The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (68 page)

During the eight-month crisis, Iran and the United States maintained an uneasy understanding. Iran viewed this new Middle East crisis as both an opportunity and a challenge. Rafsanjani rejected a dubious offer by Saddam
Hussein to support Iraq in exchange for major concessions after the war. Instead, he supported the UN sanctions against Iraq. Leaders in Tehran united behind removing Saddam Hussein, but with some unease as the prospect of a prolonged American military presence would threaten their long-term goal of regional dominance.

The United States simply wanted Iran to accept the United Nations resolutions and stay out of the way. No one in the Bush administration expected the war would lead to a breakthrough. “Our policy that normal relations can be reestablished only after Iran helps obtain the release of American hostages without bargaining or blackmail remains valid,” stated a Deputies Committee meeting paper penned by Robert Gates.
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During the Gulf War, the United States maintained regular, indirect contact with Iran through Swiss intermediaries. The U.S. government passed as many as three démarches a week to Iran during the 1990–1991 Gulf crisis. This included information about U.S. deployments to Saudi Arabia and the buildup of naval forces in the Gulf to avoid raising alarm in Tehran about American intentions. The United States asked Iran not to take action should American aircraft stray into Iran’s airspace. While Iran did not reply, it tacitly agreed: in the few instances when a coalition jet strayed into Iranian airspace, the Iranian military took no action. Just before the hundred-hour ground war began, Iran relayed through the Swiss that an American helicopter had attacked several Iranian patrol boats, chasing them up into the mouth of a river. But Iran’s protest was muted. It did little more than demand “prevention of such provocative acts” while reassuring the United States of Iran’s neutrality.
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The report proved unfounded.

On several occasions, the State Department received information that an American citizen trapped in Kuwait planned to flee to Iran. The United States relayed this to Tehran, and the Islamic Republic cooperated in safeguarding the American’s passage to freedom.
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The war did, however, help Picco and the efforts to free the hostages. The Iraqi invasion set free the “Dawa Seventeen” in Kuwait and all had quickly made their way into Iran. Held since their bombing rampage in 1983, their release had been a major fixation by Hezbollah in Lebanon. In April 1991, Picco pressed again to secure the hostages. He traveled to Damascus, where he met with the Iranian ambassador and Syrian military officers before flying on to Beirut. Thirty minutes after arriving, he received a call from the Iranian embassy confirming that he had a meeting with Sheik Fadlallah at his
home in south Beirut. Traveling alone at night, a nervous Picco met the Lebanese spiritual leader, who greeted him with a warm smile. During the ensuing discussions, the Lebanese threw his support behind the UN effort to free the hostages. While not a decision maker within Hezbollah, Fadlallah agreed to work with Picco in securing the release of all hostages held in Lebanon and Israel.

On August 10, 1991, Picco found himself back in Beirut to meet with the hostage takers. Iran had arranged the meeting, but when Picco met with the Iranian ambassador at his embassy, the UN representative asked if the ambassador was going to accompany him. “Oh, no, Mr. Picco. I don’t know these people. It’s going to be between you and them!”
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At the instruction of the Iranians, Picco left the embassy and started walking down the street. All was quiet, with only one other person on the sidewalk. After ten minutes of this unnerving stroll, a Mercedes drove up next to him and an occupant pulled him into the backseat. The abductors drove a now hooded Picco around, eventually stopping at a building in south Beirut. They ushered him into a room with all the walls covered in white sheets. Two masked men came in to greet him. After verifying that Picco came at the behest of the UN secretary general, the two were joined by a third masked man. He appeared more confident and had a commanding presence, and introduced himself as Abdullah. He was likely Imad Mugniyah.

The mood lightened and they got down to business discussing the various hostages and how to arrange a swap of everyone held in the region. At the end of the conversation, the captors offered to let Picco see one of the hostages. Picco insisted on taking one with him as a sign of good faith. After some back-and-forth haggling, they produced Edward Tracy, an American who had traveled to Lebanon to sell Bibles. After five years in captivity, Tracy’s sanity had become questionable. He could not remember his name and claimed that he ate cordon bleu three times a day.

But this small step started a chain that eventually led to the release of all the Western hostages. Over the next months, Picco flew from New York to Cyprus, Beirut, and Damascus, meeting repeatedly with Zarif and Scowcroft to secure all the hostages’ freedom. Iran threw the weight of its diplomatic effort behind the talks. But as Picco understood, the real broker was the masked Abdullah. After an intricate series of releases of prisoners in Israel and Lebanon, on December 4, 1991, Picco completed his mission. The reporter
Terry Anderson was the last American hostage freed, and later in the month Hezbollah turned over the bodies of CIA station chief William Buckley and Colonel Richard Higgins.
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With Rafsanjani having upheld his end of the unwritten bargain, he now wanted reciprocity. But when it came time for the United States to respond with its own goodwill gesture, the Bush administration reneged.

