The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (4 page)

The shah’s power began to unravel in late 1977. Khomeini’s eldest son died, likely of a heart attack, but Khomeini accused the shah and his secret police, Savak, of murdering him. A short time later, on January 7, 1978, an article published in a government newspaper ridiculed the ayatollah, questioning his religious credentials and even his sexual preference. Riots erupted in the religious city of Qom. In the resulting mayhem police shot several protesters; reports of the exact number killed varied from six to three hundred. The streets remained quiet for the next forty days in accordance with the Iranian custom of remembering the dead, but when the mourning period ended, on February 18, protests over the killings erupted in every major Iranian city. In Tabriz events turned violent, and the government sent in the army to quell the unrest, killing more than one hundred people. In a recurring pattern over the coming months, each of the events was followed by a period of mourning and then another clash between protesters and government security forces.

Attacks grew in intensity and violence, especially against targets seen as Western and decadent, such as liquor stores and movie theaters. In one of the most horrifying incidents, Khomeini supporters set fire to the Cinema Rex, a movie theater in a two-story commercial building in the port city of Abadan. Thick black smoke overwhelmed many patrons as fire spread quickly through the theater. More than four hundred people died, most of them incinerated
while still sitting in their seats. In the Middle East, suspicions of conspiracy often supplant fact: despite the evidence against Khomeini’s supporters, rumor spread in the Iranian streets that the government actually had started the fire to discredit the religious opposition.
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The rumor turned many of those sitting on the fence decidedly against the shah and marked the beginning of the end of his quarter-century reign.
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The shah found himself in a difficult position. If he tried to crush the dissidents, he would face the wrath of the United States for his human rights abuses. If he allowed the protests to continue, it would encourage the opposition.
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The shah did neither. On July 22, he met with the head of Savak to discuss policy regarding the demonstrators. The meeting adjourned with the shah clearly directing that the demonstrations should be quelled by force and authorizing the army to open fire.
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But his directive was never implemented as the conscript army recoiled at opening fire on the populace. On August 19, less than a month later, the shah shifted course and released 711 political prisoners, most of whom immediately joined in the street protests.
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A memorandum from the director of the CIA’s office for the Near East, which was responsible for Iran, summed up the monarch’s difficulties: “The shah’s efforts to modernize Iran have unleashed unexpected if accurate strong forces of reaction that are not being contained by martial law or piecemeal concessions to the opposition.”
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At the Iranian government’s urging, and perhaps to forestall a similar uprising among its own majority Shia population, the Iraqi government ordered Khomeini out of the country in a forlorn attempt to isolate Khomeini from the Iranian populace.
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Khomeini initially sought refuge in Kuwait, but the emir turned him away at the border. This rejection turned out to be fortuitous. Khomeini’s close adviser Ebrahim Yazdi urged him to find refuge in a democratic country. Yazdi, who had lived in the United States, believed that a free press would facilitate the spread of Khomeini’s message. So Ayatollah Khomeini moved into a house at Neauphle-le-Château in the Paris suburbs. There, unshackled by the Iraqi Baath Party’s authoritarian restraints, he found a more free-flowing outlet in the sympathetic Western press for his revolutionary rhetoric. In the first few months, Ayatollah Khomeini conducted more than 450 interviews with the press as part of a sophisticated media campaign against the shah.
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The protests expanded. Supporters smuggled cassette tapes of Khomeini’s talks back inside Iran. Technocrats, democratic reformers, communists,
and disgruntled merchants all joined in the growing protests. Oil workers went on strike, and the violence reached a crescendo in early December, when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets. Meanwhile, Khomeini approved sending small teams of supporters to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to begin training as guerrilla fighters for the long insurgency he expected to wage against his rival for control over Iran.
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he shah’s troubles took official Washington by surprise. Initially, the American government did not even consider the religious aspect of the opposition. “There had never been an Islamic revolution before,” observed the State Department desk officer for Iran at the time, Henry Precht.
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Despite the fact that the American embassy in Tehran was the fifth largest in the world, few American diplomats had any sense of the sentiments in the streets. The shah effectively controlled the information available to the diplomats, and the State Department did not encourage Foreign Service officers to get out and talk to dissenters, especially religious leaders. As one political officer recalled, “I doubt if anybody in the embassy ever knew a mullah.”
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The CIA devoted considerable resources to monitoring the Soviet Union and to tracking communists inside Iran. But the agency’s intelligence-gathering effort had not been focused on recruiting spies within Iran. “After all,” as one retired CIA operative sardonically observed, “we had the shah’s secret police, Savak, to tell us what was going on.”
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The two intelligence agencies did cooperate on tracking down the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mujahideen of Iran, a leftist-Islamist hybrid sect which had conducted a series of terrorist killings of Americans in Iran, including the serious wounding of U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Harold Price in one of the first uses of an improvised explosive device in the Middle East. The CIA had developed biographical studies on key Iranian military and civilian leaders.
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But for the most part, the CIA devoted its efforts to countering Soviet influence in the region.
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In a self-assessment of its efforts in 1976, the spy agency reported that “generally speaking, reporting from the mission on most topics is very satisfactory.”
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The American intelligence community committed one enormous oversight in not studying the shah himself. In 1974 Jean Bernard, a renowned French hematologist, secretly flew to Tehran to examine the Iranian monarch, who was suffering from an enlarged spleen. Dr. Bernard diagnosed the
problem as a serious case of chronic lymphocytic leukemia and Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, a blood condition.
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However, fearing that news of his ailment would leak, the shah steadfastly refused either to undergo additional tests or to begin cancer treatment. His ailment remained unknown to Washington, though rumors of the shah’s ill health were commonplace in Tehran. The cancer left the shah increasingly listless and withdrawn. Meanwhile, Washington continued to support him, blissfully unaware that the man upon whom America relied to safeguard Persian Gulf oil was dying.

