Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (7 page)

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TEHRAN SUMMER, ARAB SPRING

The first test of Obama’s new approach to the Middle East came within days of the Cairo speech, when the Islamic Republic of Iran held the most raucous election in its thirty-year history. Was Obama’s intention to use his bully pulpit to launch a new freedom agenda to overthrow tyrants across the Muslim world? Or was it something else?

Candidates for Iran’s presidency traded outlandish accusations in the first one-on-one televised debates in Iran’s history. Former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi became the darling of a fawning media in the United States and Europe, who conveniently forgot his past involvement in the regime’s terrorist activities and created an image of him as a so-called reformer, prepared to transform the Islamic Republic into a modern country open for business to the world. Young people in Iran came out to vote in massive numbers. Even Iranian exiles in Europe and America flocked to polling places set up for them by the regime in hotel ballrooms and restaurants and mosques. They expected Mousavi to win in a landslide against the retrograde incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guards officer who lived a simple lifestyle, boasted of Iran’s nuclear progress, and spoke frequently of his devotion to the Twelfth Imam. He also kept his wife in a bag—the full black
niqab
favored by Sharia-
observant
clerics—whereas Mousavi trotted out
his
wife adorned with colorful headscarves and university degrees.

The sophisticates in Iran and abroad found Ahmadinejad an inconvenient reminder that the core ideology of the Islamic regime remained rooted in a revolutionary vision of the end times that spelled doom for their aspirations of normality. Ahmadinejad’s defiance of the West had brought on international economic sanctions and made it harder for Iran’s powerful
bazaari
merchant class to maintain their wealthy lifestyle, as the Revolutionary Guards Corps increasingly monopolized Iran’s economy, crowding them out of the most lucrative contracts. They preferred to put a smiley face on the regime, as did the State Department, the European Union, and millions of ordinary Iranians. With a so-called moderate as president, it was easier to sweep the thuggish behavior of the Islamic Republic under the rug and get on with business as usual. It had happened before with Rafsanjani and Khatami; Mousavi was just the latest version of a well-known brand.

“OBAMA, ARE YOU WITH US?”

At two in the morning on June 13, 2009, six hours after the polls had closed, officials from the Interior Ministry visited Mousavi at his residence. They were elated. Mr. President, they said. You must prepare your victory speech for the morning. Not only had he won, but their projections showed that he had won by a comfortable margin, winning well over the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff.

Just a few blocks away, at an underground command center beneath Beit Rahbari, the sprawling complex of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, another meeting was under way. Led by the leader’s middle son, Mojtaba, a junior-grade mullah, it included Major General Morteza Rezai, former intelligence chief of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), the architect of the regime’s plan to overturn the elections. Mojtaba was shaking with rage. He swatted the air with a letter addressed to his father from the Interior Minister, showing the vote tally so far.

We have prepared for this, Rezai said calmly. You know what has to be done. With a single phone call, he shut down the Interior Ministry’s vote counting operation. Then Rezai sent Mojtaba’s father, the Supreme Leader, to an undisclosed secure location in north Tehran and gave orders to deploy the troops positioned on the outskirts of the capital to seal off the city by dawn, when they planned to announce Ahmadinejad’s victory.
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For weeks, Rezai and Mojtaba Khamenei had been refining the details of their election coup, which they called “Sharayet-e Khakestari” (Condition Grey). It was a not-so-subtle mix of hard power and persuasion. They called on top IRGC officials to threaten voters into voting the right way. An IRGC spokesman, Reza Saraj, warned that the Guards would not tolerate an incorrect result from the polls. “In all those countries where they have had ‘color’ revolutions, they didn’t have a Revolutionary Guards Corps,” he told the local media well before the voting began. “We do.”

The idea of a “color” revolution haunted the IRGC leaders as it did Ayatollah Khamenei. So did the knowledge that Hillary Clinton’s State Department had given orders to the Voice of America’s Persian Service to throw its full backing behind Mousavi, whose supporters all wore green scarves in public and dubbed themselves the “green movement.”