On the morning of April 7, 1992, Picco flew down to Washington to meet with Scowcroft. The national security adviser had shown signs of backpedaling on his earlier commitments, but now with Picco in his office, Scowcroft came to the point quickly: “There will be no goodwill to beget goodwill.” He then accused Iran of continuing to carry out terrorism, most recently the bombing in March of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, which Iran had carried out in response to the Israeli killing of the Hezbollah leader. Scowcroft added to the litany of Iranian offenses the brutal murder of Higgins and the killing in August 1991 of former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar by three Iranian agents who’d entered his house in Paris and stabbed him and an assistant with a kitchen knife.
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Scowcroft had been leery of Iranian regional aspirations. Keeping an Iraqi balance against Iran had been an important rationale in his mind for not removing Saddam Hussein during Desert Storm.
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Iranian support for the spontaneous Shia uprising at the end of the war only reinforced his concerns about expanding Iranian influence. After the war, Bush and Scowcroft deliberately excluded Iran from the regional peace conference in Madrid, a slight that Rafsanjani never forgot. Now, with all the hostages out, Scowcroft felt no need to honor the American side of the deal. It was a bitter blow of duplicity to the Iranian president.

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icco had the unfortunate task of breaking the news to Rafsanjani. Meeting in the president’s white-decorated office, Picco looked into his eyes and said he had come with news of broken promises. No goodwill gesture would be forthcoming from the Americans.

Rafsanjani’s eyes narrowed. “We have taken many political risks in our cooperation with you. Not everybody was in favor of such cooperation. You understand, Mr. Picco, that you are putting me in a very difficult position.” The Iranian president then added, “I think it is best if you leave Tehran very, very quickly. The news of what you told me will travel fast to other quarters, and they may decide not to let you go.”
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U
ndaunted, Rafsanjani tried another initiative through the Germans. Beginning in 1990, Iran’s ambassador to Germany, Hossein Mousavian, passed to Washington a list of four issues that divided the two nations: terrorism, the Middle East peace process, weapons of mass destruction, and human rights. He relayed that Rafsanjani was prepared to establish a joint working group to resolve these issues as a means to pave the way for a rapprochement. The Germans came back to the Iranian ambassador with the message that the Americans were not interested in the proposal.

Rafsanjani never forgave the Americans. He could overcome American support for Saddam Hussein as a by-product of war. But he had hoped to bring about change in the postwar world. “It was the first strategic mistake by the United States after the war,” said Hossein Mousavian. Hard-liners in Tehran like Mohsen Rezai seized on the American rebuff as proof that the United States was not serious about better relations. The United States needed a new enemy after the Cold War, he argued, to justify its imperialistic ambitions. Iran served that purpose.
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Years later, Richard Haass, who worked with Scowcroft on Iranian policy, met the Iranian foreign minister at a conference. When the Iranian heard his name, he replied, “Ah, yes. Mr. Goodwill Begets Goodwill.”
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I
n 1993, a new political wind blew into Washington. Unlike the man he’d defeated for the presidency, William Jefferson Clinton arrived in the White House with no foreign policy experience. Perpetually late for any occasion, Clinton was a career politician—both glib and charismatic. He possessed an uncanny ability to remember people’s faces—even those he had met briefly months earlier on the campaign trail—that charmed many prospective supporters along his way to the highest office in the land. A quick study, he impressed many senior officers, even those who disagreed with his policies. The marine commandant during Clinton’s second term, General Charles Krulak, a born-again Christian and a staunch Republican, respected President Clinton both for his willingness to ask for advice and his quick grasp of the complexities of modern military operations.

Clinton shared a common trait with other politicians who have occupied the Oval Office: a conviction in his own power of persuasion to solve foreign
policy challenges. Clinton believed that he could sit down with any leader, no matter how disreputable, and resolve disagreements. In an interview with
New York Times
reporters a week before his inauguration, Clinton responded to a question about future relations with Saddam Hussein. “I think that if he were sitting here on the couch I would further the change in his behavior,” he said, later adding, “I always tell everybody, ‘I’m a Baptist; I believe in deathbed conversions.’ If he wants a different relationship with the United States and with the United Nations, all he has to do is change his behavior.”
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Clinton’s Middle East agenda did not center on either Iran or Iraq. Iran remained devastated from its eight-year war with Iraq. Desert Storm had neutered the Iraqi dictator, and although still an irritant to the sole remaining superpower, he posed no threat to his neighbors. The U.S. military maintained tens of thousands of troops in the Persian Gulf region, keeping both countries in check and safeguarding Pax Americana.

The new national security adviser, a puckish Anthony Lake, cautioned against trying to engage Tehran. His Republican predecessors had failed miserably in their search for the elusive Iranian moderate. Iran refused to moderate its anti-American stance or curb its support for terrorists, so why waste time trying to talk with an implacable antagonist?
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President Clinton focused on forging a peace between the Palestinians and Israelis rather than refighting his predecessor’s wars.

Clinton threw his efforts behind peace negotiations that had been jump-started by President Bush after Desert Storm. He achieved a public breakthrough in 1993 with an agreement, forged during secret meetings in Oslo between Palestinian and Israeli diplomats, that led to the dramatic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the South Lawn of the White House.

Martin Indyk shepherded the Clinton administration’s new Middle East policy. The London-born, Australian-educated forty-two-year-old Indyk arrived at the White House as the NSC’s senior director for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, having served as the research director for the pro-Israel lobbyist organization American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Before joining the administration, he had served as the first director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank sympathetic to Israel, whose intellectual rigor had earned grudging respect even from the rival Arabist policy wonks inside the Beltway. Indyk played a critical role in all of
Clinton’s Middle East initiatives: he was an ardent supporter of the peace process and of building strategic alliances with moderate Arabs.