The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (19 page)

Oakley’s group elicited commitments from both the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments to provide even more assistance; both countries sent
military advisers to Iraq.
³²
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak sent thousands of “volunteers” to the country, who joined a brigade from North Yemen fighting in the trenches alongside the Iraqis. Jordan agreed to serve as an intermediary for American-made radars capable of detecting incoming Iranian missiles. Washington provided the radars to Jordan, which then sent them on to Baghdad. The United States and Egypt reached a secret agreement whereby Cairo would sell off its older, surplus Soviet-built equipment and, in return, Washington would backfill Mubarak’s military with more advanced, American-made weapons. Over the course of the war, Egypt sold over a billion dollars’ worth of military equipment to Iraq.
³³

Oakley took a liberal view of providing nonmilitary assistance to Iraq. The United States sold communications equipment, sixty Hughes helicopters (the same make as those used by U.S. Army Special Forces), as well as two thousand heavy trucks themselves worth $234 million. Iraq impressed all of this matériel into its army. To help justify the truck sale, the State Department used twisted logic, stating that, as Iraq was on the defense in the war, it “is now unlikely to use the trucks to contribute significantly to the destabilization of the region.”
³⁴

To complement the arms for Iraq, the United States worked to cut off a similar flow to Iran. To feed its military needs, Iran purchased $2 billion worth of weapons, munitions, and spare parts every year. It was a lucrative trade; any country who could fulfill that need stood to make huge profits. Overt and illicit weapons flowed into Iran from all over the globe in an underground arms trade. Iranian agents met in Frankfurt and Lisbon with shady arms dealers intent on profiting by providing American spare parts to Tehran. Israel and countries in Europe and Asia all clandestinely sold compatible apparatus for Iran’s American-made hardware. Between 1983 and 1985, Spain alone sold $280 million worth of spare artillery tubes, ammunition, and small arms. In the same period, 28 percent of Portugal’s entire arms exports went to Iran, including the illegal transfer of as many as four thousand U.S.-made TOW missiles. Belgium and other NATO allies refurbished Iranian F-4 aircraft engines.
³⁵

In order to curtail weapons flowing to Iran, in the spring of 1983 the United States initiated Operation Staunch, spearheaded by Richard Fairbanks. Having succeeded in taking Iraq off the terrorism watch list, the State Department now declared Iran to be a state supporter of terrorism. This permitted the U.S. government to impose export sanctions against Iran, which
prohibited the export of any American-made weapons to Tehran. Fairbanks knew it would be impossible to halt all arms sales to Iran, but he concentrated on stopping the sale of sophisticated equipment, such as radars and aircraft parts.
³⁶
He issued two or three démarches every month to European and Asian nations to pressure them to halt these exports. Ambassadors in Europe and Asia were instructed to “preach” the virtues of Operation Staunch: the dangers of providing armaments to Iran that perpetuated the war.

The U.S. military supported Fairbanks’s diplomatic campaign too. Senior officers at CENTCOM traveled across the Middle East with instructions to convince their counterparts to agree with the arms embargo and to forge a united effort to curtail selling any equipment that could aid the Iranian military.
³⁷

T
he United States obtained South Korea’s consent to refrain from selling aircraft parts and intervened with Italy to halt the transfer of Boeing Chinook helicopters. Great Britain agreed to clamp down on its companies selling equipment that had military applications. This constant anti-Iranian drumbeat by U.S. diplomats eventually forged widespread consensus in both Europe and the Middle East as to the culpability of Iran in perpetuating the Gulf conflict. Tehran found itself increasingly isolated and on the diplomatic defense for its unwillingness to accept a cease-fire. In late 1981 Reagan signed a secret finding that allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to pass Iraq intelligence by way of third countries. CIA officers began giving their Jordanian counterparts at the General Intelligence Department low-level intelligence on Iranian troop dispositions intending for it to be passed on to Iraq. Saddam Hussein took interest in this information ostensibly coming from Jordan. He reviewed it personally before giving it to his own military intelligence personnel. Whether Hussein knew the information had come directly from the United States is not clear, but a senior Iraqi army intelligence general, Wafiq al-Samarrai, later explained, “I was sure Jordan was not capable of getting such information.”
³⁸
Saudi Arabia provided another venue for the CIA to pass nonattributable information to Saddam Hussein. Like Jordan, the CIA had a long-standing relationship with the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, al-Mukhabarat Al-A’amah. Saudi Arabia was only too willing to pass on similar information, sharing a view of Iran similar to that of its Sunni allies in Baghdad.

