazeri, stridently opposed any dealings with the United States. He publicly called for the execution of all those who had met with the Americans. Since Khomeini had sanctioned those activities, he defended their actions as a necessity based upon the pressing needs of the war. The two religious leaders exchanged a series of letters in which their disagreement aired before the Iranian public. Khomeini removed Montazeri as his successor and ordered the execution of Mehdi Hashemi and several of his followers, despite pleas for clemency by Montazeri.

With the covert opening fully exposed, Reagan ordered the State Department to take charge of any new talks with the Iranians. Charles Dunbar, a Foreign Service officer ignorant of any of the previous discussions with the Iranians, joined George Cave to meet with Feridoun Mehdi-Nejat on December 13 in Frankfurt. Dunbar stuck to his instructions. The strategic concerns regarding the Soviet Union that had led to the arms transfers remained unchanged. However, there would be no further arms transfers and no normalization of relations while Iran continued to countenance hostage taking and supported terrorism. Mehdi-Nejat tried to ingratiate himself to the Americans. Iran remained committed to continuing the strategic opening. He pressed for the United States to abide by earlier discussions regarding providing more weapons and advocating for the release of the Dawa terrorists held in Kuwait in exchange for Iran using its influence to get hostages released. The two parties had finally reached an impasse.
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