To make sure that everyone was on the same page, the IRGC instructed a pro-Ahmadinejad member of Parliament, Fatemeh Rahbar, to announce the results of the election three days before voting even began. Standing before a parliamentary committee, she predicted that Ahmadinejad would win 24 million votes—precisely the number the Interior Ministry eventually announced he had won. But rather than deter the people, the heavy-handed intervention by the IRGC only encouraged a greater turnout.

A sizeable contingent of IRGC troops showed up at Mousavi’s house shortly after the Interior Ministry officials who had informed him of his victory left. As Mousavi and his sons soon discovered, they hadn’t come to protect the new president, but to seal him off from the public. They promptly cut his telephone lines and shut off the electricity, so he couldn’t use the illegal satellite dishes on his rooftop to access the Internet. He was under house arrest.

In his address to the people announcing the election results, Ayatollah Khamenei called the phony election result a “divine assessment,” and summoned the people to unite behind Ahmadinejad for a second term. Mousavi managed to get a message out to his supporters through his son, calling the results “treason” and a “dangerous manipulation.” His advisors told me the former prime minister was in shock. He had run for the presidency not to become a martyr or the leader of the opposition, but to play his part in the game and become the smiley face of the regime. He had planned to propose some modest domestic reforms—enough to ease relations with the West and give Iran’s youthful population a cause for hope, but nothing that would endanger the regime he had helped to establish. He had expected Khamenei to play fair. Instead, this was a coup.

Clashes between pro-Mousavi supporters and the IRGC antiriot squads erupted almost immediately in Tehran and in other cities. By Saturday afternoon, the regime cut the text-messaging system used by Mousavi supporters, hoping to stymie the protests. By eleven that night, they closed down Mousavi’s campaign headquarters in Tehran and dispersed his supporters using pepper gas.

On Monday, June 15, the Mousavi camp organized a massive
protest
in Tehran, marching from Enghelab Avenue to Azadi Square, the exact same path anti-shah protesters had used in 1978 in a famous confrontation with the shah’s police that led to a bloodbath and helped spark the revolution. Western news agency photographers captured roving motorcycle gangs of pro-regime thugs, brandishing pistols and knives as they drove into the crowds. Other photos surfaced of Basij militiamen in full riot gear firing assault rifles into the crowd, and of Lebanese Hezbollah thugs beating protesters. Two particularly gruesome amateur videos shot by Green Movement supporters showed masked policemen in body armor cutting the tongue out of one demonstrator and beating to death another.
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Millions of people took to the streets of major cities all across Iran, denouncing the stolen elections. The mass protests were dramatic in a country that kept a tight lid on any expression of public discontent. The gruesome violence of the regime response gripped headlines around the world.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the elections a “fraud.” Other Western leaders called on the regime to exercise constraint. But an eerie silence came from the Obama White House. The protesters began holding up signs in English to make sure the international media got their message. Many of them read, “Obama, are you with us?” But as the regime thugs continued their brutal crackdown, killing and wounding hundreds of protesters and tossing thousands in jail, Obama remained silent.

When a reporter finally badgered the president on Tuesday at a press conference, Obama was visibly uncomfortable. Instead of condemning the violence, he reiterated his intention to hold a “tough dialogue” with the regime. “[W]e respect Iranian sovereignty,” Obama said. “It is not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling—the U.S. president, meddling in Iranian elections.”

Obama’s comments were greeted with dismay by the Green Movement. Mohsen Sazegara, a former presidential candidate who had been jailed and tortured by the regime, told me he listened to Obama’s press conference with a sense of “deep, deep, deep regret. I never expected President Obama to say something like that”
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But Obama’s words were music to the ayatollah’s ears.

