The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (12 page)

In August 1983, however, the intelligence agencies reassessed their assumptions about Iran’s placidity should the U.S. military arrive ostensibly to protect them against the communists. Iran, DIA analysts concluded, disliked the Americans as much as it did the Soviets and would be likely to resist both with equal vigor. A CIA assessment came to the same conclusion, noting that the Iranian government worried about a secret desire by the superpowers to repeat World War II and divide Iran: “Fear of superpower collusion to divide Iran into separate spheres of influence has been infused in the Iranian people by Khomeini and his clerical infrastructure.” If the Soviets
staged a coup and installed a puppet government, as they had in Afghanistan, CENTCOM’s intervention would encounter stiff resistance. Iran would be convinced that Washington and Moscow were colluding to overthrow the Islamic Republic. CENTCOM would have to fight its way into Iran even before locking horns with the Red Army.
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Kingston revised his plans to reflect this reality. The U.S. military would now wait until after the Soviets first crossed the border into Iran. With the bulk of the Iranian army moving north to meet the Red Army, this would allow the marines and soldiers to seize the ports of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas without much opposition. More important, by waiting until Moscow struck first, CENTCOM planners surmised, the Iranians would be far more willing to cooperate with the U.S. military to counter an invasion by the communists.
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Kingston’s extensive background in covert operations was reflected in his belief that CENTCOM needed to develop an underground organization in Iran. If the proper arrangements could be made with the Iranian military, Kingston hoped to grease the skids for arrival of American troops and help organize Iranian resistance to the Soviets. Kingston looked to NATO plans as the model. In the event of war in Central Europe, the Pentagon intended to insert small teams of special forces behind the Soviet lines in Eastern Europe to execute direct action missions, blowing up bridges and attacking important targets deep in the enemy rear, and to conduct unconventional warfare operations, which entailed working with anti-Soviet guerrilla forces to foment a revolution within these less than enthusiastic members of the Warsaw Pact.
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To support this plan, the U.S. Army had secretly hidden caches of weapons and explosives throughout Eastern Europe.

Kingston developed an aggressive special operations forces plan for Iran. He formed a new, close-hold headquarters in Tampa called the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force, commanded by an army brigadier general. It would control the large contingent of several thousand Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and air force planes and helicopters that would conduct clandestine operations in Iran. The U.S. Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, specially trained for the Middle East with linguists in Farsi and Arabic, would fly in and establish its headquarters at Seeb, Oman. Its three battalions would then be dispatched to Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
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Even before hostilities began, they would secretly fly into Iran and deploy near the mountain passes in its northwestern regions along the likely avenues of invasion for Soviet
troops. There they would destroy select roads, bridges, and rail lines to hinder the Soviet advance. Meanwhile, other soldiers would make contact with Iranian resistance forces and begin to organize a guerrilla army behind the Russian lines.

Should Iran resist the Americans, Navy SEALs would quickly seize the important ports of Bandar Abbas and Bushehr and kill the defenders before they had time to organize any coherent defense. U.S. Marines or elite Army Rangers would then be hastily flown in to secure the port, a critical link in the support of the larger follow-on force of tank divisions.

