The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (77 page)

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espite the apparent harmony on Afghanistan, suspicion about al-Qaeda’s presence in Iran reinforced hard-line views inside the U.S. government. As a sidebar to Crocker’s talks in Geneva, James Pavitt, the CIA’s deputy director for operations, met separately with another Iranian delegation, composed of MOIS agents.
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Pavitt raised concerns about al-Qaeda fleeing across the Afghan border into Iran. The CIA estimated that some five hundred al-Qaeda suspects and their families were in Iran, including Osama bin Laden’s eldest son, Saad, and one of his daughters. The Iranians responded to Pavitt that they did not have enough forces to guard their expansive and lawless border with Afghanistan and that many undesirables crossed into Iran. But they claimed to have arrested many al-Qaeda members and placed others under house arrest. The CIA passed the names of several high-value al-Qaeda members suspected of being in Iran, requesting that they be turned over to the United States. Iran viewed these al-Qaeda captives as important for its own security. They provided valuable insight into the organization that Tehran viewed as a threat to its own security. Holding them also provided insurance against al-Qaeda attacks against Iran. The several hundred al-Qaeda captives and their families were held in varying degrees of confinement, from prison to limited free movements under the supervision of security officials.
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The Iranians refused to give up anyone from the bin Laden family, but did turn over one highly sought al-Qaeda affiliate to Karzai’s government in Kabul. In return, Iran requested information on those Taliban members responsible for the killing of their diplomats in 1998. Unfortunately, Crocker responded, the United States had no specific information on the culprits and none were in American custody.

To placate the Americans, Javad Zarif flew to New York. He carried photocopies of the passports of more than two hundred al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters held by Iranian authorities, as well as a flowchart of who each of them was and how that fit into the larger network. In return, Zarif requested America’s help in repatriating some of these captives to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with whom Washington had better diplomatic relations than did Tehran. One of those in custody was a renegade Afghan who opposed both the Taliban and the United States with equal fervor, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Zarif agreed to
keep Hekmatyar, a brutal cutthroat, under arrest, as long as the United States did not then accuse Iran of harboring terrorists.

Despite these overtures, the U.S. government remained suspicious that Iran knew far more about other al-Qaeda members in its country. “The Iranians were trying to give us the limited modified hangout,” said Armitage, referring to a quote by Richard Nixon during Watergate. “Give a little ankle and let them think we are showing them everything.”
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One of those the CIA suspected of being in Iran was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Jordanian had been bankrolled by Osama bin Laden to form his own militia near Herat in western Afghanistan. A cutthroat, al-Zarqawi later participated in beheading hostages and in organizing suicide bombings against U.S. forces in Iraq, until American special operators dropped a laser-guided bomb on him in 2006.

Rumors of al-Zarqawi’s presence in Iran persisted in intelligence circles, which nearly led to a secret raid into Iran to kill him in 2002. The U.S. government learned of an upcoming meeting with al-Zarqawi and other al-Qaeda operatives about obtaining chemical or biological weapons. The meeting was to occur near the northern Iranian city of Chalus, in a house only three kilometers from the Caspian Sea. Navy SEALs developed an imaginative plan. A small team would be air-dropped into the water off the coast, and then make its way across the beach to the suspected al-Qaeda meeting house. Once in position, the SEALs would call in an air strike and drop a thousand-pound smart bomb on top of al-Zarqawi.

Joint Chiefs chair Richard Myers briefed President Bush that it would be a “high-risk” operation. Iranian military forces were nearby, and the SEALs had serious intelligence gaps—lacking both photographs of the attendees and an agent on the ground to update them on the actual time of the meeting. Myers cautioned against the mission, unless they obtained some rock-solid intelligence that spelled out when al-Zarqawi would be at the safe house. The daring raid had captivated the president, and the hawkish Dick Cheney liked the idea of striking simultaneously at both Iran and al-Qaeda. But President Bush reluctantly agreed with the chairman’s concerns that the risks outweighed the gains. It was a wise decision by Bush. While detractors in the administration used Iran’s failure to produce al-Zarqawi as evidence of Tehran’s obstinacy, the man in question was never even in Iran, but in a remote, ungoverned area of Iraq.
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Despite the setbacks of the
Karine A
and detractors within the
government, the United States and the Islamic Republic had sustained their most important diplomatic contact in two decades. The shock of terrorism on a grand scale allowed the two rivals to find common ground in remaking the political landscape of a troublesome Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the quick rout of the Taliban and its al-Qaeda parasites meant that Iraq came up next in the queue, even if the decider had not yet ruled on the next war. In early December, CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks flew to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. After getting a tour of the large spread, Franks updated the president on the invasion plan for Iraq. While Dobbins had hoped his talks would serve as the catalyst for a permanent thaw with Iran, years of suspicion would not be easily overcome. With the neocon grand design about to come to fruition, Iran would not be a partner; instead, it would be part of the nefarious lineup of the “axis of evil.”

G
eorge W. Bush strode up to the podium for the customary State of the Union speech. In just four short months since September 11, 2001, U.S. troops and Afghan allies had driven the Taliban from power. On that night of January 29, 2002, the president swaggered with self-confidence. His popularity stood at 85 percent in the polls, and the nationalist fervor of the moment swept up even the most partisan Democrat. The American flag on the lapel had become a mandatory fashion accessory. Twenty-two years earlier, President Carter had stood at the same lectern and delivered one of his most important foreign policy addresses, in which he promised to use the might of the American military to defend access to Persian Gulf oil. Now, in arguably an even more pivotal moment in history, George Bush laid down his marker for Middle East security.

“As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our union has never been stronger,” Bush opened to thunderous applause. As the president moved into the meat of his address, he singled out three nations—North Korea, Iraq, and Iran—for closer scrutiny. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave
and growing danger.” As for Tehran’s trespasses, the president said they were aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction and exporting terrorism, while “an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.”