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he troubles in Iran divided the Carter administration along familiar lines. Brzezinski wanted the shah to use force to crush the resistance. He believed the United States needed to express its unqualified support for the monarch, and he advocated dispatching an aircraft carrier to the Gulf of Oman as a show of support. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance cautioned, however, that the Iranians might interpret a movement of U.S. forces to the region as a precursor to invasion; the United States needed to assist Iran in a transition from autocracy to democracy.

The president himself remained torn, harboring private sympathy for the democratic reforms sought by the shah’s opponents, while recognizing the grave strategic blow to the United States should the shah be overthrown. The president remained bothered by the shah’s poor human rights record under which political dissidents were frequently imprisoned and tortured. But the Iranian leader had consistently supported both Israel and Carter’s Camp David Accords, signed in September 1978 between Israel and Egypt, and his offer to assure Israel’s fuel requirements had contributed to Israel’s agreement to withdraw from the Sinai and relinquish control of the Abu Rudeis oil fields in western Sinai.

Carter agreed to send an aircraft carrier off the Iranian coast to demonstrate American resolve, and he dispatched his dutiful but bland deputy secretary of defense, Warren Christopher, who would later serve as secretary of state (1993–1997) under Bill Clinton, to meet with the Iranian ambassador in Washington and inform him of President Carter’s unqualified support for the shah.
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A week later President Carter penned a handwritten note to the shah: “Again, let me extend my best wishes to you as you continue your successful effort for the beneficial social and political reforms in Iran.”
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The American ambassador in Tehran was an experienced Foreign Service
officer named William Sullivan. Polished and well dressed, with a shock of white hair, Sullivan had served in two previous ambassadorial postings, including as ambassador to Laos at the height of the Vietnam War. He was no stranger to the dirty side of foreign policy and, while he was in Laos, had supported the CIA-led secret war against the North Vietnamese.

Sullivan agitated to open a dialogue with Khomeini. When the shah once told him that Khomeini supporters were “crypto-communists,” Sullivan flatly rejected the notion. The influence of Shia Islam was stronger than any Western-imposed ideology, especially the secular communists, Sullivan countered.
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Khomeini supporters held the real power behind the opposition movement and would serve as a natural bulwark against the communist groups, Sullivan thought. Any post-shah government would require Khomeini’s support to facilitate an orderly transfer of power to a new democratic government, and the sooner Washington recognized this, Sullivan observed, the better for America’s standing in the future Iran.
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Brzezinski rejected Sullivan’s views of the situation in Tehran. It was not a choice between the shah and democracy, he told Sullivan: should the shah fall, Khomeini would inexorably move the new government toward theocracy. The national security adviser began backdoor conversations around Sullivan with hard-liners inside the Iranian government about a possible military takeover.
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In an October 28, 1978, meeting at the White House with CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Brzezinski asked the CIA to look into developing information that could be used to undermine the opposition and strengthen the shah. Turner agreed, but he cautioned Brzezinski that many members of Congress looked upon the shah as so undemocratic that they would not tolerate a covert program designed to keep him in power.
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Turner responded a few days later. He believed the CIA could help keep the shah in power for the short run and this might provide breathing space for the Iranian government. But for the strategy to succeed, the shah needed to use “maximum force.” And in the long run, CIA analysts cautioned, it would not solve the shah’s problems. He needed to move more swiftly to establish a democratically elected civilian government.
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Undeterred, Brzezinski asked Sullivan about prospects for a successful military takeover if the shah was willing to use maximum force to crush the opposition. In a tense series of secure telephone conversations, Sullivan countered that a military takeover might be feasible, but every day that passed reduced the chances of a successful outcome. More important, Sullivan said,
the cost to long-term American interests would be exceedingly high. Loss of life would be great, and this would scuttle any possibility of moving the country in the direction of democracy. Sullivan again advanced the idea of opening contacts with the opposition, which the national security adviser flatly rejected. Over the coming days, exchanges between the two men grew heated on the issue. They frequently shouted at each other, their arguments clearly audible in adjacent rooms.
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On September 8, 1978, a massive throng of demonstrators—largely unaware that the shah had declared martial law the day before—gathered in Jaleh Square in Tehran. When the army moved in, the demonstration turned violent and jittery soldiers opened fire. While the true number of Iranian civilians killed was less than one hundred, news quickly spread through the streets that thousands of peaceful demonstrators—including many women—had been cut down in the streets. Today this day is known in Iran as Black Friday. The carnage horrified both the shah and the demonstrators, giving pause to the latter to rethink their actions. But as senior CIA Iran analyst and Iranian military historian Steven Ward noted, “The government then mishandled what possibly was one of its best opportunities to reassert control.”
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With the opposition reeling, the shah opted for reconciliation. He dismissed security officials, released imprisoned opponents and replaced them with some of his own Savak agents, and ordered the army to fire above the heads of the crowds. Rather than placating the revolutionaries, the shah’s actions only emboldened them as he now appeared weak and irresolute.

A few days after Black Friday, President Carter called the shah and stressed continued American support as well as the importance of liberalization. The shah had it posted verbatim in the newspapers as a sign of American support. It backfired. To the Iranian population, it read as though the United States stood behind a government that had just shot down tens of thousands of unarmed civilians in Jaleh Square, fueling hatred of the shah and his chief supporter in Washington.
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