The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (15 page)

The exiles proved to have limited utility, and CIA officials viewed them with considerable suspicion. “Exiles operate on rumint,” said retired operative Jack Devine, using an unofficial acronym for rumor and intelligence. “They’re often penetrated by double agents, or working their own agenda, which does not necessarily meet the U.S. objectives. They are never the pathway back to power. But they are always out there and can usually find an audience.”

The longtime Iran operative George Cave became disenchanted early with the opposition groups. In July 1980, a cadre of high-ranking air force officers had hatched a plan to decapitate the entire revolutionary government by bombing key government and military sites in Tehran, starting with Khomeini’s home. The commander of the Iranian air force, Major General Saeed
Mahdiyoun, was to spearhead the effort inside Iran. The son of a wealthy Tabriz merchant and reputedly one of the air force’s best pilots, he quietly assembled several dozen F-4 aircraft at a large fighter base, Nojeh, near Tehran. Under the cover of darkness, three aircraft would bomb Khomeini’s home, hitting every building in the compound with a massive ordnance of 750-pound bombs, cluster bombs, and precision-guided weapons. In quick succession other jets would strike the prime minister’s and the president’s residences, army barracks, and the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard. With Khomeini dead, Shapour Bakhtiar would enter the country from Iraq at the head of a force of exiles. He would join forces with disaffected elements within the army to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The Nojeh coup, as it became known, involved much of the expatriate community. Admiral Madani in Germany provided funding.

Yet neither Bakhtiar nor any other coup leaders disclosed the plan’s details to the CIA, perhaps to avoid revealing Saddam Hussein’s complicity. During a meeting with Cave in Paris, Bakhtiar asked the CIA to provide helicopters to move his operatives “inside of and around Iran.” When Cave pressed for specifics—when, where, why, how many men—Bakhtiar remained evasive. Shortly before the attack was to begin, someone inside the expatriate community tipped off the Iranian embassy in Paris. The Iranian government moved quickly, rounding up hundreds of people. General Mahdiyoun, the air force commander, was forced to confess before a videotaped kangaroo court. He was found guilty, and his executioners gouged out one eye before riddling his body with bullets.

“The exiles refused to cooperate with each other,” Cave said with irritation, looking back on the disparate groups trying to overthrow Ayatollah Khomeini. “They all wanted to be in charge.” He used to joke that “every Iranian male is born with a chip in his brain that periodically broadcasts: ‘I am the leader of the Iranian people.’”

W
illiam Casey and the CIA had another Iran-obsessed client: the U.S. Department of Defense. In the summer of 1981, General Kingston revised CENTCOM’s plans to respond to a Soviet invasion of Iran. A key element of General Kingston’s new scheme would involve deployment of clandestine special forces teams to organize a guerrilla army and to conduct sabotage behind the Russian front lines. But the military needed the CIA to
develop an indigenous support organization inside Iran. Existing legal mandates authorized only the CIA to conduct covert paramilitary operations in peacetime (i.e., any mission intended to conceal American involvement and permit plausible deniability by Washington). In theory, the CIA would build the foundation of an indigenous paramilitary network in peacetime, which the much larger U.S. Army Special Forces—better known as Green Berets due to their unique headgear—would exploit during wartime.
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But the CIA’s paramilitary operations had to be coordinated with Kingston. The agency’s schemes needed to be synchronized with the military war plans to make sure the two were not working at cross-purposes.

In the spring of 1982 the CIA and Defense Department began working on a combined plan for Iran. With Kingston’s extensive experience with the CIA, he persuaded the defense secretary to agree to fund a CIA operation to build a covert paramilitary network within Iran. This would serve as the foundation upon which Kingston’s special forces could conduct their insurgency against the Red Army.
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Casey eagerly supported the agreement. It offered one more avenue to develop new contacts in Iran—and with Defense Department money.

Iran required a major commitment by the CIA. The spy agency had to build a fifth column within Iran designed to undermine any “Vichy-type governments” installed by Moscow, as one Defense Department memo described it. The CIA needed to recruit the Iranians who would greet American parachutists arriving in the middle of the night. The agency had to provide the military information on roads, bridges, and airfields, establish mustering stations for arriving American troops, conduct sabotage, and rescue pilots who were shot down.