With the Iranian victories in 1982, Reagan authorized the CIA to increase its intelligence support for Iraq. In June 1982 a three-man team, headed by a fifty-year-old American who introduced himself as “Thomson,” arrived in Baghdad for several days of lengthy meetings with the head of Iraqi military intelligence and the Iraqi intelligence service, known as the Mukhabarat. “We are here to help you and are willing to provide you with more information which will help you in your war against Iran,” said Thomson in his opening remarks with the Iraqis.

The two sides exchanged views on the Iranian military, and both sides agreed on the need for better intelligence to counter the Iranian attacks around Basra. Thomson said that the CIA was willing to provide regular information on Iranian troop movements in order to prevent further Iranian advances. At the close of the conference, Thomson gave the Iraqis detailed drawings based on American overhead images of Iranian military troop locations arrayed east of Basra in southwestern Iran. At the end, Saddam Hussein thanked the Americans and gave his approval for the expanded intelligence cooperation.

As the United States had no embassy in or formal diplomatic relations with Iraq until 1984, both sides agreed to establish an unofficial station in Baghdad headed by a senior CIA officer who would serve as a liaison between the two countries.
³⁹
To support this, the CIA established a small Iraqi intelligence cell within the Near East Division of the operations directorate, which comprised a mixture of veterans and brand-new officers, many of whom went on to form the next generation of American Middle East spies. Here they compiled satellite images of the battlefront and intercepts of Iranian communications and distilled these into sanitized documents that would neither compromise the sources nor divulge capabilities. Langley passed on to the Iraqis this distilled information in documents outlining Iranian unit locations and depots and summaries of where American intelligence believed Iran intended to attack next. The CIA passed on selected information regarding the capabilities of the U.S.-manufactured equipment operated by Tehran, especially on the F-14 and F-4 aircraft that made up the heart of the Iranian air force.

Clair George, who headed the agency’s clandestine arm, closely supervised the intelligence sharing. To this consummate professional spy, the true importance of maintaining these intelligence exchanges with Iraq was to recruit new Iraqi agents from among the senior ranks of its military and intelligence services. Except when Basra appeared threatened, George ordered a
steady dribble of relatively insignificant information passed on to Baghdad—enough to keep his intelligence officers talking and coercing Iraqi officers, but not enough to really impact the fighting. “The CIA gave them chickenfeed,” observed the head of the DIA’s Middle East operations, Walter Patrick Lang.
⁴⁰

In general, however, the CIA remained lukewarm about the policy tilt toward Iraq. “It was a horrible mistake,” said Kenneth Pollack, an influential Middle East expert who was a rising star within the CIA’s analytical directorate in the 1980s. “My fellow analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character.”
⁴¹
Pollack was not alone in rejecting the view that Hussein was the lesser of two evils.

Despite Saddam Hussein’s outward pleasure with the CIA information, the Iraqis were very suspicious about the intelligence passed by the Americans. “They thought maybe we were trying to mislead them in some way,” said the CIA’s George Cave. However, the Iraqis became converts in February 1984. Having spent two years conducting futile human frontal assaults on the Iraqi defenses around Basra, Iran secretly amassed more than a quarter of a million men for a surprise attack north of the city in the seemingly impregnable seven-hundred-square-mile Hawizeh marshes. Using a flotilla of improvised boats and barges, the Iranians made their way through waist-deep stagnant black water, establishing fighting postings on the natural islets of grass and marsh reeds as well as on several man-made islands that supported oil drilling. The terrain played to Iran’s advantage in light infantry, and its audacity caught the Iraqis completely by surprise. Iranian troops nearly seized a narrow causeway over which the major road between Basra and Baghdad traversed. If Iran cut this vital roadway, Basra and its one million inhabitants would have been severed from Baghdad’s control.