In what became known as the “axis of evil” speech, the memorable line itself had been originally penned by speechwriter David Frum. It had originally been intended to be a few lines warning of the danger of Saddam Hussein, but Frum liked the term “axis” as a throwback to the great crusade of the Second World War. North Korea and Iran were more of an afterthought, as they were both state sponsors of terrorism and you could not have an axis of just one country. As Frum noted, State of the Union speeches were akin to a moon launch, drawing in all the resources of the executive branch.
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The White House routed the speech through all the departments for their review and input, and the “axis of evil” line garnered little attention, with neither Condoleezza Rice nor Richard Armitage even recalling the line. The only senior official who objected was Richard Myers.
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The affable and accommodating air force pilot rarely rose in opposition, but he believed the line counterproductive in the larger war on terrorism. But the president liked it. So in spite of Iran’s help in stabilizing Afghanistan and the ongoing talks between the two nations, the line stayed.

Iranian leaders greeted President Bush’s “axis of evil” speech with indignation. “Those comments stunned everyone in the government,” said Hossein Mousavian, a close adviser to the Iranian president. Bush’s remarks reinforced suspicions about talking with the Americans. The supreme leader called Bush’s remarks indicative of “a person thirsty for human blood.” Meanwhile, former president and head of the powerful Expediency Council Hashemi Rafsanjani seized on the “unelected few” remark with a jab at Bush’s own problems winning the popular vote in 2000: “It is interesting that this prodemocracy claim is made by somebody who has been elected with less than 25 percent of the popular vote under a court intervention.”
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The deputy foreign affairs minister sent a letter to the United Nations secretary general denouncing the speech, accusing the United States of missing the opportunity to develop a global response to end the roots of terrorism, with Washington’s “egoistic, unilateral and simplistic policy, which merely uses threats of brute force against what America one-sidedly considers to be terrorism.”
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Iran’s response did not stop with words. Iran immediately withdrew from the promising talks with Ryan Crocker. A humiliated Javad Zarif believed the United States had betrayed Iran’s good-faith overtures. In retribution, in
February Iran released the wanted Taliban commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who immediately went back to his old ways and became a significant thorn in the American side by organizing resistance to the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan.
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Iran launched a propaganda campaign using radio to foment anti-American sentiments in western Afghanistan, which helped undermine the Karzai government Tehran had helped to install. And it increased its military support for longtime ally Ismail Khan, who had sold Iran American Stinger missiles during the tanker war.

L
ike many military officers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers had worked in Iran during the heady days of the shah. In 1976, he’d traveled to the desert to help the Iranian air force build an electronic warfare range to train its pilots on countering enemy air defenses. Myers noted that most of the passengers on the flight to Tehran were defense contractors headed there to sell the shah even more weapons. “I didn’t have any revelations about the shah’s overthrow three years later,” Myers said. But as he watched all the high-tech salesmen disembark carrying their briefcases, he thought, “Is this sustainable?”
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Myers had a likable, easygoing persona, and a passion for Harley motorcycles. Detractors called him the “pliable chairman,” and over his four years as the senior military officer, he raised few objections to the unfolding Bush military policies. Myers shied away from politics; he practiced a “salute smartly and carry out orders” work ethic. Rumsfeld was a demanding boss, but as Myers recalled, he never tried to stifle the chairman’s views in front of the president.

But the Iran policy, or lack of it, frustrated Myers. The “axis of evil” line typified the problems within the administration in the chairman’s mind. “There were attempts to address Iran strategically,” Myers said, “but at the NSC level, it always became too sensitive or not the right time.” Myers suspected there might be something going on behind the scenes, perhaps a backdoor strategy that he was not privy to; in reality, however, the Bush administration had developed no Iran strategy.
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Iran typified the entire NSC process, said John Bolton: “It reflected a breakdown in the national security decision-making function. Understanding the president’s managerial style, Condi did not want to present disagreements
to the president. When you are not willing to air disagreements before the president, you get mush as a policy.”
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On January 6, 2002, Condoleezza Rice sent out a set of draft talking points on Iranian policy as part of an effort to publish a new national security decision directive, essentially a government-wide order dictating U.S. policy. Rice took a positive view of talking to Iran. While cautioning that Iran’s continued refusal to turn over members of al-Qaeda prevented any major improvement in relations, as one of the first bullets on the memorandum stated, “We are prepared to discuss practical issues related to Iraq that would be of mutual interest to both Iran and the United States.” Rice advocated exchanging information regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and humanitarian assistance. The United States had no intention of staying in Iraq permanently and understood that Iran, having been on the receiving end of Iraqi chemical weapons, had an interest in the elimination of that threat. If Iran provided its own intelligence on Saddam’s illicit weapons programs, the United States would respond by offering ways to help protect the Iranian populace should Iraq strike at Iranian cities with missiles loaded with chemical warheads. Iran could allow humanitarian assistance to move into Iraq from across its border and establish refugee camps should a chemical attack on U.S. forces cause a mass exodus by terrified civilians.

General Myers agreed with Rice. He piped up that they could use the Geneva channel to deconflict the military operations with the Iranian military and to avoid an inadvertent conflict, especially near the Iraq-Iran border. If Iran provided search and rescue for downed American pilots, that too would be useful, the chairman added. But the normally reticent chairman wanted those responsible for Khobar Towers brought to justice as part of any strategy with Iran. For the air force general, the attack on the airmen’s barracks by Iranian surrogates was personal. Scrawling a note on a routing sheet for his plans officer, Lieutenant General George Casey, he stated: “I think any Iran policy should acknowledge that Iran had a direct hand in the Khobar Towers bombing. This seems to be forgotten.”
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