To manage the paramilitary effort in Iran, the CIA created a new organization—given the nonsensical cover name “BQ Tug”—inside the Tehfran cell at Frankfurt. Langley chose a former Army Special Forces officer—described by former CIA officer Reuel Gerecht as “earthy but likable”—to run the their mission. He worked closely with a small cadre of military officers at the Central Command headquarters in Tampa, who identified specific targets for the Iranian agents to destroy and airfields the U.S. military wanted to use to support the Pentagon’s war plan.

With a few million dollars from the Pentagon, BQ Tug recruited more than half a dozen teams, four to six men each. The teams included Iranian military officers, a smattering of senior enlisted men, and peasants from villages the U.S. military considered strategically positioned. Much of the
recruiting was conducted in Iranian Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran and astride the border with the Soviet Union.
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Some of the Iranian agents’ only responsibility was to keep watch on the Soviet forces across the border or to monitor important border towns such as Jolfa, where all imports and exports from Iran to the Soviet Union traveled across a major highway and railway line.
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The CIA tried to bring team leaders out for a polygraph and some training. Several recruits later claimed they were flown to Oman for specialized weapons and explosives training.

The CIA’s pitch to each recruit downplayed his employment by the United States and emphasized the necessity of defending Iran from atheists and anti-Islamic communists. They were serving their country by helping the United States defend Iran against communism.

A typical recruit was Muhammad Zanif-Yeganeh, a housing department employee in northern Iran. He later claimed that a friend already on the CIA payroll had enticed him to travel to Turkey on the pretense of buying crystal to sell on the black market. He later described being approached by an American Farsi speaker who asked him about working with the United States to help protect Iran from a Russian attack. With five hundred dollars a month as added incentive, he agreed. He surveyed a remote poultry farm as a potential landing zone for U.S. forces and sent a detailed map of the area back to Frankfurt.
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The farm owner was also recruited and added to Yeganeh’s team, and the two men identified other landing zones for helicopters.

At one point the CIA considered using these agents to conduct covert attacks against the Khomeini regime. One proposal was to use the BQ Tug agents to bomb sensitive Iranian military sites such as command and control centers in Tehran or the port of Bushehr—“the bomb in the Hitler bunker,” as one retired CIA officer described it. At the Pentagon’s request, the CIA looked into using them to attack launch sites for the new Chinese antiship missiles around the Strait of Hormuz in 1987. However, none of these proposals materialized.

“Agents are funny people,” observed Howard Hart, a longtime CIA officer. “Few are willing to make that leap of actually putting bombs or attacking their own country. They will give you chapter and verse and GPS coordinates for sensitive sites, but it’s a huge leap to actually blow it up themselves.”
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Despite Casey’s support, many inside the CIA viewed BQ Tug as a waste of time. The operations directorate did not always assign the best officers to BQ Tug. Its liaison in the headquarters at Langley was a CIA officer who had
recently filed a disability lawsuit against the agency over his supposed chronic back pain, which he eventually won, forcing the CIA to buy him a special chair to sit in until his retirement.

On one occasion, the deputy chief of Tehfran, a former military officer, flew into Turkey with eight fake Iranian passports for operatives who were scheduled to go back into Iran on a collection mission. “He was a klutz,” Philip Giraldi recalled. “He could screw anything up.” After issuing the phony documents, the Tehfran deputy collected the real passports of the Iranian agents, stuffed them in his coat, and headed to the airport to fly back to Frankfurt. When he went through the metal detector, two pens in his shirt pocket set off the metal detector, and he was ordered to empty out his pockets. The Turkish security guards found the bundle of passports and arrested him. When the Tehfran deputy chief did not arrive back in Frankfurt, Giraldi was sent out looking for him. When Giraldi arrived at the deputy’s hotel, Turkish police arrested him too. As Giraldi was an embassy employee with a diplomatic passport, the Turks released him. But it required considerable effort, involving some favors with Turkish intelligence, to get Tehfran’s deputy released.