L
ocated in an unobtrusive compound outside of Washington, D.C., was one of the most closely guarded “black” units in the U.S. Army: the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA). Established in March 1981, ISA owed its creation to the Iranian hostage crisis and the subsequent failed rescue mission. The new organization would serve as a fusion group for tactical human, signals, and electronic intelligence to support special forces units. ISA’s first years were marked by some highly questionable actions. It provided financial and intelligence support for former Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel, and later fringe presidential candidate, James “Bo” Gritz in his fantastical schemes to rescue American prisoners of war supposedly left in Laos after the Vietnam War. In response, in 1982 Deputy Secretary Frank Carlucci temporarily suspended all ISA operations, noting in a memo for the undersecretary of defense for policy, Fred Iklé, that he found the organization’s excesses “disturbing in the extreme.” The next year Weinberger issued a new charter for ISA, placing it under tight reins under a command in Fort Bragg, and the organization soon put its past behind it, developing into one of the premier units in the U.S. military. By 1987, ISA, under the command of Colonel John Lackey III, swelled to nearly four hundred people, with distinct clandestine operations, signal collection, and communications squadrons.
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In 1983 Lieutenant General William Odom, the senior army intelligence officer, or G-2, tasked ISA with developing conduits and recruiting agents in Iran to support CENTCOM. Thin and with horn-rimmed glasses, Odom was a scholar-soldier. An expert on the Soviet Union with master’s and doctorate degrees from Columbia University, he’d risen to prominence as the military assistant to Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Odom thought that what Kingston needed were Iranian agents at a lower level who
could actually help get U.S. troops into Iran—agents with detailed knowledge of roads who could tell you, for example, how much weight a specific bridge could hold.

“I’d like to have taxicab companies, trucking companies, hotel managers,” Odom said later, “recruits at a lower level but someone who could meet you at the airport and get forces quickly into the country.” With the support of the chief of staff of the army, General Shy Meyer, Odom elevated the priority level for human intelligence in Iran for ISA so it was second in priority only to spying against the Soviets in Europe.
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Working closely with the small group of officers under Kingston in Tampa, ISA formed two special detachments focused on Iran. Detachment E operated undercover out of the nine-story I.G. Farben building in Frankfurt, West Germany. The 1930s structure housed the U.S. Army’s V Corps headquarters as well as the military’s counterintelligence and clandestine operations for Europe and the Middle East. That detachment targeted exile and resistance groups within Iran, and soon expanded to establish another office in Pakistan from which it controlled operations and agents inside Iran proper.
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Detachment L, in the United States, worked out in the open to cultivate former Iranian military officers who would contact old friends and colleagues still in Iran who could obtain firsthand information on the state of the Iranian military.

ISA was less successful in cultivating the disparate ethnic and separatist groups within Iran, especially the Kurds in the northwestern regions. Odom believed they would be a natural ally for the United States and might even provide an alternative safe haven for U.S. Special Operations Forces. “We had access to the Kurds,” one U.S. Army intelligence officer later said, “but neither the Turks nor the Iraqis wanted the U.S. to stir up any separatist movements with the Kurds—unless they controlled it—for fear it might spread to their own countries.”

Odom’s staff dusted off an old defense plan, code-named Armish-Maag, that the 10th Special Forces Group had developed for the shah to defend Iran from a Soviet invasion. It contained detailed targeting data on the tunnels and the mountain passes leading into northern Iran from Soviet Azerbaijan. The shah’s army had used this information to pre-position materials to destroy bridges and tunnels. One of the Iranians now working for ISA confirmed that the explosives had been removed, but the predrilled holes along bridge pilings and tunnel entrances remained. Armed with this information, Army Special Forces would only have to replace the explosives so as to quickly
close many of the important roads needed by the Soviet Union to invade Iran. It saved years in research, an army analyst later acknowledged.

However, ISA drew the ire of the CIA. The CIA had legal responsibility for all recruitment of agents during peacetime and viewed the ISA officers as amateurs. Howard Hart, an experienced CIA operative who’d organized the initial effort to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan and later ran the CIA’s Special Activities Division, which controlled all the paramilitary forces, believed that the military lacked the subtlety for sensitive operations. “The military men are patriots, but in general when it comes to paramilitary operations and spying, they are well-intentioned amateurs. When the military sends someone undercover into Iran disguised as a Middle East businessman, they seem to look like a guy pretending to be a businessman. When CIA sends one in, he is a Middle Eastern businessman.”
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At the time, the U.S. military’s view of the CIA was just as jaded. A senior U.S. military officer who spent two decades working with the CIA used a common military acronym related to commanders or headquarters, C2, which stands for “command and control,” when he noted that in the CIA, C2 stands for “control and credit.”