Alarmed, the CIA rushed new imagery of these Iranian forces to Baghdad. The agency strongly advised the Iraqis to seal this breach before the Iranians could exploit their breakthrough. The Iraqis mustered superior armor and artillery and counterattacked in one of the largest and most savage battles of the war. Iraqi shells rained deadly nerve gas while electric power lines were diverted into the swamp, electrocuting many of the Iranian defenders. After two months of fighting, Iran held on to a few toeholds of mosquito-infested swamp islets, but more than twenty thousand Iranians died in their failed bid to cut the road.
⁴²

When full diplomatic relations were established in 1984, the CIA opened a full-scale station in Baghdad supervised by a station chief under the direct
supervision of the operations directorate.
⁴³
On paper the CIA station chief met formally on fourteen separate occasions with senior Iraqi officials over the next few years, but in reality it was much more a continuous ongoing relationship. The CIA relayed classified data obtained from Saudi and ELF-One AWACS on Iranian aircraft operations and passed the latest imagery of Iranian units directly to Baghdad, where the station chief was authorized to show a slightly altered version to the Iraqis. The Iraqi generals were free to study the imagery, taking notes and keeping drawings provided by CIA analysts. While the Iraqis would check the CIA’s photographs with satellite imagery they received from the French too, nevertheless this presented the Iraqi generals with an unprecedented view into the lay of the Iranian military, as well as American intelligence capabilities.

M
odern Lebanon sprang from a touch of European colonialism and a dash of Middle Eastern haggling. After the First World War, the French carved out the country from the old Ottoman Empire and granted the rump state independence in 1943. However, they structured Lebanon’s government into a Gordian knot. Maronite Christians, Sunnis, Shias, Druzes, and more than a dozen other confessions shared power in an arrangement that allocated every significant job in the government based upon the populace’s religious affiliation as determined by a 1932 census—the last ever taken in the country. In this antediluvian text, the Christians made up the majority population, and thus were permanently allotted the powerful presidency and head of the armed forces. The next largest group, the Sunnis, were given the less powerful prime minister’s slot, while the Shia received the weak speakership of the parliament. This arrangement stumbled along for the next three decades, and Lebanon prospered. The business acumen of the population transcended their political divisions. According to one tale, when a Lebanese schoolboy was asked by his teacher, “How much is two and two?” he replied, “Am I buying or selling?”
¹

Beneath this veneer of harmony, however, Lebanon was held together with chewing gum and baling wire. As the population demographics changed,
the power-sharing arrangement reflected less and less the realities within the country. The establishment of Israel strained this delicate balance as two hundred thousand disenfranchised Palestinian refugees arrived in southern Lebanon. The Shia community of southern Lebanon, viewed as backward hicks by their Christian and Sunni countrymen, had been relegated to minor cabinet posts devoid of real power, but they were the fastest-growing sect within the country, soon making up a third of the population. The facade of unity finally shattered in the 1970s. Several thousand Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters led by the charismatic Palestinian nationalist Yasser Arafat arrived in Lebanon after being forcefully expelled from Jordan. In Lebanon, Arafat established a de facto state with a separate army and parallel government in the Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut and southern Lebanon. They repeatedly launched attacks into northern Israel, with the poor Shia of south Lebanon bearing much of the brunt of the massive and sometimes indiscriminate Israeli reprisals. The Shia populace bitterly resented Arafat and the PLO, as did the ruling Maronite Christians, who viewed them as a threat to their hold on power.