“Its mission was a joke; no one took it seriously,” said one CIA officer. “The Soviets were not likely to invade Iran. If they did, these half dozen teams would have the effect of a gnat hitting a truck.” More important, the Iranian regime was decidedly hostile to the United States and no one could say what Ayatollah Khomeini’s reaction would be to the arrival of U.S. Special Forces inside Iran. As another CIA officer observed: “We now had a plan to defend those who don’t want to be defended against those who are not going to attack.”

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hile the United States recruited spies and paid exile groups, the agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) did not remain idle. From the days of the shah and Savak, the Iranians excelled at counterintelligence. The new Iranian intelligence service was formed in August 1984 by combining several smaller intelligence groups that sprang up after the revolution. Surprisingly, considering the hatred Khomeini’s backers had for the shah’s secret police, MOIS employed a large number of former Savak officers—perhaps one-third of those working for MOIS had worked for the shah. They proved equally as formidable in addressing security threats for the Islamic Republic as they had for the royal regime.

Iran received some assistance from other spy services eager to undermine
the CIA. Despite the Islamic Republic’s disdain for communism, common purpose overcame ideology when the MOIS developed cooperative relationships with both East German and Romanian intelligence services.
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The Romanians provided new technology and trained the Iranians on spy craft. The East Germans conducted surveillance of Tehfran’s activities in Frankfurt, providing important pieces to fill in the American spy puzzle.

The MOIS external security directorate tracked dissident groups. It created small hit teams, blending in with Iranians traveling to Turkey, to assassinate critics of the Islamic regime. Moving from Istanbul to Western Europe, the teams carried out dozens of beatings, stabbings, bombings, and other acts of intimidation and murder. In August 1991, for example, three Iranian men talked their way past a French guard and into the house of the shah’s last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar. They then killed him and his secretary with a kitchen knife. U.S. intelligence attributed more than eighty killings to MOIS agents between 1980 and 1995, the date of the last known Iranian assassination. Few MOIS officers were apprehended; they typically left only a body, say, on a Paris sidewalk, with a bullet in the back of the head as testimony to their handiwork.

Unfortunately for the CIA, many of MOIS’s victims were prospective American recruits. The MOIS staked out the U.S. embassies that were trying to enlist Iranian citizens and were not shy about killing suspected American collaborators. Philip Giraldi frankly admitted that “the Iranians in particular were very good and often were able to identify and assassinate our agents. These were people who were providing information to the U.S. embassy and CIA station in Ankara.”
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On a few occasions, the Iranians tried to run double agents to Tehfran. Reuel Gerecht, a large, gregarious Farsi speaker who replaced Giraldi at the consulate in Istanbul, uncovered two MOIS agents during his interviews with visa applicants. Both men seemed too eager to offer their services and information about the Iranian government.

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ran soon uncovered Casey’s spy ring. According to former Iran minister of intelligence and security Mohammad Reyshahri, in July 1985 the MOIS was alerted when the CIA tried to recruit a midlevel government official in Iranian Azerbaijan for BQ Tug.
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Unfortunately, the United States approached the wrong guy. Rather than cooperate, he immediately alerted MOIS to the
CIA recruitment drive. Then the Iranians rolled up two CIA agents working in the Iranian foreign ministry. One had foolishly kept all the coded messages received over the radio from his CIA handler in his house. The MOIS discovered these as well as his codebooks and his radio.

The MOIS was nothing but patient. For the next few years, its counterintelligence officers painstakingly unraveled the CIA’s spy network. It recruited its own spies within the Iranian military to keep watch on senior officers who might be susceptible to the CIA’s pitch. Junior officers were encouraged to spy on senior officers. For Captain Riahi, the MOIS recruited a first lieutenant and fellow pilot to monitor his movements. Aware of a possible compromise, Reza Kahlili’s case officer instructed him to change his codes. He and the others did, and continued to relay information back to Tehfran as Langley remained ignorant of the calamity that would befall them. Meanwhile the MOIS watched and waited.
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