Even though ISA had to coordinate all its operations with Langley, the CIA viewed the military unit as a liability that was intruding on its turf. Odom knew that Langley wanted ISA shut down, and some of his officers accused CIA of distorting ISA’s problems and of leaking the damaging information to Congress in 1982 that had nearly led to the organization’s disbandment. According to Odom, the CIA undermined the Pentagon’s Iranian operation. The CIA station chief in Pakistan invited the ISA army officer in charge of Iranian operations to a diplomatic cocktail party in Islamabad. He made a point of staying close to the officer and loudly proclaimed that the two men worked together. As the station chief operated out in the open, the officer’s public association with him destroyed his cover and forced him to leave the country. His departure halted the army’s recruitment in Pakistan. This petty move by the CIA infuriated senior officials within the Pentagon, Weinberger included.
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T
he Reagan administration came to office convinced that the machinations of Soviet adventurism caused most of America’s national security problems.
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The Arab-Israeli confrontation was seen largely through the prism of the Cold War: the American-backed Israelis were pitted against the
Soviet client states of Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Kingston and ISA had developed a clandestine spy organization in Iran whose mission focused solely on confronting the Soviet Union and not the Islamic Republic. This unitarian view downplayed both historical and regional causes behind the steady stream of conflicts that had dominated the region since the Second World War. The Iranian Revolution did not fit neatly into ISA’s worldview, to put it mildly. Only slowly did Washington replace this myopic view and begin to realize that Iran itself, and not the Soviet Union, represented the real challenge to American control over the Persian Gulf.

W
illiam Casey was sixty-eight when Ronald Reagan appointed him to run America’s principal spy organization. The new director of central intelligence did not radiate a James Bond aura; in fact, he resembled a superannuated college professor. He shuffled more than walked; bald, with pronounced jowls, the once tall New Yorker was now stooped with age. He mumbled, at times to the point of incoherence, a trait that seemed to worsen when he testified before Congress, an institution he generally disdained. His clothes were rumpled and flecks of food stained his jacket and tie, complementing a heavy coat of white dandruff. Eating across from William Casey, contemporaries noted, was not for the fainthearted.

Despite his visible aging, Casey retained a keen mind. A voracious reader and astute student of history, he roamed Washington’s bookstores for material, especially on the Soviet Union, often buying stacks of books in a single outing. During briefings, he often appeared comatose, slumped back in his stuffed chair with only a sliver of his eyes visible through his drooping eyelids. Then, suddenly, Casey would spring to life, firing off a rapid series of probing questions.

Casey had a distinguished career both in and out of government. He had
served as the intelligence chief for Europe with the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) during World War II, as a corporate lawyer after the war, then as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Nixon. A staunch Republican, he was Reagan’s campaign manager for the 1980 election and aspired to become secretary of state. When that post went to Alexander Haig, Casey eagerly accepted the job as CIA director, determined to reinvigorate the clandestine wing of the agency, which he believed had been gutted by congressional investigations and poor leadership during the 1970s.

Casey, who displayed a gift for organization and planning, seemed an ideal choice to head the CIA. “The man had a natural bent for what the Germans call
fingerspitzengefühl
, a feel for the clandestine,” recalled Richard Helms, Casey’s roommate in London during the war and later CIA director.
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In 1944, Casey had been sent to Paris to reinvigorate efforts to insert agents into Germany. “The place had gone slack. There was no sense of purpose,” said fellow OSS officer Walter Lord, who worked for Casey and later wrote the acclaimed novel about the Titanic
A Night to Remember
. Casey soon gained the admiration of Lord and other subordinates. “He was blunt and impatient,” observed Lord, “but he knew exactly what to ask.”
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Casey energized the headquarters and initiated some of the riskiest missions of the war. Disguised as foreign laborers, more than one hundred agents were air-dropped into Germany, both to spy and to determine the location of key industrial sites for Allied bombers. Remarkably, sixty-two of the agents ended up reporting information back to Casey, and only 5 percent were lost.
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