To explain why Obama was turning his back on what appeared to be a pro-American freedom movement in Iran, the White House eventually leaked his lofty geopolitical goal. The president was engaged in a delicate diplomatic dancing act with the ayatollahs, and was still waiting to hear the response of the Supreme Leader to a secret letter he had sent him weeks earlier offering direct talks. For the United States to back the street protests now would doom this attempt to achieve a lasting peace with the Iranian regime and resolve the nuclear standoff.
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Hundreds of deaths later, the Iranian Green Movement sputtered to end, as Iranians realize that help was not on the way.

Why did Obama fail to come to the aid of the Iranian people, who were crying out for American help? Part of it was pure politics. In the euphoria of the 2008 presidential campaign, when candidate Obama pledged that the power of his personality alone would launch an era where the “earth would begin to heal,” no problem seemed unsolvable. And clearly Iran and its quest for nuclear weapons and its ongoing support for terrorism had eluded the best efforts of President George W. Bush, just as it had his predecessors. Obama pledged he would fix that, by embarking on “negotiations without preconditions” with the Tehran regime as soon as he took office. As he told
Newsweek
in May 2009, just before meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, he believed his approach was “superior” to what had been tried before.
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But part of it was also Obama’s reluctance to actively pressure the Islamic regime, despite its barbaric track record. He was reinforced in this view by his consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who was born in Shiraz, where her father worked at the Nemazee Hospital in the 1950s. “Every memory from Iran is a very happy memory,” Jarrett told a National Public Radio reporter. “It is where my life-long love of rice and lamb began.” She was personally involved in the outreach to the Supreme Leader, as I will show in subsequent chapters, and urged Obama to continue the effort to strike a deal with the regime, rather than promote the secular opposition. So did his two Iranian-American advisors, Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh, who had contempt for the secular greens and the opposition more generally. “Obama had to make a choice, and he made it,” wrote conservative analyst Robert Kagan in the
Washington Post
. “His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government’s efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts to prolong the crisis.”
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Up until the point that Obama acknowledged he was not going to “meddle” in Iran’s domestic affairs by supporting the Green Movement, Ayatollah Khomeini had found the new American president an enigma. He had sent multiple emissaries to talk to the Americans since Obama was elected, starting during the transition. In February 2009, he sent a former intelligence officer, Ahmad Samavati, to Washington with a five-man delegation of Foreign Ministry officials, with an offer to render top al Qaeda members who were living in Iran, but no one in Washington seemed interested. Later that month, Khomeini sent a military advisor, Sadeq Mir-Hejaz, to meet with the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Iraq on Kish Island to discuss cooperation in Afghanistan. Those talks became the subject of heated discussion in the Iranian parliament, with critics accusing the government of caving in to American demands.
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But now, with millions of protesters on the streets, Khamenei was worried. News that a State Department official, Jared Cohen, had asked the directors of Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance period, so that Iranians could use their Twitter accounts to organize new protests had reached Tehran. (What they didn’t realize was that Cohen had gone out on a limb, without consulting the State Department hierarchy.) The Voice of America appeared to be supporting the Green Movement, at least initially. Just like his IRGC advisors, Khamenei was terrified that the United States would back a color revolution using soft power, precisely because he knew how vulnerable the regime was to popular protest. So Obama’s hand-wringing apology that he was not going to meddle in Iran’s domestic affairs came as a huge relief. Khamenei concluded that Obama was either weak, or a fool. Either way, he was taking America out of play in Iran.

Fear of American action can be an important motivator to Middle Eastern leaders, as Qaddafi’s turnaround showed. Similarly, the lack of fear can be a kind of drug, making leaders such as Ayatollah Khamenei feel they can get away with murder and pay no price. Obama’s acquiescence to the Islamic Republic’s killing machine gave Khamenei the breathing space he needed to finish the job. Intentional or not, Obama sealed the fate of freedom in Iran for years to come. And he emboldened the ayatollah to attack the United States elsewhere—from Afghanistan to Benghazi.

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